Last Thursday evening, I attended a pre-Phagwa event at a mandir. Such events are very common, but this one was special for several reasons. The mandir is dedicated to the worship in the Shakti tradition brought by Indian indentured labourers from the then Madras Presidency in South India. In that tradition, the Divine is worshipped in the female form; more specifically as Mariamman (“Amman” means mother) a village deity that was later syncretized with other divine female forms, like Kali and her incarnations. In Guyana, the tradition is called “Kali Mai” worship.
Since only 6% of the 239,000 Indian immigrants originated from Madras, it is remarkable that the tradition continued and even expanded; including from other races. In this mandir at Cornelia Ida, from the iconography alone, one could also see many other changes signalled in the practices as the community adapted to the new circumstances in Guyana. Unlike the older “Kali Mai” Mandirs, the Goddess, in her manifestations, along with her consorts, were not housed in separate structures, but in one building, as do the wider Sanaatani Hindus. The worship also incorporated many of the “Sanaatani practices” that themselves had incorporated western elements, such as discourses by the Pujari (priest). The celebration of Phagwa itself is an adaptation, since, if the spring festival were celebrated in South India, it would be dedicated to Kaamadeva, the god of love.
The centerpiece of the pre-Phagwa programme was the performance of a Chautal group from Suriname. Chautal is a folk musical genre associated with Phagwa. It originated from the Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Western Bihar part of North India called the “Bhojpuri” belt, from where most of the indentured servants originated. However, Chautal has almost disappeared in India, but, very intriguingly, has survived and indeed flourished in Guyana, Trinidad, Suriname and Fiji, and their diasporas in North America and Netherlands. But both in the instrumentation – from the single dholak (barrel drum) and Jhaals (cymbals) and Dhantal (steel rod and U-shaped clapper) – Fijians and Surinamese now use several dholaks and sometimes the large booming Tadja drum, while Guyanese are introducing Tassa Drums.
Continuity and change
What the event brought to my mind was the ever-increasing blurring and disintegration of boundaries between the descendants of North and South Indians as they navigated the field of institutions created successively; the plantations, the colonial and then the post-colonial states; to become “Indians”. Prior to them, individuals from diverse tribes of West and Central Africa had also had their differences obliterated to become “Africans” after the slave experience. While it is commonplace to “explain” the present relations between the Africans and Indians by the latter undercutting the wages of the former when they were brought in, we must remember that forty-two thousand African West Indians, fourteen thousand Chinese, and thirteen thousand West Africans were also brought in to also undercut those same wages. But today, the boundaries between the eighty thousand freed Guyanese Africans and the sixty-nine newly introduced non-Indians also were disintegrated.
What that means is that group identities are not fixed, nor are boundaries impermeable: the salience of the Indian and Portuguese Guyanese identities must be interrogated. Are there, for instance, different values between them and African Guyanese towards the accumulation of wealth which help maintain a boundary? What studies in various disciplines have shown is that the simple “explanation” of “cultural” differences creating divisions is inadequate. As one theorist since the 1960s had posited, it is not the “stuff” of the different cultures that is necessarily the key, but the boundaries. During the colonial period, under a “divide and rule” strategy, institutions such as Government, the plantations, the Civil Service, the Police, the judiciary etc, were actuated by a hegemonic white-bias culture that reified and kept the boundaries in place.
At Independence, one would have thought that new institutions would be created to encourage a civic “Guyanese” identity in the nation-state we inherited. It is my thesis that the totalitarian regime between 1964-1985 that was instituted to keep Burnham in power – the exclusivist single-party led by ‘the dictator’; the official ideology; the system of terroristic control; control of mass communication, state coercive institutions, the economy and social organizations – also further reified those boundaries.
We need new political, cultural, economic and social institutions to create “Guyaneseness” in Guyanese citizens. Biology does not have to be destiny.
