1Because of the astounding diversity of peoples in India—a multitude of races, linguistic groups, religions, castes and sub-castes, tribes—the articulation of nationalism, however nuanced, inexorably excluded many. The fact that this new idea of India was grounded in a pre-Muslim, largely ‘Aryan’ or Vedic past, Hindu in its essentials, rendered the nationalism of the Indian National Congress (founded in 1885) inherently flawed, however sanctimonious its professions of secularism. In the end, its raison d’être was a procrustean Hindu construction of Indianness. Although the modern idea of India would hasten the end of Empire, it also had to confront its potential contraction: the notion of two nations, culminating in 1947 in the creation of Pakistan, the Muslim nation. The unitary idea of India—mapped by Empire— was difficult to sustain without the imperial presence. It was caught between exaggerated assertions of cohesion, because of its fragility, and its fissiparous reality. The essentially Hindu foundations of Indian nationalism, therefore, made it ill equipped to bridge the powerful fault-line between Hinduism and Islam.

2British rule had invented both the space and the intellectual underpinnings of that idea of India. Sunil Khilnani has explored the thinness of that idea and its imaginary dimensions:

[B]efore the nineteenth century, no residents of the subcontinent would have identified themselves as Indian. There existed intricate, ramified vocabularies of common understanding, which classified people by communities of lineage, locality and sect; but ‘Indian’ would not have figured among its terms… What made possible the self-invention of a national community was the fact of alien conquest and colonial subjection. It was the British interest in determining geographical boundaries that by an act of Parliament in 1899 converted ‘India’ from the name of a cultural region into a precise, pink territory… The arbitrary precisions of colonial administrative techniques thus brought forth an historical novelty, a unified and bounded space named India. (154-5)

3For the Indian in British Guiana (Guyana since May 1966), the amorphousness of Indianness was largely unconsidered. But whereas it was the foreigner, the British ‘other’, against whom the idea of India cohered in the motherland, it was primarily the African ‘other’ that engendered the comprehensive Indianness of Indo-Guyanese, whether Hindu, Muslim or Christian; north Indian (UP and Bihar) or south Indian (Tamil). Indeed, their conception of self as not African—the distinction at the core of their identity as Indians in the Caribbean—gave them a flexibility to adopt diverse constructions of India (‘many Indias’), several more or less imagined, a compound of fact and fantasy. Indo-Guyanese could appropriate these Indias tendentiously for the ever-shifting requirements of their identity construction, the quest for self-affirmation in a plantation society where Indians were still seen, as late as the 1940s, as ‘coolies’. The pejorative ‘otherness’ was not amenable to easy dissipation; but the idea of India, with its multiple articulations, became a potent instrument of self-assertion, as they selectively challenged their exclusion from a broader creole sensibility while not subscribing to it fully. In the process, Indians in the Caribbean would grope towards a tenuous belonging, fortified by the example of Mother India. For middle class, Christianised Indians, identity with India was no less imperative than for the ‘bound coolie’ (indentured labourer) anchored in the India of the Ramayana—its anthropomorphic Ram, Sita, Lakshman, Hanuman and Rawan, apprehensible and manipulable to suit every local exigency. For within this seeming paradox, between the Christian Indian lawyer or doctor and the ‘bound coolie’ engaged in a common project of claiming a redemptive idea of India was a common denominator: the ‘coolie’ stain, which clung like barnacles to all Indo-Guyanese. Yet the confidence generated by identity with Mother India prolonged the incredulity of other Guyanese with regard to the authenticity of Indo-Guyanese loyalty to British Guiana.

