*A Liminal Presence: Sikhs in America

 

The history of Sikhs in America, it may appear to some, is bookended by violence directed at them.  News of the shooting on August 5^th at a Sikh Gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, where a white gunman with pronounced neo-Nazi views shot dead six Sikhs as morning services were about to commence, reverberated throughout the United States and beyond.  It is reported that the gunman, Wade Michael Page, was an army veteran, had a tattoo commemorating 9/11, and played with the white supremacist heavy metal bands End Apathy and Definite Hate.  His motives remain unclear:  some argue that ‘hate crimes’ need no motive as such, as they feed upon a visceral fear of the Other, though many have speculated that Page mistook Sikhs for Muslims.  Mainstream American media organizations, such as CNN and Fox News, wasted little time in characterizing Page as an anomaly to ‘peaceful, mainstream America’, and deplored the shooting as a ‘tragic mistake’ perpetrated ‘against the peaceful Sikh community’.

 

‘What we call the beginning, T S Eliot wrote in ‘Little Gidding’, ‘is often the end / And to make and end is to make a beginning.’  The end, not unexpectedly, ‘is where we start from’, but the end so often seems prefigured in the beginning.  Indians first started appearing in some numbers on the west coast of the United States and Canada around 1900:  though the majority of them were Sikhs, all Indians were commonly described as ‘Hindoos’.  I suppose we should call this a ‘tragic mistake’ as well.  Indeed, the US Immigration Commission of 1911 stated that, for purposes of immigration, Indians were to be labeled as ‘Hindus’.  If, in the old American adage about American Indians, the only good Indian is a dead one, the few hundred (Asian) Indians who had made their way to the US by around 1905 were seen as a menace to American society.  ‘Hindu Invasion’ was the phrase used by one Fred Lockley in the Pacific Monthly in May 1907 to describe the presence of turbaned Indians; a year later, the Overland Monthly would similarly speak about ‘The West and the Hindu Invasion’.  Eerily, the 9/11 –– in 1907, not 2001 –– edition of the Bellingham Herald carried a headline more than an inch thick, ‘British Columbia Threatens to Secede; Horde of Hindus Landing at Vancouver.’

 

Though the Sikhs who marked their presence in America dressed mainly in Western clothes, they were distinguished by their flowing beards and turbans:  the local press took to calling them ‘rag-heads’.  In the town of Bellingham in Washington, many were employed as lumbermen, much to the chagrin of white labor leaders who alleged that Indians had stolen their jobs and driven down wages.  On September 4, 1907, a large crowd of white men instigated large-scale violence against the Indians.  The Indians were driven out of the city; many were herded into the city jail, ostensibly for their own protection.  Three days later, the Bellingham Herald, in an article entitled ‘Bellingham Sees Last of the Hindus’, announced with evident pride:  ‘Entire Colony is Wiped Off City Map’.  The Asiatic Exclusion League would continue to agitate vigorously for keeping America empty of ‘undesirable Asiatics’, achieving this outcome with the Immigration Act of 1924 that barred nearly all Asians from the US.

 

It is of course Muslims, not Sikhs, who are today viewed as the undesirable hordes who have invaded America.  There is something grotesque in the argument that the shooting of the Sikhs at the Oak Creek Gurdwara was a ‘tragic mistake’:  if it was a ‘mistake’, a deviation from the right path, how could it have been any better to have killed Muslims?  Would Page have stood exonerated if his victims had been adherents of Islam?  The Oak Creek shooting raises so many profound questions, beyond those that have been raised about America’s endless fascination with guns, the nearly unfathomable influence that the National Rifle Association exercises in American society and politics, and the country’s subcultures of white supremacy.  Since Page turned the gun on himself in bringing the killing rampage to an end, should we not characterize him as akin to a suicide bomber?  Might that not be one way to ensure that we do not think of countries where suicide bombings have been taking place as strangely barbaric?  Had Page been a Muslim, is it not certain that he would have been immediately branded as a ‘terrorist’ and the country would have been deluged with calls to eradicate Muslim fanatics?

 

Less than two weeks after the Oak Creek massacre, SALDEF (Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund) reported the murder of shopkeeper Dalbir Singh, a member of the Oak Creek Sangat who was not present at the Gurdwara on August 5^th.  However well Sikhs have done for themselves, they occupy a liminal position in American society, indeed the world over.   At the turn of the century in America, around 1900, they were mistaken for Hindus, and in India itself Sikh secessionism has had much to do, from the 1920s until the movement for Khalistan that peaked in the late 1980s, with disputes over the precise nature of Sikh identity.  In the American imagination, one hundred years later, Sikhs have been conflated with Muslims.  Many Sikhs are bound to feel anxious, troubled, and perhaps even resentful, and will insist upon their distinct identity; some, doubtless, will hold on to the hope that an appreciation of their true identity will alleviate their distress.

