About the Book
Shaped over a period of twenty years, this is an elegantly written, scholarly but highly accessible, collection of essays that are essentially a map of how one of the Caribbean's most distinguished historians has sought to discover himself through practise of his craft. It covers new ground in Indo-Caribbean history primarily, but it also explores innovatively aspects of the intellectual legacy of four eminent Caribbean writers and thinkers: Guyanese poet, Martin Carter, Guyanese historian, Walter Rodney, Nobel laureate, V.S. Naipaul, and C.L.R. James, author of one of the great books of the 20th century, Beyond a Boundary (1963). Several of the pieces by Professor Seecharan, author of many books, including Sweetening 'Bitter Sugar': Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934-66 (awarded the prestigious Elsa Goveia Prize in 2005 by the Association of Caribbean Historians), adopt a revisionist approach in revisiting the migration of indentured labourers from India to the Caribbean, between 1838 and 1917.He challenges many of the received assumptions on the subject; and he rejects that it was 'a new system of slavery'; that all the people were duped or kidnapped into indentureship; indeed, that the migrants had no agency in the process.
He counters that the reverse was invariably the case, documenting that most women and men dared to travel alone, fleeing a life of utter despair in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in India to greater social freedom and a modicum of material success - flight to Guyana and Trinidad could therefore be considered, in most cases, an escape to freedom. Seecharan's essays demonstrate that the struggles on the plantations notwithstanding, Indians in Guyana gradually shaped a new persona of hope, rising quietly but confidently from the death of caste prejudice; thriving on the fruits of their new, vastly more open, environment with the making of communities rooted in rice, cattle and retail trade; maximizing the benefits of education while claiming the legacy of 'many Indias', part fact, part fiction, in advancing their civil and political rights in Guyana.Within this complex mix are located several Indo-Guyanese personalities, such as Joseph Ruhomon, a pioneer intellectual; Cheddi Jagan and Balram Singh Rai, politicians of contrasting visions; and the unsung cricketer, Ivan Madray.
In the process, Seecharan finds not only himself, but he locates a rich narrative vein, illuminating a vital aspect of Caribbean life.
About the Author :
Professor Clem Seecharan, BA, MA, PhD is a writer and historian of the Indo-Caribbean experience, as well as a historian of West Indies cricket. He was born at Palmyra, East Canje, Berbice, Guyana, in 1950. He attended the Sheet Anchor Anglican School, Berbice Educational Institute and Queen's College. He studied at McMaster University in Canada; and taught Caribbean Studies at the University of Guyana before completing his doctorate in History at the University of Warwick in 1990. He joined the University of North London (now London Metropolitan University) in 1993 and was the Head of Caribbean Studies there for nearly 20 years. In 2002 Clem was awarded a Professorship in History at the London Metropolitan University where he is now Emeritus Professor of History. He is the only person to have taught courses, in the UK, on the Intellectual History of the Caribbean, the History of Indians in the Caribbean and the History of West Indies Cricket. In 2003 he was awarded a Certificate of Distinction by the Guyana High Commission (London) 'in recognition of his achievement in his profession in the United Kingdom'. A distinguished historian, his main publications are (with Frank Birbalsingh) Indo-West Indian Cricket (Hansib,1988); India and the Shaping of the Indo-Guyanese Imagination: 1890s-1920s (Peepal Tree Press, 1993) 'Tiger in the Stars': The Anatomy of Indian Achievement in British Guiana, 1919-1929 (Macmillan Caribbean, 1997), Bechu: 'Bound Coolie' Radical in British Guiana, 1894-1901 (UWI Press, 1999); Joseph Ruhomon's India: India and the Progress of her People at Home and Abroad (UWI Press, 2001);Sweetening 'Bitter Sugar'. Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana 1934-1966 (Ian Randle Publishers, 2005) [awarded the Elsa Goveia Prize (2005), by the Association of Caribbean Historians]; Muscular Learning: Cricket and Education in the Making of the British West Indies at the End of the 19th Century, (Ian Randle Publishers, 2006). From Ranji to Rohan: Cricket and Indian Identity in Colonial Guyana 1890s -1960s (Hansib, 2009); Mother India's Shadow over El Dorado: Indo-Guyanese Politics and Identity, 1890s-1930s (Ian Randle Publishers, 2011). His collection of essays, To Write was to Learn: Finding Myself through History, will be published later this year by Peepal Tree Press. He has delivered several prestigious lectures, including the Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture, University of Warwick (2007); the Sir Frank Worrell Lecture, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados (2011); the Leonard Tim Hector Memorial Lecture, Antigua and Barbuda (2011); the feature lecture to Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO), New York City (2011); and the 2014 Republic of Guyana Distinguished Lecture.