4In the early 1880s Rev H.V.P. Bronkhurst, an Anglo-Indian Wesleyan missionary in the colony, bemoaned the tendency among creoles, even educated blacks and coloureds, to see all Indians in the colony as ‘savages or semi-civilised barbarians’: ‘You, sammy; you, coolie! ’ were the common demeaning epithets thrown at them. Bronkhurst rejected the pervasive crude perceptions of Indians, although he, too, often used the opprobrious term, ‘coolie’: ‘Whatever may be the defects and blemishes seen by the people of the colony in the coolies around them, I have no hesitation in saying that I have found a large number of them to be a very hospitable and courteous people. They surpass every other nation in this respect…’ (268- 69). But the ascription of Indian indentured labourers to low caste status with a proclivity for criminality, mendacity and turpitude was resilient. The following assessment of ‘coolies’, from the Berbice Gazette, in August 1882, was characteristic of attitudes towards all Indians in the colony, although their caste background mirrored the caste diversity of the United Provinces (UP) whence most had come:

The present labourers from India, with very few exceptions are all pariahs and the low castes. Perhaps it may be suggested that as labourers do not come here for any other but agricultural pursuits it is no matter who comes… but when we review the crimes that are being committed by the coolies, we are led naturally to suggest otherwise, and speak in favour of better labourers to our colony than the present set. We apprehend that most of the labourers embarking from India… are always the lowest castes… chamars, domes [doms or cremators of the dead], mathurs, harries, pariahs and half-caste Mussulmans [Muslims]. We . . . should try to get coolies from the Western provinces of India [Punjab, Rajputana and Bombay].

5This erroneous impression emanated from the county of Berbice, where Indians were comparatively better off. Forty-two years later, in 1924, in their report on conditions of Indians in British Guiana, Pillai and Tivary, the delegates sent from India, were appalled by the stubbornness of the ‘cooly’ stain. They did concede that Indo-Guyanese could ‘acquire property or carry on business without let or hindrance’; indeed, that ‘no disabilities have so far been imposed upon… [them] on merely racial grounds’, yet they deprecated what they deemed ‘considerable race-prejudice’ towards Indians:

Every Indian, high or low, rich or poor, is a cooly [sic]. This contempt against East Indians is partly racial and partly economic, and is the direct outcome of the conditions under which East Indians used to be taken from India and made to work… [under] the indentured system… We asked Mr Lukhoo [sic] [J.A. Luckhoo, the first Indo-Guyanese legislator and twice a Colonisation Scheme delegate to India] whether the following statement… in 1917, was true of British Guiana…: ‘It is known fact that the general body of Europeans in the colonies consider Asiatics as racially and fundamentally inferior to them… the latter is reduced to that of mere cattle…’ Mr Lukhoo stated: ‘Of course, “cattle” is a strong word to use but that is exactly what is thought of Indians here’… He added that Indians were considered to be inferior in intelligence to others, including the Negros [sic]. The prevailing idea has been that the East Indian is fit to serve only as labourer and nothing more. (55-6)

6The Daily Chronicle of 24 March 1924 concurred: ‘Here is an ugly aspect of local conditions; but no one can deny their essential truth’. As Edgar Mittelholzer, who grew up in New Amsterdam, Berbice (after the First World War), next door to the most distinguished Indian family in British Guiana, the Luckhoos, recalls: ‘… “coolies” we called them, whether they were labourers or eventually became doctors or lawyers or civil servants’ (155). Consequently, educated Indians, particularly Christianised ones like Joseph and Peter Ruhomon (cousins of the Luckhoos), and J.I. Ramphal, a respected educationist and journalist, would seek assiduously— over five decades—to use the tools of Western scholarship and the knowledge of India unearthed by it, to establish that Indians had a mind, that they were not all ‘coolies’ or menial jobbers; that their ancestors were makers of great ancient civilisations. The process of intellectual rehabilitation, the necessity to transcend the ‘coolie’ universe of humiliation, had begun as early as the 1890s, with the formation of the ephemeral British Guiana East Indian Institute, in Georgetown (in 1892), ‘the first society of East Indians in the Caribbean’, according to its founder, the British Guiana-born Indian, Dr William Hewley Wharton.

