jayawardena - culture and ethnicity in guyana and fiji

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Culture and Ethnicity in Guyana and Fiji Author(s): Chandra Jayawardena Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sep., 1980), pp. 430-450Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2801343Accessed: 26-05-2015 22:15 UTC

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CULTURE AND ETHNICITY IN GUYANA AND FIJI

CHANDRA JAYAWARDENA

Macquarie Untiversity

The Indians of Guyana and of Fiji derive from the same areas of northeastern and southern India, imported to those countries, both British colonies, under the same indenture system. In both countries they are predominantly rural dwellers living in polyethnic societies. In both countries Indian culture has persisted but has developed along contrasting lines. The differences may be attributed to differences in the structure of the respective societies, particularly to processes and events that occur in the fields of class, status and power. In Guyana the tradition that has been transformed into a publicly expressed consciousness of kind here termed 'ethnicity', in Fiji exists in a deeper but muted form.

At an official reception for the former governor of a state someone called across to me, as we sat silently in deep chairs set against the walls of the room, 'How is Indian culture getting on in your part of the world?'

V. S. Naipaul (I965:223)

The main theme of this article is the significance of 'ethnicity' in the determination of forms of culture in migrant situations. My argument is that, in the case of the Indians of Guyana and Fiji, the nature and manifestations of the traditional culture of immigrant peoples are influenced by historical processes that may or may not engender 'ethnicity'. 'Ethnicity' itself is to be understood in terms of particular political, class and status conflicts.

The medium through which an ethnic group or an ethnic identity exists is the consciousness of sharing a common culture derived from a set of traditions attributed to a common homeland. This homeland is not necessarily a fixed geographical entity. It is periodically redefined by historical events and present developments, so that, for example, the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh need not affect the emigrant consciousness of 'India'. Conversely, in Fiji for instance, 'Indian' means the Hindi-speaking descendants of emigrants from northeastern India; very occasionally it excludes Tamils and Telugu from southern India, Muslims, and quite often also people from Gujarat. In the special case of Guyana and Fiji, the experience of emigration created a kind of historical lacuna. This hiatus occurs with reference to the immediate past which is largely shrouded in ignorance.1 Whatever knowledge of the immediate past is retained, it is retained as an ideology of resentment, a matter forjest or one better forgotten; it does not really constitute a living, continuing historical tradition. The imaginations of the descendants have to leap-frog to a more distant past, beyond that of indenture which, though it exists in memory or hearsay and still informs attitudes, does not provide a source of

Matt (N.S.) 15, 430-50.


CHANDRA JAYAWARDENA 431

inspirational legitimations. For these, emigrants and their descendants appeal to the more remote past or to the current present.

Other factors are important: a distinct identity, class and prestige. Their fusion in a political context produces those ways of acting and believing which can be termed ethnicity; it is ethnicity that gives form and meaning to the culture of the descendants of immigrants.

Guyana and Ftij The Indians of Guyana and Fiji are comparable in several respects. They come from the same regions of India; in both cases the majority, about three-fourths, derive from the eastern districts of Uttar Pradesh and the western districts of Bihar, a minority from the districts of Madras and Andhra in southern India. The proportion of immigrants from southern India is larger in Fiji (about a fourth) than in Guyana (under a fifth). In Guyana immigrants from the south have merged with other Indians and have almost lost their separate identity. In Fiji they maintain their identity in several significant respects, such as in their marriage patterns, some distinctive forms of religious worship and the retention, teetering on the brink of extinction, of Tamil and Telugu as domestic languages. It may also be noted that in Fiji there is a small but influential group of people from Gujarat whereas there are none in Guyana. In both countries the predominant majority is Hindu; about a sixth of the immigrants is Muslim, largely from the north.2 In Fiji there is, in addition, a small minority of emigrants from the Panjab, predominantly Sikhs. Neither the Gujarati nor the Panjabi emigrated as indentured labourers; they were free settlers. These latter are largely excluded from the present comparison.

The emigrants from northeastern and southern India left for much the same reasons: dislocation of village life following British conquest and administrative reorganisation, shortage of land and the expansion of modern commerce. In both Guyana and Fiji the majority of northern Indians set the model of what developed locally as 'Indian culture', though in Fiji there is an occasional southern backlash aud a retention of regional differences stronger in the case of the Gujarati than among the Panjabi. Apart from these regional differences there was a striking demographic similarity between both countries. The immigrant populations were young, male and unmarried (Gillion I 962; R. T. Smith I962; Jayawardena I 979).

In both countries the immigrants were imported, in Guyana from I 8 3 8, in Fiji from i 878, to work on cane plantations and sugar factories. Immigration was organised under a system of indenture developed by the British Colonial Office and terminated by the Government of India in I9I6. Indians were sought as a substitute labour force because other sources of labour were not readily available. In Guyana the Amerindians had retreated into the forests and, after Emancipation in i834, the freed Negro slaves preferred to leave the plantations for the liberties of small peasant farming. In the case of Fiji, the Governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, decided that the Fijian clans should be protected from the ravages of capitalism and the labour market (Nath I950; Legge I958; Gillion I962).


432 CHANDRA JAYAWARDENA

Recruitment to both countries was organised through the same system of courts and emigration depots. During I878-I9I6 at some times of the year ships were dispatched to the Caribbean and at others to Fiji; this was also true of emigration to Mauritius and South Africa. Emigrants themselves were often in the dark about their destination. In Guyana I met an Indian who had believed he was going to Natal; in Fiji I met one who had wished to go to Demerara.

In the indenture countries the newcomers were administered by officials who had had experience of immigration elsewhere. For example Sir Arthur Gordon, the Governor of Fiji who initiated Indian immigration, had been Governor of Trinidad; his successor in Fiji, Sir George Des Voeux, had been a magistrate and played an important part in reforming the system in Guyana as well as being the Administrator of St Lucia. In consultation with the Government of India, the same department in the Colonial Office coordinated matters relating to indentured Indians wherever they were sent. And in both countries the fate of the Indian immigrants was dominated by international companies. In Guyana this was Booker Bros. who came to own most of the plantations and sugar factories and dominated the commerce of the country (R. T. Smith I962); in Fiji the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (C.S.R.). Until independence each company enjoyed a dominant role in the governance of its country (Fisk I970).

