ETHNO-HISTORY AND MARRIAGE AND WOMEN

This history follows the identity movements of the 1960s and is part of the postmodernism of the students’ revolts. This postmodernism argues that there are no facts and no truth. Rather there are only perceptions, each perfectly valid, ie, my truth is my truth and as valid as your truth. It is the combination of this “truth is relative” with identity movements which has produced “ethno-history.”

This ethno-history does not seek to answer why, how or when. It is not interested in social relationships as they actually obtain. It is not interested in the complexity of social classification nor is it interested in the findings of archaeologists or human geneticists. What interests ethno-historians is the use of fact or myth in order to consolidate what is a fabricated identity.

Black Studies

Trinidad is unlucky. We are at the crossroads of the three major identity movements which have elaborated ethno histories. Black Studies in the USA emerges out of the separatist demands of the Black Students’ Movement. This reversed the integration movements of Martin Luther King in the Southern USA and Bayard Rustin in the North. The principal architect of this was no other than Stokely Carmichael. The remnants of the Black Panthers claim that it is Stokely Carmichael who ends any possibility of the emergence of another “racially” integrated movement in the USA. It is true that Black Studies permitted funding for projects which had not been funded before. Inikori’s work on the slave trade is an example of this. The greater part of Black Studies, however, was about Black ethno-history.

Crusaders

Islam produced its own ethno-history. This history divided the world into Muslims and Crusaders. This was not only Al Qaeda nor assorted terrorists. The entire history of North Africa was collapsed into Crusader and conquered Muslim. If in 1965 I could happily wear my cross-pendant in Morocco or Tunisia, by 1980 it had become dangerous. Indeed by 1980 Syrian nuns in Carthage were holding clandestine mass in the fear of attacks by Islamists. I do not write from hearsay but from my own personal experience.

The best of Algerian historians and sociologists became refugees in a France they had once fought.

RSS-VHP History

In India the rise of Hindu fundamentalist movements around the RSS, saw history become the major battlefield. This had nothing to do with history per se. It had to do with the legitimation of a Hindu India. It is for this reason that RSS-VP historians accepted one of the European theories: that Aryans began in India. It permitted RSS-VHP to claim as Hindu the early Indian Harappa Civilisation — whatever the linguistic and archaeological evidence. It is this “proof” of an Aryan India that was always Hindu which would justify the RSS thesis that Muslims and Christians were foreigners and that the Indian Secular State of Gandhi and Nehru was in contradiction to the “Hinduness” of India.

The translation of Hinduvta is a “Hindu essence.” The result of this ethno-history in India was the mobilisation of Fundamentalist Hindus against Muslims — the Ayodha affair being the best known event because of the number of Muslims massacred. Mobilisation against what was called “forced conversion” was mobilisation against Christians. It has been noted that the conflict was sharpest where Christian schools served Tribals and Dalits (Untouchables). It was practically non-existent where Christian schools served Upper Castes. Nuns, priests and laity were killed. Christian schools were blackmailed and threatened in order to ensure that their intake would be Upper Caste Hindus and not Dalit or Tribal Christians. A vast “reconversion” campaign was launched. This served to mobilise the Hindu (and sometimes Animist) base against Christians converts. It is this Hinduvta history which is transferred to Trinidad.

Jamadar’s Christians and Hindus

The Jamadar “history” is classic ethno-history. If the Islamists push history back to the undifferentiated Crusaders and Hinduvta-RSS historians build their theory around a forever Hindu India under continued pressure from invading Muslims and colonising Christians — even if both are Indian — so Jamadar’s Hindus and Muslims in Trinidad have been discriminated against from the beginning of the ordinary calculated historical time: Christopher Columbus. History is reduced to a religious conflict between Christians on the one hand and Muslims and Hindus on the other, even where they were neither. The social impact of the plantation disappears, wiping out the complex society which emerged after emancipation.

That marriage affair

Neither race nor class exist nor do conflicts within Christianity. But then there are no conflicts with Hinduism either. This last is important. If we take schools, the delay in granting the Maha Sabha permission to open schools as compared with the Arya Sumaj or ASJA, had nothing to do with “Christians.” It had to do with conflict between two Hindu organisations claiming the same Sanatan Dharma. In the same way the refusal to accept Hindu and Muslim marriages as legal, was in part due to the structure of both as compared with the clerical structure of most Christian communities. Where this clerical structure was absent, as in the case of British Quakers who do not have a clergy, the crucial “marriage officer” was not automatically discerned. Marriages were not considered valid unless they were afterwards “registered.” Quakers solved inheritance by making wills a religious obligation. In Trinidad middle class Hindus and Muslims registered their marriages. Jamadar takes it for granted that the question of marriage was simply Christian as against Hindu and Muslim and Christian priests or pastors as against Hindu pundits or Muslim imams. But the Hindu pundit is an evolution within a Trini Hinduism pressed to produce a clergy.

In Hinduism as practised in India, the pundit is the ritual specialist of the Brahminical Caste. Other castes or sub-castes have their own ritual specialists or poojaris — given a negative meaning in Trinidad and Tobago. I leave aside Shango and Shouter Baptists. They were banned.

Hindu and Muslim marriages

There is another reason — or impact — with regard to the non-recognition of Hindu and Muslim marriages contrary to British colonial practice. This practice usually accepted customary law as valid for marriage. This was true both for Africa and for India. African customary law was never accepted in Trinidad and Tobago if only because plantation slavery de facto abolished all marriage laws including Christian within slavery.

Beside that — most of African colonialism came after Emancipation. There was therefore no precedent within Trinidad for the inclusion of Hindu and Islamic customary marriage laws within the jurisprudence of the country. It should be noted that both Hindus and Muslims favoured arranged marriages and the marriage of what were children. Girls could be married as young as seven or eight although they would not move to the bridegroom’s house until puberty. In the case of Islam, not only did girls in particular marry young in an arranged marriage, wives were — and are in Islamic countries — subject to easy repudiation. Indeed repudiation ranks first in the problems Muslim women list today.

The impact of Hindu or Muslim customary marriages on women can be seen in the percentage of women who will be illiterate in rural India or in Muslim countries and indirectly by the fact that every female Prime Minister in Asia has been educated in Catholic or Anglican convent schools.

Anglo-Indian law

It is not surprising that while Anglo-Indian customary law recognised Hindu and Muslim marriages during the colonial period, an Independent India has abolished this. Marriages are today only valid if they are registered. The requirement in Trinidad and Tobago that Hindu and Muslim marriages were only valid if registered could certainly be considered discriminatory. However it could be argued that this discrimination prevented an even greater discrimination: that against girls and women.

Muslim women here cannot be easily repudiated. The dowry in a Hindu marriage is increasingly only a ritual affair even in desperately poor homes. There is no pattern of the burning of brides associated with dowry payments.

If Peter Jamadar did not recognize the problem it is in large part due to the reification of religious discrimination to suit Indo Ethno-History. Religious discrimination was not the only or the most important of discrimination in Trinidad and Tobago.