How Guyanese Hindus Are Preserving Their Religion In South America
“They came in ships.
From across seas, they came.
Britain, colonizing India, transporting her chains,
From Chota Nagpur and the Ganges Plain.
Westwards came the Whitby,
The Hesperus,
The Island-bound Fatel Rozack.
Wooden missions of imperialist design. ”
Sivindra Mangru, president of Peter’s Hall Mandir, with his mother.
It was a hot June Sunday service at Peter’s Hall Mandir, a Hindu temple located on the outskirts of Guyana’s capital, Georgetown. There were at least about 20 people singing and chanting the “bhajans” (devotional songs) and other hymns, putting their hands together as they faced the deity statues, all adorned in colorful clothing and jewelry.
The Hindu temple following Sanātana Dharma is one of the oldest in Guyana, the only English-speaking South American country, and is historically significant.
The dominant strands of Hinduism practiced in Guyana are Sanātana Dharma, Arya Samaj, and Madrasi, which refer to the South Indian region of Madras, now Chennai.
Peter’s hall was a plantation on the east bank of the Demerara River in Dutch Guiana and British Guiana with a history of plantation laborers fighting for their rights and against poor living conditions in the “lodgies” — accommodation provided by colonizers to the indentured communities in British and Dutch Guiana, which by and large were inhabitable.
“It is a long ranch building, divided into little sections,” Sivindra Mangru, president of Peter’s Hall, explained. “Each section was occupied by an indentured laborer and his family; it had nothing like a kitchen or a bathroom.”
“Poor sanitation, unsuitable diets, overcrowding, bad water and endemic disease all jeopardized the indentureds’ health and livelihood and weakened the plantation population,” wrote Mukesh Kumar, a researcher, in “Malaria and Mortality among Indentured Indians: A Study of Housing, Sanitation, and Health in British Guiana (1900-1939)”.
After slavery was abolished in British territories, colonial sugar planters sought cheap labor that they could control in their colonies.
According to historians, indentured servitude in Guyana started around 1834. Many Indian nationals unable to pay the British-imposed land taxes indentured themselves and migrated, hoping for financial gains and land ownership. At the same time, there is also a recorded history of kidnapping and coercion to sign these indentured “girmit” contracts. Guyana received its first Indian immigrants in 1838, followed by Trinidad and Suriname.
The vast majority of indentured laborers came from the provinces of Orissa, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madras and Calcutta. They brought their specific brand of worship under the overarching Hindu and Muslim traditions.
Now, Guyanese people of Indian descent form a little over 44% of the country’s population. It’s no coincidence the country also has the largest population of Hindus in the Western Hemisphere, with nearly 25% of the Guyanese population identifying as Hindu.
Strength and solace in religion
“Indian people came with their strong cultural background,” Mangru explained. “They lived in very poor circumstances and didn’t have a meeting hall. People used to meet under mango trees because they were shaded.”
In “The Indentured Contract and its Impact on Labor Relationship and Community Reconstruction in British Guiana”, Parbattie Ramsarran wrote, “Many religious festivals and services were commemorated or celebrated under a tree, including Phagwah, Diwali, and Ram Naumi. Marriage, birth, and death rituals, ‘auspicious days for performing particular tasks, the naming of children, astrological information, and so on’ were transplanted... a tree became the reconstructed stage for observation and celebration of indentured laborers’ religious functions.”
With the scant financial resources, the original temple was not how it looks today. Mangru said the temple has probably been at its current location close to 70 years.
“They needed a place to congregate,” he said. “It became a meeting place as well as a home of worship. Later, as the living conditions of the sugar workers started to improve, the plantation owners allotted the area of worship; that’s how the current location (of the temple) came into existence.
“Mandir formed a strong focal point for the Indian indentured community. People now had a permanent structure where they could meet to discuss the community’s needs.”
Savitri Bisram, 80, recalled going to Peter’s Hall growing up as she adjusted her posture on the hammock in her home in Providence.
“When we were small, we would go regularly to the mandir,” she said. “It wasn’t very far from Peter’s Hall estate. Our parents would put (Hindu) flags outside and would celebrate Phagwah, Shivratri (Hindu festivals),” she said. “Pandits would sometimes come home to do the puja (a worship ritual), too.”
Bisram believes her religious devotion helped her heal from difficult life situations. She worked as domestic help for nearly 11 years after her husband passed away to help support and supplement the family income.