Despite geographical differences between Guyana and Fiji there are significant demographic similarities (table i). Guyana consists of about 85,ooo square miles of land situated in South America between Venezuela, Brazil and Surinam. Fiji is a complex of several hundred islands in the middle of the

Pacific. Of these Vitu Levu, about 4,000 square miles, and Vanua Levu, about 2,000 square miles, are the largest and most important. Hardly any Indians are settled on the other islands. Both countries are similar in that habitation is mainly on the coastlands, the interiors being largely unoccupied. In Guyana the lack of communications (except by river) with the bush of the interior has made the coastal belt a densely populated area (R. T. Smith I962; Lowenthal I972). In Fiji the two main islands contain cultivable coasts; the interiors are steep mountains which are barely accessible. The bulk of the populations,

TABLE I. Ethnic composition of the populations of Guyana and Fiji. Guyana 1970* Fiji 1971** No % No %

Amerindian 32,794 4'4 Indian 266,1 89 5I Chinese 4,678 o-6 Fijian 225,J02 43 Indian 377,256 5IO Part-European 9,523 2 Mixed 84,077 I I4 European 5,286 I Negro 227,09I 30'7 Rotuman 6,5 I 2 I Portuguese 9,668 I-3 Other Pacific Island

Islanders 6,837 I White 3,076 0o5 Chinese s,oo8 I Others 556 0I

740,I96 Ioo0o 524,457 IOO

Sources *J. F. Greene (I974: I74) ** R. Norton (I977: 4).


CHANDRA JAYAWARDENA 43 3

Indians and Negroes in the one case, Indians and Fijians in the other, live in these constricted spaces (Ward I 965).

Ethnic identity However, it is not the similarities of the past and present that I am concerned with but rather the contrasts. It will enlarge the scope of this article unduly to spell out all the differences. I therefore confine myself to contrast, first, the general trend of cultural changes that the emigrant Indian communities underwent, and, secondly, the impact of political events and developments. These two processes are interrelated.

If one compares the 'Indian culture' of Guyanese Indians with that of Fiji Indians, it appears that the culture of the Fiji Indians has retained and developed a greater and more essential part of the ancestral tradition than that of their Guyanese counterparts. The basis of this difference lies in the retention of Hindi as the main language of communication in Fiji in contrast to its almost total disappearance in Guyana.3 The retention of both the spoken and written form of the language must mean that the Fiji Indians' communication with India is the more direct. India, its cultures and its current events, are a more known reality. My impression is that more Fiji Indians visit India as students and tourists than do Guyanese Indians. The Gujarati of Fiji adhere very closely to the practices of their home province, obtain spouses from there and maintain properties in their ancestral villages. For rural Guyanese Indians, India is largely a mythical land: a composite of the Ramayan, the memories of grandparents, Gandhi and whatever is the ideal to which they appeal in situations of conflict. The Trinidadian Indian novelist V. S. Naipaul sensitively explores the 'mythical land of my childhood' as follows:

To me as a child the India that had produced so many of the persons and things around me was featureless, and I thought of the time when the transference was made as a period of darkness, darkness which also extended to the land, as darkness surrounds a hut at evening, though for a little way around the hut there is still light. The light was the area of my experience, in time and place (I965: 32, see also I77, I97).

The 'transference' is the emigration of his ancestors and the light around the hut were bits and pieces brought to Trinidad by them, together with pictures in his grandmother's house of Hindu gods and goddesses sporting themselves on lotuses amidst Himalayan snows. These isolated fragments alone were abidingly real, whereas the actual India he was to visit later was baffling and alien. Naipaul's experience clearly can be contrasted with the vivid experience of India and Indian-ness revealed in the work of Fiji Indian writers (such as Subramani I 979). If one may distinguish between two extreme perceptions of India, then one may say that the perceptions of the Guyanese are nearer to myth and those of the Fiji Indians closer to a living reality.

Because of these differing perceptions, India can in some senses mean more to the Guyanese Indians than to those of Fiji. The Guyanese can play around with their concept of India, make more of it, invest it with more usable meanings. By this I mean that if a cultural entity exists mainly in the



imagination, then it is the more susceptible to interpretations prompted by the need to shore up an ideal in times of anxiety and crisis, personal or public. For Fiji Indians, India is less amenable an object of conscious or unconscious manipulations and projections. For them India is, in brief, less serviceable as an ideology. Here there is a kind of paradox. Fiji Indians are more 'Indian' than the Guyanese; they have a more realistic knowledge of India, for them it is less of a myth. Yet the consequence of this is that India can be 'more meaningful' in the literal sense for Guyanese, in that they can read more meanings into the phenomenon of 'India' and their 'Indian-ness'. To Indians in Fiji India is too real, too existent, to be susceptible to re-moulding and therefore less amenable as a political and cultural symbol.

The ethnic identities that can be constructed by Indians in the two countries thus derive from the same source, but due to different social and cultural situations, manifestly differ.

Cultural contrasts Two facts are pertinent here: first, the extent to which in the one case a persisting culture is anchored in the retention of the traditional language and its vivid continuance in daily life, while in the other case the traditional is, as it were, a free-floating entity buffeted by current societal pressures. The second fact is that the predominant proportion of Indians in both countries is Hindu. I therefore contrast the ways in which Hinduism is practised in Guyana and in Fiji and advert to other aspects of Indian culture more briefly.

In Guyana Hinduism flourishes with the full panoply of public temples and ceremonies; dozens of friends and relatives are invited to household rituals. In Berbice, Guyana, it was common to invite and feed 25-30 people at one of these household puja, usually held at weekends. Practically every household presents such an offering to the gods, especially to Hanuman, one or more times a year. (Muslims hold analogous Quranic readings.) The event is commemorated by the erection of a tall bamboo pole flying a red pennant. These pennants remain until they are renewed at the next puja, so that travelling in rural Guyana one can estimate the proportion of Hindus in a local community by noting the forest of bamboo poles. In Guyana almost every local Indian community has its own temple in the charge of a Brahmin priest who acts also as a kind of parish priest, tending to births, deaths and marriages, and as a general counsellor. In addition to these temple priests are several others who have a clientele at whose household puja they officiate. Public religious ceremonies are held with a noticeable frequency, such as yag, when the scriptures are recited and expounded to several hundred by well-known pandits. Yag can last several days during which all visitors are fed. Expenses are largely met by the donor of the ceremony though he/she is usually helped very considerably by others of the local community.

In contrast, Fiji Hinduism is a private, familial, almost an unobtrusive activity. There are very few temples, especially among the northern Indians. Buildings erected for public worship are reminiscent of the small wayside


CHANDRA JAYAWARDENA 43 5

shrines that one finds in great number in northern India. Such temples as exist are set up by southern Indians and are administered by a pujari, a ritual specialist not necessarily of the Brahmin caste. Several of these are well- established centres of orgiastic devotion at which northerners are mainly bystanders (see Mayer 196I).

Among the northern Indians weekend household puja are relatively infrequent or, rather, unnoticeable; and the forest of bamboo poles is not a characteristic feature of the rural skyline. Only close kin are invited and the observer of the scene in Fiji is not likely to be told, as he would be in Guyana, that the bamboo pennant is a public notification that 'in this house dwells a Hindu'. There is little or no public hymn (bajan) singing. Furthermore, for reasons that are obscure, the typical household puja is dedicated to Satnarayan rather than to Hanuman. Quite possibly Hanuman, who very adventurously led Ram's forces into Lanka, is a god of the Hindu pantheon more attuned to the outgoing mood of the Guyanese Hindus rather than the more passive and devotional Satnarayan favoured by the Fiji Hindus. Yag are performed but are less frequent than in Guyana. To my knowledge in Fiji there are no pandits of national renown, though both countries are occasionally visited by swami from India. The privacy of religious devotion among the Fiji Hindus contrasts with its publicity among the Guyanese.