7The founders of the organisation were largely Christian Indians, the first generation with the learning and confidence to challenge creole rejection of their claims to belonging. But they would assert a wider Indian inheritance, even inchoate claims to Indian nationhood in the colony, in seeking credence for their identity with creole society. This paradox was engendered by the pervasive tendency in British Guiana to deny them the capacity for intellectual discernment, to ridicule any suggestion of a civilised temperament. And because most creoles (whites, coloureds, blacks, Madeiran Portuguese) were bred on the assumption of British cultural superiority, mastery of its principal idioms was indispensable to claims of belonging to the colonial space. The shaping of Indian identity in the colony would be conditioned by a complex, sometimes contradictory, interplay between the pursuit of colonial indices of civility and culture, on one hand, and identity with the high civilisation of an imagined Mother India, on the other. That India could not have been constructed without the affirmation of Indology, and only the Westernised elite in British Guiana were trained to apprehend and maximise its intellectual legacy. Such were the founders of the British Guiana East Indian Institute: Veerasawmy Mudaliar (a student of H.V.P. Bronkhurst); F.E. Jaundoo, J.R. Wharton (later a lawyer) and his brother, William Hewley Wharton (later a medical doctor). As aspirants, too, to colonial mobility, they were astute enough to identify with Indians who had gained recognition in the West. The caste or religious background of the successful ones overseas was immaterial, and Indo-Guyanese would have appreciated some reciprocal recognition from them, however minimal. Yet it was not an imperative, for their notion of Indianness, including the appropriation of indices of Indian achievement, was germane solely to the shaping of their identity in British Guiana.

8A memorable illustration of this was occasioned by the case of Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917), the first Indian elected to the British House of Commons. On 28 July 1892 the Daily Chronicle in British Guiana carried the following terse item on the unique achievement:

An interesting figure in the next Parliament will be the Parsee, Naoroji, whom Lord Salisbury [the Tory Prime Minister] held up to mistaken ridicule as a ‘black man’. Naoroji’s victory in Central Finsbury, by three votes, was challenged by the Conservatives, but a recount confirmed Naoroji’s poll. The National Liberal club men, with whom the genial Indian is popular, greeted his victory with volleys of hurrahs.

9On 1 October 1892 the British Guiana East Indian Institute forwarded a congratulatory letter to Naoroji, expressing ‘exceeding joy and gratification’ at his election, which they viewed as ‘an honour… [to] our race in this remote part of Her Majesty’s dominions’. Furthermore, they considered his election to the House of Commons an honour to ‘the East Indian nation’. The idea of that imagined nation permeates the letter (reproduced in the Daily Chronicle of 7 October 1892), thus substantiating my argument that this extraordinary achievement could be appropriated as an antidote to the calumniation of the ‘East Indian’ in the colony as ‘coolie’. There was no equivocation in claiming Naoroji for ‘the East Indian’ nation. They were unabashedly triumphal:

We are fully conscious of the multifarious difficulties you must necessarily have had to surmount in order to secure your success in this, to our nation, memorable election, and that fact alone impels us to doubly prize the honour which the East Indian Nation has, through your meritorious instrumentality, attained—an event unparalleled in the annals of the History of India. We need hardly say that although we are thousands of miles separated from you, it will be our foremost interest to read of your career, and earnestly trust that success will attend your undertakings… and we further venture to hope that the example which you have so nobly set will be fruitful in actuating others of our ancient race to follow; and thereby rid themselves and countrymen of the political oblivion [into] which they have been presumed hitherto to be sunk. In concluding our humble quota of the many manifestations of pride at your entrance to such a traditionally illustrious house… we fervently hope that Almighty God will direct your every movement in your elevated sphere, and thereby ensure a brilliant and happy career for one in whose veins courses our kindred blood.

10 Their imagined East Indian nation—a concept that would have had no resonance in any part of India—was designed to satisfy the yearnings of a people who had lost their old moorings, however restrictive and oppressive, and were groping towards a new self-definition. It is noteworthy that although the idea of the East Indian nation was vague in relation to India, it was suggestive of a potential extension of it: a greater India, within the Empire. It was certainly not creole in conception and would not have inspired empathy by Africans or other groups in British Guiana. There is no evidence that Naoroji responded; indeed, that he was even aware of the existence of Indo-Guyanese. Although he would become President of the Indian National Congress thrice, he could not have comprehended what ‘the East Indian nation’ meant; and, as a Parsi (a Zoroastrian of Persian descent, however remote), it is doubtful whether he considered himself a member of ‘our ancient race… in whose veins course our kindred blood’. They, however, had defined him as ‘East Indian’, a son of Mother India—not a ‘black man’ as Lord Salisbury had defined him—whose eminence could absolve them of some of the stain of an extant bondage (indentureship), while endeavouring to shape an identity in British Guiana.