 

The Sikhs have, throughout their history, been wonderfully energetic and marvelously receptive to new cultures.  They are, as well, an eminently diasporic people.  But what is most distinctive about them is precisely their liminality, even if they should wish to insist upon their distinctiveness.  The question, ‘Just who is a Sikh?’, is always lurking on the horizon; even their scriptures have an intricate relationship to both Islam and Hinduism.  Even as this liminality makes them vulnerable, it is the source of their greatest strength and wisdom.  As the world shows increasingly little ability to live with ambiguity and difference, the Sikhs must remain a beacon of hope to those who wish to resist the painful infliction of certitudes upon an ever greater number of people.

(First published in Times of India, Crest Edition, 25 August 2012).

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*Be What You Can: Indian Americans Triumphant at the National Spelling Bee, Again!

Early June in the United States, and it’s that time of the year when a peculiarly American institution comes into the national news – and, on listening to the news, the feeling of déjà vu is absolutely inescapable.  Some years ago, the particular phenomenon of the national spelling bee, over which Indian Americans have come to exercise something of a monopoly, captivated a documentary filmmaker who attempted to leave his viewers “spellbound” with a film of the same title.   Many viewers may not find “Spellbound” (2002) as mesmerizing as Hitchcock’s thriller (1945) with which the documentary, barring its name, cannot otherwise be confused, but its director, Jeffrey Blitz, succeeded remarkably well in conveying the palpable tension that participants, their parents, and viewers experience each year as the national spelling bee comes to a nail-biting finish.  Who will falter over words such as consuetude, phillumenist, foggara, osteomyelitis, mirin, epiphysis, mirin, ochidore, and juvia?  What evidently also struck Blitz is the lightning war – blitzkrieg – with which Indian Americans have staged their recent dominion over this 85-year old competition.  For eight of the last twelve years, Indian Americans have been the national champions; and when Animika Veeramani triumphed this year with the word “stromuhr”, which does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary but is defined by Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary as a “rheometer designed to measure the amount and speed of blood blow through an artery”, she became the third Indian American to triumph in as many years.

As Indian Americans continue their winning spree at the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee, which annually brings to Washington the winners of the regional bees, this somewhat strange competition is understandably garnering increased attention in India.  Writing for the Hindu (6 June 2010) on this year’s competition and its winner Anamika Veeeramani, a 14-year old from the state of Ohio, Narayan Lakshman commenced the article thus:  “Is it because of Indian colonial history with Britain or is it something at the level of genetic programming?  Whatever the explanation, there is no denying that Indians have a penchant for the English language, a transgenerational, linguistic love affair that gets transmitted even to [the] far-flung diaspora.”  That characterization of Indians as having “a penchant for the English language” is seemingly endorsed by a recent article in the New York Times, which reports that American law firms have now begun to outsource legal documents to India not only for legal assistance at a fraction of the cost in the US but also to ensure that correct and indeed elegant English is used in such documents.  That penchant will also be self-evident to those who have observed the rise of the English novel in India, from the time of R. K. Narayana, Mulk Raj Anand, and Rajo Rao to G. V. Desani, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, and Kiran Desai.  Nevertheless, anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the manner in which English is relentlessly butchered in Indian newspapers or the shocking errors of grammar and syntax found in most English-language books published in India would have reason to pause over this wildly generous reading of the alleged mastery over English exercised by Indians.

Lakshman’s speculations on the “mystery of the enduring Indian passion for all things English” conclude, however, on a different note.  Anamika’s father, on being pressed to explain the success of his daughter, who has set her eyes on Harvard and a career as a cardiovascular surgeon, praised her for dreaming big and attributed her triumph to the family’s “emphasis on education”.  This is, of course, very much in keeping with the general perception of Indian Americans as an ambitious, hard-working, and law-abiding ethnic group, and Lakshman all too easily moves to the triumphalist conclusion that “Indians are simply people who believe that hard work, a rigorous education and familial support are the keys to their dreams.”  But is it the Indians alone who believe in hard work and the virtues of family life?  And, by implication, are we not to believe that other ethnic groups in the US are much less appreciative of education?  There is no reason to believe that other immigrant communities are less invested in “the American dream” than Indian Americans; similarly, whatever their facility with the English language, it is far from being demonstrably true that Indians in the US have a greater command over it than those from other immigrant communities.

In a relatively recent book, The Other Indians:  A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America (Los Angeles:  UCLA; Delhi: HarperCollins, 2008), I ventured to provide a different reading of the phenomenal success of Indian Americans in the national spelling bee.  As I wrote, we must first ponder on how a minority comes to view itself as a ‘model minority’.  Here, then, are the relevant passages:  “A somewhat more sociological explanation [of the Indian success at the national spelling bee] would perhaps stress the fact that Indian students to a disproportionately high degree come from highly educated families and that knowledge of English, which is almost a native tongue to many Indians in the United States, confers advantages on Indians denied to other ethnic groups.   Yet the evidence from the Census Bureau’s latest reports on this question is somewhat ambiguous.  The Asian Community Survey of February 2007, based on data collected in 2004, shows that Japanese and even Filipinos far outstrip Indian Americans in describing English as the language that is spoken at home; however, among people who claimed that English was not spoken at their home, or was not at any rate the predominant language of everyday conversation, Indians easily outnumbered all other Asians in describing themselves as speaking English ‘very well’.  One might also take the view that all immigrant communities attempt to create particular niches for themselves, and that Indians excel in spelling bees just as Dominicans dominate American baseball and Kenyans and Ethiopians appear to have monopolized long-distance running.