The lack of public ceremonial expression should not be interpreted to mean that Fiji Indians are 'less Hindu 'than the Guyanese. Indeed the opposite is more likely to be true. For from the point of view of knowledge of the doctrine, and conformity and internalisation of norms and outlook on human life and fate, the Fiji Hindus are probably more absorbed in the religious tradition than Guyanese. Yet at the level of quotidian community life, in Fiji Hinduism is a more private, and in Guyana a more public, activity. Which of these particular characteristics is closer to the tradition of Hindu India I am not competent to judge.

A comparable contrast can be drawn in respect of the development of modernist movements (ayawardena I966). The Arya Samaj, the modernist reinterpretation of Hinduism according to the teaching of Swami Dayanand, created a public schism among the Hindus of Guyana. The Arya Samaj established their own form of puja which was counterposed to the orthodox one of the Sanatan, their own marriage ceremonies and voluntary associations, and engaged in vigorous debate with the orthodox (Sanatan). The Arya Samaj, denying caste, dispensed with Brahmin priests and obtained recognition of their own priests (who could be anyone competent) as marriage officiants. The Arya Samaj spread to Fiji, as it did to Guyana, and along similar channels, but had a quite different impact there. After a brief dispute the Arya Samaj was accepted by the majority of the orthodox Brahmin priests and their adherents. In Fiji Brahmin priests will conduct a puja or a marriage ceremony whichever way their clients prefer or in any mixture they choose. Unlike the Brahmin priests in Guyana they see no conflict. In both countries the adherents of Arya Samaj tend to be found among the middle social strata and the upwardly mobile, but from the religious point of view, in Fiji being orthodox (Sanatan) or modernist (Arya Samaj) is seen simply as an idiosyncratic way of being


436 CHANDRAJAYAWARDENA

Hindu. In Guyana it became a matter of open affirmation, a field of acrimonious religious posturing because of the public nature of religious identity.

In other important respects, such as family, caste and relations between the sexes in which the skeins of the traditional culture have been spun out, it is evident that Fiji Indians are closer to both the tradition and present practice of India than are the Guyanese Indians.

In both countries the process of disintegration of caste as a system of ritual and occupational hierarchy was produced by the exigencies of plantation life. What remained was caste as a constraint on free inter-marriage and as a source of esteem. In both countries caste influences marriage preferences, more in Fiji than in Guyana. In Guyana aspersions about caste status are more likely to be bandied about in public, whereas in Fiji lowness of caste is a relatively more serious matter and one that cannot be an occasion for badinage; caste avoidances are indulged in with an unobtrusive discretion. In both countries the ideal of the patrilineal extended family is recognised though it is realised much more frequently in Fiji. The reasons for this can be related, directly or indirectly, to the control of productive property by the head of the household who, in both countries, is normally the father. In Fiji the father is usually succeeded by a son, failing which by a daughter's husband; in Guyana the widow can be actually in control for a period.4

Internal diversity The two Indian populations are not homogeneous. A significant feature of the Indian cultural scene in both countries is the primary internal division into Hindus and Muslims.

Guyanese Hindus and Muslims have closer relationships than their Fijian counterparts. In social interaction the distinctiveness of being a Muslim (Fula- man) appears mainly in ironic repartee. Antagonism between orthodox and modernists among the Muslims, Sunni and Ahmadiya, corresponds to that of the Hindu Sanatan and Arya Samaj, and orthodox priests of both persuasions sympathise with one another's problems. In Guyana political antagonism between Hindus and Muslims is virtually non-existent at either national or local level.5 In Fiji the two religious groups co-operate uneasily in political formations at the national level. For several decades official Muslim organisations have demanded separate political representation (Norton I977). At the local level, outside the towns, there is very little free interaction between Hindus and Muslims, apart from co-operation in agricultural work. For Guyanese, intermarriage between Hindus and Muslims is a tolerated deviance, while it is fiercely condemned in Fiji. Among Hindus of both countries there is a historical tradition of Muslim pillage, forced conversion of the most beautiful girls for their harem - in Fiji the resentment is more vivid. Finally, in Fiji the Muslims do not recognise analogues between the puja and Quranic readings, between the celebration of the festivals of Holi and of Id-ul- Fitr, between the marriage rites of the shadi wedding and the nikah.

In Fiji differences of regional origin are of great importance. Hindus distinguish between Northerners, Southerners, Gujarati and Panjabi (who



include Sikhs). These distinctions are manifested in minimal contact between households, practical absence of intermarriage, retention of regional languages wholly or in part, and differences in religious and marriage rituals; the exception to these is the intermingling of the Northerners and the Panjabi. Each section regards itself as a constituent in a loosely co-ordinated conglomeration considered to be Indian. However quite often when a Northern Hindu refers to an 'Indian' he may exclude Gujarati, and to a lesser degree Muslims and Southerners.

In Guyana Northern and Southern Indians are totally merged and marriage between Hindus and Muslims causes little distress provided it is not celebrated publicly by the rites of one or the other religion. Differences of regional and linguistic origin do not take on a political complexion. Religious practices recognised as deriving originally from south India are incorporated into a kind of pan-Indian practice. In both countries the North Indian cultural mode is dominant, completely in Guyana while in Fiji it is effectively contested by minority sections of the Indian population.

The contrast between the ways in which Indian tradition persists in the two countries can be summed up by saying that in Guyana it is its public and external elements that have been developed; in Fiji the private and internal. The contrast is related to differences in the ways in which the immigrant Indians were integrated into the wider societies which absorbed them. It is these differences that I now discuss.

Class situation: proletarians and peasants In both Guyana and Fiji the Indians were brought in under indenture to work on the plantations because existing populations were unwilling or were deemed unsuitable.6 Plantations in both countries developed under conditions of a relative amplitude of land and a scarcity of labour.

The plantation is, in essence, a mode for the control of labour. The control of immigrant labour entailed the direct or indirect control of the culture of the immigrants and its adjustment to a capitalistic mode of production. In both Guyana and Fiji the immigrant population was largely young and callow; the imprint of the class structure on their culture was therefore of the greatest significance in its development. To this extent the ways in which Indian peasants were incorporated into the industrial world in the two countries were basically similar. However, the associated circumstances were different.

In Guyana, after Emancipation in I834, the Negro ex-slaves moved out in large numbers to whatever lands were available; these were on the peripheries of plantations being largely the lands of abandoned ones, and they became marginal cultivators (R. T. Smith I962: ch. 3). Indians were brought in to replace as the main labour force the ex-slaves who thus sought to consolidate their freedom by loosening their bond to the plantation, though many continued to work at planting and crop time. In Fiji Sir Arthur Gordon, fearful of depopulation, arranged for the importation of Indian coolies to shield the Fijians from the deleterious consequences of unmediated exposure to an industrial economy.