11Naoroji, whose example exerted a seminal influence on Gandhi when he was studying in London (1888-91), was being constructed as their leader, at the highest level of Empire, who could hasten and inspire a political awakening in Mother India and, therefore, among her scattered children. Ideas of India (many Indias of the imagination) were ever at the heart of Indo-Guyanese self-definition. By humbling themselves before Naoroji, they were embracing the aura generated by his meteoric rise in order to challenge their many local detractors. The problem, of course, was that African, Coloured or Portuguese people would not have been enamoured of ‘the East Indian nation’ in British Guiana, however abstract. Although it offered Indo-Guyanese a degree of self-belief, it conveyed to others a communal aspiration at variance with creole sensibility.

12 The unpalatability of the notion of ‘the East Indian nation’ to African Guyanese would have been exacerbated by the absorption of ideas of Aryanism by some Indo-Guyanese, particularly as articulated in the works of Professor Max Muller and Rev. H.V.P. Bronkhurst, the Anglo-Indian missionary in the colony. As early as 19 November 1885 Bronkhurst had echoed Max Muller’s thesis on the remote common ancestry of Europeans and Indians, from an original Aryan stock in central Asia. His paper, entitled ‘The Ancestry and Origin of our East Indian Immigrants’, must have evoked enormous rehabilitative pride among the despised ‘coolies’ of British Guiana:

[Indians] are unmistakably the oldest people now living in the civilised world… The ancient name of [their country] was ARYAVARTA, literally the abode of the Aryans… Even in British Guyana [sic]… where they are employed as labourers, we find the Indians more prolific than any other race… They are, as a race… a comely and tractable people, possessing intelligence—a large number of them exhibiting cultured minds—and a natural capacity for civilisation… Civilisation then is natural to the Hindu race… The ancient Hindus were an enterprising people, and they were always on the move, migrating or voyaging to distant countries… The modern Hindus have traditional accounts of their forefathers crossing the ‘Seven Seas’ in search of wealth, fame, home, etc., and thus establishing themselves in different parts of the globe… (3; 5; 15)

13Bronkhurst underlined the supposed common ancestry of Indians and Caucasians, the thesis of the so-called Aryan race:

Heathenism and superstition have… blinded the eyes of the modern Hindus as to their origin and relationship to the Europeans, but… they will wake up to the fact that they… are related to each other, by the closest ties. The descendants of the ancient Aryan-Hindus will claim relationship with the Germans or Germanic races in Europe, and the descendants of the Tar-Aryans… [and] the Tamil population of southern India, will claim relationship with the English or the Saxons of Great Britain… (67-8)

14Indians in British Guiana were probably buoyed by Bronkhurst’s celebratory reflection on their antecedence, which must have assuaged some guilt for crossing the kala pani, the dark waters of modern Hindu opprobrium. They would also have been flattered by his assertion of a common ancestry between themselves and the ruling imperial race. Lightness of skin is an imperishable Indian preoccupation; it is prized. The illusion of racial affinity with Europeans, however, must have banished the dark African further from the Indian imagination, thus compounding their own deep-seated caste bigotry permeated by notions of ritual pollution and sexual contamination. Moreover, because many Indo-Guyanese were dark themselves and of low caste origin, their instinct for distancing themselves from blackness would have been magnified.

15Like the myth of Rama Raj, the blissful rule of Lord Rama in the Ramayana, the Golden Age in the kingdom of Ayodhya, and the myth of El Dorado, so resonant—and necessary in a hard environment—in British Guiana, the myth of Aryanism answered the urgent needs of the ‘coolie’ angst. It elevated the Indian to kinship with the British ruler, thus short-circuiting in the imagination the pedestrian, measured creole route through education, religion and cricket, to a kind of Englishness. It compensated for gnawing inadequacies and self-doubt on the weary road to creolisation in colonial society. No wonder the first Indian intellectual in British Guiana, Joseph Ruhomon (1873-1942), and his brother, Peter Ruhomon (born 1880), Dr. William Hewley Wharton (born 1869), founder of the British Guiana East Indian Institute, and several Westernised Indians would fall for the allure of Aryanism.

