Review of Clem Seecharan From Ranji to Rohan: Cricket and Indian Identity in Colonial Guyana 1890s-1960s Hertford, Hansib Publications, 2009 pp. 311, ill. ISBN: 978-1-906190-27-9 £ 12.99
By Peter Fraser
This interesting new book, written in his usual lucid style, from Professor Clem Seecharan addresses three main themes: the significant role of cricket in the Indo-Guyanese community, the history of Indo-Guyanese cricketers and cricket in Guyana and the importance of Rohan Kanhai and cricket in Port Mourant where he, Basil Butcher, Joe Solomon and Ivan Madray all came from, as well of course as Dr Cheddi Jagan.
Much has been written recently about “revisionist” historians of Guyana and this is a new book by one who, it is often claimed, is one of these revisionists. “Revisionism” is a word with many connotations – for historians it is the very nature of the trade. New evidence, new perspectives, new techniques, new theories of human behaviour, greater chronological (and psychological) distance all ensure that history is always being revised. The second and third themes are good examples of such historical revision: we now know more about them because of the additional evidence assembled and analysed in this book.
The book itself actually seems to be three books jostling for supremacy. One is a straightforward old-fashioned (in the very best sense of the word) history of Indo-Guyanese cricket. Given our tendencies to historical amnesia and neglect of our records there is nothing easy about writing such a history. Seecharan tells us how difficult it was to discover the fate of some of these cricketers: the tendency to historical amnesia is exacerbated by emigration- collective memories disperse when people do. For this alone we should be grateful for the author’s hard work. In many ways this is a continuation of his previous book Muscular Learning: Cricket and Education in the Making of the British West Indies at the End of the 19th Century (2006) applied to one part of the Guyanese population. The second book is one on the rise of Port Mourant cricket and cricketers and this is an expansion of a section of the prize-winning Sweetening ‘Bitter Sugar’: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934-66 (2005). The particular circumstances of Port Mourant (a progressive estate when the standard for being progressive was set very low), Campbell’s reforms which, as far as cricket was concerned, involved getting the great West Indian batsman Clyde Walcott to be in charge of cricket development, along with Robert Christiani (that model for stylish and flawed Guyanese batsmen that Kanhai so narrowly failed to emulate) and the people’s passion for cricket came together to produce at the same time three outstanding cricketers of whom Kanhai was the star.
The third book, the one the title leads us to expect, is the most problematic. Much will probably be better explained in his forthcoming Mother India’s Shadow over El Dorado: Indo-Guyanese Politics and Identity, 1890s-1930s. Here the wider claims about the cultural significance of cricket are asserted rather than demonstrated; the history of race relations in British Guiana is sketchy and so is the treatment of political history. Here too is where the term “revisionist” used in its most recent sense of revising the received versions of Guyanese political history from the early 1950s (usually it should be added by politicians who were participants rather than historians) is most appropriate. It is also the most seriously flawed aspect of the book.
Let us start with the conventional cricket sections.
The second and third chapters contain much new material. The second carries the story to the 1940s. Starting with the two JS As-John Aloyisius Veerasawmy and Joseph Alexander Luckhoo- both now better known for legal and political activities- Seecharan provides an enthralling account of their role in cricket and Guyanese society. He points out that in 1917 and 1918 Veerasawmy who had earlier played a central part in the founding of the British Guiana East Indian Cricket Club was captain of the British Guiana Cricket Club, next in rank to the Georgetown Cricket Club. He reiterates the point that he had made in ‘Tiger in the Stars’: The Anatomy of Indian Achievement in British Guiana, 1919-1929 (1997) that Hindus, Muslims and Christians played cricket together and cricket became a means of bridging the religious divides among Indo-Guyanese. Less well-known but for cricket important figures like Chatterpaul ‘Doosha’ Persaud, the Kitty born batsman who became the first Indo-West Indian to score a century in inter-colonial cricket, appear. The third chapter treats the story of Port Mourant cricket beginning in institutional terms with the founding of the Port Mourant Sports Club by the progressive manager of Port Mourant Estate, J.C. Gibson. The central figure is Johnny Teekasingh, a superb leg-break bowler who fostered the talents of the young cricketers later to make Port Mourant famous. Part of the problem for all of these cricketers was racism- not playing in Georgetown was the other-a point made on page 119 (we tend to forget how long it took to travel the length of the coast in the 1950s and early 1960s). Even in recent times, and in other West Indian territories, cricketers from the country found it difficult to break into national sides- the significance of the Bookers initiative and the construction of a first-class ground at Albion were crucial institutional bases for incorporating rural cricket into a national framework.The fourth chapter focuses on the men that Teekasingh helped to nourish-Kanhai, Butcher, Solomon and Madray. Here the glory of Kanhai fulfilling his talent (and the expectations of Indo-Guyanese) is admirably set out. There are in these chapters a few minor cavils: in 1971 Burnham was Prime Minister, not President as a caption states; the phrasing on page 240 suggests the author is still seeking Sonny Moonsammy’s date of death while the previous page has given it. Part of the problem occurred at the proofreading stage- corrections led to further errors as the printer and author used different programmes.