438 CHANDRAJAYAWARDENA

In Fiji the indenture system did not create a permanent proletarian class as it did in Guyana. After serving their indentures, the Fiji Indians left the plantations and sought to set themselves up as independent cultivators, leasing land from local Fijian clans. In Guyana a large portion remained as labourers on the plantations. As in the rest of the West Indies the plantation had become the cornerstone of society (ayawardena I963; Beckford I972; Mandle I973). In Fiji this was true only to a limited extent because there were intervening circumstances, particularly the presence of an existing culture, that of the Fijians, with their polity and economy recognised by the colonial regime (Legge I958). Skimming over their similarities, the contrast can be drawn: in Guyana the great majority of immigrants became proletarians on the plantations and their peripheries; in Fiji they became peasant farmers. In Guyana proletarianisation was the key experience of the immigrants, for many the abiding fate. In Fiji it was a limited interlude.

Guyanese Indians who left the plantations drifted into villages occupied by Negroes. Here they bought, leased or, in unoccupied areas, opened up land for cultivation. There are hardly any villages in Guyana that are either completely Negro or completely Indian though in most villages one or the other ethnic section preponderates. The Indians moved into established local communities where they intermingled with the Negroes; together they constituted a single class of reserve labour pools for plantations. Planters were probably glad to get some off the plantations, yet to have them available at croptime with no responsibility for them in the dead season. On their part those who settled in the villages sought to maintain their independence, with indifferent success, by growing root crops, vegetables and rice. Cultivation of rice in extensive areas of the Corentyne and the Essequibo established independence from the plantations for some, while the Negroes achieved this by migrating to Georgetown and Mackenzie to become an urban proletariat. The Indians who, typically, remained in the villages in the vicinity of plantations associated with Negroes in a basic pattern of creole life dominated by the plantation.

In Fiji, however, the Indians who left the plantations moved out into a quite different environment.7 They had been brought in to shield the Fijians from the ravages of modern industry and commerce. The British administrators regarded Indians as carriers of this contagion, and in the early twenties were concerned with the infusion of Indian nationalism. They forbade Indians to settle in Fijian villages, with the full approval of the Fijian chiefs who themselves had urged that Indians be kept away from Fijian villages. The systems of chiefly authority at the local level was as much the cornerstone of society in Fiji as the plantation was in Guyana. In Fiji, time-expired Indians settled in isolated homesteads. These locations came to be recognised especially when co-operative labour between households working as tenants of the CSR was necessary for harvesting and the maintenance of irrigation. The Indians moved out as aliens on to lands owned by others and not as citizens in a more open society as in Guyana. In contrast to Guyana, in Fiji all villages are solely Indian or solely Fijian.

The formation of Indian villages in Fiji came about through the break-up of its plantations by the CSR into ten-acre blocks leased to cane-farmers, which



created a peasant stratum, whereas in Guyana plantantions are still the main form of cane cultivation (Mayer I96I; Anderson I974). Whether as tenant farmers on company or Fijian land, producing cane for the company mills or producing vegetable crops for the urban markets, the Indians developed a mode of production that placed them in a class position somewhat similar to that of the Fijians making a gradual entry themselves into commercial agriculture. Yet they did not do so under conditions conducive to the intermittent recognition of the kind of consciousness that marks Indian-Negro relations in Guyana (Belshaw I964; Nayacakolou I975; Watters I969). The class situation of the Indian peasant in Fiji is not dominated by the plantation that enfolds both agricultural labourer and cultivator in Guyana.

In Guyana the development of rice-growing was important in that it enabled at least partial autonomy in relation to the plantation. Most Indians were, so to speak, detained in the plantations and their environs, and rice production became the main avenue of escape from the plantation and increased steadily despite vicissitudes. In Fiji the cultivation of rice is insignificant socially and economically. The rice and the flour on which Indians depend for their diet are imported by a stratum of Gujarati merchants. Here, where the dissolution of the plantation made possible the development of some kind of peasant society, they paradoxically felt no need to develop an alternative to the commercial monocrop.

Traditional Indian culture is rooted in a peasant way of life: the more extensive the process of proletarianisation the more extensive its erosion. In Guyana continued domicile in the plantations and their environs in association with Negroes produced conditions of life that sapped at the roots of traditional culture. Enclaves of freedom from the plantation achieved through rice cultivation, which thejagan government partly realised, could not reconstitute this traditional culture to any considerable extent because the point at which it might have been recreated had passed (R. T. Smith I962; Mandle I973, Jagan I 966). In Fiji, too, the system of the indenture plantation placed decided limits on the contitAuation of the traditional culture. But when the immigrants steadily left the plantations most came to produce cane along peasant lines for the company mills; the rest produced crops for the local markets. They are not typical peasants but rural farmers. But the contrast with Guyana is that most Indians came to be anchored in a domestic mode of production conducive to the retention of some of the essential elements of the traditional peasant culture. This crucial difference in their class situations was reinforced by their particular relations with other ethnic groups in the constitution of a colonial society based on a separation of cultures.

Social hierarchy In both countries the social hierarchy is based on wealth, occupational prestige and style of life but the way in which culture and ethnicity articulate with it is significantly different. In Guyana the situation is complicated further by the importance, general in the Caribbean, of colour and associated phenotypical



characteristics. In Fiji these factors are muted. The differences can be squarely attributed to historical circumstances, to the ways in which the immigrant Indians were integrated into societies that were themselves in the process of reorganisation under colonial conditions.

In Guyana, by the time the Indians arrived, the basic premisses of the colonial society were decided. According to Raymond Smith:

A social system emerged in which the Negro, White and Coloured were bound together through their common participation in the social, economic and political life of the country and through a sharing of certain values and cultural forms, notably the valuation of'English' culture as superior to African 'superstition' and the common beliefin Christianity (I962: I05).