16Joseph Ruhomon’s discovery of India, through Bronkhurst, was seminal to Indo-Guyanese identity in the 1890s. His pamphlet of December 1894, India and the Progress of Her People at Home and Abroad and how those in British Guiana may Improve Themselves, was deeply inspired by his pride in ancient India’s diverse intellectual achievement. Ruhomon was pained by the educational backwardness of Indo-Guyanese, and he exhorted them to take pride in the legacy of ancient India and contemporary progress in Mother India (Seecharan 2001: chapters 1-3). Forty-three years later, in 1937, Joseph Ruhomon recalled the context of his seminal pamphlet. He was ‘shocked at the intellectually and socially backward state of my people in comparison with their advanced and still advancing Negro brethren, and I thought I would sound a clarion call for a forward movement’. He elaborated:

[I]ts great objective was to arouse local Indians from their lethargy or indifference in respect of their intellectual and social interests and to stimulate them to action, after first comparing them with their more progressive brethren in the Motherland and in other parts of the world… I [also] pointed… to the achievements of black and coloured people [mixed] in the realms of education, of intellectual, cultural and social movements, of professional practice, of politics, and of village administration; and on the other hand, I pointed to the fallow-fields of Indian soil in those same realms awaiting still the ploughshare of intelligent husbandry to make them rich and fertile… I emphasised… the urgency of the matter and demanded… the establishment of some institution that would be both cultural and representative of Indian interests… (23)

17To counter the ‘coolie’ stigma, he extolled the cultivation of the intellect. He was inspired by the reported oratorical and philosophical exposition, as well as the acclamation, of India’s Swami Vivekananda at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, as he was by the election of Dadabhai Naoroji to the House of Commons the previous year. In both cases Indians had earned the recognition of the West through merit. Joseph Ruhomon, too, was claiming Naoroji’s achievement as his own, and that of ‘the East Indian nation’. As the following excerpt shows, there was also a millennial strand in his imagined nation, redolent of the golden age. Moreover, his ‘East Indian nation’, more than that adumbrated in the East Indian Institute’s congratulatory letter to Naoroji two years earlier, clearly encompassed all Indians, ‘at home and abroad’—a greater India:

We, East Indians, should feel supremely proud of the fact that the members of our own race are practically showing the world today by their example that the great East Indian nation is no mean nation. Our people have been great in the past and they will be greater yet in the future. The signs of the times point to the brilliant future of the East Indian race. Let prejudiced-eaten races say what they will… but we know that there is a golden harvest to be reaped by East Indians… I am not only convinced… of the greatness of India as a country, and the greatness of her sons and daughters as a people, but I am joyfully and confidently anticipating the time when in intelligence, in culture, in morals and intellectual attainments, the great East Indian Race shall be second to none in the world. (Seecharan 2001: 62-3)

18Then, having advanced claims for the intellectual sagacity of Indians, he endorsed the then popular notion of Aryanism, as if to validate his postulate of cerebral equivalence to Europeans, through a putative common racial pedigree. The ‘coolie’ persona was being transcended in Joseph Ruhomon’s formulation of Aryanism: ‘I may add… that we also in British Guiana with all our ancestors in India are closely allied by blood relationship to the British nation, as the following poem by Ben Elvry entitled “To India”… will show’:

Brave brothers, of the sun-kissed face
Heirs of the ancient Arya name;
Like heritage with you we claim,
Our tongue betrays our kindred race.
Far sundered had our wanderings been,
By depths of dusk and ways unknown;
Glad now we join once more to own
One Mother Empress—Kaisar—Queen. (Seecharan 2001: 63)

19But Ruhomon would not acquiesce in ‘the East Indian nation’ being under the indefinite governance of their ‘fair-faced brothers’. He acknowledged that the latter were making a salutary contribution to the intellectual awakening of India; and that Indians ‘at home’ were acquitting themselves magnificently in many spheres of European scholarly and professional endeavour. He considered British rule a period of apprenticeship in mastering the skills for the regeneration of ‘the East Indian nation’.