Over the years, Bisram has collected copies of Hindu hymnals, old cultural magazines, CDs, cassettes, wedding cards with religious symbols, and images of deities. She said that she would like to visit India “if health allows” and often looks at pictures of temples in India.
“I wake up at 3 a.m., and I’ll put it (CDs) up, this one with 18 bhajans,” she said. “I like to listen to them. I love them. I have a whole box of them.” Bisram attributes her good health to her devotion. “I am not being punished for anything. I got good health. I can go out, wash, clean, everything I could do.”
Clem Seecharan, an Indo-Caribbean historian, also pointed out that indentured laborers took to British Guiana “copies of the ‘Ramayana’, the ‘Bhagavad-Gita’ and the ‘Mahabharata’ (ancient Indian epics and Hindu Scriptures) on board the immigrant ships. (These) added immeasurably to the self-confidence of the Hindus.”
Kamala Dhanvanti, 56, the caretaker at Peter’s Hall Mandir, has been working for the temple for nearly 30 years.
Her role includes washing deity statues, keeping the mandir clean, and assisting the priest with temple puja and services. She insisted that she likes her role.
“It’s a gift that God gave me,” said Dhanvanti, who is a seamstress by profession. “Even the pandit said not everybody gets an opportunity like that.”
The temple doesn’t pay Dhanvanti a salary for her services. She has been provided accommodation on the premises, where she has lived for over 30 years. She said temple-goers would sometimes give her a “dakshina,” a small honorarium.
“I end up spending more than I get from people coming at the mandir, like buying things for the mandir,” she said. “This is my life and happiness.”
She wakes up early for many major Hindu festivals to make fresh food for those attending the service. “I wake up at 3 a.m. and fry eggplant batter and pholourie (fried, spiced spilt pea and flour dough balls served with a chutney) for them,” she said. “I love to feed people.
“I have served God from the time I left home. My belly was big and still, I scrubbed the mandir.”
Hinduism without a caste system
Mangru has been the Peter’s Hall Mandir president for nearly a decade. He emphasized that the caste system doesn’t exist in indentured Indian communities.
“Isn’t it amazing?” he said.
“In signing the indentured contract and migrating to British Guiana, indentured laborers reinvented their caste,” Parbattie Ramsarran noted in her research piece.
Many changed their names and last names to move away from the caste system. “Speculatively, changing names explain the note of optimism and hope that accompanied the tenor of horror that described the migration of indentured labor from India to British Guiana,” Ramsarran stated.
“They used to be called ‘Jahajis,’” Mangru said. “For them to survive in the conditions in which they came here, they had to bond together. There was no need for a caste system. Every man just had to survive.”
The term “Jahaji” translated to “ship-traveler” and was often used to invoke the close bonds formed on the arduous journeys and the camaraderie shared by fellow ship travelers.
Vindhya Vasini Persaud, president of Guyana’s Hindu Dharmic Sabha and minister of human services and social security from the ruling People’s Progressive Party, spoke of her grandfather’s journey from India to Guyana.
She said that her grandfather, Pandit Durga Persaud, came from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in 1914 as an indentured immigrant and belonged to the upper caste.
Persaud said he introduced the Ram Leela tradition — a performance of the “Ramayana” epic in a series of scenes that include song, narration, recital, and dialogue — in the South American country.
“‘Ramayana’ in those days was very important to the descendants of early indentured immigrants because they had a history of where they were coming out of colonialism, and they held on to their culture and tradition,” she said.
Persaud’s father, Pandit Reepu Daman Persaud, also a former vice president of Guyana, continued the cultural tradition and took the teachings of ‘Ramayana’ to neighboring countries with the indentured Indian population, Trinidad and Suriname.
“He also held ‘yagyas’ (worship and rituals often performed in front of a sacred fire) where thousands of people would attend,” she added.
She explained how caste became unimportant in the lives of Guyanese Hindus. “My father opened the doors to pandits who are non-Brahmins to become pandits. His thing was that you have to live life. You have to train to become a pandit. It was a practical and necessary movement,” Persaud said.
In their work, “Brahmanism Abroad: On Caribbean Hinduism as an Ethnic Religion”, anthropologists Peter van der Veer and Steven Vertovec note, “Hindus grew more aware of their isolation as members of a minority religion, and congregational modes of worship increasingly came to the fore. This coincided with the founding of numerous temples when Indians completed their terms of indenture, left the estates and began settling in near homogeneously Indian villages.
