At Independence, many bemoaned that we were given the paraphernalia and symbols of a state, but had not acquired the bonds of being a nation. It is felt that our subsequent imbroglios in the following 54 years – including the one in which we are presently enmeshed – are the consequence of this lacuna. How is this to be done? In 1983, Benedict Anderson offered, in his seminal book, “Imagined Communities”, a definition of what it takes to be a “nation”. He saw “the nation” as an “imagined political community that is imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. The nation is: Imagined because “members…will never know most of their fellow members…yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”
The nation is thus a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. This social construction is achieved through any number of discursive mechanisms, such as the media, which usually targets a mass audience or generalises and addresses citizens as the “public”. Unfortunately, much of our media is partisan and divisive. Public holidays are another device to create the togetherness envisage by “nation”. As the name implies, the “public” holiday offers the entire nation a day off from work or school, and the opportunity to both think about the event being celebrated or commemorated at the same time, if not the same space.
It is in this spirit that Phagua was included in the list of national Holidays. On Dec 12, 1962, with independence promised by the British following the 1961 elections, the PPP, then in charge of internal self-government, tabled a resolution in the National Assembly stating “that this Legislative Assembly recommends that a committee be set up to recommend significant and suitable national holidays for an independent Guyana.” Early in 1963, the committee was constituted to consult religious organisations on the holiday structure. Forbes Burnham offered a succinct rationale for the change in the Public Holiday calendar: “One of the difficulties in our community is that we have Christians living side by side with Muslims, and Hindus living side by side with Christians, and none of those three understanding even some of the basic tenets of the other two…I believe that if we were able to share the holidays, we at least would be invited to attempt to learn each other’s point of view, creeds, beliefs and attitudes, and that further education and information will undoubtedly lead to a greater understanding and bring closer to us the day when we have a Guyanese nation, as distinct from a country with a number of different people.”
After agitations, submissions and deliberations, several Hindu and Muslim festivals were recommended. Three from the former, including Holi, and two from the latter were recommended by 1964. The PPP, however, was removed from office at the end of that year, and after a hiatus of more than two years, in 1967, the new PNC regime was prompted to revive the proposals and legislated recognition to Holi and Divali as Public Holidays.
The 1967 legislation offered the rationale: “A driving force behind the changes made in the holiday structure was the facilitation of people of different persuasions to participate in the rich heritage that the diversity in the Guyanese culture provided. It was accepted then that one of the ways to achieve such participation was to grant religious holidays to Christians, Hindus and Muslims. At the same time, this perspective would have enabled the removal of those holidays that had no significance for the Guyanese heritage.”
From this standpoint of bringing all the various peoples in our multicultural nation together, no other festival does this like Holi. In the more than fifty years since it became a Public Holiday, Holi has been embraced by the widest possible cross-section of Guyanese. If life is all about happiness, then Holi is the festival that brings out this more than anything else in Guyana.
Happy Holi!
