A momentous occasion

“Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid? That is the only time a man can be brave” – George R R Martin

Sunday marked the 175th anniversary of Indians arriving in Guyana.  175 years since the first batches of Indians arrived on the shores of Guyana aboard the ‘Whitby’ and the ‘Hesperus’.
And in Grade Two, around this time, our project was to make a model of either the Whitby or the Hesperus. I remember those days (not so very long ago) when my dad and I would painstakingly glue on sails to the masts and paint on tiny portholes onto the sides of the ships.

For me, building that ship was one of the things I like the most about Indian Arrival Day.  We put a lot of effort into building that ship. We didn’t just build some generic ship – we built the Whitby. We did research to try to build the ship as accurately as possible. It made me reflect that this ship was something important. So as far as school projects go, that one was pretty thorough.
And for the other grades when we didn’t have to build ships, there was always a special effort by the teacher to teach something specifically concerning the arrival of Indians in Guyana.
But somehow, in secondary school, interest in the arrival of Indians to Guyana, for some reason, had waned. The holiday came and went relatively unremarked. There were no more assignments to build the Whitby or the Hesperus. Or even to reflect on why their “arrival” was necessary. We should think about the reasons for this neglect.
We had to build Columbus’s ships though. And learn about his voyages, and his heritage and his birth and his parents and his death. We did spend an entire year learning about our indigenous people, but not too much about how they were exterminated.
In history textbooks, there was probably only a single chapter dedicated to Indian arrival and heritage. You could blink and literally miss the entire topic of Indian Indentureship to the Caribbean. And yet about half-a-million souls arrived and the vast majority remained.
Today, there are activities to commemorate Indian Arrival Day – but we have to call it “Arrival Day”. There was the Alka Yagnik and Udit Narayan Show and there’ve been other stage shows. And these were of course a welcomed way to relieve stress before our exams begin this week.
And Indians have contributed so much to our society and culture. There is so much diversity present in our dances and songs and music and food. They deserve to be celebrated even more widely.
I’m Guyanese, I’m a Caribbean person – I’ve never even stepped foot in India. I’ll always support the West Indian cricket team over the Indian team without question. But the cultural practices, philosophy and beliefs that my ancestors brought and preserved from India, have shaped me, my ideas and my ideals.
So for me, May 5th is an important day. It’s a momentous occasion. It’s the day that the first set of Indians, after crossing the Kala Pani (Black Waters), arrived on our shores.
It’s the day when they disembarked on an entirely different continent. It’s the day that everything changed for them – and for us in Guyana.
It’s the day that their old life ended and a new life began. For better or for worse, they were here, in Guyana, a whole ocean away from their old lives. And most of them left behind family members, and most of them, like my great-great-grandfather, never saw those family members again.
It must have been so traumatic to be transplanted from everything that was familiar to this completely alien land. But they pushed on, they survived and they prevailed.
They made a home away from home.
They forged a new identity to cope with everything that they had to deal with. They showed courage and fortitude in the face of hardship. They pushed aside their fears to bravely make a better life for themselves and their descendants.