East Indian solidarity in nation building in Guyana
By Prem Misir, Ph.D.
MEMBERS of the distinguished panel, members of the diplomatic corps, distinguished guests, members of the audience. Moses Nagamootoo said a lot of stuff about me, and I don't know if I can live up to some of them. Yes, I've written about race relations, but so have many other people. I have a distinct concern, a distinct connection with the issues affecting Guyanese. Since last year, after the December 1997 national elections, I seem to be coming here every three months or four months. I was here in December at the empowerment conference, which focused on race relations. Then I was here in January of this year, when I launched a book on Leader Behavior and the Compliance Structure in Education. I have had many involvements with East Indian culture apart from being actually East Indian myself. I share many of the sentiments expressed by the Honorable Minister of Information. As a young undergraduate student in the United Kingdom, in the refectory in the Halls of Residence where I used to dine, there was an East Indian girl who generally sat in front of me. At breakfast, she frequently ate bacon, beef, etc.. I grew up in a very orthodox home where I was told not to eat beef or pork. I've never been to India, and here was this girl who just came from India, sitting right across from me, eating bacon and whatever else. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I just want to point out in support of some of the remarks that Mr. Nagamootoo mentioned about a Guyanese East Indian who is quite different from an East Indian from India or `India East Indian'. I became Chairman of the East Indian Diaspora in 1987. We had a major event in 1988, commemorating the 150th year of the East Indian migration from the South East Indian sub-continent. It was that year, and this was 1988, that we invited Dr. Cheddi Jagan and the Honourable Basdeo Panday to New York. I didn't know in 1988 that Dr. Jagan's party was going to taste electoral victory in 1992. Dr. Cheddi Jagan was a very humble man. Probably, the closest I ever got to him was at this event in 1988. At the same time, Dr. Frank Birbalsingh, a good friend of mine, was doing a similar type of activity at York University in Toronto, and he invited me to speak. Dr. Jagan was the keynote speaker at this event, and also the event in New York in 1988. As Chairman of the East Indian Diaspora, I have tried in a very considerable way to bridge the gap between the East and the West. The East Indian Diaspora even gave me an award for that, but I don't think I deserved it because I was not successful in developing articulate links between Caribbean East Indians and Indians from India. I tried my best believing hat since we are part of the East Indian Diaspora, we could create Indian unity in New York. I was even able instrumentally to have Kusum Mohan, an `India' East Indian national, as Vice Chairperson of the East Indian Diaspora. It still did not work in so far as meeting the standards set by the East Indian Diaspora. They are different. Trust me on this one. I've lived in many different parts of the world for protracted periods of time. The Indians from India are quite different from Indo-Caribbeans. I think as long as we try to acknowledge that, we can remove some of the cultural shackles of the past. We are hankering too much on the past. The past is important, but we must be highly selective as to what we peddle from the past, in order to redefine for us a new way of life. East Indian Marginalisation Indo-Caribbean culture, today is not widely accepted as a valid concept, or a legitimate field of study because the Caribbean is still seen as African. Numerous studies of Afro-Caribbean history and culture attest to this definitive conclusion. These studies show an Afro-centric approach toward the Caribbean. Given a sizable number of East Indians in Guyana, the notion and application of an Afro-centric philosophy entrenched in Caribbean Studies certainly reduce the significance of East Indian labour in the Caribbean from the beginning of Indenture. Some features of the Indo-Caribbean experience may very well be dislocation from India, massive burden of labour in the Caribbean, ethnic victimisation in the post-colonial era, and migration to the metropolitan centres. These characteristics generate a double marginalisation, as Naipaul would say (Birbalsingh 1997: xv). First, there is marginalisation via their relationship to a subservient American and Euro-centered Creole-Caribbean condition. Second, there is marginalisation via their `outsider' status as East Indians in the Caribbean. De jure and de facto colonialism Caribbean countries symbolise class, race, ethnic diversity, ethnic cleavage and ethnic closure that had their beginnings in the Colonial era, to now achieving some degree of permanence. East Indians and Africans were subordinate to the Europeans in imperialist times. Whites constituted the ruling class, and Africans and East Indians were the ruled. But even among the ruled subculture, dominant and subordinate relationships were institutionalised through differences in job status and religion. During the European conquest, cultural imperialism as manifested in European beliefs, values, rules, laws, and sanctions, were well accepted by both Africans and East Indians who projected extreme deference to the Whites. Such undue deference had its price, for it