Download or read book India and the Shaping of the Indo Guyanese Imagination 1890s 1920s written by Clem Seecharan and published by Peepal Tree Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the first East Indian intellectuals emerged in British Guiana at the end of the nineteenth century, most of their compatriots were still working as indentured or free labourers on the colony's sugar estates. Indians were conscious that they were looked down on as barbarous 'coolies' by other sections of the population. In response, the intellectual elite constructed a view of India, drawn from the writings of Max Muller and Tagore, which provided the Indo-Guyanese community with a sustaining sense of self-esteem and the sources of its resistance to colonialism. Focusing on individuals such as Joseph and Peter Ruhomon, JA Luckhoo and WH Wharton, the study looks at the way the beginnings of the nationalist movement in India stimulated such individuals to start defining the nature of their presence in the New World. Seecharan argues that while the vision of 'Mother India' stimulated the community's cultural revival, it constrained the way it thought about Guyana. "Dr. Seecharan's research is meticulous and his analysis penetrating. This is why, despite its specific Indian focus and slender look, India offers much insight into the broader history of Guyanese society as a whole." Frank Birbalsingh Clem Seecharan was born in Guyana. He currently teaches on the Caribbean Studies programme at the University of North London.
Download or read book Joseph Ruhomon s India written by and published by University of the West Indies Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reissue of an 1894 pamphlet celebrates Joseph Ruhomon as the first Indian intellectual in British Guiana, now Guyana. He wrote at a time, Seecharan notes, when self-deprecation was an instinct...and the construction of this essay was an admirable accomplishment.
Download or read book Memory and Myth written by Fiona Darroch and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the problematical historical location of the term 'religion' and examines how this location has affected the analytical reading of postcolonial fiction and poetry. The adoption of the term 'religion' outside of a Western Enlightenment and Christian context should therefore be treated with caution. Within postcolonial literary criticism, there has been either a silencing of the category as a result of this caution or an uncritical and essentializing adoption of the term 'religion'. It is argued in the present study that a vital aspect of how writers articulate their histories of colonial contact, migration, slavery, and the re-forging of identities in the wake of these histories is illuminated by the classificatory term 'religion'. Aspects of postcolonial theory and Religious Studies theory are combined to provide fresh insights into the literature, thereby expanding the field of postcolonial literary criticism. The way in which writers 'remember' history through writing is central to the way in which 'religion' is theorized and articulated; the act of remembrance can be persuasively interpreted in terms of 'religion'. The title 'Memory and Myth' therefore refers to both the syncretic mythology of Guyana, and the key themes in a new critical understanding of 'religion'. Particular attention is devoted to Wilson Harris's novel Jonestown, alongside theoretical and historical material on the actual Jonestown tragedy; to the mesmerizing effect of the Anancy tales on contemporary writers, particularly the poet John Agard; and to the work of the Indo-Guyanese writer David Dabydeen and his elusive character Manu.
Download or read book Tracing the New Indian Diaspora written by Om Prakash Dwivedi and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The growing importance of the Indian diaspora is felt today across the globe due to its emergence as the second-largest dias¬poric community. By examining historical, socio-cultural, economic, political, and lite¬rary aspects of the Indian diaspora, this volume sets out to trace the latest devel¬opments in the field of Indian diaspora studies. It brings together essays by Indian and foreign scholars, thus providing an authoritative platform for discussions in which identities and affiliations are con¬tested and constituted through the hier¬archies of cross-cultural migration in this increasingly globalized world. This volume traces the transnational network of the Indian diaspora, and will prove of interest to scholars working in the fields of the Indian diaspora, diaspora theory, and cultural studies. Countries covered include Mauritius, Fiji, Singapore, Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, the UK, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Malaya, South Africa, and New Zealand. Creative writers dis¬cussed include Ramabai Espinet, Vikram Chandra, Rohinton Mistry, Chitra Banerjee Diva¬karuni, Nisha Ganatra, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kavery Nambisan, and Sarita Mandanna, along with the work of filmmakers (Mira Nair, Yash Chopra, Kabir Khan, Shuchi Kothari, Mandrika Rupa, Karan Johar, Sugu Pillay, Mallika Krishnamurthy, and Nisha Ganatra). Wideranging and scholarly. Dwivedi’s edited collection on routes and representations of the Indian diaspora is a vital contribution to the growing critical discourse on this subject. — Professor Janet Wilson, Northampton University, UK Tracing the New Indian Diaspora is a significant contribution to the understanding of the positions and representations of the Indian diaspora, forcing us to re-examine our notions of location and dislocation, of home and the world, of belonging and alienation: in short, of the politics of the diaspora today. — Professor GJV Prasad, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Om Prakash Dwivedi is Assistant Professor in English at Taiz University, Yemen. His recent publications include The Other India: Narratives of Terror, Communalism and Violence (2012), Postcolonial Theory in the Global Age (co-ed. with Martin Kich, 2013), and a collection of short stories, The World to Come (2014).