“The difference here is that baseball has a huge following in the Dominican Republic, just as the longer races, extending from 5,000 meters to the marathon, have been part of the repertoire of Kenyans and Ethiopians in their own country for some time; however, by contrast, the ‘Spelling Bee’ is a cultural artifact of American society that has no resonance in India itself.  It may well be the case that the present generation of affluent middle-class Indians settled in Bangalore and Mumbai who are plotting futures in the United States may already be preparing their very young children in India for the near future when the family will be comfortably settled in an American suburb and the children will be memorizing the spelling of arcane words, but there is no evidence yet that the institution of the Spelling Bee has winged its way to India.  (British rather than American spellings prevail in India, though with Britain’s diminishing influence in Indian life this legacy of the Raj may soon show signs of fracture — and perhaps the American institution of the spelling bee will add its own color to the demise of the world of colour.)  When a particular community is viewed as having a stranglehold over some profession, trade, or cultural phenomenon, other communities might be inclined to direct their resources elsewhere.  Thus success breeds more success.

“It can well be argued, however, that all these interpretations fall quite short in their explanatory power, and that many Indians themselves might not have an adequate understanding of the manner in which they are able to call upon certain cultural resources.  Indian intellectual traditions persist in continuing to emphasize memorization, and various mnemonic devices are still deployed in various Indian traditions for the retention of texts.  Thus ‘Indian culture’ may well be a potent factor in understanding why Indian Americans have nearly monopolized the spelling bee, though this is not the Indian culture that students and their parents have in mind when they are probed by outsiders.”

It is unlikely that we will ever know what exactly accounts for the resounding success of Indian Americans at the National Spelling Bee.   The 8-year old sister of Kavya Shivashankar, the winner of the 2009 competition, already made it to the pre-semifinal round this year, and two of the three contestants vying for the second position were Indian Americans.  To speak only of the near future, the ‘invisible minority’ of which I spoke in my blog yesterday is clearly endeavoring, not without success, to render itself visible as equally the partaker and shaper of “the American dream”.

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*Joel Stein’s Edison and the Rage of Indian Americans

Indian Americans, the so-called model minority, have recently been up in arms. The object of their rage is an American columnist by the name of Joel Stein, who had the audacity, Indian Americans bitterly object, to write a piece called ‘My Own Private India’ [after ‘My Own Private Idaho’] which begins thus:  “I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J.  The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 – the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Ava Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor – has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S. . . .”  When Joel writes that he is “very much in favor of immigration”, he seems to want to signal his distance from those bigots, in Arizona and elsewhere in the US, who have declared their determination to keep the US as much free of immigrants as is possible; but the qualifier, “except Edison, NJ”, was not bound to go down well with Indian Americans who feel outraged that Time’s columnist should have marked Indian Americans as the undesirable immigrant community.

What follows in Joel’s piece is not surprising.  The sparkling town where Joel grew up is unrecognizable though, if anyone knows America, it is doubtful in the extreme that it was recognizable in the first instance.  The Pizza hut outlet – one of hundreds of thousands in the country, which along with Burger King, McDonald’s, KFC, Jack in the Box, and Dunkin’ Donuts have succeeded remarkably well in making every American town look like any other – has been replaced by an Indian sweets shop; the local A & P – never mind that this chain was anyhow destined for obscurity – has given way to an Indian grocery store; the Italian restaurant “is now Moghul” (by which our enlightened writer means not that it has become a movie palace or an icon of a movie Moghul but rather that it serves ‘Mughlai’ food); and the local multiplex, where Joel and boys of his ilk once gyrated their loins to the music of R-rated films, now screens Bollywood films with their buxom belles and serves samosas during ‘intermission’.  Joel and his friends, modern-day Huckleberry Finns, shoplifted, raided the cash drawers, and sneaked into places where they did not belong.  But those days belonged to the past:  “There is an entire generation of white children in Edison”, Joel bemoans, “who have nowhere to learn crime.”  The place of those delightful pranksters was taken by nerds from India, who all seemed adept at computers and to the white boys appeared nothing short of “geniuses”.  At this point, one almost expects to read a comment pointing to the winning streak of Indians in the national spelling bee over the last decade and more, but Joel departs from that script only to adopt another predictable point of view.  Over time, he says, that first generation of educated and professional Indians gave way to a more motley crowd of relatives who would run Dunkin’ Donut shops, 7-11 franchises, and gas stations.  Some years later, the not so dazzling “merchant cousins brought [over] their even-less-bright cousins, and we started to understand why India is so damn poor.”  And, luckily for the white man, he could once again begin to feel like he was on the top of the world.

