Ancestral Sentiment or National Loyalty?

There are times when you are looking from the outside but feel like an insider, and everything is like you know it but different. If you are Indian and reach Berbice in Guyana or Chaguanas in central Trinidad, chances are you will feel it. You will hear Hindi music, smell curry, see Bollywood film posters, and read Indian names - but with a twist (Prasad is Persaud, Gopal is Gopaul). You will meet people who look like you but don't talk like you, and you will find them reaching out to you. They are the East Indians.

A hundred and sixty years ago, a culture was transplanted here. On ships they arrived, hundreds of contracted labourers from India, mainly Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, to work upon the British-owned plantations. Slavery had been abolished and the negroes were no longer under force to work; the 'coolies' were an exploitative - but legal - alternative.

Today, the descendants of these, and subsequent, migrants form roughly half of the population of Guyana and Trinidad. They feel themselves part of their country in a manner their forefathers could not, either because they have witnessed independence, an experience powerful enough to override previous allegiances, or because they are second- or third-generation citizens who have not known any society outside of their current one.

Yet their attachment to anything Indian is palpable. Many try and preserve every tradition of the Indian household; some speak of visiting India as their life's greatest ambition.? Bollywood is very much a part of their pop culture, though they don't understand a word of Hindi. Cricket is equally alluring, but it comes with a conundrum. Bollywood is mere entertainment.

Cricket involves conflict: between the land of their ancestors and country of residence. Where must their loyalties lie?

It is a matter of race as much as nationality. The manner in which these societies evolved meant that racial friction was inescapableand explainable. By the middle of the 20th century, three large communities lived alongside one another - the ruling whites who were on their way out; the Africans, who had broken free; and the Indians, who were still settling in.

All of them, explains Trinidadian social commentator Ravindranath Maharaj ('Raviji'), had different kinds of claims: "The white colonial masters felt they had a claim because they ruled. So did the blacks, who had emancipated themselves and were asserting themselves politically. And then the Indians, who were at the lowest rung of the ladder, also felt they were wronged.

On top of all that, it is such a small space. All the dynamics of race and culture and religion and political differences were always flying in each other's face with a very, very strong intensity."

In an environment like this, cricket, an increasingly significant social element, was bound to be touched. Till today, there is a feeling among the Indians, perhaps not fully justified, of being wronged, just as there was among the Africans when their colonial masters wouldn't grant them equal opportunity. A few days before the Port-of-Spain Test when India toured WestIndies earlier this year, an article appeared on the op-ed page of Trinidad's Newsday under the headline "Why some Indo-Trinis support India in cricket". It sought to provide reason to this feeling of injustice.

The article argued: "In 1984, former West Indian captain Vivian Richards said that the WI cricket team was the only black sporting team in the world that has been winning continuously at the international level. Note, black here means Afro-Caribbean and completely disregards the Indian presence in the Caribbean.

"Second, under Richards, not a single Indian was selected to play for the West Indies. Third, it was then that the Ethiopian/Rastafari colours of red, yellow and green were introduced in the WI logo and worn by many WI players. Why use African colours in a team representing all in the Caribbean?" The point is that Africans, at a very conscious level, saw cricket as a weapon to prove their worth against the Whites and ironically worked to deny the Indians the same opportunity," the article concluded.

The perception of being victimised goes back even further. Nyron Asgarali, now an endearing man of 81, was the first East Indian to lead any of the British West Indies colonies (Trinidad). He could have been, too, the first East Indian to have played for the West Indies had he not been overlooked despite having scored two centuries in two trial games for the home series against MCC in 1948. He was eventually picked for the England tour of 1957, at the age of 36, and was dropped after two Tests, in one of which he made 29 out of 89 all out. Today his bitterness is scathing: "They never considered Indians at all. Indians were nobody."

Don't get the wrong idea. Racism did not have everything to do with it - in fact, it probably had quite little to do. After all, Sonny Ramadhin was picked for West Indies just two years after Asgarali was rejected. The fact was the Africans produced a lineage of great cricketers, while the East Indians, with the exceptions of first Ramadhin from Trinidad, and later Rohan Kanhai from Guyana, did those who were merely good.

Ramadhin was the original East Indian inspiration. From a poor peasant boy in south Trinidad who, the legend goes, spun oranges to pass the time, he became the man who beat the whites in their own land. In West Indies' first Test victory in England, at Lord's in 1950, Ramadhin, only 20 then, took 11 wickets and he took them with an Indian mystique, finger-spinning the ball from off to leg and vice-versa without any perceptible change in action. He triggered the imagination.

Across the waters in Guyana, Berbice, a large but thinly populated rural area where measureless sugarcane fields grow and enormous muddy rivers flow, emerged as the hotbed of East Indian cricket. Port Mourant, the tiniest of villages, has over the years given rise to as many as seven Test cricketers: Kanhai, Joe Solomon, Alvin Kallicharran, Basil Butcher, John Trim, Ivan Madray, and the first-choice spinner of the current team, Mahendra Nagamootoo. Butcher is half-Indian, and of the others all but Trim are of Indian descent.