It is into this environment that Indians entered. Since they were low status plantation labourers their cultural traditions were promptly dubbed 'coolie culture'. It was commonly recognised that they were the 'slaves' of the developing economy. Immured in the indenture plantation they had little contact with other sections of the society and so were heedless of these evaluations. As they moved out of the plantation enclaves to join the rural proletariat, the peasantry or the urbanised middle stratum, they had to define their traditional ways of life in relation to those of other ethnic sectionsjostling for prestige in the colonial hierarchy. Indians needed to regard themselves in relation to that version of the culture of the dominant whites which, as 'creole culture', permeated the colonial society through the institution of the plantation.8 The basic components of this culture are those set out by Smith. In time it developed a legitimacy of its own through the driving force of nationalist sentiments.9

Class situation, determined by the dominant plantation, induced rural Indians to associate with rural Negroes and so to evaluate themselves in terms of a social hierarchy which included them both. The coolie culture that typified them was disparaged by the rural Negroes with whom they found themselves obliged to associate in terms of class and residential interests. From the viewpoint of the dominant White Christians rural Negroes and Indians were at the bottom of the pile. However Negroes could claim a certain superiority in that their creole culture was oriented towards the mainstream values propagated by the ruling White stratum. The Indians were not Christians and there was nothing they could do about this except convert, which a few did. But in relation to the phenotypical racial hierarchy they were better placed in that they shared straight hair and prominent noses with the ruling Whites. 10

However the Indians laboured under a double disadvantage. The first, already touched on, is that of the low evaluation of their traditional culture in terms of the English/Christian one. They were aware that they were inheritors of an ancient culture that could bear comparison with that which the Whites vaunted over them. But here is where the second disadvantage arose - they felt lacking in this regard as well for they were poor exemplars of this ancient culture, which existed in their minds largely in the mythology of the Ramayan. The desperation and resentment many felt cannot be better expressed than in the protest of a Guyanese Indian to a visiting Indian (from India) who was



collecting folk songs. 'Me nah know English, me nah know mother tongue (Hindi). Tell me somethin' man, don't aks me nothin' to laugh at we' (quoted in R. T. Smith I967). Not knowing 'English' (i.e. standard English) deprived him of prestige in the English/Christian hierarchy; not knowing Hindi divorced him from the prestigious Hindu high culture. It is this kind of situation which engendered attempts among Guyanese Indians to discover and develop their links with the ancestral heritage and the example of Gandhi. There was little continuity with the immediate past which everyone deprecated as 'coolie culture' anyway. But there was a greater and remoter past and present which could be re-interpreted in ways that made sense to Whites and Negroes at whatever stratum the contact was made.

This explains the great prominence which the Arya Samaj and Ahmadiya movements acquired in Guyana compared with Fiji. In the reformist movements traditional Indian culture, particularly through development of its 'higher' religious aspects, could be brought into line with the English/Christian and creole cultures Jayawardena I 966). The only traditional elements that the Indians reserved for themselves were the institutions of marriage and kinship (Smith & Jayawardena 1959; Jayawardena I962). But, in general, fitting into a unitary prestige hierarchy meant that all elements of the traditional culture were negotiable in terms of creole culture. Being 'Indian' is only partly concerned with the continuation of an ancestral tradition internally understood and apprehended. It is as much a matter of reaching out to definitions and perceptions developed from interaction with like groups composing the hierarchy that integrated the society.

In Fiji the situation was similar in some respects but markedly different in others. The culture of the ruling Europeans was regarded as superior and to be emulated but there was little of the West Indian colour hierarchy. The dominating culture existed largely in the supra-village sphere-in government, commercial and industrial occupations, generally, in urban contexts. In the rural sphere, where Fijians lived in their villages and Indians in theirs, traditional Indian culture was not denigrated as 'coolie'; it was simply different, just as Fijian culture was different. The Fijians, cherishing their vaka vanua (custom of the land), accorded the same to the Indians. For example, the kava ceremony was the Fijian way of greeting important personages just as garlanding was that of the Indians; these were alternative ways of showing respect in each of the ethnic sections; neither was valued higher than the other. In each ethnic section prestige derived from indigenous evaluations: among the Fijians from traditional rank and among Indians partly from caste but more importantly from family repute (Nayacakalou I975; Mayer I96I; Jayawardena I970; I974). In both sections occupational prestige boosted ascribed rank.

Overarching the rural scene is the superior European culture by whose standards rural people may be regarded as modern or conservative. Traditional ways hold sway in rural life and modern ways in urban life, but it is difficult to say that they are calibrated in one exclusive scale. In urban society it is European ways that matter but a Brahmin in his dhoti or a Fijian chief in his sulu is accorded respect even if his status is considered as belonging to a



different sphere. European culture is the medium in which members of different ethnic sections interact with one another. But this does not prevent an Indian from understanding and participating in it without resorting to a single scale of evaluation. Individuals retain their own cultural identity while they move freely in and out of the European, Fijian and Indian cultural spheres.

The gist of the contrast is that in Fiji cultural evaluations are privatised, in Guyana they are publicised. In Fiji the social hierarchy enables Indians (and Fijians) to develop their own systems of evaluations without having to bring these into accord with a more comprehensive national scale. Tradition can flow relatively unobstructed by the cross-currents of inter-ethnic contacts. Thus the pressure to justify and 'modernise' has little affected the current of inherited culture compared to Guyana. In Fiji to be Arya Samaj or Ahmadiya is almost an idiosyncratic matter which individuals choose or mix with the orthodox according to their inclination. In rural society 'culture' is a way of life by which one is categorised rather than evaluated. When an individual enters the urban scene it is necessary but not difficult to adopt the outward features of the overarching European culture because this is the only medium through which Indians can interact with Europeans, Fijians and, to some extent, with one another. These modes are only partially internalised and people can adopt its postures consciously and instrumentally. The traditional culture is a solid internal core that need not be exhibited in the bargaining forum of public life; it remains an intra-section source of moral and aesthetic evaluations.

To say this is not to mean that in the practice of their culture Fiji Indians are indifferent to the existence of different and adjacent cultures. Though they lead separate lives they have a considerable practical experience of the contiguous cultures of the local Fijians and Europeans. They understand and participate in ceremonies of others as marks of respect. Indian farm housewives, leading secluded lives, acquire some knowledge of the local Fijian dialect, amazing in view of the paucity of interrelations with Fijians. It can be said that the contact of cultures does not take place within a structure of evaluation. The cultures are recognised and co-existent, equal, different. There is no felt need to make them correspond or to reconcile them, no pressure to publicise the one in relation to the other. The need to do so, in Guyana by contrast, is ultimately political, and it is this field that requires consideration.

Power structure The differences between the types of colonial regime in Guyana and Fiji constitute a crucial contrast. Each regime determined to a considerable extent the conditions under which the immigrants settled in the host society which, in turn, determined the expression of immigrant culture. The emphasis in the following discussion is on rural society, though key processes were initiated in administrative and political circles of urban society.

As colonies the political systems of Guyana and Fiji were basically similar: the country was ruled by a Governor under, to borrow Trollope's phrase, 'a mild despotism tempered by sugar' (I968: I62). As claims to greater popular



participation came to be heeded, local notables from each ethnic section were appointed as consultants. With greater claims for democracy these ethnic representatives came to be elected on a gradually broadening but still ethnic franchise. Much of government was devoted to the maintenance of law and order, security and welfare in a plantation economy. Here the similarity ends because of differences in another fundamental feature-the mode of administration. In Guyana administration consisted of direct rule by the Governor and his council. In Fiji it was indirect, though the power of the plantation sometimes blurs this distinction.