“Congregational worship, in the form of periodic large-scale celebrations, regular puja (rites of offering to various deities) and gatherings to recite the ‘Ramayana’ or to sing devotional hymns, forged communal links, and settlements in fundamental and especially powerful ways.”
As a parliamentarian, Persaud’s father made efforts to make Diwali and Phagwah, two important Hindu festivals, national holidays in the country. He also helped introduce the “Diwali motorcade,” where a procession of lit vehicles carries people dressed as Hindu deities.
He also pushed to commemorate Indian Arrival Day on May 5 in Guyana.
The commemoration of arrival day is problematic, however, as scholars have brought attention to how the day is a stark reminder of the struggles of indentured communities from India and other regions. Those who signed these bonded contracts and stepped foot on those ships suffered grave consequences at the hands of their colonizers.
Der Veer and Vertovec also discussed how several Indian communities banded together to forge a bond that led to dismantling a hegemonic structure like the caste system.
“Within the Caribbean states of Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname, Hindus traditionally regard themselves, and are regarded by others, as a distinct ethnic group marked not only by names and religious beliefs but by criteria of language, kinship, values and aspirations, and social status,” they noted.
Inheritance of a lost language
In Guyana, one can hear old Hindi film songs in cabs, corner stores and gatherings, but while most Indo-Guyanese folks are fond of the music, they do not understand the words and their meaning.
Hindi and dialects like Bhojpuri were predominant when the Indian indentured people first arrived. Still, the ancestral language and dialects continued to deplete in the face of colonial impact and challenges brought on by the new environment in the South American country.
In an attempt to homogenize Bhojpuri, as many Indian communities didn’t speak the language even though a vast majority did, Guyanese Bhojpuri and Caribbean Hindustani emerged, which Indo-Caribbean communities used to communicate across the region.
“Temple culture is very strong in this country,” Persaud said, “People celebrate all the major Hindu festivals and follow the rituals and the fasts the way one is supposed to,” Persaud said.
But using Hindi or Sanskrit in these rituals and devotional hymns is complicated.
“The songstress may not necessarily understand the meaning of the songs but will follow the tune and sing it,” Peter’s Hall President Sivindra Mangru said. “Not only is the script lost, but the ability to articulate in the language has also been lost.”
“Standard Hindi ... never enjoyed the breadth of functions, to begin with,” explained Surendra K. Gambhir, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, in a research paper, “Diglossia in Dying Languages: A Case Study of Guyanese Bhojpuri and Standard Hindi”.
Guyana maintained its sociocultural unity by shifting and replacing the ancestral language “to the Guyanese Creole and English as their natural choice in communication,” Gambhir wrote. This shift coincided with the last Indian indentured communities entering Guyana around 1920.
“Today, in the Indo-Guyanese speech community, Guyanese Bhojpuri is used in a very limited way by members of the oldest generation,” Gambhir stated. “Younger generations are passing through a gradual loss of their ability to speak Guyanese Bhojpuri.”
However, there is an impetus to engage Guyanese Hindus with the Indian culture through virtual classes and sending them to India, where they learn the language, dance and music.
“We’ve also been working with the Indian government through the Indian high commission and getting scholarships to send our pandits to train in India in Hindi and Sanskrit,” Persaud stated.
Classes to revive Hindi have also been introduced over the years, but the pandemic has impacted these endeavors.
Conversion, a concern
Mangru pointed out that othering and alienation are some of the reasons why younger generations turn to other religions.
“You were told, including me in school, that what I have and what I practiced doesn’t belong to a modern way of life,” he said.
“There is a lot of misinterpretation and misunderstanding of the Hindu faith because it stands apart in how we worship as Hindus compared to others. Deity worship is a sour point for non-Hindus. They don’t understand the concept of worship with the murti (images or statues of Hindu deities).”
Dhanvanti said she has tried to reason with the community members who sought counsel and were considering conversion.
“They hurt you, you know. I have tried to convince people to come back to the mandir and try and talk to them, but it’s a waste of time,” she said.
Nothing seems to work, she said, once they’ve made up their minds.
Mangru said they are trying to bring back old traditions where a mandir is no longer just a traditional place to worship but a place to meet, interact and bond with other community members to help alleviate issues like conversion.
“COVID-19 has shown that the meaning of life has been lost without that social interaction, so now it adds more value to the efforts,” he said.
Manmeet Sahni is an independent journalist from New Delhi based in New York. She writes about politics, human rights, inequality and social movements. Her bylines have appeared in Documented, The Article and others, and she is an alumna of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.