15 November 1997, 1004 words
Although my surname is Baldeosingh and I write a weekly newspaper column, I recently discovered that I am not , in the truest and deepest meaning of the term, an "Indian columnist." Now that I am aware of this deficiency, I am considering what I need to do in order to become one (an Indian columnist, I mean, not a deficiency.)
The truth is, I've never really thought of myself as an Indian anything, save on the rare occasion that the fact has been forced to my attention. Whenever I've applied labels to myself, I've considered myself a human being, a man, a writer, a Trinidadian, a Caribbean person, and a person of East Indian descent. Clearly, my priorities are all screwed up.
But, thanks to Kumar Mahabir's column in last Wednesday's Independent, I now see that being an Indian supersedes every other definition I might apply to myself. (But I want Kumar to know that, in my eternal gratitude for his enlightening me about my dharma, I will never lord over him the fact that I am of a higher caste than he.)
In his column, Kumar pointed out that Indians form 40.3 per cent of the population and 91 per cent of all Indians support the UNC. Yet, he says, there are only five "Indian cultural and political representative columnists" between the four daily newspapers. These are Anil Mahabir, Rajnie Ramlakhan, Devant Maharaj, Kamal Persad and Kumar himself. I have been making a close study of these writers in order to understand what constitutes an Indian columnist so that I might, in the fullness of time, become one myself.
But it's not going to be easy. For example, I had considered Anil Mahabir to be a puerile, intellectually deficient hypocrite whose main purpose is to get a well-paying job by sucking up to Basdeo Panday and Ish Galbaransingh. But I must be wrong, because Kumar describes Anil as a "star commentator" and Kumar is studying for his doctorate in Florida and sends e-mail, whereas all I have is a mere BA from UWI and am not even on the Net. (I mean, my name is there, on a few author sites, but I don't surf.)
Then there's Rajnie Ramlakhan, who promotes an Indian viewpoint in her Express column. Last week, she dealt with Afrocentric intellectuals. Anyone who has heard or read the rantings of those black American academics the Emancipation Support Committee brings down here every year knows that Afrocentric scholars are a set of silly asses. And, after arguing that the Afrocentric view is based on prejudice and not scholarship, Ms Ramlakhan ended her column by saying, "Evolution theory tells us that the first human being evolved in Africa as homo erectus but without Africoid features; and the first intelligent being developed as homo sapiens somewhere in Europe...The Africoids were the last to develop in the evolution chain."
I never knew all this. Probably I have not read as much about evolution as Ms Ramlakhan. I've never even seen the term "Africoid." The traditional anthropological classifications used to be Negroid, Australoid, Mongoloid and Caucasoid. But these have been abandoned since there is no genetic basis for them. I also thought that it was a time-frame conflict between paleontological and recent DNA evidence which led to the interesting conjecture that <i>homo sapien sapiens <i> may have developed in parallel groups on different parts of the planet and that modern humans might have developed last in Africa. But the prevailing theory to account for the conflicting evidence is that there were actually two great migrations from Africa: the first one at the time of the earliest homo sapiens between 130,00-60,000 years ago, and the second one 45,000-12,000 years ago, when modern humans first appeared.
But no doubt Rajnie is right. After all, her views could not possibly be informed by prejudice rather than scholarship. She says "Evolution theory also tells us that the first being to evolve was female, the Sita/Eve theory." Me, I stupidly thought that the prehistoric "Eve" was identified through mitochondria that is passed on only through the female line, this being a DNA scanning technique that only a feminist or a silly ass could take to mean that the first human was female. But if Hindu philosophy says is so, is so. Who am I to argue with thousands of years of tradition?
Kamal Persad, Devant Maharaj and Kumar himself all write pretty much along the same lines. So I think I now have a pretty clear idea about what I need to do in order to be a true Indian columnist. These are the guidelines I've figured out:
Write only about ethnic issues and racism. (This will be difficult, since race is not a topic which interests me much. But I know I can do it if I try really hard.)
Promote the past greatness of Indian civilization. (This will also require some effort. I know that India gave the world a major religion, some mathematics, curry and the Kama Sutra. Unfortunately, I also know that the anthropologist Donald Brown studied 25 caste societies and found that none of them, including India, had accurate historical writings, political, social or natural sciences, biography, realistic portraiture, uniform education or anything which might have threatened the mystical and illegitimate power of the ruling class. But I am sure, with practice, I can forget such inconvenient facts.)
Assume that all non-Indian newspapers editors are racist and all Trini-indians see every issue through a racial prism and none has any concern for universal cultural values. Assume also that no Trini-indian person would ever want to read criticism of the Government or "non-Indian" views. (Now I just need to figure out what exactly a "non-Indian view" is.)
Those are the basics. If Kumar is right, once I follow these rules, I should soon become one of the most widely-read columnists in Trinidad. And he must be right, right? I mean, the man is studying for his doctorate. And he even sends e-mail.
Copyright ©1997, Kevin Baldeosingh