20When Joseph Ruhomon’s pamphlet was published in Georgetown in December 1894, the conservative Argosy of 29 December challenged his contention that Indians had the capacity to govern themselves in the near future. They observed that although ‘a Hindoo or a Negro’ had the same scope for advancement in the Empire as the British, it was premature to assume that they were ready for self-government. Subject races had to be tutored for responsibility, necessarily an incremental process. Furthermore, they contended that Ruhomon’s extolling of India’s achievements redounded more to the credit of the British than to any inherent native capacity for self-improvement. In a sarcastic allusion to Ruhomon’s affirmation of Aryanism, the kinship of Indians and the British, the Argosy cautioned Indians (and Africans) with pretensions to self-governance that their apprenticeship was far from over:

In an absolutely free country like the British Empire, a Hindoo or a Negro has equal opportunity with the Anglo-Saxon to rise to eminence, granted he has the same capacity for taking pains; but it is in this sternly-necessary qualification that the hundreds of millions of the tropical and sub-tropical races are defective. Here and there in the present day, just as it was in the past centuries, spring up a commanding genius whose exceptional career only throws into deeper shade the utterly blank and purposeless lives of the teeming millions; but it is open to all of us to hope and believe, as Mr Ruhomon says he does, that in course of time the genius, intelligence and industry of the East Indians as a people, will gain for their country [India] a foremost place amongst the nations of the world… We notice that the lecturer is constantly measuring the East Indian with the Anglo-Saxon… that the former is at least the equal of the latter… Granted this to be true, it is the fair-faced brother who has most reason to rejoice in it. It was he who liberated, as far as he could, both the Negro and the Hindoo…

21Ruhomon recalled later that he was not at all actuated by ‘jealousy’ or ingratitude towards the British, as ‘that fine old Scotsman [Thomson, editor of the Argosy]’ had asserted. He was simply arguing that Indians had the ability to compete with Anglo-Saxons intellectually: ‘… the equality of the two races in respect of mental capacity, in order to encourage our own people to try to realise their possibilities in the intellectual world (Joseph Ruhomon 1937: 24)’. This was why the incisive and provocative letters of Bechu (the Bengali ‘bound coolie radical in British Guiana’), to the liberal Daily Chronicle between 1896 and 1901, made such an impact on all Indo-Guyanese. It was not only the insurgent tenor of his challenge to the sugar planters, but also his mastery of the English idiom—the language and the conventions of debate, his demonstrated nimbleness of intellect—that resonated with them. The fact that Bechu was of humble origins, an iconoclastic indentured labourer, would have added immeasurably to the self-esteem of his compatriots in the colony (Seecharan 1999).

22It is comprehensible, therefore, why Indo-Guyanese would envision ‘the East Indian nation’ essentially in terms of an ever changing and perceptibly resurgent Mother India. They still lacked the confidence to create their own ideas; they were not at ease with a creole sensibility but they could not elude it; they were despised as languishing in a state of barbarism. It was the idea of a renascent motherland, reinventing herself through her ancient greatness, which gave them the strength and an emerging confidence to shape a new identity. This was fraught with danger in creole society, but the power of India to mould attitudes in the new space was immense—and inescapable. And the fact that indentureship was not abolished until 1917 enhanced the motherland’s moral authority in the tortuous process of self-definition.