Joel’s attempt at humour, for that is evidently what he had in mind, appears not to have succeeded.  Following the publication of his column, there have been loud and insistent calls by Indian Americans to have his column removed, and to have Joel censured for his ‘racist’ comments.  Some in the Indian American community have been outraged that as prestigious a journal as Time, for that is how this long-standing conduit of mediocrity is imagined, should have allowed the expression of the most tiresome stereotypes:  perhaps all that is missing from Joel’s piece is a comment about the smell of curry taking over the town.  As I have previously argued on numerous occasions, ours is a culture of ‘apologies’, and it is not surprising that the Indian American community should immediately have striven to exact an apology from Time and Joel Stein.  “We sincerely regret”, responded Time, “that any of our readers were upset by this humor column of Joel Stein’s.  It was in no way intended to cause offense.” Poor Joel followed suit, though his apology deviates from the standard form:  “I truly feel stomach-sick that I hurt so many people. I was trying to explain how, as someone who believes that immigration has enriched American life and my hometown in particular, I was shocked that I could feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with my changing town when I went to visit it.”  One of the least commonly explored facets of Americanization is how immigrant communities embrace the dominant idiom of literal-mindedness that pervades American society, and the irony and ambivalence of Joel’s remarks was certainly lost on Indian Americans.  A place that he associated with his childhood had irretrievably changed, and Joel found himself outside, so to speak, his ‘comfort zone’.   The small town seems remote, perhaps even an ungainly sight, after the dizzy pace of life in the metropolis; in Joel’s case, the sense of alienation he may have experienced upon his return to Edison was compounded by the fact that even the intimacy and familiarity promised by the town had disappeared.

In the exchange that has followed the publication of Joel Stein’s essay, neither Joel nor Indian Americans have across as impressive figures.  Some commentators have deplored the absence of humour among Indian Americans, to which of course they have responded with the observation that they have for long been the target of insults and jokes and have had enough of “humour”.  In India, some writers and media broadcasters have not fully understood the emotions that are understandably aroused when Joel, adverting to the fact that townsfolk started referring to the Indians as “dot heads”, adds by way of trying to be ironical:  “In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if ‘dot heads’ was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.”  Caricatures of a religion never go down too well with its adherents; moreover, there is a lasting memory, especially in New Jersey, of a previous chapter of racial history when the “dot busters” went around assaulting Indians and even killing a couple of them.

Indian Americans, on the other hand, give every appearance of being a trifle too sensitive.   They have accepted the designation of ‘model minority’ with gratitude, scarcely realizing that the term was less a recognition of their achievements and more an admonition to African Americans and Hispanic Americans to shape up; consequently, they feel all the more slighted by Joel’s apparent characterization of them as undesirable.  If an ‘over-achieving’ community could be so easily slighted, what hope is there for immigrant communities or ethnic groups that are less affluent or less characterized by high educational achievements?  This is a reasonable enough claim, except that Indian Americans have never been keen on expressing their solidarity with less affluent or otherwise stigmatized communities.  Moreover, much of the anxiety stemming from Joel Stein’s unimaginative attempt at humour owes its origins to the widespread perception that Indian Americans are an ‘invisible minority’, whose decency and relative distance from the mainstream of American politics has rendered them susceptible to onslaughts and humiliations that would never otherwise be imposed on a community otherwise distinguished by its affluence, attainments, and general reputation.  All this, I would submit, is germane to an understanding of why Joel Stein’s column, ‘My Own Private India’, has been so unsettling for Indian Americans.

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*The Difficult Return to the Womb: The Travails of the Non-Resident Indian in the Motherland

A number of my friends, acquaintances, and students have emailed me an article that appeared in the New York Times business pages on November 28, entitled ‘Some Indians Find It Tough to Go Home Again’.  The article, which chronicles the difficulties that some well-intentioned Indians have encountered in their efforts to relocate to India, has evidently created something of a buzz.  No one even a decade ago would have expected that Indian Americans, in significant numbers, would choose to return to India.  The call of the ‘motherland’ may have always been there in the abstract, but even among those who thought of their stay in the US as a brief sojourn in their lives, and who seemed determined to render service to the motherland, the return to India was always deferred.  Inertia and laziness have a way of taking over one’s life; but, for many others, the moment when the gains of a professional career, built painstakingly through dint of hard work and a relentless commitment to ‘achievement’, could be abandoned seemed not yet to have arrived.

