Robert BuddanTHE MONTH of May is significant for Indians in the Caribbean. It is the month in which Indians first arrived (in different years) in Guyana, Trinidad and Jamaica. CARICOM is, in reality, a largely Afro-Asian region. Indians are the largest ethnic groups in Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname and a smaller proportion in Belize. Their arrival constituted the most significant cultural redefinition of the Caribbean after European and African arrivals. Their cultural impact is now well known. Indians arrived as labourers, and it is significant that in this month Jamaica also celebrates Labour Day.
The occasion of Indian arrival gives cause each year to reassess Indian civilisation in its many homes and diasporas. Home and diaspora can engage in a new Caribbean arrival sharing advances in their civilisations. No other westerner has attracted as much controversy over the value of Indian civilisation than Vidia Naipaul, the Caribbean's Nobel laureate and most well known of all Indo-Caribbean persons. Naipaul was a great writer but a poor 'reader'. He misread Indian civilisation because he saw it as a failure much as Victorians saw it. He would have great difficulty explaining India's reputation as a rising power and a reawakened civilisation today.
NAIPAUL AND WOUNDED CIVILISATION
The titles of two of Naipaul's books, An Area of Darkness (1964) and India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), capture his tragic misunderstanding of India. His basic argument was that India's plight stemmed from conquer and Hinduism. Muslim conquest in the 16th century had vandalised Indian culture and Hinduism had acquiesced to it. Hindu philosophy, he believed, was defeatist because its concept of karma caused its people to accept their fate, including their poverty.
Naipaul thought the karmic principle of living and reliving predestined fate made India's civilisation stagnant. Progress was hopeless. India could only imitate. It could not innovate. Conquest had inflicted such a psychic wound to produce a wounded civilisation lacking the national confidence to fight off invasion and humiliation. Rather than fighting back, it withdrew. Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence was symptomatic of this tendency to retreat and withdraw into inner consciousness.
Naipaul wrote good literature but poor history. Historians now agree on the richness of Indian culture, its multi-religiosity, multi-ethnic democracy, and cross-fertilisation of Hindu, Muslim, and western civilisations into nationalism with a mission. India is now in the throes of one of the contemporary world's great transformations and has been (next to China) the fastest growing economy in the world for the past 15 years.
INDIAN REBIRTH
About a quarter of the visas the United States gives out to foreign professionals go to Indian computer scientists. Its age-old philosophical tradition shows its appetite for wisdom, leading in turn to knowledge of grammar, logic, numerals and the decimal system. These are the founding ingredients of the modern digital age and digital economy. It is the basis of the Indian sciences that drive its numerous industries.
India is known for its poverty but its science and industry are changing that image. Its middle class has doubled to 20 per cent in the last ten years and will reach 50 per cent by 2025. Its poverty level has been cut from 40 per cent a few decades ago to 20 per cent now. Its Human Development Index improved by 23 per cent between 1985 and 2000. Indians now live nine years longer and improvements in child mortality saves 1 million children a year from the death they would have suffered in the 1980s. Naipaul could not have predicted any of this.
CARIBBEAN INDO-CIVILISATION
Indian philosophy has had
a different impact in Jamaica.
In Hindu Influences on Rastafarianism (1985), Professor Ajai and Laxmi Mansingh argue that Jamaica's now globally popular Rastafarian culture owes more to Indian cultural and religious influence than to Garveyism, Ethiopianism, or biblical Zionism. The presence of Indians in Jamaica with their own culture and religion, they argue, caused the poor Afro-Jamaicans to wonder why they did not have their own.
Afro-Jamaicans adopted the Indian holy herb (ganja, a Hindi word), the phrase, 'Jah' (a corruption of Jai), long hairstyle with locks (Jatavi, which preceded the Rastafarian practice), vegetarianism,
God-incarnates (human-like intermediaries with the spirit world), nature-living, communal living, and certain aspects of male-female relations.
The founder of the movement, Leonard Howell, had even changed his name to Gangunju Mahraj (meaning 'knowledgeable' and 'virtuous').
Naipaul thought the Caribbean was a region of 'mimic men'
with no culture of its own. But
we now have ample evidence of the creative religions, music, language, literature, foods, and the richness of hybridisation. We still do not have the sciences of India, its distinct architecture, ancient nationalism, or human and manufacturing industry but we have great potential for our distinct cultural industries, regional cooperation, sports, democracies, education and productive diaspora.
THE NEXT ARRIVAL
India and China have proven that western culture and democracy do not provide the only routes to development. Investments in human resources and science and technology are critical. The Vice Chancellor of the UWI says that CARICOM spends only 0.08 per cent of its GDP on research and development. India, China, South Africa, Brazil, South Korea, Cuba, and Malaysia are some of the S&T powerhouses of the future.
It is to these countries that we must turn for relevant technology in energy, agriculture, medicine, and education and culture.
It is in these areas that the new India and the new China, and indeed a revitalised Afro-Asian and Latin American-Caribbean partnership, can help to lift many countries in the next wave of development. The philosophy 'we are with the west' is as moribund as Naipaul's limited horizons. Our new globalist philosophy must be 'we are with the world'.
Indians have had two historic arrivals in the Caribbean. The first was the arrival of indentured labourers between 1838 and 1917. The second was the arrival of medical and commercial business interests after 1945.
We must now plan the third arrival. This must be in science and technology, education and culture, trade and investments.
PROGRESSIVE FUTURE
Caribbean immigration brought in pirate adventurers, sugar planters, uneducated labour and small import traders whose culture reflects their suppressed histories. We did not receive scientists, industrialists, scholars, architects, and investors. We need to change this to create a progressive future. In March this year, President Bush visited India and signed a US$30 million agreement to establish a commission on science and technology between the two countries. India is an important player in biotechnology, computer science, synthetic chemicals, and pharmaceuticals, among others.
The Indian government now intends to spend more to fill a hole in western investments in water, biomass, solar energy, and agricultural science in ways that create jobs in rural India. We can benefit from these kinds of technology.
We can attract new generations of young scientists following the U.S. by granting special visas, establishing offshore schools and a commission on science, technology and development. Globalisation cannot simply be the 'McDonalds' form of consumerist globalisation. It must have real meaning to people's lives.
The contradiction of the Caribbean, as Naipaul pointed out, was between the narrowness of island life and the cosmopolitan ambitions and tastes of our people.
We can go abroad to find that cosmopolitanism but we can bring it here as well. We remain incomplete as a region. If we are going to mimic and borrow, let us borrow what is relevant and progressive from people who know science and technology.
Robert Buddan is a lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies. Email him at robert.buddan@uwimona.edu.jm
