This Issue | Editorial | Feature | E-mail

In his new book, Cricket and Indian Identity in Colonial Guyana 1890s-1960s: from Ranji to Rohan, written with his usual vigor, vibrancy and breathless exuberance, Professor Clem Seecharan surveys a variety of thoroughly researched sources including, most interestingly, buried, forgotten, or largely unknown information exhumed from Guyanese newspapers, journals and personal contacts. His main argument is that cricket was: “indispensable to the construction of identity in this polyglot [Guyanese] colonial environment,” (p.18) and that Indo-Guyanese, like their Afro-Guyanese countrymen who arrived in the colony centuries before them had, by the 1960s, assimilated the game into their national psyche.

As we might expect, when the first Indians arrived as indentured plantation laborers in Guyana in 1838, most of them were unfamiliar with basic elements of Guyanese culture such as the English language (or its Guyanese variant), Christianity, and Western habits of dress, food, sport and so on. Five or six decades later, however, some members of a small Indian middle class had emerged, many of them Christians, for example, Joseph Rohomon, the Wharton brothers, and Veerasawmy Mudaliar. Inspired by achievements on the world stage of distinguished Indians such as Prince Ranjitshinji, a cricketer of rare genius, Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian elected to the British parliament, and Swami Vivekanda who had addressed the world's Parliament of religion in Chicago in 1893, these men produced pioneering efforts that made them: “central to the process of redefinition of Indo-Guyanese Indianness.” (p.22)

That this redefinition manifested itself most visibly through cricket was not accidental since cricket was “a defining idiom of creole society” (p.74) and the most readily acceptable entry point for Indo-Guyanese into the heart and soul of Guyanese society. Stalwarts in the early development of Indo-Guyanese cricket, for instance, were Thomas Flood a businessman, and J.A. Luckhoo a lawyer, both Christians. Soon, in 1914, the East Indian Cricket Club (EICC) was established, and one or two Indo-Guyanese players even chosen to represent Guyana in inter-colonial cricket, for example, J.A. Veersawmy a dynamic fast-medium bowler and cricket writer, Charlie Pooran a right handed batsman, R.B. Rohoman a slow bowler, and Chatterpaul “Doosha” Persaud, the most gifted Indo-Guyanese batsman of his era who scored heavily in local Parker Cup matches during the 1930s and probably possessed the caliber for Test cricket, except that he failed in trial matches for the 1939 West Indian tour to England and never got another chance to prove himself.

By the 1950s, however, as Indo-Guyanese cricketers marched forward, politics raised its ugly head with growing agitation for freedom from colonial rule and the calamity of Britain's suspension of Guyana's Constitution in 1953. Professor Seecharan does not flinch from making a connection between Dr. Cheddi Jagan, the political hero, even if a failed one, and Rohan Kanhai, the batting genius, through their common birthplace in Plantation Port Mourant, and their shared background with cricketers from the ancient county such as Sonny “Sugar Boy” Baijnauth, Sonny Moonsammy, Leslie Amsterdam, Saranga Baichu, Joe Solomon, Ivan Madray and Basil Butcher. It was a turbulent time when the period from 1955 to 1957 became both a “watershed in the colony's cricket” (p.122) and a decisive moment in Guyana's failed political history because of a tragic split in Dr. Jagan's People's Progressive Party.

The title of Chapter Four of From Ranji to Rohan “Rebellion and Racial Bitterness: the Age of Rohan Kanhai” admirably captures the spirit of these times by portraying Kanhai's batting as a triumphant gesture of defiance against the humiliation of indenture and the failure of Guyanese political aspirations. Kanhai's batting, in short, atoned for the limitations of Indo-Guyanese political history. Thus does Professor Seecharan expatiate on Kanhai's batting triumphs during the West Indian tour of India/Pakistan in 1958/59 when he scaled two of the highest peaks of his career: his 256 against India in Calcutta in 1958 - his highest score - and 217 against Pakistan shortly afterwards. Deploying impressively painstaking and meticulous research, Professor Seecharan also quotes lavishly from Australian cricket gurus Jack Fingleton and Richie Benaud who, following Kanhai's exploits in Australia in 1960/61, boldly declared him the best batsman in the world at that time. For such glory and glamour to be showered on one of their own brought bountiful joy to Kanhai's fellow plantation dwellers: “He [Kanhai] was at the centre of their [Indo-Guyanese] lives... they had actually elevated the man [Kanhai] into the pantheon of Hindu gods.” (p.178) Also: ”he [Kanhai] made them [Indo-Guyanese] feel they had earned the right to belong to the West Indies.” (p.186)

But if cricket speeded up the process of realization for Indo-Guyanese it did not solve the deep-seated problem of ethnic conflict between Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese that still bedevils Guyana's future: “Cricket in British Guiana helped to bridge the incomprehension across the African/Indian racial chasm; but it deepened that divide.” (p.234) This is the Guyanese sphinx whose riddle has defied solution from the bravest and best so far. From Ranji to Rohan may not solve the riddle but it offers illumination by revealing much previously hidden information about cricket in colonial Guyana together with reflections about: “so many of our outstanding cricketers withering on the vine.” (p.242)

The volume provides details, for example, about forgotten players like Sonny Moonsammy and Ivan Madray whose careers did wither on the vine, and even of Basil Butcher who became a successful Test batsman, but whose career was negatively influenced by his role as an Afro-Guyanese from Port Mourant. More importantly, the volume records the crucial influence on the development of Guyanese cricket by Robert Christiani as Personnel Manager at Port Mourant, and of Clyde Walcott as cricket organizer for the Sugar Producers Association. All this, and such details that, in the 1940s, Baijnauth: “was the first Indian from a plantation [in Berbice] to represent British Guiana,” (p.147) only lend support to Professor Seecharan's argument that, by Kanhai's heyday in the 1960s: “cricket was now unambiguously central to Indo-Guyanese identity.” (p.156)