A Subaltern History

Written by Ravi Dev for KN 2-27-05

History, the saying goes, is written by conquerors. Looking at the texts handed down to us, one may add that it is actually written by the elite of the conquerors. I still well remember my earliest history book, An Outline of English History, that only considered events directly associated with the Kings and Queens of England, as worthy of mention. Ordinary folks who struggled and died in their millions were mere fodder and footnotes. Later, even Marxist historians who rejected this perspective, ignored Hegel’s distinction between “events” and “actions” and lumped the makers of history as anonymous classes that responded to historical “forces”. Of recent, there has been an attempted rectification of this jaundiced historiography by some historians who take a “subaltern” perspective. That is, to look at the contributions of the ordinary folks, in effectuating change – independently of the men on horseback and other elites. They remember too, that there can only be dialectics in consciousness.

I was reminded of these opposing views of “history makers” on the recent death of my father. As a subaltern, he will almost certainly not make it in the history books – but just as certainly I know that he played his part in shaping history. My father’s history actually begun on the East Coast, where his widowed Aja (paternal grandfather) was expelled from Plantation Mon Repos for some infraction. This was not an uncommon subaltern experience. The old man brought his son to Uitvlugt on the West Coast to start a new life. My father was born in the logees of field “Letter A” during the mid 1920’s just after the end of indentureship in 1921. By the time he was twelve the worldwide Great Depression of the 30’s had plunged sugar and the Caribbean into despair and rebellion. He was forced to leave school at the fourth standard and begin working at Plantain Uitvlugt, where a year later four striking workers were gunned down in neighbouring Leonora. The sacrifices such young “subaltern” men across the sugar industry would lead to grudging reforms. History was inexorably changed by them.

The greatest change that was effectuated by my father’s generation, and still unacknowledged - much less examined by the official historians - is the remarkable reforms they made in the social institutions brought by their forbears from India. The recent controversy generated by claims made by Dr. Kean Gibson on the role of the Hindu caste system in Guyanese politics is a perfect illustration of this elitist perspective. It is uncontroverted that after 800 years of foreign rule, the social structures – including the caste system - had acquired many deformities in India, by the 19^th century. By the mid-century the Arya Samaj (Noble Society) was one of several Hindu responses to reform itself. Several missionaries had visited Guyana from early the 20th century but the arrival of Professor Bhashkaranand in 1937 was crucial in spreading its rejection of “caste” by birth, acceptance of education of women (including becoming priests) and the inculcation of a broad social conscience.

Clem Seecharan has claimed that while the Ramayana was a central text in the lives of the Hindu immigrants, he said they did not conduct exegeses of such texts. I beg to differ. In ever logee settlement, by the 1930’s, there was a Ramayana “gol” (circle) with an individual who gave the “arth” or exegesis. My grandfather was one such individual in Uitvlugt and he left a life-long insistence for intellectual pursuit and rigour – and the Hindu demand for its application in one’s life. My father was proudest of the fact that his father traveled to Georgetown to search out Prof. Bhaskaranand, invite him to the logees of Uitvlugt and have him conduct a seven-evening lectures against the wishes of some orthodox Pandits and the Pln. Management. My father and quite a few of his peers became “Arya-Samajists”. His “Arya-Sameness” was more an attitude than anything else:

an attitude of questioning, a commitment to reason and an obsession with argumentation.

I am sure that there will be so many readers who will recognise instantly, the “hard-mouth” old-line “Samajists of whom I speak.I’ve come across them all over Guyana. While Samajists never became more than ten percent of the Hindu population in Guyana, their arguments, as much as anything else, contributed to the demise of the caste system. Dr. Gibson should research this subaltern history on caste.

My father’s post-WW2 generation was the first to make the mass-movement out of the Plantations onto the new housing schemes sponsored by the Jock Campbell of Bookers in the early 1950’s.

With their new social consciousness, not many of the men allowed their wives to work in the backdams and most swore to do their utmost that their children would never sink to that. My father was quite justly proud that in the end, he kept his word.

What made this achievement more remarkable was the fact that in the new schemes, with the improvement in sanitation, water supply, and health facilities, the children did not die like flies as in the previous generation and the families were extraordinarily large. The ten children in my family was a typical number. In the aggregate, their generation created the bulge in the Indian population that was to forever alter the demographics of Guyana and create a new political equation.

My father remembered Dr. Cheddie Jagan standing outside Plantation Uitvlugt, pointing to the Overseers quarters and announcing dramatically, “When we kick those White bastards out, you will live in those houses.” It was a standing indictment against my father by my Nana (maternal grandfather – who raised me from the age of six) that he (my father) voted for Dr. Jagan against Dr. Jang Bahadur Singh – the old Indian leader. It was not a coincidence that there were so many Arya Samajists among Dr. Jagan’s early following: their fire for social change had already been lit. During his retirement in New York, (when he pointed out that he achieved more in ten years amongst the hated White men of his youth) my father became quite cynical about Dr. Jagan and the PPP. He spent much of his last years arguing politics with any Guyanese he could strike up a conversation with along Jamaica Avenue. He was my respected advisor.

At our family reunions, he would look forward to giving his annual “charge”, which everyone in the more than 70-odd gathering took most seriously. As I reflect on his own life and of the arenas of life in which those individuals are engaged, and will be engaged, I can only proclaim once again, that this subaltern, my father, has indeed made history.