There was a time when ‘brain drain’ could mean only one thing.  Indians educated at the expense of the Indian state flocked to the US, and by the late 1980s there were enough graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology settled in the US that one could speak of the American IIT fraternity.  Ten years after ‘the economic reforms’, the benign phrase used to characterize the jettisoning of the planned economy and all pretensions to some measure of social equality, first commenced in the early 1990s, there was some mention of the trickle of Indians who had finally elected to test the waters of the ‘new India’.  No one is characterizing that trickle as a stream, much less a raging river, but increasingly in India one hears these days not only of those who left for the US but of those who have abandoned the predictable comforts of American life for the uncertainties of life in India.  And, now, to come to the subject of the New York Times’ article, some of the returnees to India are making their way back to the US.  The motherland, apparently, has not done enough to woo the discerning or ethical-minded Non-Resident Indian.

Shiva Ayyadurai, the New York Times tells us, left India when he was but “seven years” old, and he then took a vow that he would return home to “help his country”.  Why is it that, upon reading this, I am curiously reminded of contestants in Miss World or Miss Universal pageants, who have all been dying to save the world, whose every waking moment has been filled with the thought of helping the poor beautiful children of this world?  My eight-year old has certainly never taken a vow that even remotely seems so noble-minded, but then who am I to judge the ethical precociousness of a seven-year old who, perhaps putting aside his toys, had resolved to “help his country”.  The young Bhagat Singh, let us recall, was no less a patriot.  Almost forty years later, Mr Ayyadurai, now an “entrepreneur and lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology”, returned to India, in fulfillment of his vow, at the behest of the Government of India which had devised a program “to lure talented scientists of the so-called desi diaspora back to their homeland”.  Mr Ayyadurai left with great expectations; he seemed to have lasted in India only a few months.  “As Mr Ayyadurai sees it now,” writes our correspondent, “his Western business education met India’s notoriously inefficient, opaque government, and things went downhill from there.”  Within months, Mr Ayyadurai and his Indian boss were practically at each other’s throats:  the job offer was withdrawn, and Mr Ayyadurai once again found himself returning ‘home’ – this time to the US.

One cannot doubt that the culture of work in the US and India is strikingly different, even if the cult of ‘management’ has introduced a cult of homogeneity that would have been all but unthinkable a decade ago.  The account of the difficulties that Indian Americans encounter upon their attempt to relocate to India sometimes reads like the nineteenth-century British colonial’s narrative about the heat and dust of the tropics, the intractability of the ‘native’, and the grinding poverty  – to which today one might add the traffic jams, pollution, electricity breakdowns, water shortages, and a heartless bureaucracy.  The “feudal culture” of India, Mr Ayyadurai is quoted as saying, will hold India back.  How effortlessly Mr Ayyadurai falls into those oppositions that for two centuries or more have characterized European (and now American) representations of India:  feudal vs. modern, habitual vs. innovative, chaotic vs. organized, inefficient vs. efficient, and so on.  Nearly every aspect of this narrative has been touted endlessly.  The only difficulty is that by the time India catches up with the United States, with the West more broadly, the US will have moved on to a different plane.

In all this discussion about home, the mother country, and the diaspora, almost nothing is allowed to disturb the received understanding of what, for example, constitutes corruption, pollution, or inefficiency.   There is no dispute in these circles of enlightened beings that Laloo Yadav is corrupt, but the scandalous conduct of most of the millionaires who inhabit the corridors of power in Washington passes, if at all it is noticed, for ‘indiscretions’ committed by a few ‘misguided’ politicians.  I wonder, moreover, if Laloo’s corrupt politics kept the state of Bihar free of communal killings – a huge contrast from the ‘clean’ and ‘developed’ state of Gujarat, where a state-sponsored pogrom in 2002 left over 2,000 Muslims dead.  Gujarat is the favorite state of the NRIs and foreign investors, though the sheer dubiousness of that distinction has done nothing to humble either party.  Or take this example:  the US has done much (if not enough) to tackle pollution at home, but its shipment of hazardous wastes to developing countries is evidently a minor detail.  And one could go in this vein, ad infinitum, but to little effect.  The more substantive consideration, perhaps, is that there is little recognition on the part of many NRIs that there is a sensibility which still resists the idea that the conception of a home is merely synonymous with material gains, bodily comforts, or a notion of well being that is defined as an algorithm of numbers.  William Blake, when asked where he lived, answered with a simple phrase:  ‘in the imagination’.

On the subject of home, let me allow the 12th century monk of Saxony, Hugo of St. Victor, the final words:  “It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether.  The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.  The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”

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*“Hosay” in Trinidad: Political Unrest and Solidarity in a Plantation Society

On 30 October 1884, two police firings in San Fernando, Trinidad, wounded over one hundred Indians and took the lives of perhaps as many as 20 people.  As the 125th anniversary of the infamous ‘Muharram Massacre’ is upon us, it is perhaps well to consider the circumstances that led to the killings and what they might suggest about racial and working-class politics down to the present day.