In Guyana both Negroes and Indians were administered through specialised government departments co-ordinated at the local level by District Commis- sioners. Law was enforced by a single system of courts and police. The only exception to this was the defacto recognition by the government of the power of the plantation manager, especially during the indenture period. On many plantations there was a manager's court with law-enforcement officers recognised by the government as 'rural constables'. In urban society little of significance was decided except the carving out of fields of influence and the proposal of meliorist measures for ethnic supporters. In the case of Indians these related to eliminating discrimination against non-Christians, the legitimation of customary wedding rites, and so on.

The most significant political activities in Guyana came not from the restrictive system of separate representation but from the development of unions which, arising from class interests, gradually eroded ethnic boundaries. Working-class movements led by unions were only partly ethnic, and they came to fruition with the institution of universal franchise which in I954 enabled the combined vote of the working and peasant classes to elect with a massive majority a government with a leftwing non-ethnic ideology. That the 'coolie and black man proper punish' (i.e. suffer) became an important filter in the perception of events. This government was deposed after I 00 days in office and then, sometimes distracted by red scares, there developed a left versus centre division, the former largely Indian, the latter Negro; ethnic oppositions became intertwined with the international cold war. The prominence which the memory of the I954 People's Progressive Party government retains in the minds of many suggests it may be seen as a myth of a golden age (agan I954; I966; Chase I964).

Political activities engendered by the class structure are distinct from those arising from the processes of the social hierarchy. The latter are not strictly 'political', although in a broad sense they certainly enmesh with more overtly political relations. As the most recent occupants of the lowest social stratum of Guyanese society, Indians had strong incentives to claim a respected position and not be treated condescendingly as a set of heathens. They developed a defensive, self-justificatory stance and claimed that there was no essential difference between them and other cultural sections in the society, while at the same time they retained a series of customs that provided them with an identity more worthwhile than that accorded to them in the cultural hierarchy. Many changes in their culture can be so explained in terms of the long haul from 'coolie' to 'Indian' recognition Uayawardena I966).



Much of the initiative in this assertion was taken by the upper strata of urban society who formed nationwide organisations such as the Hindu Maha Sabha and the United Sadr Islamic Anjuman, while the reformists formed their own counterparts. There was the British Guiana Pandits Council which did much to dispel opinions that Brahmin priests were akin to creole sorcerers (obeah-men) and to define their role as on a par with Christian clergymen. The urban leaders of such organisations often looked down on rural Indians as backward and superstitious. This attitude was sometimes resented by the rural Indians but the function of these organisations in maintaining a favourable image of Guyanese Indian culture met with considerable support. The organisations won acknowledgement of the comparable status of Indian culture in relation to White and creole cultures, and backed Indian claims to compete for status in a social hierarchy which, as stated earlier, was based upon a combination of cultural evaluation, occupational prestige and wealth.

At the same time these organisations acted as a brake on the creolisation of Indians and preserved some elements as representing their distinct identity. These cultural features are 'Indian' in an ethnological sense; sociologically they are 'Indian' because they are labelled as such in the Guyanese social scene. Awareness of derivation from India and legitimisation as Indian in Guyanese society and culture gave Indians some recognition in terms of English/Christian and creole cultures and therefore some place in the social hierarchy. At the same time they acted as an assurance against the complete creolisation of the Indians, and thus against them becoming (to use their expression) 'cosmopol- itan', by preserving some elements of a distinct identity. This places the Indian in a somewhat ambivalent position. On the one hand the Indian merges with the Negro in that both are accepted variants in the creole culture; on the other hand there is a differentiation in terms of origin.

This dual character allows the Guyanese Indians two possible lines of political manoeuvre. On the one hand they can claim to be the same as Negroes and establish solidarity on these grounds; on the other they can counterpose their commonality and postulate different goals. Status solidarity and competition are often transformed into class solidarity and conflict. In a polyethnic society ethnic conflicts incorporate some class antagonisms (e.g. attacks on shops), and class conflicts can be fed into ethnic animosities (R. T. Smith I970; Despres I967). It is reasonable to state that at present ethnic antagonism arises from processes that operate in the social hierarchy while the solidarity between ethnic sections is strengthened by pressures that operate in the class structure.

In Fiji the establishment of a system of indigenous indirect rule was the cornerstone of the colonial regime. To this fact can be attributed many of the contrasts with political processes in Guyana. From the time of the Deed of Cession (I874) the colonial government sought to buttress Fijian chiefly authority and custom within the overall control of colonial affairs of the British Government. There was an implicit division of labour in government; the colonial government administered Fijians, while Indians on the plantations came under the bailiwick of the CSR Company. When Indians left the plantations they did not, as in Guyana, move into an already constituted civil



society (except for some who drifted into towns). The law prevented them from settling in Fijian villages and decreed that they could not buy land from the Fijians; they could purchase small patches of freehold as opposed to native reserve land that came on to the market.' 1 They moved out into a kind of limbo where they were left to their own cultural devices, and were relatively ignored by the colonial authorities. Proclaimed to be different and set apart, they enjoyed a considerable degree of cultural and political autonomy, provided they did not clash with Europeans or Fijians.

When the CSR Company divided its plantations into small-farming blocks most of these were taken up by Indian tenants. These tenants formed groups for co-operative labour under the supervision of the Company. The gangs providing labour became the bases of local organisation, including important school committees, which were formed to institute and maintain schools for the Indians, since the colonial schools were mainly for Fijians. That local communities had to manage and staff their own schools goes far to explain the persistence of Hindi as a means of communication. In time these villages or groups of them became the bases of the cane-farmer unions. The gang, the school committees and the cane unions provided the grass-roots sources of political power among rural Indians.12

Apart from sporadic disturbances on plantations, the first organised political endeavour of the Indians was to demand a definition and consolidation of their political and economic position, a movement connected with the current nationalist movement in India.1 3 Their agitation led gradually to the achievement of a state of parity with Europeans and Fijians in political representation, and to increased expenditure on Indian welfare. Behind political agitation for equality was the class demand for security of tenure of land, a source of much aggravation between rural Indians and Fijians. However, at the risk of sounding too optimistic I suggest that a series of events has prevented confrontation between Fijians and Indians. First there was the subdivision of the plantations and the leasing of land in small blocks to tenants. Second was the later acquisition of the CSR lands by the government, removing the question of land tenure from inter-ethnic politics. Thirdly, more generally and haphazardly, were local agreements concerning working the land made between Indian tenants and Fijian owning clans. The tensions between Indian storekeepers (Gujarati) and Europeans have been settled by the Indians controlling almost the entire retail trade, while the wholesale trade and imports are shared between the two. This is not to state that any of these are abiding solutions: the lack of land among the Fijians, the diminutive role of Fijians in business enterprise and other such factors could cause further problems and upset existing compromises, but there is a clear realisation on both sides that overt conflicts over these intractable problems could be disastrous to both of them. The current 'stability' achieved through a careful balancing of political prerogatives, de facto economic monopolising and sharing of administrative office is a position from which both sides have to gain, despite extremist views. Whether the nation will come to be afflicted by economic and political difficulties that may scramble present concordances is a matter for the future.



