Professor Lomarsh Roopnarine
Ever since our Indian foreparents stepped aboard the ships that sailed across the kala pani and brought us to the New World, we have become world travellers. The most recent publication from Dr Lomarsh Roopnarine, Professor of Caribbean and Latin American history at Jackson State University, Mississippi, USA, follows our journeys since that initial embarkation which brought us from the known to the unknown with all the opportunities and advantages as well as the setbacks that came with colonialism and plantation life.
The main thrust of the study is to continue the story of our migration which has taken many forms: from the very first desertions from sugar plantations which were internal migrations “based on the desire for freedom and the power to dictate one’s own time” to our current journeyings to North American cities such as New York and Toronto where, in a sense, we are still seeking that freedom.
Roopnarine places our current journeys within the historical context of the indentureship period and adds to the theory of the push and pull factors that spurred the initial migration the idea that “Indians also migrated because of an expansion of world capitalism and the program of imperialism and colonialism.” While slave emancipation created a labour shortage in the Caribbean there was a parallel labour surplus in India because peasants had been displaced from their lands and Roopnarine posits that the British colonials saw the benefits of channelling the labour from one area to the other: “For the capitalist class, indentured labour was mobile labour.”
His research investigates the reasons and conditions that spurred internal migrations within Guyana, Surinam and Trinidad, as well as intraregional migrations from mainly Guyana to other Caribbean states, and Indian migration from the Caribbean to Europe and North America. Included in the study are the return of indentured laborers to India, the influx of NRIs to the Caribbean, and the settlement of smaller numbers of Indians on islands such as St Croix, St Lucia and the US Virgin Islands.
Because much of this movement is recent and ongoing, there is little recorded data from archival and secondary sources so Roopnarine relied “on the voices of migrants and other people” even though these are not always accurate because people “reveal lived experiences normally not found in written sources”.
This gives the study an immediacy and accessibility since it deals with patterns of migration that are familiar to us and have shaped the demographics of various Caribbean countries. The movement from plantations to settlements then to urban areas, for instance, is the pattern of many of our own family history and accounts for the large Indian family businesses headquartered in the city of Georgetown: Gafoors, Kissoons, Muneshwer’s, Toolsie Persaud, Beharry’s. “The rural-urban movement was based on economic success and individual aspirations …. although they had to compete with other ethnic groups which resulted in ethnic tensions,” Roopnarine writes.
Whereas he himself, a migrant to the US, refers to the ethnic tensions and impoverishment that resulted from the introduction of cooperative socialism, and mentions “Forbes Burnham’s racial politics”, he does not fully explore or interrogate this major factor of racialised politics which spurred the migration of Indians out of Guyana. There are references to the varying degrees of ethnic tensions that exist in Guyana, Surinam and Trinidad, but the eruptions of open racial hostility and violence in Guyana from the 1960s onward are not included and the internal migration of thousands of Indians who fled as refugees from the Wismar/McKenzie area in May 1964 is overlooked. Indians fled the arson, rape, assault and murder that occurred over three days and resettled in various villages along the country’s East Coast of Demerara. This experience of Indians being victims of what is today known as ethnic cleansing was never replicated elsewhere in the Caribbean and the threat of that violence continues to spur Indian migration out of Guyana.
Serious academic study that would provide historical, economic, social and political analysis of this violence would be a vital component of any dialogue and discourse initiated with a view to resolving this issue and could themselves become the bases for meaningful discussions.
Ever since leaving India, we have continued to travel and to seek a permanence in the New World not only in the physical sense of having a home with the peace and stability the word connotes but also in a cultural and psychological sense as we continue to honour our heritage from India within the context of Western education, values, and lifestyles.
Roopnarine captures the restlessness that comes with such displacement and with the unsettled idea of who we are as a Caribbean people, an identity that is still in flux. He explores the concepts of creolization, coolitude and coolieology as various pathways to identity formation. Some Indians have assimilated into Caribbean or American culture; some are douglarised; and some maintain much of the cultural and religious norms of their foreparents, which are not viewed as being contrary to Western values and behaviours.
He writes: “Caribbean Indians have been shaped by Indian subcontinent customs such as the Hindu religion, music, folklore, and Bollywood films. Caribbean Indians have developed an in-between status. They are not like Indians in India nor are they like Caribbean Creoles. Instead, they have merged India and the Caribbean to produce a distinct and dynamic local entity.”
That first Indian footfall on May 5, 1838 at Plantation Highbury on the banks of the Berbice River had the romance of a beginning for all time. The story of our journey through the world is still being written and Roopnarine’s book is an important chapter in that story.