The circumstances under which Indians began to arrive in Trinidad in 1845 are now widely known.  The price of black labor had risen after the emancipation of slaves in 1838, and indentured labor from India, a British colony, was viewed by plantation owners and government officials in Trinidad (and the Caribbean) as the most expeditious way of undermining free black labor and keeping the sugar plantations running at a profit.  As the Port of Spain Gazette noted with optimism in its issue of 30 May 1845, “when the labourers (Negroes) are informed that there are countless thousands of these people inured to tropical labour, and the heat of a tropical climate, starving in their own country, and most willing to immigrate to this, it may be the means of opening their eyes a little to the necessity of working more steadily and giving greater satisfaction to their employers.”

The story of the Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian divide is, happily, not the subject of my present ruminations.  As a number of scholars have argued, Muharram [or Hosay, from Hussein or Husayn, as it came to be known in the British Caribbean] was well established in Trinidad from the outset of Indian indentured immigration as a religious and cultural festival that bridged what might otherwise have been marked differences within the growing Indian community.  Though Muharram is a re-enactment of the events that led to the death of Hassan and Hussein, the Prophet Muhammed’s grandsons, during the struggles over the succession to the Prophet, Hindu participation in the Muharram rites has been widely documented.  If in India Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Oudh, had no compunction in having the raslila, the eternal play of Krishna, performed at his court, it should not be surprising that Hindus should have thought nothing of their involvement in the Muharram rites.

In Trinidad, however, matters had gone much further, as black people were also reasonably well invested in Muharram celebrations.  Kelvin Singh, author of Bloodstained Tombs:  The Muharram Massacre 1884 (1988), argues that “Negro involvement in the celebrations” has been well documented from the 1850s onwards.  To some European observers, black people were inclined to gravitate towards a ‘fete’, whenever and wherever it might be held; others took the view that the ancestral drumming of Negroes drew them to the tassa drumming that is so characteristic a feature of the Muharram celebrations.

In 1884, the colonial government took the decision to ban Muharram processions from the principal urban areas.  Kelvin Singh is among those scholars who has argued that the ban had little to do with Muharram celebrations themselves, and was rather impelled by other considerations, for instance by concern over industrial unrest.  Such unrest had been prominent in the previous year, and the falling price of sugar had heightened the misery of workers.  Displays of solidarity among workers were never welcome.  One cannot doubt, however, that colonial authorities also feared that the Negro, typecast as a lazy and undisciplined person, might come to exercise a nefarious influence over the “effeminate Hindu” and “fanatic Muslim”; moreover, in standing together in a common cause, Hindus and Muslims threatened to overturn another article of faith ever present in colonial thought, namely the idea that adherents of these two religions were bound together in a struggle to death that only a transcendent and rational force such as represented by the Englishman could avert, diverting that volatile energy into less hostile channels.

Sookhooo and 31 others petitioned the governor when the ban was put into effect.  The Government response, in part, was to argue that non-Indians had no place in an Indian festival; and that Hindus, similarly, could claim no entitlements with respect to a Muslim religious rite.  At Cipero Street, Mr. Child, the Magistrate, read the Riot Act in English to a large crowd comprised largely of illiterate people.  Even Major Bowles, who headed a contingent of soldiers, could not hear the Act being read out; but the volleys unleashed at the orders of Mr. Child mowed down many of the men gathered in defiance of the ban.  At the Mon Repos junction, the ‘Riot Act’ was again ‘read out’, whatever that might mean, and amidst the chanting and the tassa drumming the firing commenced and took its deadly toll.  The British could congratulate themselves that ‘law and order’ had been restored:  as the Port of Spain Gazette cheerfully editorialized about the firings on 8 November 1884, “this lesson may have a salutary effect not only on coolies but also on the heterogeneous collections of loafers, prostitutes, roughs, rogues and vagabonds which infest our two towns.”

As the Muharram massacre of 1884 in Trinidad suggests, the idea that such supposedly disparate groups as Hindus, Muslims, and Negroes could find common cause was nothing less than anathema to the state.  The Muharram celebrations never recovered ground as the preeminent festival rite of Trinidad, and diminished in importance over the years; nevertheless, the sheer survival of Hosay suggests that, notwithstanding the state’s quest to deploy the discourse of ‘law and order’, the voice of workers can never be entirely suppressed.

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*Pizzas, Pigs, and the Presidency: Happy Lucky Three-some in Guyana

It is my last night in Guyana, and I am struck by the fact that Guyana is surely the only country I have been to where I have yet to see a pizza restaurant. Pizzas, Chinese, and Indian food have become the global food of our times, and I wonder why pizzas have not found their way into Guyanese society. A friend remarked that somewhere in Georgetown is Guyana’s only pizza shop, but he described its pizza as rotten. One bad pizza joint cannot tell the whole story. The absence of pizza is all the more surprising considering that the New York area has become a mini-Guyana, with, I am told, something like 200,000 Indo-Guyanese or more settled in that area. Some entrepreneur could surely have taken the New York-style thin crust pizza back to Guyana?

