As I happened to be in New York earlier this year, I was asked to offer some remarks at the 40th anniversary of the Indo-Caribbean Federation –which had launched its flagship activity, the annual “Indian Arrival Day” commemoration, at Smokey Park in 1984. I took the opportunity to honour Mr Rudra Nath, who was one of its founders, first president and guiding light. Mr Nath, like so many who were forced to flee the Burnhamite dictatorship, replicated in New York the indentured forbears’ inestimable role in building the Guyanese nation into which they had arrived.
He was born in 1929, was the eldest of three brothers, and had an older sister to parents who had arrived at the logies of Plantation Uitvlugt, WCD, via Trinidad from Kanpur, India, earlier that decade. His father, who was a noted wrestler, moved his family to Pln Tuschen, EB Essequibo around 1940. He established a grocery and a bicycle repair shop. His sister and brother-in-law also established a shop nearby, along with a milk distribution business. Mr Nath and his siblings all inculcated their father’s entrepreneurial bent. Taught Hindi by his father, which formed the core of the five subjects he passed at the Cambridge Exam through self-study, he became a teacher at the Guyana Oriental College (GOC). This had been launched in 1955 in Georgetown by Indian national Mr Shruti Kant, who had been sent by the Arya Samaj.
On a motorcycle trip to Corentyne, he saw that even though Corentyne High School had been established since 1938 by JC Chandisingh, it was comparatively expensive and demanded high marks at the Common Entrance. Mr Nath grasped the opportunity, quit his job at GOC in 1957, and converted the disreputable “Rock Diamond Hotel” into the Rose Hall High School (RHHS). A more salubrious locale in the then village was sourced by local businessman Alim Shah for a new RHHS, which was constructed by 1959 and had a local Board. Mr Nath insisted that all who wanted an education must be admitted at comparatively low fees.
One of the teachers he hired was Julius Nathoo, who became inspired to move to De Kinderen, WCD, not far from Mr Nath’s Tuschen, and established Saraswat High School, which made secondary education available in that rural community. All the while, Mr Nath was a staunch supporter of the PPP.
A disagreement with the Board over education versus profits, however, led to him taking the students to the Port Mourant Race Course pavilion in 1964. By then, Corentyne Comprehensive High School in Port Mourant Free Yard had run into difficulties with its administration, and asked Mr Nath to become Headmaster. He accepted, and his students all followed him there. But once again his focus on students’ welfare caused a break with this Board, and Mr Nath refused to violate his principles. In 1966, he established National High School in Portuguese Quarters of Port Mourant, at the home of his extended family, whom he had persuaded to follow him to Berbice. They had taken their entrepreneurial bent with them, and had established a slew of businesses, of which the famous “Spready’s” in Port Mourant is one. Mr Nath finally thought of his own happiness, and, the next year, got married.
He ran National High School until 1975, then left for Canada, from where his wife had remigrated, and then he went on to the US in 1978, where one of his younger brothers had migrated. He and that brother continued their entrepreneurial drive and operated a gas station in Brooklyn. But as the trickle of Indian Guyanese immigrants to New York City became a wave, and most of them gravitated to Richmond Hill in Queens, and gradually spread into the surrounding neighbourhoods, Mr Nath saw another entrepreneurial opportunity. He tinkered in his basement and came up with equipment to mass produce Guyanese snacks like “Sal Sev”, fried split channa, mittai, etc, which he packaged and sold to the Guyanese and West Indian groceries springing up.
As usual, Mr Nath was always thinking about his community’s needs, and facilitated by the pioneering Guyanese real-estate entrepreneur Ramesh Kallicharran, Mr Nauth then became president of the “Indo-Caribbean Federation”, which roped in many of his former students and teachers from Guyana. I had invested in real estate via Kali, and joined the ICF to help launch the first Indian Arrival Day celebration.
In 1989, Mr Nath moved to Florida with his family, which had increased with the birth of his son. He passed away in 2003.
