Life Practices

Roar by Ravi Dev

As Rambishoon settled into De Willem’s plantation life, he realised that the rhythm from the demands of “agreement”/Girmit had a most profound effect on the quality of his life. With only Saturday afternoons after getting paid and Sundays as his own, he was inducted one Saturday into visiting a rum shop on the De Willem Public Road, where a ramshackle village had coalesced by freed Africans, who had departed the logies and built cottages on either side of the road. The Portuguese, preceding the Indians into indentureship, and the Chinese who followed, had quickly monopolised the rum shops as well as “salt goods” stores that did brisk business there. Time-expired Indian indentureds gradually joined them and started to build cottages modelled on the houses they had left behind in India.
While Rambishoon was very lonely and enjoyed the camaraderie of the rum shop, he did not enjoy counting the money remaining that he could “put away” that week and resolved those rum shops were not his thing. After he married Sanicharie, he would occasionally purchase a “flattie” of rum – the smallest bottle available and measuring an eighth of a pint – to drink before the special meal on Saturday evenings. His son, my Nana Ramlagan, would follow this practice, and I never saw him inside a rum shop in the years I lived with him before he passed. I purchased his “flattie” most Fridays from a side window of the Chinese rum shop, Chee-a-Tow.
While being “religious” was an alien concept to Rambishoon and his fellow 19th-century indentured labourers, he was used to the practice of being the “jajman” of a village Brahmin who would be invited to perform various pujas in the family compound. “His Brahmin” family lived in a separate section, or “tola”, of Ishmailpur. This relationship was a hereditary one, and they had a tight web of reciprocal duties of which pujas were only one. There were the consultations regarding the suitability of brides and bridegrooms and the performance of weddings and other life-cycle rituals (the sixteen sanskaras), like the naming of children and the final immolation on the pyre.
At De Willem, there were a few individuals preceding Rambishoon who had asserted their Brahmin lineage and started performing family rituals for individuals and families in the logies. They were typically time-expired immigrants or British Guiana-born, and bereft of texts, relying on memory and traditions passed down from parents and elders, adapted their practices to their new realities. One interesting adaptation was the formation of new “jajmani” relationships that slowly transcended the old, rigid caste distinctions. Sadly, anti-Chamar prejudices stubbornly persisted. One of the first rituals that Rambishoon witnessed was the burial rites (Anteyeshi) for the deaths that occurred almost weekly in Zeeburg-De Willem, where he realised to his horror that, legally, they could not be cremated but buried. They were interred in a burial ground immediately south of the Zeeburg Public Road.
In Rambishoon’s Ishmailpur, recitations of the Ram Katha – the story of Sri Ram from Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas – written in the vernacular were quite popular, and everyone could chant favourite verses (Chaupis or dohas) that guided their lives. Rambishoon’s was “Karma pradhāna bisva kari rākhā | Jo jasa karai so tasa phalu chākhā – Action (karma/hard work) is the ruling principle of this universe. Whoever acts reaps the fruits corresponding directly to their efforts.” This Ram Katha tradition was continued in the logies informally during chantings in the evening gatherings after work in the logies or more formally on Sundays when collections would sponsor visits by Brahmin exponents – fiercely contested by local exponents. The Indian practice of parsad, or mohanbhog, being served, was continued along with communal feeding.
Another practice that was transformed in Zeeburg-De Willem was the sponsoring by families – as in North India – of Satyanarayan Kathas, consisting of five chapters from the Skanda Puran, as an offering of thanks to the Supreme on full-moon (Purnima) nights. An exponent’s (Pandit’s) primary qualifications in the 19th century were simply the ability to chant the Ramayan and navigate the steps of the Satyanarayan rituals.
To Rambishoon’s great consternation, the Chhath Puja, performed universally and ostentatiously by agriculturalists like Kurmis in the Bhojpuri belt for life-giving Surya (the Sun) for familial well-being, could not be replicated in De Willem – or the rest of British Guiana for that matter. Not requiring Brahmin participation, the rigours of the four-day festival, demanding days of complete fasting and the institutional memory of women, were made impossible by the procrustean plantation order.