Joseph Ruhomon's India

Joseph Ruhomon's India PDF Author:
Publisher: University of the West Indies Press
ISBN: 9789766400958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
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.

Joseph Ruhomon's India

Joseph Ruhomon's India PDF Author:
Publisher: University of the West Indies Press
ISBN: 9789766400958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
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.

Muscular Learning

Muscular Learning PDF Author: Clem Seecharan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Seecharan explores the role of that quintessential imperial game - cricket, and education in the shaping of identity in the British West Indies. Inspired by CLR James's Beyond A Boundary, Seecharan locates the foundation of the liberal democratic tradition in access to organized cricket by the West Indian colonial, as well as the birth of an indigenous intellectual tradition dating back to the 1890s. He agrees that in the post-emancipation period because of the comparatively small numbers of Europeans coloured or mixed race people were given early exposure to two of the main instruments of imperial rule - cricket and education. Such exposure was soon expanded to larger subordinate group of Africans and Indians, and consequently engendered in them a belief that mastery of these two imperial idioms would accelerate their social and economic mobility. Cricket and education came to be invested with almost magical properties: indispensable indices of belonging and instruments of deliverance, resulting in the creation of a discrete Anglophone Caribbean identity in spite of resilient rivalries. Written with passion and imagination, this study is a major contribution to the debate on cricket and society in the West Indies.

Kyk-over-Al

Kyk-over-Al PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Caribbean literature (English)
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description


They Came in Ships

They Came in Ships PDF Author: Lloyd Searwar
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
From 1838 until 1917, Indians arrived to work as indentured labourers in Guyana. The majority never returned to India and today over 50% of the Guyanese population is of Indian origin. This anthology of prose and poetry shows how the Indians changed the character of Guyana and the Caribbean and how, over 150 years of settlement, Indians became Indo-Guyanese. Ranging from the earliest attempts at cultural self-definition in the 19th century (and early narrative images of the Indian presence in non-Indian writing), to the creative writing of the 1990s, this anthology provides a fascinating insight into the transformation of an ancient culture in the New World. Extracts from novels, short stories, essays and poems explore the experience of plantation life, of relationships with other ethnic groups, issues of gender within Indo-Guyanese culture and the adjustments in cultural practices which separation from India and involvement with the new environment required. Brief introductory essays by Jeremy Poynting set historical contexts, and there is an invaluable bibliography of Indo-Guyanese writing. This is the only anthology of its kind.

A History of Indians in Guyana

A History of Indians in Guyana PDF Author: Dwarka Nath
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : East Indians
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description


India and the Shaping of the Indo-Guyanese Imagination, 1890s-1920s

India and the Shaping of the Indo-Guyanese Imagination, 1890s-1920s PDF Author: Clem Seecharan
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
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.

Bechu

Bechu PDF Author: Clem Seecharan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789766400712
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
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).

Jung Bahadur Singh of Guyana (1886-1956): Politician, Ship Doctor, Labor Leader and Protector of Indians

Jung Bahadur Singh of Guyana (1886-1956): Politician, Ship Doctor, Labor Leader and Protector of Indians PDF Author: Baytoram Ramharack
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578478289
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
JUNG BAHADUR SINGH: As a second generation Indian in Guyana, born about fifty years after the commencement of the period of indentureship, and whose parents were of Indian and Nepalese origin, Jung Bahadur Singh was a Guyanese pioneer in many ways. JB Sing was a prominent leader of the Hindu community and a trusted self-appointed mediator who assisted sugar workers in their disputes with management. He was one of few early Indian medical doctors in Guyana, and, as a ship doctor, he made numerous trips accompanying Indian immigrants who were leaving India to be taken to the colonies, as well as Indians who were returning to India. JB Singh's contributions towards nation-building in Guyana was unmatched by many of his contemporary peers. Elected 7 times as the President of the British Guiana East Indian Association (BGEIA), JB Singh relentlessly advocated for universal adult suffrage. He was a patriot and a humble servant who spent his adult life providing public service to the Guyanese people for 23 years as a member of the British Guiana Legislative Council from 1930 until his electoral defeat in 1953. He was the first Indian to be officially cremated in Guyana.

Ways of Sunlight

Ways of Sunlight PDF Author: Sam Selvon
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0241654548
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
'A delightful book, a pleasure to read and reflect over afterwards ... for humour, sprightliness and downright exuberance at being alive' Sunday Times 'You could be lonely as hell in the city, then one day you look around you and you realise everybody else is lonely too' This irresistible, bittersweet collection of short stories from the supreme chronicler of West Indian lives in Britain brings together two worlds: Trinidad and London. Here is an illicit love affair on a plantation, gossip and rivalry between village washerwomen, a boy rebelling against his parents' traditions. Here too is life after leaving for England: hustling for work, eking out money for the gas meter in winter, dancing in clubs, discovering romance in a night-time park, experiencing unexpected kindness, dreams and disenchantment.

Crown Jewel

Crown Jewel PDF Author: Ralph De Boissiere
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780954359621
Category : Riots
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
De Boissiere's best-known novel, Crown Jewel, is a story of the economic struggle of Trinidad workers in the 1930s and is regarded as one of the major political novels of the Caribbean. It is set in the 1930s at the time of the Butler riots in the oilfields of south Trinidad-part of the general disturbances in the British Caribbean during the 1930s. Set in his native Trinidad in the 1930s, Crown Jewel describes intricate social and racial gradations. At the bottom of the society are the "blacks"-at the top are the colonial elite, the English. One of the characters in Crown Jewel, Andre de Courdnay, a young musician who works as a yeast salesman, is torn between an Englishwoman, the daughter of a judge, and the woman he actually loves, the teenage daughter of a Venezuelan seamstress. This young coloured girl has a fierce belief in de Courdnay as an artist capable of creating social change. What distinguishes de Boissiere's characters from so much political art is that they aren't two-dimensional. He understands the complexity of the human heart. Crown Jewel climaxes with the 1937 workers' revolt in Trinidad in which workers were shot by police. In the words of University of the West Indies Professor, Ken Ramchand, de Boissiere's work, "combines social realism and political commitment with a concern for the culture of the feeling within the individual in a way that is unique not only among West Indian writers but among writers with a social conscience anywhere in the world." Ramchand says that Crown Jewel is essential reading for an understanding of the rich possibilities of young Trinidad in the 1930s and 1940s and the subtle makings of what renowned West Indian writer, Sam Selvon, called "the Trinidadian".