Download or read book A Powerful Indian Voice Alice Bhagwandai Singh Reflections on Her Work in Guyana written by Baytoram Ramharack and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2023-03-02 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baytoram Ramharack was born in Berbice, Guyana. He teaches history and political science at Nassau Community College. His previous publications include Against the Grain: Balram Singh Rai and the Politics of Guyana (2005); and Jung Bahadur Singh of Guyana (1886-1956): Politician, ship doctor, labor leader and protector of Indians (2019). He remains a strong advocate and supporter of stable democracy in Guyana. Dr. Ramharack is working on a forthcoming book examining Cheddi Jagan’s relationship with Indians in Guyana.
Download or read book Coolies of the Empire written by Ashutosh Kumar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies Indian overseas labour migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which involved millions of Indians traversing the globe in the age of empire, subsequent to the abolition of slavery in 1833. This migration led to the presence of Indians and their culture being felt all over the world. This study delves deep into the lives of these indentured workers from India who called themselves girmitiyas; it is a narrative of their experiences in India and in the sugar colonies abroad. It foregrounds the alternative world view of the girmitiyas, and their socio-cultural and religious life in the colonies. In this book, the author has developed highly original insights into the experience of colonial indentured migrant labour, describing the ways in which migrants managed to survive and even flourish within the interstices of the indentured labour system and how considerably the experience of migration changed over time.
Download or read book The Indian Diaspora written by N. Jayaram and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2004-05-24 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: N. Jayaram provides a well-presented overview of the patterns of emigration from India, highlighting the key disciplinary perspectives and strategic approaches. The study of Indian diaspora has emerged as a rich and variegated area of multidisciplinary research interest. This volume brings together nine seminal articles by well-known scholars which deal with the empirical reality of Indian diaspora and the theoretical and methodological issues raised by it. Between them they cover a variety of important aspects such as asocial adjustment, family change, religion, language, ethnicity and culture.
Download or read book Sociology and Social Anthropology in India written by Yogesh Atal and published by Pearson Education India. This book was released on 2009 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indian Council of Social Science Research, the premier organization for social science research in India, conducts periodic surveys in the major disciplines of the social sciences to assess disciplinary developments as well as to identify gaps in research in these disciplines.
Download or read book Diasporic dis locations written by Brinda J. Mehta and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indo-Caribbean women writers are virtually invisible in the literary landscape because of cultural and social inhibitions and literary chauvinism. Until recently, the richness and particularities of the experiences of these writers in the field of literature and literary studies were compromised by stereotypical representations of the Indo-Caribbean women that were narrated from a purely masculine or an Afrocentric point of view. This book fills an important gap in an important but underestimated emergent field. The book explores how cultural traditions and female modes of opposition to patriarchal control were transplanted from India and rearticulated in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora to determine whether the idea of cultural continuity is, in fact, a postcolonial reality or a fictionalized myth. kala pani, to Trinidad and Guyana provided courage, determination, self-reliance and sexual independence to their literary granddaughters who in turn used the kala pani as the necessary language and frame of reference to position Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity with equating writing as a pubic declaration of one's identity and right to claim creative agency. The book is of critical interest to those interested in twentieth-century literary studies, Caribbean studies, gender studies, ethnic studies and cultural studies.
Download or read book Translating Kali s Feast written by Stephanos Stephanides and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translating Kali's Feast is an interdisciplinary study of the Goddess Kali bringing together ethnography and literature within the theoretical framework of translation studies. The idea for the book grew out of the experience and fieldwork of the authors, who lived with Indo-Caribbean devotees of the Hindu Goddess in Guyana. Using a variety of discursive forms including oral history and testimony, field notes, songs, stories, poems, literary essays, photographic illustrations, and personal and theoretical reflections, it explores the cultural, aesthetic and spiritual aspects of the Goddess in a diasporic and cross-cultural context. With reference to critical and cultural theorists including Walter Benjamin and Julia Kristeva, the possibilities offered by Kali (and other manifestations of the Goddess) as the site of translation are discussed in the works of such writers as Wilson Harris, V.S. Naipaul and R.K. Narayan. The book articulates perspectives on the experience of living through displacement and change while probing the processes of translation involved in literature and ethnography and postulating links between ‘rite' and ‘write,' Hindu ‘leela' and creole ‘play.' The author wrote the description of the Big Puja (namely chapter 9, 10, 11, and 13) and the Guyana Kali Puja Lexicon (chapter 17) in collaboration with Guyanese scholar Karna Singh.
Download or read book Fabrics of Indianness written by Sinah Theres Kloß and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-29 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes how Guyanese Hindus recreate Indian ethnic identity in contemporary Guyana and examines how Hindu traditions have been transformed in this multi-religious and multi-ethnic society. By illustrating the exchange and consumption of clothing, the book demonstrates that the practices of wearing and gifting clothes materialize and visualize relationships. The significant outward migration of Guyanese to North America has resulted in substantial international gift exchange and transnational rituals. Applying the concept of translocality, this book demonstrates that different localities continue to influence transnational networks and socio-cultural practices. It provides a study of migration that emphasizes various aspects of material and visual closeness, conceptualizing the notion of touch.