enabled both Africans and East Indians to view their own cultural make-up as inferior to the White culture. Whites controlled the legal-political stage, a prerequisite to sustain their power as the dominant group. Relations between East Indians and Africans were neutralised and mediated through Whites vis-a-vis a triadic (three-way) relationship (Whites, Africans, and East Indians). East Indians and Africans interacted and perceived their society as if it were a nation. Weber saw the nation as "...a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest itself in a state of its own" (Gerth and Mills 1977:176). Africans and East Indians' notion of nation as a community of sentiment was that of the Whites, despite the resonance of an embryonic African-Creole nationalism. They participated (in) and complied with a framework quite foreign to their own. In effect, in the colonial period, the Whites' dominant value system represented their concept of a "nation" toward which subordinate groups (East Indians and Africans) display compliance and deference to White values. The Whites unilaterally set up themselves as a nation, and created a state to provide for the legitimate use of force, in order to uphold their nationhood and power interests. Africans and East Indians subscribed to this White nation, but were excluded from being part of the nation. Their cultural make-up was not an element in the Whites' community of sentiment (nation). East Indians and Africans were not a component of the state, as the state was used as an instrument of domination by the White group against them. Indeed, in the colonial epoch, both Africans and East Indians were "outsiders" in a society that they helped to build. The legal departure of Whites in 1966, destroyed the traditional triadic relationship between Whites, Africans, and East Indians, resulting in a loss of the mediating factor among the two major ethnic groups. The White exit meant that there were no East Indian and African nation, only separate East Indian and African cultural sections. The White nation remained intact, ensuring that East Indians and Africans continue to relate to a White belief system, values, norms, and institutions. Today the White social structure still drives many Caribbean societies. However, loss of the White-mediating factor has induced Africans and East Indians to use this ethnic diversity to their personal political advantage to become successors of the legal-political stage. Caribbean societies characterised by these diverse ethnic origins seem susceptibly but not inevitably driven toward displaying racial problems, more a product of race than ethnicity. Race directly focuses on the socially constructed physical features of the individual, while ethnicity refers to the common cultural heritage of the person. Poor race relations flow dynamically from a spotlight on the individual's socially constructed physical characteristics. The human mindset is much more receptive to focusing on differences among people, and (is) indifferent to their similarities, thereby diminishing the quality of relationships. Cross (1980) gave three reasons for the development of racist ideology. In the first place, the colonialists used race as a factor to classify the colonised Africans, East Indians, and other minority groups. Secondly, the belief in the inequality of the human races was applied to maintain the social order. Thirdly, the effect of British parliamentary democracy, with its emphasis on the two-party system, is more than likely in societies like Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana, with two major ethnic groups, to induce racial divisions. Despite the absence of de jure colonialism today, the de facto persisting colonial value system driven by racism, still largely permeates Caribbean societies, and manipulated by political parties to secure the prized legal-political stage. It is this de facto colonial racism that provides the diktat for social behavior today. Weakening subordinate groups Long periods have elapsed in which one political party allied to a particular race and class, has dominated the legal-political stage; and wherein used its race-class identity to devise its own "nation" and its own "state". In effect, the period 1964 through 1992 witnessed the growth and consolidation of the People's National Congress (PNC) elite. This process of establishing political authority by one race-class party, the PNC, following the principles used by Whites earlier, operated to exclude other subordinate race-class groups in the electoral process. The PNC in power, given its efforts to create a nation based on its own cultural make-up, induced the subordinate race-class groups to assimilate the values of the dominant PNC elite. This assimilation process driven by the then ruling PNC party's quest to establish its own nation, was a method applied to dilute the cultures of other peoples, and thereby eliminate cultural diversity in the society. A case in point is the Guyana National Service, as administered during the ruling People's National Congress years. An integrated pluralist model Guyana emerged from the White planters' clutch as a plural society with multiple class and cultural traditions. People have ingrained belief systems and values, driven by their cultural norms. In a multiethnic society, the cultural institutional structure, i.e., family, kinship, religion, and ethnicity, are presented as