Clem Seecharan, Mother India’s Shadow over El Dorado: Indo-Guyanese Politics and Identity, 1890s–1930s. Kingston: Ian Randle, 2011. xii + 524 pp. (Paper US$45.00)
2014; Brill; Volume: 88; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1163/22134360-08803052
ISSN2213-4360
Autores Tópico(s)Cuban History and Society
ResumoClem Seecharan's Mother India's Shadow Over El Dorado is an ambitious compendium of his earlier work and ongoing research on Indo-Guyanese history, including over 500 pages of text comprised of 32 chapters divided among seven parts and a conclusion.While the abundance of (short) chapters allows Seecharan to look closely and chronologically at selected Indo-Guyanese activists' writing and speeches, it also engenders repetitiveness and a book of unnecessarily unwieldy dimensions.This is unfortunate, because it is a trove of fascinating information on the lively cultures of political self-fashioning and stakes-claiming in colonial Guyana.To assemble this, he mined official documents (which reflected metropolitan perspectives as well as those of resident or absentee white proprietors), but also predominantly urban Indo-and Afro-Guyanese community organizations' newspapers and their spokesmen's editorials, letters to editors, and other writings.Seecharan frames his study of the persistent and increasingly polarized and racially-charged conflict between the two numerically largest ethnic groups in independent Guyana in terms of two distinct but overlapping clusters of ambition.The first is the lure of El Dorado, the durable colonial conviction that the region's abundance of natural resources promised incalculable wealthif only there were labor enough to exploit them.This conviction precipitated the transportation of enslaved Africans and subsequently (with British abolition of slavery in its empire) of indentured Indians.Further, Seecharan notes, it continued to shape British colonial policy.Finally, he argues, intersecting with and crucially shaping these dynamics was (and is) the second formative myth: the invocation of "Mother India" by members of British Guiana's small but growing coterie of educated Indian-descended men.They animated contemporary Indology with their own ambitions and experiences (as first-or second-generation immigrants) to claim precedence over African-descended and European communities as stewards of El Dorado.In pursuing their vision-which included a proposal that the British Government of India rather than that in London be given responsibility for governing British Guiana and developing its inland resources-they alienated their African-descended counterparts, who understood, resented, and resisted their subordination in these schemes, to enduring effect through the twentieth century.This, then, is the shadow of "Mother India" over "El Dorado."In tracking the crystallization of a distinctively Indo-Guyanese political imaginary between 1890 and 1930, Seecharan's discussion of spokesmen for
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