In his opening remarks, IAC executive member, Evan Radhay Persaud gave a brief introduction on the origin of the name `Indian Opinion’ and the reasons for launching the newsletter.

According to Persaud, `Indian Opinion’ was originally the name of a short-lived journal started in South Africa early in the last century, and edited by the late Mohandas K. (later, Mahatma) Gandhi. That journal focused - as did a later one of the same name - on the social and cultural lives of Indian immigrants, what Persaud referred to as bharatiyas, in the Diaspora.

The later journal was the official organ of an organisation called the British Guiana East Indian Association (BGEIA), formed in 1914 to highlight the achievements and aspirations of bharatiyas living in then British Guiana and, ostensibly, to lobby for their inclusion within the colonial political system. In a brief historical note, Persaud said that the late President Cheddi Jagan had joined the (BGEIA) on his return to British Guiana but found their policies too elitist. He left to form the PPP and the BGEIA and the production of their organ was necessarily eclipsed.

Persaud said that in revitalising the name `Indian Opinion’, the IAC hopes to capture the spirit of the former journals and to make sure that it serves for the betterment of Indo-Guyanese and mixed Indo-Guyanese. Persaud explained that the IAC's inclusion of mixed Indo-Guyanese represented the organisation’s recognition and acknowledgement that firstly, the original bharatiyas did not migrate only from the geographical space known today as India, but from the more ancient Bharat which included countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh as well; and secondly, the descendants of the bharityas did not exclude persons of mixed heritage as well.

Feature speaker, Dr. David Dabydeen, Guyana’s Permanent Ambassador to UNESCO, picked up on this notion in his address. He advised that the recent upsurge in East Indian scholarship should not be characterised by an absolutist methodology or by scholastic sentimentalism.

He encouraged a study of Caribbean East Indian history within the context of Caribbean history and not as an isolated body of scholarship.

“We cannot speak of the experiences of one people without speaking of the experiences of the other[s]”, he said. He posited that much of Indo-Caribbean scholarship in recent times contained what he said was “quite frankly, elements of fascism”, and an ethnocentrism like what characterised some of the Black studies in the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

He said that Indo-Caribbean scholars need to connect strongly to their heritage but to remain objective in their research. He urged that they should highlight all the achievements of their predecessors but not to gloss over their failures and faults as well.

The first issue of `Indian Opinion’, funded according to Persaud by a prominent businessman within the East Indian community, contains articles on the 165th Indian Arrival Anniversary; the calls for Indian Arrival day to be a national holiday; cricketers Ramnaresh Sarwan and Shivnarine Chanderpaul; the IAC’s lecture series; anti-Indian crime; and a photographic spread on the first Annual IAC Mela held in April this year.