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May 05, 2013 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev
The Indians that “arrived” in Guyana from India between 1838 and 1917 left a country that had been conquered by Britain. But unlike the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals, Britain always viewed itself as a “foreign power”. She conquered India between 1757 – when the adventurer Clive at the battle of Plassey seized the richest province of the moribund Mughal Empire – Bengal, for the British East India Company, and 1818, when it defeated the Maratha Confederacy in western India.
The Indians of Guyana cannot be understood unless one understands the history of India during this period. In her pursuit of wealth, the British plundered the country so thoroughly that the first Hindi word to enter the English language was the word “LOOT”. In fact, Bengal and the United Provinces [Bengal, Modern Bihar and Uttar Pradesh], the earliest conquests of the British, remain the most backward regions of India – such was the magnitude of the plunder.
The cotton and indigo industries, in which India had reigned supreme for thousands of years, was destroyed, as the cotton mills of Lancashire were established. The importation of all machinery to India was forbidden until the pressures of World War One forced the British hand. India’s industrial base was stillborn, as its factories were snuffed out. It was the beginning of the structural underdevelopment of India.
By introducing a direct tax on the land and refining the Moghul methods of collection, millions were uprooted from the land as they could not pay the onerous taxes. Cash crops for export were encouraged as the uprooted millions wandered across the land in search of food. Famines arrived in India. Before the British arrival in India, under Mughal rule, the villages had remained self-sufficient … there were no famines. It is not mere fortuity that British rule and famines swept across India simultaneously.
Even though force, supported by treachery, bribery, vice and venality were the instruments of the British conquest of India, through “education” and a wide array of measures, they created and projected an image of them being incorruptible, just and god-like. A new paradigm was created to conquer the minds of the populace.
To correct the contradictions between the reality and the paradigm, the facts were simply re-written. India was “backward, superstitious, and primitive”. According to the new paradigm, India was not conquered for “gold” – its economic wealth, or “glory” – political expansionism, or “god” – religious fulfillment, but was ruled purely for the benefit of the Indians.
This altruism supposedly sprung from the British desire to:
• establish amongst the “squabbling and warring peoples” in India,
• bring civilization to Indians,
• eradicate inhuman social practices,
• establish law and order,
• develop the Indian economy, and
• save the souls of heathen Indians etc, etc.
All these had to be accomplished stoically, for it was “the white man’s burden”.
It was against this background of economic, social and psychological devastation that the emigration of Indians was engineered. So when one uses the word “voluntary” to describe Indian emigration, it is as if a man invades your home, destroys that home and all its contents, and then claims you “voluntarily” chose to live elsewhere. “Voluntary” implies a choice. There was no choice for most of the Indian immigrants. Even some of the immigrants’ reasons, which may be termed ‘personal’, actually stemmed from the destruction of their societal value system by the British invaders.
Another spur to Indian emigration to the ‘colonies’ was provided by the first Battle for Indian Independence [the so-called “Indian Mutiny”] of 1857. With the defeat of the Indian forces, caused by internal dissent among the soldiers (sepoys) – brutal British retaliation on suspected and actual participants, forced many to flee for their lives. Thousands were killed and entire villages were razed. Many of the “sepoys” ended up in Guyana.
In a random sample taken by anthropologist R.T. Smith, of the 238,934 Indians who arrived in Guyana between 1838 and 1917, 84% were Hindus, 15.9% Muslims, and only 0.1% Christians. Of the Hindus, 13.6% were high caste Brahmins and Kshatriyas, while the others were mainly from the agricultural castes. The percentage of high castes was higher than in North India as a whole, in spite of the prejudice against them by the British, who branded them ‘trouble makers’.
It is unquestioned that many of these individuals were literate in their own languages and were quite conversant with their religious texts, and chafed at being branded ‘illiterate heathens’ by the Planters. Against great odds, and under great privation, these Indians worked to preserve the institutions of their culture. The first Mandir in Guyana was noted in 1870 on Leguan Island in the Essequibo River and up the Berbice River. The first Masjid was built in 1869 at Vergenoegen on the East Bank of Essequibo.
By the turn of the century, these had spread exponentially and almost every village had a Mandir and Masjid, which formed the nuclei around which the Indians reconstructed their lives in the new land.
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