Ray­mond Ram­char­i­tar

The last few weeks have been rife with sto­ries about In­di­ans. The In­di­an Ar­rival gang did a reen­act­ment, com­plete with eth­nic cos­tumes, ships and wail­ing about how aw­ful In­den­ture­ship was.

The re­doubtable chief of the Sanatan Dhar­ma Ma­ha Sab­ha, Sat Ma­haraj, rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a large body of or­tho­dox Hin­dus, has been at the fore­front of the de­bate that shouldn't even be a joke–whether child mar­riage should be le­gal. Even though the SDMS has been con­tra­dict­ed by Hin­du Women's Or­gan­i­sa­tion, that the po­si­tion can be held and con­fi­dent­ly ar­tic­u­lat­ed by any­one is a de­feat.

Let's not for­get the rest of the In­di­an com­mu­ni­ty. Al­ways lurk­ing in the back­ground is the In­di­an po­lit­i­cal par­ty, still too woozy to take se­ri­ous­ly af­ter its five-year ben­der in the trea­sury. Throw in, for good mea­sure, the le­gion of wealthy In­di­an lawyers and doc­tors and oth­er pro­fes­sion­als who seem to dom­i­nate their re­spec­tive pro­fes­sions, and you have the ac­cept­ed ty­pol­o­gy of In­di­ans in 2016 Trinidad. Re­li­gious, hard­work­ing, over­achiev­ing, locked in an Ori­en­tal­ist mind-world, a lit­tle dodgy.

It's a pic­ture of an eth­nic, not a na­tion­al, com­mu­ni­ty to which there seems to be no con­tra­dic­tion. But the pic­ture is wrong, as is the as­sumed his­to­ry–In­den­ture­ship, mys­ti­cal re­li­gion and in­su­lar­i­ty. As the two pic­tures re-pub­lished here (orig­i­nal­ly seen in this news­pa­per in 1934) show, much has been lost in the in­ter­im.

The first pho­to "Milk Sell­ers Board­ing a Train" was tak­en by Guiller­mo Brath­waite, and won the Guardian's week­ly pho­to con­test, of De­cem­ber 2, 1934. The im­age tells a fa­mil­iar sto­ry: In­di­an peas­ants, tra­di­tion­al eth­nic cloth­ing, their milk con­tain­ers on their heads. Up from In­den­ture, yet still with­in the precincts of agri­cul­ture and an­i­mal hus­bandry. It's al­so a pic­ture of self-suf­fi­cien­cy and in­cip­i­ent en­tre­pre­neur­ship which seems to per­sist in and irk the mind of Cre­ole Trinidad.

The oth­er pic­ture, how­ev­er, tells an un­known sto­ry. It was pub­lished three weeks af­ter the first, on the Guardian's In­di­an News and Views page, on De­cem­ber 20, 1934. It seems sim­ple enough; a wed­ding pho­to, of Mr Mo­hammed Ho­sein and his wife, for­mer­ly Ms Imel­da Welch.

In par­tic­u­lar, this frozen im­age tells an­oth­er sto­ry of In­di­ans who had made their way in­to Trinidad in­to or­di­nary, quo­tid­i­an lives, mi­nus eth­nic cos­tumes and shad­ow of In­den­ture.

This isn't a re­cent phe­nom­e­non. In 1878, the Trinidad Chron­i­cle news­pa­per ob­served that one in five burgess­es of San Fer­nan­do was Asi­at­ic. There were In­di­an news­pa­pers from 1898, start­ing with the Koh I Noor, pub­lished in Eng­lish. Around the turn of the cen­tu­ry, In­di­an names be­gan ap­pear­ing in the Ma­son­ic lodge lists, and po­lit­i­cal/cul­tur­al as­so­ci­a­tions formed, like the East In­di­an Na­tion­al Con­gress, and lit­er­ary and de­bat­ing so­ci­eties.

The Guardian, in the 1930s, felt the In­di­ans were un­der­rep­re­sent­ed in the na­tion­al mo­sa­ic, and launched its In­di­an af­fairs page. On the same day Mr and Mrs Ho­sein's wed­ding pho­to was pub­lished, were ar­ti­cles on ear­ly Hin­di Lit­er­a­ture, the phi­los­o­phy of Yo­ga, news from In­dia, and lo­cal so­cial events, like In­di­an friend­ly so­ci­ety meet­ings.

This page ran for sev­er­al years, and was, for a time, writ­ten by Seep­er­sad Naipaul, whose son won the No­bel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture in 2001. That achieve­ment is em­blem­at­ic of the miss­ing di­men­sion of In­di­an life in Trinidad–the so­cial, in­tel­lec­tu­al, and in­te­gra­tive im­puls­es of the com­mu­ni­ty–which seem to have dis­ap­peared and re­placed by a ba­nal eth­nic atavism.

(Con­tin­ued next week)