As far as the Indians are concerned, their separation from the Fijians and their relative autonomy are a major feature of the society and do not need to be affirmed or denied. In the eyes of the Fijians the Indians constitute a separate coeval group with several common interests. There is no developed ethnicity among Indians since the position they occupy in the society is given in its very constitution and does not have to be affirmed by them as a group. That the Gujarati who never went through indenture are owners of capital, that other Indians provide the peasants, workers and a carefully weighed share of white- collar positions, are constituents of the Indian position. Thus sub-ethnic variety, with solid bases in the realms of domestic life, kinship, religion and intra-sub- ethnic group marriage are a prominent aspect of Indian social life, not the overall consciousness of being all Indian in opposition to the Fijians. Hindus and Muslims sometimes see their political interests as divergent and have to recognise a wider common purpose to keep them in alliance; similarly with the Northerners and Southerners. The possible use of cultural, economic and political cleavages is always present in intra-Indian social processes. Serious political conflicts can arise between Indians and Fijians, but they are largely obviated by a tacit acceptance of Fijian political hegemony. The tradition of political separateness works against firm class alliances between Fijians and Indian peasants, or even, perhaps, urban workers. The only considerable degree of alliance occurs in the higher reaches of the social hierarchy where ethnic sections both intermix (except perhaps in marriage) and form what may be termed a common social stratum. Social elites dominate class interests in the operation of the power structure in Fiji.

Ethnicity and violence Much interst in ethnicity as a political phenomenon arises from its occasional association with violence. Despite many descriptions, little headway has been made in the analytic study of ethnic violence which, as Sorel said of political violence, is baffling. Yet his distinction between force and violence can also be applied here (Sorel I 96 I). Force, in the ethnic context, can refer to the coercion exerted by racist regimes while ethnic violence can refer to actions protesting against threats to and suppression of ethnic identity by ruling and other dominant groups. I do not propose to go beyond Sorel's early formulation.

It is possible that those who rely on the theory of the plural society may be able to analyse the phenomenon, insofar as the potentiality of violence is an essential part of the postulate that the removal of an externally imposed 'common will' inevitably results in violence. However, it is difficult to show that a 'common will' is a necessary component of society or that it is absent in those societies labelled plural. It is clear that the theory of the plural society is class-blind and ignores the extent to which incidents of ethnic violence contain an element of class violence (Furnivall I938; I948; M. G. Smith I965; Despres I 967).

The race violence in Guyana in I957 came somewhat as a surprise, at least until the activities of foreign agencies were later revealed. That there have been



no race riots in Fiji is also a surprise, especially in view of the resumption of Indian-leased land into Fijian reserves in the early sixties. A Fijian politician who threatened that if the privileged position of the Fijians were to be infringed 'blood will flow', and another who adverted to Idi Amin's Uganda caused some anxiety among the Indians; when they won the elections in I978 they hurriedly set about looking for a Fijian to lead their government. Most have come to believe that Fijians have some prior rights and that if Indians keep a low profile and do not make many radical demands all will be well. In Guyana it was the infusion of cold-war political ideologies into ethnic antagonism that exacerbated Negro-Indian relations to the point of violence. What was mainly class repression was mystified as ethnic domination and then transmuted into communist infiltration.

In Fiji the segregation of ethnic sections and the clear separation of rights by law implies that the resort to violence in the settlement of matters under dispute is not necessary; nor is a common will absent. In Guyana the merging of social structures and cultures have created situations of abrasive and vexatious confusion where an absence of clearly demarcated rights and duties precipitated violence. However, few people in Guyana took this violence seriously, which was mainly a matter of arson and looting, and the situation of aggravation soon settled back to normal1 . In Fiji both ethnic sections are intensely aware of the horrifying course events could take were violence to break out and both groups are wary of precipitating a crisis neither could control.

Conclusions This tentative comparison unravels a kind of paradox. In the segregated society of Fiji the Indians have retained and developed their traditional heritage to a far greater degree than Guyanese Indians have. They maintained their culture to the extent they found it serviceable in the process of settling, sorting out relations amongst themselves and finding a position in society in Fiji. Apart from a brief period in the indenture plantations, they were not pressured to adapt to another culture to any considerable degree and developed their own in a laissezfaire manner without conscious goals. Given the circumstance of their definition in a special category as 'Indian', further proclamation of Indian- ness was superfluous and would have been detrimental to their political and economic interests.

In Guyana the situation was quite different. The Indians were not declared to be separate and were not encouraged to keep apart. They were held in class subjection together with Negroes, but attempted to counter this disability by claiming that they were different from the rural Negroes and not mere plantation fodder. They proclaimed themselves descendants of an ancient civilisation in order to evade the stigma of'coolie'. Negroes were able to evade it by an orientation towards 'white' because practically all their traditions had evaporated in the process of slavery and been replaced by creole culture. But the indenture plantation did not last as long; nor was it as thorough.



The Guyanese Indians claimed that they were not simply coolies but Indians. The Fiji Indians had to accept being defined as Indian, together with the restricted rights of immigrants that this entailed. They needed a revaluation of this position rather than a revaluation of their culture; the Guyanese Indians needed both. Indian-Negro relations are thus not quite comparable to Indian- Fijian relations. The two sets of immigrants were placed in different situations; for the Guyanese Indians their recognition as Indian was a bid for liberation; for the Fiji Indians it was a mark of their constraint.

In Fiji the Indians were confident enough in their unambiguous ethnic identity but played down its public expression. Indigenous Fijians needed to keep in the forefront of public consciousness their prerogatives as the premier people of the land; hence the celebration of the Deed of Cession and all the panoply surrounding the chiefly system while Indians are more reticent about their more humble introduction into the country. Here Indian culture persists and thrives best away from the public gaze. In Guyana, by contrast, the experience of proletarianisation caused the Indians to lose much of their own tradition and to become creolised like the Negroes. They define their Indian- ness in response to these processes. In polyethnic societies such as those of the Caribbean, where ethnic sections closely intermingle and where the contents of practised cultures are very similar, an insistence on outward symbolic indices of differences becomes important. In such circumstances the need to assert a distinct identity may partly be the result of the fear of losing it.

In this article I have explored three main factors in the production of ethnicity: class, social status and power. Political processes arising from these fields of action transform ethnic identity into that self-conscious phenomenon one may term 'ethnicity'. However, it is a process that occurred in Guyana but hardly in Fiji because of historically determined and crucial differences in these fields. Thus, despite other similarities, divergent patterns were created out of what was once the same culture derived from India.