dimensions of pluralism. Therefore, the traditional pluralist model comprises two concepts: culture and ethnicity. Smith describes a plural society as a society divided into separate social and cultural sections, each of which was typified by a different system of basic institutions. He argued that "This basic institutional system embraces kinship, education, religion, property and economy, recreation, and certain modalities." (Smith 1965:82). These differences structure the society into a hierarchical mosaic of total communities, whereby each distinct community furnishes the complete sweep of life experiences. He argues that a plural society lacks a common value system shared by the separate cultural sections. Under these seemingly conflict and unstable conditions, therefore, order and control functions become a premium, and these are effected through a political machinery controlled by the dominant cultural section. However, the ruling elite has a dominant value system, with which subordinate groups have to comply, even in situations of cultural coexistence. Clearly, cultural coexistence under the traditional pluralist model could breed ethnic cleavage and ethnic closure, with only minimal participation of the competing ethnic groups in the economic sector of society. This analysis of pluralism, if true, suggests minimal social interaction between Africans and East Indians in Guyana. But the empirical evidence would indicate otherwise. For instance, observation of these two races in the adolescent and adult socialisation process in Guyana shows consistent meaningful interaction, even during colonial times. In these circumstances, class as a third dimension needs to complement the other two concepts of culture and ethnicity in the pluralist model. However, ethnic cleavage and ethnic closure become diluted when both competing ethnic groups begin to perceive themselves as holding a similar class position at each level in the class structure. Indeed, the possibility still exists for people of similar ethnicity and race, but from different class levels to experience prejudice and discrimination. Any of the three factors of race, class, and ethnicity, or their combination is capable of triggering off the ugly face of prejudice and discrimination. Therefore, class, race, and ethnicity are lived simultaneously (Andersen & Collins 1992:xxi) to create stratification systems, and they interact to facilitate or thwart access to social and economic rewards, intensifying the impact of any of them individually (Rothman 1999:15-16). Rothman argues that the interaction of class, race and ethnicity can be illustrated in examining the distribution of income. For instance, then, those East Indians and Africans who comprise the working class, will share similar occupation, income, and education characteristics, referred to as socioeconomic status (SES). This similarity is observed for all racial and ethnic groups at all class levels of the stratification system. In this integrated pluralist model, we can now identify the level of cultural pluralism in Guyana, albeit theoretically (Gordon 1959:143), by first examining four types of cultural pluralism. These are: ** The tolerance level - minimum cultural coexistence ** The good group relations level - more secondary and less primary contacts transcending ethnic lines ** The community integrational level - increasing primary contacts with less emphasis on ethnicity ** The pluralistic integrational level - growth of subnational heritage where there is free movement among different ethnic groups. Some mutual accommodation to each group's cultural values, some freeing up of ethnic endogamy, and their increasing informal interaction, may very well symbolise in Guyana a good group relations level of cultural pluralism. Seeing Guyana today as being characterised with a cultural pluralism only in terms of race and ethnicity, motivates a person to largely focus on the distinctiveness of beliefs, values, kinship groups, and institutions. However, each ethnic group's culture is distinctive but permeable, due to the injection of class as a variable into the pluralist model, creating an integrated pluralist paradigm. This expanded pluralist model has the potential to facilitate a focus on ethnic similarities and not ethnic differences, thereby preventing a minority group's assimilation to a dominant culture. Resistance to assimilation Most societies have a stratification system where there is an upper class, a middle class, a working class, a lower class, and an underclass. Now some of us are located at different levels of this class structure. Let us assume for a moment that a person is part of the middle class as an East Indian. Do you not realise that there are Africans who, too, are part of that middle class? And because they are part of that middle class, even though their race and culture are different, the East Indian middle class person would tend to have more meaningful interaction with those Africans who share the same economic status as that of the East Indian. Some people may not accept it, but I think that you should ponder for a moment about the many similarities East Indians have with Africans. If you accept this level of similarity, then the quality of interaction between the two major ethnic groups will be enhanced. The same argument can apply to any of the class level for both ethnic groups.
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