Every country in the world has its version of Chinese food. The generic Chinese restaurant has a sound, I should say thriving, home in Guyana. With names such as Happy Lucky, Fat Boy, Silver Dragon, New Moon, Jade Inn, China Moon, Happy Garden, and Golden Dragon, one should perhaps expect little better than slightly greasy noodles or sweet and sour pork. Chinese restaurants remain one of the principal employers of the Chinese. A new albeit small class of upscale Chinese restaurants, something akin to the Hong-Kong style Chinese restaurants that dominate the landscape of Monterey Park and the San Gabriel Valley in the Los Angeles area, has arrived on the scene in Georgetown. The signature piece is the never-more aptly named “The New Thriving Restaurant”, a glassy palace or Shangri-la or sorts for the elite of Guyana. Not far from the modest residence of Guyana’s President, this huge restaurant on Main Street was described to me as having replaced its namesake that was burnt down some years ago. At its opening, its Chinese proprietors staged a cultural show highlighting Guyana’s multiculturalism before an audience comprised of senior members in the government. What was I was not told, but read in the Kaiteur News yesterday, is that the President, Bharat Jagdeo, and the Agriculture Minister feasted on a pork buffet yesterday, apparently in a demonstration of the fact that diners should not be deterred by the swine flu pandemic from consuming pork.

If Guyana’s pork is good for its president, it ought to be good for everyone else as well. Some might be inclined to remark that this encroachment on the dignity of the office of the president is a sign of debased politics, and politicians are now not much more than glorified salesmen. American presidents make a pitch for their weapons and cars, and Guyanese presidents do so for pigs and sugar. Nevertheless, in this story there is more than meets the eye: indeed, the story is a pointer to the democratization of politics in our times. Monarchs and despots have been noted throughout history for having the food that was prepared for them tasted by their servants. Some of the Mughal emperors had official tasters, and Louis XIV, ever fearful of being poisoned by one of the many intriguers who populated his court, had all his dishes tasted by someone else before he would consent to consume them. The tables, it appear, have been reversed. Who would have thought that a President would now consent to become a guinea pig, a high-order salesman for the pork industry?

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*From Masjid to Mandir: Across the Corentyne, into Suriname

Guyana’s history, since the arrival of the Europeans, has been inextricably linked to the quest for ‘El Dorado’. For a small country, with a population of around 800,000, it has a surfeit of political stories. I call it the ‘land of narrratives’. But it is not only narratives which are aplenty. Its rivers are imposing, even if I will not see the Essequibo, which – I have been told many times – is 22 miles wide at its mouth. The Los Angeles river flows close to my home in Encino, and at its best is not much more than a creek. To be in Guyana, by contrast, is to be reminded of the elemental force of water and the majesty of rivers. In the hotel room in Georgetown, however, the water pressure in the taps was very low, and I understand that there have been water shortages. The abundance of water, and yet not enough for cooking and drinking – this story has its counterpart in many other parts of the world.

This morning Rishee Thakur and I took a wooden speedboat across the Corentyne into Suriname. The river, which must be two or three miles wide at this point, was not choppy and it took all of fifteen or twenty minutes to land at the other end. It was a lovely ride. We commenced our trip from close to the mosque in Corriverton, and at the other end arrived at a Sanatan Dharma temple in Suriname, a few kilometers from Nickerie. Hinduism and Islam both came to Guyana (which was part of Dutch Guiana, as I recall from my history, before the British purchased Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice in the 19th century and renamed their possessions British Guiana) with the indentured laborers, and it is perhaps apposite that this trip should have been prominently marked by signs of both the religions. At the landing, we were mobbed by taxi drivers, nearly all Indians – this could have been a scene from almost anywhere in India. Our taxi driver picked up his wife from the Sanatan Dharma mandir, and offered to share the temple’s prashad, a generous helping of big puris and small ladoos.

The taxi driver and I talked in Hindi. The one obvious difference between Guyana and Suriname that strikes one is that Guyana is surprisingly monolingual, just as Suriname is an astoundingly polyglot society. The Indians in Guyana have, almost to the last person, lost their Hindi or rather Bhojpuri, but my taxi driver in Suriname alerted me to the difference by conversing with me in Hindi. Dutch is the official language, and the road signs are in Dutch; but a creole, described to me as Tranan Songo, is also widely spoken. The Indians speak Hindi, or rather I should say a dialect of Bhojpuri, and the Javanese, who account for something like 15% of Suriname’s half a million population, speak Javanese. Everyone speaks two or three languages, even more – a pleasant contrast from the monotonous monolingualism of the Anglo-Saxon world. In addition, as I found, Mandarin, Chinese, Portuguese and Amerindian languages are also spoken by some. I asked Surinamese and Guyanese Indians why Bhojpuri had survived among the former while it had disappeared in Guyana, but no one was able to give me a reply. Similarly, I am tempted to say, a greater portion of the Amerindian population appears to have survived in Suriname, compared to Guyana. Did Dutch and English colonial policies impact differently on the capacity of people to retain their language? Is it the particular misfortune of those who speak English that, given the increasing dominance of English over the last several decades, they become ‘linguistically lazy’ and lose command over other languages?