The transformations of cultures in the context of polyethnic communication can be approached in more than one manner; one being the sociological which has been used here. In the last issue of Man Drummond approached the problem through a modification of the linguistic/cultural model (Drummond I980). He argues that just as the co-existence of several languages in the history of a society creates creole languages so the co-existence of different cultures creates creole cultures. These are not so much an amalgam of bits and pieces from different cultures but rather a continuum between them in which any element from a particular culture shades into one from another. The fact of the continuum enables actors to combine and recombine them into coherent patterns of symbolic discourse because they know the whole continuum; they understand the elements and the significance of their variations and transformations. Drummond's analysis presents a useful descriptive device. Its full force can, however, be appreciated only against the backdrop of prestige, economic and political interests that motivate the actors, for the linguistic model is of limited use unless sustained by sociological variables. In particular Drummond's suggestion that the creole language/creole culture metaphor might be applicable to all multilingual multi-cultural societies is not quite



tenable. A case in point is that of Fiji which has no creole language, unless the Hindi spoken by rural Indians, distinguishable from the standard Hindi of the press and formal speech, be termed creole. Even so there is no creole language resorted to by all ethnic groups. Similarly there are hardly any patterns of behaviour that can be termed creole, though some nascent forms of urban adaptation may qualify for that appellation. Creole in the Caribbean is the product of a specific form of economic and political domination and not only a mosaic of historically distinct cultures. Only aspects and not the totality of such a form of domination is found in Fijian history; there was no common class subjection of ethnic groups under the domination of one. Perhaps if systems of domination arise to which all ethnic groups are subject, evenly and in common, a 'creole' language and a 'creole' culture will appear.

NOTES 1 The immediate past is that of the indenture period and, for the Negroes of the West Indies,

slavery. The lacuna occurs because as Naipaul (I962:I22) suggests, 'the past is so unimaginable'. 2 For a more amplified discussion of these situations see Jayawardena I 966 for Guyana and

Mayer 196I and Gillion I962 for Fiji. I Attempts were made to import teachers from India to teach the language, but to no great

effect. 4 Smith &Jayawardena I959; Mayer I96I ;Jayawardena I97I; Smith &Jayawardena I967.

For a general review see Jayawardena I968. S For an account of co-opertaion at the local level see Jayawardena I963: ch. 6. 6 For an account of the indenture system see Nath (I950) for Guyana and Gillion (I962) for

Fiji, The circumstances leading to the introduction of indentured Indians are dealt with in Legge I 958. Conditions of life in the indenture plantations of Fiji are described in Gillion I962: ch. 6. The work of Totaram Sanadhya I 9 I 8, himself an indentured immigrant, is not translated into English; the book was banned until recently. For Guyana the main sources are Jenkins I 87 I and Des Voeux I903.

7 Legge I958; Gillion I962; Mayer I96I; France I969; Roth I953; Nayacakalou I975. 8 In this article, for accuracy of representation, I use the term 'whites' for the Caribbean, and

'European' for Fiji. 9 For a discussion of the notion of 'creole' see Lowenthal I 972; R. T. Smith I967; I 970. 10 The Negro internalisation of the White Caucasian phenotypical image is well documented

in the literature (e.g. Lowenthal I972). Indian films are popular with Negro rural audiences; a Negro girl once told me that she liked the Indian film actor Dilip Kumar because 'he like Clark Gable'. Sometimes the situation can get confusing as in the statement of a Negro friend: 'Man, me nah know wha' mek-Black gal ah straighten she hair, coolie girl ah crinkle it!'.

' I For an analysis of land tenure in Fiji see Ward I 965 and France I 969. 12 For a discussion of rural politics see Mayer I 96 I and Norton I 977. 13 Gillion I962. C. F. Andrews and nationalist politicians were active in India in efforts to

reform or abolish the indenture system. 14 In several areas of Guyana Indians and Negroes jointly formed organisations to stop the

violence. Homicide was not a prominent feature. Something of the attitude to that violence is conveyed in a calypso composed by Lord Sparrow, a Trinidadian calypso singer:

I ain't care if the whole of B.G. burn down; I ain't care if the whole of Bookers burn down; But they be putting me out me way If they tackle Tiger Bay And burn down the hotel wheh all dem whabeen ah stay.

Gloss: B.G. stands for British Guiana as Guyana was formerly called. Bookers is a large firm that owned most of the economic assets of the country. Tiger Bay is the wharf district of the capital. 'Whabeen' is probably peculiar to Trinidadian slang; from his other calypsos the word seems to mean a good time girl.



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Article Contentsp. [430]p. 431p. 432p. 433p. 434p. 435p. 436p. 437p. 438p. 439p. 440p. 441p. 442p. 443p. 444p. 445p. 446p. 447p. 448p. 449p. 450

Issue Table of ContentsMan, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sep., 1980) pp. 411-581Front Matter [pp. ]On Sharecropping [pp. 411-429]Culture and Ethnicity in Guyana and Fiji [pp. 430-450]Settlement and Diversity in the Solomon Islands [pp. 451-466]Ethnography and Iconography: Aspects of Southern San Thought and Art [pp. 467-482]The Art of War: Wola Shield Designs [pp. 483-501]Reciprocity and the Construction of Reality [pp. 502-517]Fieldwork, Reciprocity, and the Making of Ethnographic Texts: The Example of Maurice Leenhardt [pp. 518-532]Dialectical Societies (Review Article) [pp. 533-540]CorrespondenceThe Omani Xanith Controversy [pp. 541-542]Gods, Priests and Purity [pp. 542-545]Subscribers and Subscriptions [pp. 545]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 546-547]Review: untitled [pp. 547]Review: untitled [pp. 547-548]Review: untitled [pp. 548-549]Review: untitled [pp. 549-550]Review: untitled [pp. 550-551]Review: untitled [pp. 551]Review: untitled [pp. 551-552]Review: untitled [pp. 552]Review: untitled [pp. 552-553]Review: untitled [pp. 553-554]Review: untitled [pp. 554-555]Review: untitled [pp. 555-556]Review: untitled [pp. 556]Review: untitled [pp. 556-557]Review: untitled [pp. 557-559]Review: untitled [pp. 559-560]Review: untitled [pp. 560]Review: untitled [pp. 561]Review: untitled [pp. 561-562]Review: untitled [pp. 562-563]Review: untitled [pp. 563-564]Review: untitled [pp. 564-565]Review: untitled [pp. 565]Review: untitled [pp. 566]Review: untitled [pp. 566-567]Review: untitled [pp. 567-568]Review: untitled [pp. 568-569]Review: untitled [pp. 569-570]Review: untitled [pp. 570-571]Review: untitled [pp. 571-572]Review: untitled [pp. 572]Review: untitled [pp. 572-573]Review: untitled [pp. 573-574]Review: untitled [pp. 574-575]Review: untitled [pp. 575-576]Review: untitled [pp. 576-577]

Books Received for Review in Man, April-June 1980 [pp. 578-581]Back Matter [pp. ]

jayawardena - culture and ethnicity in guyana and fiji

Documents

countries indian culture

fiji authors

indians of guyana

jstor terms

termed ethnicity

significance of ethnicity

common culture

terms conditions of