Honouring our legacy

By Ryhaan Shah

Yesterday was Arrival Day; or, to give it its correct title, Indian Arrival Day. This year, we commemorate the 180th year since the start of the colonial indentureship programme that brought our fore-parents to these shores. The day is often given over to much celebration through our traditional music, dance, foods, and the donning of our fabulously decorated garments.
That so much has survived the crossing of the kalapani is remarkable. But while there is much to celebrate, we should also take time to consider the realities of our situation, which sustain behaviours and attitudes that are detrimental to our community.
Indian culture, retained primarily through the religions of Hinduism and Islam, does not support the idea of victimhood, or any tendency to blame others or history or circumstances for our faults or problems. In fact, the high suicide rate in Indian diaspora communities derives in great part from the readiness to blame ourselves for problems that arise.
There could be a degree of fatalism in seeing the removal of oneself from a problematic situation as the ultimate solution, even though our religious books, the “Holy Quran” and the “Bhagavad Gita”, both instruct us to resist and fight not only external enemies, but the battles that rage within ourselves. The idea of jihad, for instance, is misused and misinterpreted by Middle Eastern terrorists and their critics alike. That “holy war” is actually prescribed as a process of self-examination, whereby Muslims confront negative traits and behaviours and seek to improve themselves.
The Holy Prophet Mohammed was himself a warrior who advanced Islam through physical defence, and when Lord Krishna stood on the field of battle, as recorded in the “Bhagavad Gita”, he said: “Action rightly performed brings freedom.”
Hinduism and Islam are belief systems that encourage and reward struggle that seeks to overcome obstacles and restore peace and order. Suicide, and alcoholism — which leads to domestic violence, poverty and illness — are behaviours that destroy our communities, and dishonour both our traditional beliefs and the legacy of courage and resolve that sustained our fore-parents when they arrived here to the hardships of plantation life.
Despite those hardships, they saw a chance to prosper, and the thousands who stayed were willing to do the work and make the sacrifices needed to give their children and their children’s children a better life. This is a foundational Indian value: that parents work to provide their children with an improved inheritance. The drive to build is an innate Indian quality, and even with the colonial prejudices aligned against them, their religions and their culture, our fore-parents managed to locate themselves with some measure of success in this new world.
Travelling on ships across oceans and mostly without family members, they relied on the jahaji bonds forged with their shipmates to sustain themselves in this new land with its new circumstances. They looked out for each other, and this fostered a self-reliance and independence of spirit that made them less dependent on external agencies for aid and support. Mandirs and masjids throughout Guyana are still built and managed with funds raised from within our community, and this very community-based independence can work to our benefit, to create the programmes and institutions needed to educate our people against scourges like alcoholism and suicide.
These societal ills have been aggravated in recent years due to the high levels of migration to mainly New York and Toronto, which have fractured vital extended family structures. It is as if the journey out of India continues northward, and no one can blame those who choose to leave in order to seek the peaceful life, denied them here.
Our fore-parents did not arrive to a welcoming society. There are historical records even from as early as 1839 – one year after the first ships from India arrived – of freed Africans assaulting Indian labourers accompanied by shouts of “See coolie, kill coolie!” The victim becoming the victimiser is a known psychological progression, and this racial hostility towards Indians was weaponised by the PNC from the 1960s onwards, and used as a tool by African Guyanese in their quest for political power.
With another PNC-led Government in office, modelled on the Burnhamist past, our community is faced with serious challenges, such as the closure of sugar estates and the retrenchment of thousands of workers.
This is the time to stand firm and show ourselves worthy of the legacy inherited from the very first jahajis and jahajins, who survived the worst of the terrors and hardships, and who made the supreme sacrifices that laid the foundation on which we can build and prosper.