That the Indians in Suriname have not lost Hindi at all became all too evident as soon as we came into Nickerie. At Manoj’s Music Center, near the India Bazaar, I conversed with the shopkeeper in Hindi, and some men standing nearby chimed in with their opinions when I asked for some recommendations for Caribbean Indian music. I found there a collection of songs by Droopati. Nickerie is doubtless more affluent than any of the towns in Berbice, across the river in Guyana, though there too I found a sizable presence of the Chinese. Not all of the Chinese here go back to the period when Chinese contract laborers were brought to the country; in Nickerie, especially, it appears that there have been recent Chinese immigrants who run restaurants, boutiques, supermarkets, and the like. Suriname might not seem a likely place for understanding what globalization has wrought around the world, but heaven knows that the Chinese, Indonesians, Indians, creoles, Africans, and Europeans have created a society that merits more attention than is commonly bestowed on it.

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*Gandhi in Guyana

Is it sheer coincidence that in the three days that I have been in Guyana the name of Mahatma Gandhi has come up repeatedly? Or is it the case that in a troubled country the invocation of his name is not only a plea for sanity and nonviolence but also an expression of the hope that where everything else appears to have failed to heal the country’s racial wounds it may well be the teachings and example of Gandhi that will bring some relief to the country?

It had not been more than an hour after I had checked into my hotel room at Sidewalk in Georgetown on Friday morning and had gone to cash some US Dollars for Guyanese Dollars at one of the cambios that I first heard mention of Gandhi’s name. My friend, Rishee Thakur, and I were seated in a taxi talking about the racial politics in Guyana when the taxi driver, having overheard us, intervened with an observation. He asked if we were Guyanese, and was told that I had come from India via the US. ‘The saintly Mahatma’, intoned our African driver, ‘taught us humility’. He then proceeded to narrate the incident where Gandhi, in his early days in South Africa, learned what it meant to be a ‘coolie’ when he was tossed out of the train for daring to travel in a first-class cabin. That incident has resonated very strongly with nearly everyone acquainted not only with Gandhi’s life in South Africa but with the history of resistance to racism and colonialism, and I found it remarkable, and inspiring, that a taxi driver in Georgetown should have recalled this incident.

Yesterday, one Mr Harold Khan of Bassant’s Taxi Service took me to West Coast Demerara. Though he claimed (as did many others) to be speaking from the heart, letting me have the truth unvarnished, it soon transpired that he is a hard-core member of the PPP. To gauge his assessment of Cheddi Jagan, it is enough to say that he described Cheddi as Guyana’s Mahatma Gandhi. I have, of course, far too many reservations about this comparison. It requires an enormous stretch of the imagination to think of Cheddi and Gandhi in the same vein, but I suspect that, by the same token, no one who is not familiar with Cheddi can understand the much larger-than-life figure he was in Guyana, particularly for the country’s Indians.

This morning, my friend Deo Persaud took me into Indian villages on the East Coast road, and we also stopped by the African village of Buxton. On Sunday mornings, the action is all at the local rum shop. In Good Hope, we spent the better part of the entire afternoon at a rum shop. The 20-20 final was taking place between Sri Lanka and Pakistan, but we nevertheless entered into a conversation with some of Deo’s friends. In the three days that I have been in Guyana, I have heard much talk of rampant corruption. The prevailing view is that politics has ruined what is a beautiful country and might otherwise have been prosperous. Our conversation veered at one point to a discussion of the violence that occasionally grips the country. One of the brothers, Rudy, who drove a truck in the US for two years, was articulate in the expression of his political sentiment that Guyana sometimes appeared to be lurching towards racial violence, even if he was clear that in their everyday relations the Indians and Africans exhibited an intermingling about which official or scholarly views of the country are more or less clueless. Rudy then quoted Gandhi, ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’

Listening to Rudy and thinking of how Gandhi has been invoked so often in the three days that I have been here, I wonder why, in some 20-25 years that I have lived in the US, I have rarely heard Gandhi’s name come up in table-talk or everyday conversation. Gandhi’s name evidently has cultural capital everywhere in the world, particularly so, perhaps, in countries which are desperately seeking solutions to what appear to be insuperable political problems. In the US, Gandhi’s name has been mentioned in conversations I’ve had with political activists, liberals, Quakers, peaceniks, and (occasionally) academics, but seldom with people from ordinary walks of life. This is not altogether surprising when we consider that the US is most likely the most apolitical and insular country in the world.

Statue of Mohandas Gandhi, Georgetown, Guyana. Photo: Vinay Lal, June 2009.

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