23In India, as well as with Indo-Guyanese, European recognition of India’s ancient legacy was received with pride. This is evident in the response of William Hewley Wharton (the first Indian born in the Caribbean to study at a British university) to assertion of their mutual Aryan antecedence, by a distinguished Scotsman, in December 1899. Wharton was born in British Guiana on August 20, 1869; his parents were indentured labourers from India. He was the founder of the short-lived British Guiana East Indian Institute, in 1892, the demise of which is probably attributable to his departure for the University of Edinburgh in 1893. Throughout his university years (1893-9), he identified closely with Indian affairs; in 1896 he was elected secretary of the Edinburgh Indian Association. A unique honour was thus conferred on him, an Indian born outside the motherland, when he was elected president in 1898-9. But the cherished commendation would come on the occasion of the annual dinner of the Association, on 7 January 1899, from the guest speaker, Professor Sir Thomas Grainger Stewart, Physician-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria. More than 40 years later, in his entry for Who is Who in British Guiana, 1945-8, Dr. Wharton reproduced the accolade of the eminent professor from that Edinburgh evening in 1899. It must have had a profound impact on his life, erasing the ‘coolie’ stain:

Here is a young gentleman who was born in British Guiana, possesses an English name, fills the chair at this banquet with much dignity and grace, and still insists on calling himself Indian. I may as well call myself Indian, as we both belong to the same stock—the Aryan family. (551-2)

24 In British Guiana, where thousands of Indians were still under indentureship, Max Muller’s writings on Aryanism, however fictive, aided the small Indian middle class to ease their gnawing self-doubt and self-deprecation. Max Muller’s influence ran deep in the colony, as it did in Victorian India. Nirad Chaudhuri assesses the eminent Anglo-German scholar’s contribution to India’s awakening. He was referring not only to Aryanism, but also his indefatigable labours in translating the ancient Vedic works from Sanskrit. Chaudhuri explains:

The human urge in all his scholarly work was that, becoming aware of their great past and drawing on their legacy… [Indians] would revitalise their contemporary life, and shed the dead wood which had accumulated through the centuries.

25He cites a Bengali writer who, as early as 1874, had dramatised the impact of Sanskritic studies in Europe and comparative philology in reshaping British attitudes to Indians:

We were niggers at one time. We now become brethren… The advent of the English found us a nation sunk in the mire of superstition, ignorance and political servitude. The advent of scholars like Sir William Jones found us fully established in a rank above that of every nation as that from which modern civilisation could be distinctly traced…. We should know that it is to the study of the roots and inflexions of Sanskrit that we owe our national salvation… (318).

26The idea of ‘the East Indian nation’, a construct by the small Indo-Guyanese elite at the end of the 19^th century, had much in its aspirations as the idea of India in the motherland, and flowed from similar promptings. The lowly image of Indians in the colony—the menial, ignorant ‘coolie’: a barbarian—gnawed especially painfully at the dignity of the educated minority—an experience shared by the educated elite in India. The discovery of ancient India with its seminal accomplishments in diverse spheres of high culture— initially, almost wholly the work of scholars such as Jones, Colebrook, Wilkins and others in the Asiatic Society of Bengal—imbued Ram Mohan Roy, Dayananda, Vivekananda, Tagore, Ruhomon and Wharton with the means to redefine themselves. This gave them the self-belief to challenge imperial definitions; indeed, to begin to reinvent India and challenge imperial supremacy. In this sense, Indo-Guyanese in the short-lived East Indian Institute were right to speak of an East Indian nation, however impractical it would prove to be in the colony later. It reflected their pride in a resurgent Mother India that was beginning to stir at the end of the 19^th century.

27The stature of Mother India, often, was heightened by the fact that colonial authorities tended to respond to educated, articulate men from India who visited the colony with arrogance and paranoia: they were deemed subversive. For instance, Pandit Parmanand Saraswat, a distinguished Arya Samaj missionary from the Punjab, arrived in British Guiana on 28 December 1910. The government would not permit him to deliver a lecture at the Immigration Department, an institution with ambiguous resonance within the Indian community: indentureship was still in force. The problem originated with the Government of India, which deemed him ‘a dangerous man’, and sought intelligence on his activities overseas, including British Guiana. Parmanand’s offence was an intellectual one: he was celebrating the achievements of ancient Hindu India. This was conducive to a resurgence of Indian self-respect and self-confidence, thus kindling notions of their capacity for self-governance. However, Parmanand was eventually allowed to deliver his lecture, ‘Ancient India’, at the Town Hall, Georgetown, on the evening of 12 January 1911.