Download or read book Bechu written by Clem Seecharan and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clem Seecharan has written a useful documentary history of Bechu, the first Indian to testify before the Royal Commission in 1897. Now who was this Bechu? He was, in Seecharan's words, "an indefatigable gadfly," who in letters to the local press revealed the conditions of Indian indentureship: poor wages, sexual exploitation of women by overseers and managers, and the virtual impossibility for Indians to obtain justice because of the collusion between colonial authorities and the planters. This knowledge we owe to economic historian Alan Adamson who "discovered" Bechu in the 1960s. Yet the man himself remained somewhat of a mystery, something Bechu himself seems to have cultivated. Seecharan has now filled a number of lacunae in our understanding with this two-part volume. The first section focuses on Bechu and the British Guianese environment in the late nineteenth century, while the second part includes letters and memoranda by Bechu (and reactions to them by local opponents).
Download or read book Ethnic Stratification and Structural Pluralism in Guyana written by Duane Edwards and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Labour and the Multiracial Project in the Caribbean written by Sara Abraham and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Labour and The Multiracial Project in the Caribbean covers major twentieth-century political developments in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. It pays particular attention to social movements, class formation, and new emancipatory ideas on liberation from colonial legacies in political structure and racial division.
Download or read book Colonial Visions Postcolonial Revisions written by Shanthini Pillai and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2008-12-18 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers reflections of the representations of the Indian diaspora of Malaysia according to two spectrums, colonial and postcolonial. It takes seed from the belief that any engagement with the Indian diasporic experience in Malaysia must take into account the role of the pioneer Indian immigrants who carved the niche of existence for the overseas Indian on Malayan soil. It begins by tracing their presence within the terrain of colonial narratives to uncover, not only the ways in which they were subordinated to colonial ideological discourses but also, and more significantly, the suppressed story of coolie resistance that lies under the weight of such masks of conquest. It then moves on to show how postcolonial revisioning is able to reconstruct the Indian immigrants of Malaya as choreographers of the diasporic identity that they have left as the most significant legacy for contemporary Malaysian Indians. This book ultimately reveals the politics of Malaysian Indian identity from colonised to globalised grounds, and the ways in which the subaltern spaces of the former can be reclaimed and reterritorialised in the latter.
Download or read book Contradictory Indianness written by Atreyee Phukan and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Contradictory Indianness endeavors to show, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. This book's unique contribution lies in an explicit privileging of Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean.
Download or read book Sanatana Dharma and Plantation Hinduism Second Edition Volume 2 written by Ramesh Gampat and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian Missionaries worked hard to convert immigrants. Their first order of business was to denigrate Hinduism, designate Hindus as heathen, and disparage their culture, food and even attire. Immigrants stubbornly resisted, led by the tiny educated elite, including Brhmaas whom we call Brahmins. Conversion was a failure at least up to the end of the 19th century but picked up a self-generating momentum thereafter. The result is that the share of Hindus in Guyana’s Indian population declined from 83.5 percent in 1880 to 62.8 percent in 2012. The largest portion of the contraction was lost to Christianity. The loss notwithstanding, even a casual observer would conclude that Guyanese Hindus, at home and in the Diaspora, are a very religious people. Many of us do a jhandi or havan once annually; others do the more elaborate and costlier yajña, where everyone is welcome, once or twice in their lifetime. Most of us do a short daily puja – prayers, offerings, reading the stras and listening to bhajan – in our homes. An important, but perhaps unintended, way immigrants countered conversion to Christianity was an unplanned movement towards a “synthesis” that brought Hindus, regardless of caste or sect, under a “unitary form of Hinduism.” The “synthesis” began around the 1870s and was completed by the 1930s to the 1950s. Guyanese Hindus call the unified corpus of religious beliefs and practices that emerged from the “synthesis” Sanatana Dharma. Ramesh Gampat labels it Plantation Hinduism in this path-breaking book. The book argues that the brand of Hinduism practiced is inconsistent with Sanatana Dharma, called Vednta by the more philosophically inclined. Plantation Hinduism features an extraordinary dependence upon purohits (pandits), which has anaesthetized the Hindu mind and render him unable to think, question and inquire when it comes to Dharma. Rituals and bhakti have been degraded and turned into desire-motivated worship; devats have been misconstrued as Brahman rather than as limited manifestation of the one non-dual pure Consciousness; belief in the multiplicity of gods encourages image worship; and superstitions anchor Guyanese Hindus to tradition and mere belief. Plantation Hinduism is little more than desire-motivated actions, dogmas and superstitions. Absent is the idea that Sanatana Dharma is a spiritual science no less scientific than hard sciences, such as physics and astronomy. The central message of Vednta is the innate divinity of every person and the freedom to realize that divinity through anubhava, direct personal experience of Supreme Reality.