“Revisionism” in its most recent sense appears throughout the first theme. The first chapter deals with Ranjitsinhji, the great batsman and his significance to Indians in India and abroad, especially British Guiana. This establishes the role of cricket in forming people’s ideas of themselves and bolstering their confidence in a colonial society that disregarded their culture and relegated them to subordinate positions. The fifth chapter consolidates the theme which starts with the first chapter and runs through the others- the role of cricket in society. It also offers an overview of Indo-Guyanese racist attitudes, and writes Basil Butcher back into the story of Port Mourant cricket. Its main thesis is supported in an appendix, a reprinted chapter, by the Guyanese linguist Professor Hubert Devonish of the UWI entitled “African and Indian Consciousness at Play: A Study in West Indies Cricket and Nationalism” which calls for a broader definition of nationalism and an acceptance of cultural variety.
Here, however, problems of historical method intrude frequently.Writing about public opinion in the age before polls (about which one should be sceptical) is difficult. Was Ranjitsinhji really the cultural icon to ordinary Indo-Guyanese that he appears here? Perhaps so, even probably so but the evidence provided is thin.The bigger problem, however, is best illustrated by Seecharan’s laudable and successful writing of Basil Butcher back into the Port Mourant narrative.
This might have been the start of a discussion of whether we can really write about different groups in Guyana as self-contained units (such a perspective being a little easier perhaps after our ethnic cleansing of the early 1960s?). The chapters on cricket and his writing about Butcher indicate a more integrated approach. Instead he apologises to Butcher for leaving him out of his first book co-authored with Frank Birbalsingh, Indo-Westindian Cricket (1988). Why should Butcher have been included in that book if its subject was Indo-West Indians? Seecharan after all lays to rest the suggestion that Butcher had Indian ancestry. Yet claiming that he is now writing Butcher “into the Indo-Guyanese narrative, where he belongs” (p.248) really raises more problems than it solves: he can be seen as either accepting or demolishing the racism against which he argues. Might not the answer be to write a Guyanese narrative? After all if being Guyanese is illusionary so too is the unity and homogeneity of each group (cricket certainly did not solve all problems of religious differences among Indo-Guyanese).
A historian who has always stressed that we are not merely victims, the author wants to discuss openly the racism of Indo-Guyanese (giving examples of the neglect of Butcher in the Port Mourant story, the arson attack on his house). But in this how different are they from other Guyanese population groups? It would have been surprising if they had not been racist. Here the problems of historical method multiply.
Indian racism is presented as an inheritance from Indian cultural traditions seemingly unmodified by any historical experience in Guyana: we are told of the ancient Indian prejudice towards dark skins and its continued existence in modern-day India (pp 228-230). This is justified on the grounds that Indians in colonial (and present-day) Guyana looked to India for cultural guidance (p. 230).What we are presented with here is an image of culture as unchanging. This one might describe (if that sweet is remembered) as the Kaieteur Rock idea of culture- that the name remains the same wherever we break into the culture and that people are merely representatives of their culture. Cultures change and people live and interpret their cultures in different ways. One might also note how these ideas from India were reinforced by 19th and 20th century racist ideas in the colony (and in India itself).
This interpretation underpins an analysis of Guyanese politics of the 1950s and 1960s. Seecharan writes of “the illusion created within the PPP that Guyanese could co-exist, even unite, in forging a national identity” (p.237); of the PPP itself being “ a loose colaition across the ethnic chasm” (p.143); and of “the racial divide” (p.144). These all seem to suggest fixed, insuperable problems: but he also writes of “the promising tone of the early 1950s” in race relations (p.244) and of the political roots of racism, using the uncharacteristically inelegant phrase of “the racial divide” being “exacerbated by the mutual suspicion spawned by the imminence of Independence” (p.144). The primary interpretation of unremitting hostility is further reinforced by quoting Eusi Kwayana on page 244 to the effect that Africans found it difficult to accept an Indian leader even before the 1955 PPP split: how then did the African bauxite workers in the late 1940s choose to be represented by the MPCA under Ayube Edun? This raises the issue of post-event testimony (the source is a 1992 interview). And is Eusi Kwayana the only or the best witness of Afro-Guyanese attitudes in the early 1950s? Seecharan also unquestioningly accepts Cheddi Jagan’s statement from The West On Trial that “ ‘the police and armed volunteers[Africans] did nothing to help’” the beleagured Indians of Wismar in 1964(p.247) even though this was the impression of eye-witnesses- the 1965 Wismar Commission Report decided not “nothing” but “not enough” (the Wismar Commission was not filled with people who would want to make excuses for negligence;The West On Trial was published in 1966). Historians need to be suspicious of all evidence but even more so of evidence that fits in with their preferred interpretation. In the context of Guyana the obligation is even more burdensome as bad history is so wrapped up with present political disputes. In both cases the statements are not wholly false: accepted as wholly true, however, they produce a misleading picture.
There is a fourth book on the history of Guyanese cricket and its meanings to Guyanese that still is to be written: Clem Seecharan is the only possible candidate to write such a work. But there is more to West Indian and Guyanese history than cricket: we desperately need Guyanese narratives.