28The missionary’s stature was enhanced immediately: he was seen by all Indians, whatever their religious persuasion, as an emissary of the new India. This was magnified by the enthusiastic response of a wide cross-section of Guyanese society who attended the lecture. It was chaired by the distinguished English-born historian of the colony, James Rodway, the author of a three-volume history of British Guiana as well as several other works. Among the prominent non-Indians present were: Hon W.C. Crawford, a member of the Executive Council, Dr W.W. Campbell, the 1894 Guyana Scholar, Rev. J. Dingwall of the Moravian Church and Venerable Archdeacon Josa of the Anglican Church. Rodway’s erudition was unassailable in British Guiana, so his acclamation of the legacy of ancient India must have been deeply appreciated by Indo-Guyanese. He cited the scholarship of Professor Max Muller in bringing India to the European imagination, adding that ‘India had taught Europe a great deal’. He reportedly argued: ‘The old Greeks and Romans were very sharp in a great many things, but they knew nothing about Arithmetic, nothing about the cipher or the nought; and on account of not having the nought, they could not carry on commercial business. About the year 1200, the Arabs brought to Europe figures up to 10, from India, and from that time Europe began to become mercantile. The basis of mercantile calculation, the decimal system, came from India’. Rodway concluded thus: ‘Another thing India had given, was still giving and would give to the world, and that was the basis of its religion, the basis of humanity—loving kindness. No people in the world were like the Hindoos for their loving kindness… (Daily Chronicle, 14 January 1911)’.

29Parmanand, too, referred to Max Muller, noting that if India’s contribution to warfare, imperial conquests or the political history of the world was not impressive, she had more than recompensed by virtue of her pre-eminence ‘in the religious history of mankind’. She was, indeed, ‘the mother of religious thought’. He then addressed the intellectual universe opened up by European discovery of the language of Aryan India, Sanskrit, which has to its credit seminal achievements in drama, poetry, literature and philosophy. Sanskrit also provided the foundation of comparative philology that led scholars to the supposed commonality of origin between it and Greek, Latin and the Indo-European languages. Parmanand observed that the rich Sanskrit legacy was epitomised by the Rig Veda: ‘the oldest book of mankind’.

30He was arguing that ancient India was the source of civilisation because her literary and philosophical texts reflected originality of thought several thousand years ago. He concluded with a portrayal of the ancient motherland as a veritable utopia; this would have struck a chord with his Indo-Guyanese audience, buoyed by the recent cascade of credits for their antecedents. It was also congruent with their conception of the rule of Lord Rama, the Golden Age, in the Ramayana. But Parmanand, while celebrating their ancestral religious legacy, counselled them, like Joseph Ruhomon, to pursue Western education:

India influenced humanity through the Persians, Greeks and Arabians, and when India exerted her influence through Buddhism… seven centuries before Christ, the standard of morality was so high, they did not require locks for their doors, did not lie, and were sober and industrious… [He discussed] the teachings of Buddhism… comparing it with the teachings of Christianity… [arguing] that they should not force the East Indians to accept the latter religion, but should educate them and make them better citizens… [Western] education was the only thing to better their condition… (Daily Chronicle, 14 January 1911).

31S. Radhakrishnan, once Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford, has commented on the importance of the influence of the West in equipping Hindu India with the means of self-assessment, the foundation of India’s regeneration and nationalist assertion:

It is the tragedy of India that while its culture produced individuals who had something undeniably attractive and superior, it did not develop a high civic or national sense… As a designer of national life, Hindu civilisation was not a success… [The] disparity between Hindu ideals and practices became manifest when India came under the influence of the West after the advent of the British. Her thinking men felt the undemocratic character of many of the institutions associated with Hindu religion, and traced the weakness of India to lack of social sense and imagination. Western influence widened the horizon of the Indian mind, opened up fresh channels, and gave it a more universal direction (350).

32This was true of British Guiana as well. India and Europe were both seminal in the shaping of Indo-Guyanese identity.