Evolution Of Writing In English By And About East Indians Of Guyana 1838-2018

Ameena Gafoor

Description

An appreciable number of indentured Indians shipped to British West Indian plantations were literate and brought a number of sacred books (Ramanayas, Mahabaratas, Vedas, Qur'ans) among their paltry possessions. A few were Haffizs who could recite the Holy Qur'an from memory. They were each versed in many dialects. These men kept the literate culture alive among East Indians in those oppressive times. Yet, a hundred years after the cessation of the indentureship system no listing exists in the Caribbean region of the writings that have evolved by East Indians since their dislodgement from India; no comprehensive listing exists that records the distinctive aesthetics, the substantial scholarly and creative writings, and the intriguing artistic works of the cultural block loosely referred to as the East Indians of Guyana. This Bibliography attempts to provide a record of the evolution of such writings in English produced by those who chose to remain, as settlers in what was then British

Informations

• Publié par: Hansib Publications
• Date de parution: 13 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912662050
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE EVOLUTION OF WRITING IN ENGLISH BY AND ABOUT EAST INDIANS OF GUYANA, 1838 - 2018

First published in Great Britain by Hansib Publications in 2018
Hansib Publications Limited
P.O. Box 226, Hertford, SG14 3WY
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Copyright Ameena Gafoor, 2018
ISBN 978-1-912662-05-0
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Cover image:
Journey into the Dark Circle: the Arrival , reproduced with the kind permission of the artist, Philbert Gajadhar
Design Production by Hansib Publications Ltd
Printed in Great Britain
DEDICATION
I dedicate this work to all our foreparents who left India, initially on sailing ships, braved unknown oceans, and arrived at unwelcoming shores to labour on British Guiana s sugar plantations - today we exist on the legacies of their struggles and sacrifices;
to all Guyanese of East Indian origin wherever they may be;
to my grandparents on both sides;
to my parents, my siblings, my children;
and to my grandchildren.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
EVEN THOUGH MUCH INDEPENDENT RESEARCH HAS gone into this publication it, nonetheless, stands on the shoulders of previous and current Bibliographies and Timelines of Guyanese History. I recognise all existing Bibliographies on Guyana and I have listed in this work those of which I am aware. However, inaccuracies and omissions were found in some entries which I sought to set right, and all needed to be brought up to date.
I am grateful to Emeritus Professor Frank Birbalsingh and to James Mangar for contacting Guyanese authors now living in North America to submit lists of their publications (some authors responded and I thank them); to Bernadette Persaud for also contacting writers and journalists and for reviewing the manuscript; to Tota Mangar for verifying the historical accuracy of the Timelines; to Ravi Dev for the benefit of his intuitive reading of the final draft; to Pat Dial who also read the final draft of the manuscript and made insightful remarks.
I thank the staffs of the University of Guyana Library, the National Library, the National Archives, the libraries of private persons for their unfailing courtesy when approached for material, and all individuals who freely offered pertinent information and material.
I have devoted the year 2017 (the Centenary of the Order to end Indentureship) to this Bibliography and it has been a labour of love.

Writers are not writing about Indians for the sake of emphasizing Indianness but more to create understanding and deepen meaning of the many cultures which co-exist.
Emeritus Professor Kenneth Ramchand The West Indian Novel and its Background (1970, 1983)
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Bibliographies
Guyana before Indentureship
THE INDENTURESHIP PERIOD: 1838-1917
1838-1900
1901-1910
1911-1917
THE POST-INDENTURESHIP PERIOD TO INDEPENDENCE: 1917-1966
1917-1920
1921-1930
1931-1940
1941-1950
1951-1960
1961-1966
INDEPENDENCE TO PRESENT: 1966-2018
1966-1970
1971-1980
1981-1990
1991-2000
2001-2010
2011-2018
PREFACE
IN HIS 1992 NOBEL PRIZE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH, DEREK Walcott begins by describing the Ramleela, the dramatisation of the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, in the village of Felicity, mostly populated by the descendants of indentured cane-cutters. In a series of moving poetic tableaux, Walcott describes the colourful costumes worn by the children, the costumed actors playing gods and princes, the artistry of drums, the gigantic effigy of a deity:

Under an open shed on the edge of the field, there were two huge armatures of bamboo that looked like immense cages. They were parts of the body of a god, his calves or thighs, which, fitted and reared, would make a gigantic effigy. This effigy would be burnt as a conclusion to the epic. The cane structures flashed a predictable parallel: Shelley s sonnet on the fallen statue of Ozymandias and his empire, that colossal wreck in its empty desert.
Drummers had lit a fire in the shed and they eased the skins of their tablas nearer the flames to tighten them. The saffron flames, the bright grass, and the hand-woven armatures of the fragmented god who would be burnt were not in any desert where imperial power had finally toppled but were part of a ritual, evergreen season that, like the cane-burning harvest, is annually repeated, the point of such sacrifice being its repetition, the point of the destruction being renewal through fire.
Walcott confessed that although he had recently adapted the Odyssey for a theatre in England, presuming that the audience knew the trials of Odysseus, hero of another Asia Minor epic, nobody in Trinidad knew any more than he did about Rama, Kali, Shiva and Vishnu, apart from Indian Trinidadians:

I had often thought of but never seen Ramleela, and had never seen this theatre, an open field, with village children as warriors, princes, and gods. I had no idea what the epic story was.
Walcott s Nobel speech ( https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-lecture.html ) argues for Indian drama and Indian culture to be placed at the heart of Trinidadian society, which was impoverished because of its unawareness of such richness in its midst. It reminds us that the indentured labourers and their descendants were not illiterate peasants, but that the boats bringing them to the region also bought their books. Among the pots and cloth and humble belongings were the Holy Koran, the Ramayana and other texts. As I have written elsewhere:

Since 1838 we have had in the West Indies a body of texts of staggering physical bulk and philosophical dimensions ... The Ramayana rolls on to a hundred thousand lines, much longer than Virgil s Aeneid or Homer s Iliad. The Mahabharata quadruples that sum; the Vedas when collected form eleven huge Octavo volumes, whilst the Puranas extend to two million lines. I mention quantity so as to highlight the fact that the act of ignoring these texts is an act of monumental bias ... We don t have to keep imposing a Homeric grid on native life, or agonise over Western theories of tragedy, to express the character of our West Indian historical and individual selves. Exile and Homecoming are the Ramayana s themes. ( Teaching West Indian Literature in Britain, in Studying British Culture , ed. Susan Bassnett. London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 135-51; reissued in Articles by and Interviews with David Dabydeen: Pak s Britannica , ed. Lynne Macedo. UWI Press, 2011, p. 55)
What I am saying is that among the Indians trafficked to the region were brahmins who took Hindu religious texts with them, and Imams who would recite the Holy Koran in Arabic to followers of Islam. There would certainly have been some haffiz, people who had memorised the complete Koran. These were the leaders who introduced and encouraged literacy among the indentured labourers. Christian missionaries supplemented such literary resources by introducing the Bible. We should not be surprised to learn that literate and educated Indians accepted the lesser role of indentured cane-cutters, given that Indians were fleeing famines in their thousands; famines which, as Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen and Indian scholars like Shashi Tharoor argue, were a direct result of British colonial mismanagement of the Indian economy in the 19th century:

As India became increasingly crucial to British prosperity, millions of Indians died completely unnecessary deaths in famines. As a result of what one can only call the British Colonial Holocaust, thanks to economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 30-35 million Indians needlessly died of starvation during the Raj. Millions of tons of wheat were exported to Britain even as famine raged. When relief camps were set up the inhabitants were barely fed and nearly all died. (Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire . Hurst and Company, 2017, pp.149f)
Tharoor tells of how, during the Orissa famine in 1866, when one and a half million Indians starved to death, the British shipped two hundred million pounds of rice to Britain. He cites Professor Mike Davis who stated that, London was eating India s bread ( ibid ). In addition, millions of acres of good arable land were given over to poppy cultivation so that the British could supply opium to China (leading to wars with China) instead of being used to grow food crops. In 1700, India s share of the world s economy was 23 per cent. By the time the British left India, it had shrunk to 3 per cent. No wonder that brahmins and imams numbered among the indentureds, for many of them were also affected by dire poverty. They too were starved and shipped out.
* * *
Ameena Gafoor s Bibliography is a significant effort to set the record straight with respect to Indian Guyanese literacy, and literary and scholarly production. Building upon previous work by Robert McDowell, A.J. Seymour, Jeremy Poynting, Joel Benjamin and Lall Balkaran, she has produced the most comprehensive and up-to-date list of Indian Guyanese writing, drawing our attention again to seminal 19th century works by Joseph Ruhomon and Bechu. Ruhomon was the founder of the East Indian Association, a man with a passion for the pursuit of reason, to quote Clem Seecharan, the Guyanese historian who has done more than most in resurrecting the writings of Ruhomon. In 1894, at the age of 21, Ruhomon published an extended pamphlet, India: The Progress of Her People at Home and Abroad (reprinted by the UWI Press in 2001, edited by Clem Seecharan). It was, as Clem Seecharan says, the first publication