Joseph Ruhomon's India


Book Description

This reissue of an 1894 pamphlet celebrates Joseph Ruhomon as the first Indian intellectual in British Guiana, now Guyana. He wrote at a time, Seecharan notes, when self-deprecation was an instinct...and the construction of this essay was an admirable accomplishment.




Sanatana Dharma and Plantation Hinduism (Second Edition Volume 1)


Book Description

Christian Missionaries worked hard to convert immigrants. Their first order of business was to denigrate Hinduism, designate Hindus as heathen, and disparage their culture, food and even attire. Immigrants stubbornly resisted, led by the tiny educated elite, including Brhmaas whom we call Brahmins. Conversion was a failure at least up to the end of the 19th century but picked up a self-generating momentum thereafter. The result is that the share of Hindus in Guyana’s Indian population declined from 83.5 percent in 1880 to 62.8 percent in 2012. The largest portion of the contraction was lost to Christianity. The loss notwithstanding, even a casual observer would conclude that Guyanese Hindus, at home and in the Diaspora, are a very religious people. Many of us do a jhandi or havan once annually; others do the more elaborate and costlier yajña, where everyone is welcome, once or twice in their lifetime. Most of us do a short daily puja – prayers, offerings, reading the stras and listening to bhajan – in our homes. An important, but perhaps unintended, way immigrants countered conversion to Christianity was an unplanned movement towards a “synthesis” that brought Hindus, regardless of caste or sect, under a “unitary form of Hinduism.” The “synthesis” began around the 1870s and was completed by the 1930s to the 1950s. Guyanese Hindus call the unified corpus of religious beliefs and practices that emerged from the “synthesis” Sanatana Dharma. Ramesh Gampat labels it Plantation Hinduism in this path-breaking book. The book argues that the brand of Hinduism practiced is inconsistent with Sanatana Dharma, called Vednta by the more philosophically inclined. Plantation Hinduism features an extraordinary dependence upon purohits (pandits), which has anaesthetized the Hindu mind and render him unable to think, question and inquire when it comes to Dharma. Rituals and bhakti have been degraded and turned into desire-motivated worship; devats have been misconstrued as Brahman rather than as limited manifestation of the one non-dual pure Consciousness; belief in the multiplicity of gods encourages image worship; and superstitions anchor Guyanese Hindus to tradition and mere belief. Plantation Hinduism is little more than desire-motivated actions, dogmas and superstitions. Absent is the idea that Sanatana Dharma is a spiritual science no less scientific than hard sciences, such as physics and astronomy. The central message of Vednta is the innate divinity of every person and the freedom to realize that divinity through anubhava, direct personal experience of Supreme Reality.




South Asian Transnationalisms


Book Description

South Asian Transnationalisms explores encounters in twentieth century South Asia beyond the conventional categories of center and periphery, colonizer and colonized. Considering the cultural and political exchanges between artists and intellectuals of South Asia with counterparts in the United States, continental Europe, the Caribbean, and East Asia, the contributors interrogate the relationships between identity and agency, language and space, race and empire, nation and ethnicity, and diaspora and nationality. This book deploys transnational syntaxes such as cinema, dance, and literature to reflect on social, technological, and political change. Conceiving of the transnational as neither liberatory nor necessarily hegemonic, the authors seek to explore the contradictions, opportunities, disjunctures, and exclusions of the vexed experience of globalization in South Asia. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.




A Powerful Indian Voice Alice Bhagwandai Singh: Reflections on Her Work in Guyana


Book Description

Baytoram Ramharack was born in Berbice, Guyana. He teaches history and political science at Nassau Community College. His previous publications include Against the Grain: Balram Singh Rai and the Politics of Guyana (2005); and Jung Bahadur Singh of Guyana (1886-1956): Politician, ship doctor, labor leader and protector of Indians (2019). He remains a strong advocate and supporter of stable democracy in Guyana. Dr. Ramharack is working on a forthcoming book examining Cheddi Jagan’s relationship with Indians in Guyana.




Bechu


Book Description

Clem Seecharan has written a useful documentary history of Bechu, the first Indian to testify before the Royal Commission in 1897. Now who was this Bechu? He was, in Seecharan's words, "an indefatigable gadfly," who in letters to the local press revealed the conditions of Indian indentureship: poor wages, sexual exploitation of women by overseers and managers, and the virtual impossibility for Indians to obtain justice because of the collusion between colonial authorities and the planters. This knowledge we owe to economic historian Alan Adamson who "discovered" Bechu in the 1960s. Yet the man himself remained somewhat of a mystery, something Bechu himself seems to have cultivated. Seecharan has now filled a number of lacunae in our understanding with this two-part volume. The first section focuses on Bechu and the British Guianese environment in the late nineteenth century, while the second part includes letters and memoranda by Bechu (and reactions to them by local opponents).




Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920: Volume 1


Book Description

This volume examines what Caribbean literature looked like before 1920 by surveying the print culture of the period. The emphasis is on narrative, including an enormous range of genres, in varying venues, and in multiple languages of the Caribbean. Essays examine lesser-known authors and writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads; non-elite memoirs and letters, such as the narratives of the enslaved or the working classes, especially women. Many contributions are comparative, multilingual, and regional. Some infer the cultural presence of subaltern groups within the texts of the dominant classes. Almost all of the chapters move easily between time periods, linking texts, writers, and literary movements in ways that expand traditional notions of literary influence and canon formation. Using literary, cultural, and historical analyses, this book provides a complete re-examination of early Caribbean literature.




Far from Mecca


Book Description

Honorable Mention, 2022 MLA Prize for a First Book Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry, and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis, Khan argues for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean. Case studies explored range from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth-century Jamaica, to early twentieth-century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the attempted government coup in 1990 by the Jamaat al-Muslimeen in Trinidad, as well as the island’s calypso music, to contemporary judicial cases concerning Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.




Why Should We Be Called ‘Coolies’?


Book Description

What are the dynamics of the abolition of the Indian indentureship system? Why was it ended? Who were the main players in the final end of the labour scheme? Were Indian labourers and/or the Indian middle classes actively involved in the processes leading towards complete abolition? This book examines the end of a labour system which lasted from 1838 until 1920 in various territories throughout the British Empire. It looks at methods of agitations which had their genesis in the territories of the Indian Ocean and compare/contrast these with those of other territories such as the British West Indies. The volume provides a comparative study of the abolition of the Indian indentureship system and shows the global interconnectedness of abolition, with a strong subaltern focus. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.




Contradictory Indianness


Book Description

As Contradictory Indianness endeavors to show, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. This book's unique contribution lies in an explicit privileging of Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean.




Sanatana Dharma and Plantation Hinduism (Second Edition Volume 2)


Book Description

Christian Missionaries worked hard to convert immigrants. Their first order of business was to denigrate Hinduism, designate Hindus as heathen, and disparage their culture, food and even attire. Immigrants stubbornly resisted, led by the tiny educated elite, including Brhmaas whom we call Brahmins. Conversion was a failure at least up to the end of the 19th century but picked up a self-generating momentum thereafter. The result is that the share of Hindus in Guyana’s Indian population declined from 83.5 percent in 1880 to 62.8 percent in 2012. The largest portion of the contraction was lost to Christianity. The loss notwithstanding, even a casual observer would conclude that Guyanese Hindus, at home and in the Diaspora, are a very religious people. Many of us do a jhandi or havan once annually; others do the more elaborate and costlier yajña, where everyone is welcome, once or twice in their lifetime. Most of us do a short daily puja – prayers, offerings, reading the stras and listening to bhajan – in our homes. An important, but perhaps unintended, way immigrants countered conversion to Christianity was an unplanned movement towards a “synthesis” that brought Hindus, regardless of caste or sect, under a “unitary form of Hinduism.” The “synthesis” began around the 1870s and was completed by the 1930s to the 1950s. Guyanese Hindus call the unified corpus of religious beliefs and practices that emerged from the “synthesis” Sanatana Dharma. Ramesh Gampat labels it Plantation Hinduism in this path-breaking book. The book argues that the brand of Hinduism practiced is inconsistent with Sanatana Dharma, called Vednta by the more philosophically inclined. Plantation Hinduism features an extraordinary dependence upon purohits (pandits), which has anaesthetized the Hindu mind and render him unable to think, question and inquire when it comes to Dharma. Rituals and bhakti have been degraded and turned into desire-motivated worship; devats have been misconstrued as Brahman rather than as limited manifestation of the one non-dual pure Consciousness; belief in the multiplicity of gods encourages image worship; and superstitions anchor Guyanese Hindus to tradition and mere belief. Plantation Hinduism is little more than desire-motivated actions, dogmas and superstitions. Absent is the idea that Sanatana Dharma is a spiritual science no less scientific than hard sciences, such as physics and astronomy. The central message of Vednta is the innate divinity of every person and the freedom to realize that divinity through anubhava, direct personal experience of Supreme Reality.