Jamadar’s Trinity Cross History

Of importance is the context within which the issue of the Trinity Cross passes from what may well have been personal discomfort with which I sympathise — Wahid Ali’s approach to Eric Williams — to that at which the Trinity Cross becomes an ingredient in ethnic mobilisation led by the Maha Sabha. That period begins in the mid ’80s and continues until today, ie, the same period as the mobilisation for Indian Arrival Day, Hindi as a second language, the founding of GOPIO, Indian “refugees” to Canada, the Indeshi demands, and an increase in the use of history as the terrain of struggle. It is also a period when globalisation is accompanied by a decline in universality and a decline in the Republican concept of State and citizen.

Jamadar’s use of the word “multicultural” to refer to the Trini State illustrates the extent of this decline right here in Trinidad and Tobago. Multicultural refers to a State where integration into the State through citizenship, and democracy as a choice of State policies, is replaced by State integration through mutually exclusive cultural identity groups, and democracy as mediation between group interests. This demolition of the Republican State — for that is what it is — was part of the counter-culture of the Cultural Revolution of the Students’ Revolt. It is the Black Power 1970 “revolution” which, seeking to integrate Blacks into a universal black movement: Pan Africanism, triggers the return of Indos to HP Singh and their integration into VHP Pan Hinduism. Marcus Garvey’s Race First is no different to Sat’s Hindus first. Nor is either fundamentally different to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations.

Father of Indian Nationalism

It is in this period (mid’80s and ‘90s) that a number of books and articles written by Indian — mainly Hindu — Nationalists appear and are published in Central. One of these is a selection of the writings of H P Singh entitled The Indian Struggle for Justice and Equality against Black Racism in Trinidad and Tobago (1956-1962). The Foreword is by John La Guerre, it is edited by Rajnie Ramlakawan — who is also involved in the creation of Indian Arrival Day — and it is dedicated “to the memory of H P Singh, Father of Indian Nationalism in Trinidad, to his children and to Indian Activists struggling for Justice and Equality.” It is published in 1993 by the Indian Review Press, Couva.

I open the book and I read this explanation of Indos and the 1961 election: “Black nationalists’ goal was independence from Britain...Independence from Britain meant leaving one form of colonialist domination under the British Raj to enter a period of a more vicious and racist black neo-colonial domination under Eric Williams and the PNM...” I will take up the ideology of H P Singh in another article in this series.

This idea that the PNM and Independence was simply a continuation of Spanish colonisation and British colonialism is an accepted position among Indo nationalists. It is with this in mind that I raise eyebrows at Jamadar’s tracing of an Eric Williams’ decision to a quasi-genetic impact on Indians of Isabella’s religious policy.

VHP-RSS

By the time that mobilisation against the Trinity Cross begins, there is an important influence on Trini Hindus: The VHP-RSS interpretation of Indian history. From the mid ’80s there is a steep rise of the extreme Hindu Nationalist Right in India that would culminate in the BJP electoral victory. Important to this is the RSS. The VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) and the Sewa Bharati (more influential in the UK) are considered by many as front organisations of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Singh (RSS). Both the Sewa and the VHP have been accused of being behind the attacks on and murders of Christians. Certainly the VHP was the organising force behind the attempt to stop John Paul II’s visit to India. All Hindu organisations in Trinidad and Tobago are affiliated to the VHP and often also to the RSS. The major Hindu organisations backed the attempt of the VHP to stop the John Paul II’s visit. Like the VHP they excused the killing of a Christian missionary and his children in a ghastly murder in India. Now this could hardly be caused by Jamadar’s Hindu and Muslim marginalisation here.

VHP history is couched in terms of a Hindu India in a continuing struggle primarily against Muslims, but also against Christians. It is interesting to note that Sat Maharaj in dismissing that Indian icon and historian of Ancient Indian history, Prof Romila Thapar, discusses her as “the darling of Christians,” a term that the VHP-RSS in India who has attacked Thapar and whose “history” of a Hindu India Prof Thapar has debunked, have never used. It suggests that the word “Christian” could be understood by Trini Hindus as disqualifying Prof Thapar’s academic work.

Fixed identity

There is one phrase in Jamadar’s document which may be seen as, unintentionally perhaps, directly supporting the VHP-RSS theory. It is that anthropologists are agreed that religious identity is fixed at birth. I can say formally that anthropologists, of whom I am one, have agreed on no such thing. The three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam accept conversion. Christianity and Islam are religions of converts and conversion. A religious identity fixed at birth is only true of Hinduism and clan religions and argued in that form, is true only of the VHP, RSS and other such organisations. It is part of the ideology of Hinduvta. It is rejected by most Indians as contrary to the idea of India itself, as the Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner Sen states in a book recently reviewed by Kevin Baldeosingh in Newsday.

Spanish and British Confessional States

Judge Jamadar uses the term “Christian” with regard to discrimination against Hindus and Muslims. The use of this term is justified by the intention to discriminate which Isabella of Spain’s 15th century Catholic State implies and, later on, the nature of the British Confessional State as illustrated by a letter to its officials. It is Catholics and Anglicans therefore who are primarily responsible for discrimination against Hindus and Muslims. I turn to history and I find a more complex story. But first that myth of Indo settlement.

Did Africans leave the plantations?

Jamadar explains the importation of Indian indentured labour in what is now familiar terms: African did not wish to work on the plantations so Indians had to be brought in. This has been repeated so often that it is now believed by most people —including Afros. However I cannot find this explanation in the research done on the period. The seminal study, Keith Laurence’s doctoral thesis (unpublished) cites as reasons given by the planters of the time, that after 1833 women and children gradually withdrew from the labour force, that “negroes” began to “indulge a preference for certain localities and types of work,” that former field slaves made every effort to bring up their children as traders and artisans, and that immigrant labour was needed not only for remedying a labour shortage, but also of “producing” competition for employment “which would induce the native labourers to accept reasonable wages.” Africans were anxious to acquire land, sometimes putting together to buy it. What emerges is that former slaves behaved like free labour everywhere.

I have seen mention of “negroes who had worked 16 hours a day in the mill during crop time, now seldom would work more than nine hours.” (Note: in a six day week) I have seen no mention of mass desertion of the plantations and indeed labour on cocoa plantations, with one exception, was African. That is not to say, that Africans liked plantation work. No one did, including Indians.

Vagrants and beggars

The 295 Frenchmen brought out from Le Havre in 1839 abandoned the estates to become beggars in the street. Portuguese did the same. It was the report that the Madras “coolies” became vagrants and beggars and that Bengalis were better workers which triggered the change in recruitment from Madras to what Sat calls the “cow belt.”

But these Indians were only marginally better than those from Madras, France or Portugual. Rather they were known for drinking, wandering around the country and sometimes ending up vagrants and beggars. A look at recruitment of indentured labour in its entirety, scuttles a number of received ideas about “race” and about religion. Portuguese and French, after all European and Catholic, were as marginalised by plantation work as would be Indians, Muslim and Hindu, after them. I leave aside former African slaves. They are left aside by Jamadar in all of his 80 pages.

John Morton

I have searched around for the genesis of the idea that emancipated slaves deserted the plantations. The earliest mention I can find is from John Morton. In his diary as autobiography edited and completed by his wife Sarah Morton, I find this:

“The emancipated slaves either would not work or diverted their energies to their own gardens. For want of workmen the sugar interests came to the brink of disaster.”

Well, well, well, Morton again! It is to John Morton, the Presbyterian Missionary to Trinidad’s Indians, to which I will turn next week for clues as to Jamadar’s discrimination and Sat’s Christians.