Those who have been around long enough can still remember the beginnings: of how every cane field had a pitch (well, of sorts), of how the prodigious Kanhai taught himself to bat with a sponge ball against the walls of the 'logies' (long corridors divided into tiny rooms with a small toilet and cooking area, where the workers were made to live), of how Kallicharran's right shin would be furrowed by a ball constructed of tree-bark; of how, basically, cricket came to be the essential passion in Berbician life.

Then there were those who found the talent and nurtured it. Clyde Walcott was one. A Welfare Officer with the Booker Tate sugar company in the 60s, old-timers remember how Walcott "uplifted and polished" the young Indians. Robert Christiani, an eminent Guyanese cricketer who played 22 Tests with moderate success, was another.

East Indian cricket grew steadily in Guyana and Trinidad and it was not uncommon in the 1970s to see two or three players in the West Indian squads. They were all spinners or batsmen, which could be because of natural inclination, physical attributes (the best ones were invariably slight), or even the pitches in the fields. Then Clive Lloyd turned to pace; Viv Richards kept it going, and whether or not a black corpus existed cannot be established with authority, but till the time that Shivnarine Chanderpaul was picked as a teenager in 1993-94, not a single East Indian made it to the West Indies team.

So what's changing? You only need a glance at the West Indian squad of today to see the difference. Typically, it will include Chanderpaul, Ramnaresh Sarwan and Mahendra Nagamootoo; Dinanath Ramnarine and Daren Ganga will be in and out. These are young Trinidadian or Guyanese players who together represent about a third of the team. But that's the present; look at where the future is coming from.

West Indies won the Under-15 World Cup in England in 2000. It was led by a Tishan Maraj from central Trinidad, and half the team was East Indian. This February, the West Indies Under-19s reached the semi-final of the Youth World Cup in New Zealand. That team was led by Narsingh Deonarine, and included left-arm seamer Ravi Rampaul who has just set a record for maximum wickets in a youth tournament in West Indies.

In the West Indian under-15 competitions, Trinidad has been sweeping the stakes for three years now with a predominantly East Indian team. In the under-19s, Guyana won an astonishing six competitions in a row between 1992 and 1997, with teams that had an average of 60 per cent East Indian representation.
At the senior level, Guyana won last season's Busta Cup and Red Stripe Bowl with a team that had six East Indians in the first XI. Within Guyana, Berbice wins most of the inter-county championships at all levels, and typically you would find about seven or eight East Indians in these teams. You get the picture.

The reasons for this revival are several. The first, most widely recognised one, is that the Africans are increasingly enticed by soccer, basketball and athletics. Cricket today no longer means to Afro-Caribbeans what it did at the time they were fighting the colonisers. It remains part of what Raviji likes to call the "myth of the Caribbean person", and so they will watch it, but the passion to play it has suffered in comparison to American sports which are relentlessly beamed on satellite television. And, as in India now, the talent tends to come from outside the cities; in Guyana and Trinidad this automatically raises the East Indian percentage.

And there is more, feels Raviji. "Indians have risen economically, to be able to allow their children to play cricket. It is not beyond the reach of the normal Trinidadian to buy the equipment. Then the Indians have more leisure time now. For a long time, many people would be partly in agriculture and partly going to high school."

The key factor, however, has been the development of systems in Berbice and central Trinidad. Schools and club cricket flourish here, and is often watched by crowds in numbers that are reminiscent of the 1950s and '60s.

Albion (where India recorded their first-ever one-day win against the West Indies, in 1983) has become the hottest club in the Caribbean. Nagamootoo plays for them, as does the West Indies under-19 captain Deonarine, and a handful of Guyana players who could conceivably play for West Indies soon.

Azib Ali-Hanniff Haniff is a wicketkeeper who made the Guyana first team at a very early age, and trains at the Shell Academy in Grenada. He feels completely guyanese but retains a soft spot for India and his hero is Rahul Dravid. Sewnarine Chattergoon is a 21-year-old opener whose hero is Chanderpaul.

Chanderpaul himself doesn't dwell on matters such as East Indianism. "My batting is for everyone," he says. "I'm not a person like that. If young Indian boys want to follow me, that's good. But I'm there to help everyone." Yet he has become an icon. Not only did he end the drought, but in a nation ravaged by racial conflict, he and Carl Hooper, an Afro-Guyanese, have been projected as symbols of a coming together.

They have been honoured with a song, "Hooper and Chanderpaul", the lyrics of which even use culinary imagery to spread unity:

"We must play Carl and Shiv,
That's how we must live,
Curry cook-up with Coconut Metegee,
Yellow plantain and Dal Puri"

The big question is whether the young East Indians will go on to greater things. Ironically, it is their gradual economic rise that will dissuade them from taking up cricket as it will encourage them into it. More Indians are today able to pursue studies in say, computers or medicine, than in the '50s when there didn't exist much opportunity outside the plantation. Berbice, for instance, has lost forever Hemnath Poonoo, a blossoming offspinning allrounder who played the Under-15 World Cup but has now migrated to the United States.

Could there be, say a decade down the line, a West Indies team with six or seven East Indians, despite the strong claims that cricketers from predominantly African societies such as Barbados and Jamaica will always have? If so, how good will they be? How attached will the people of Caribbean be to a team with this demographic? Nobody really knows the answers. The world will evolve, so too will societies, their trends and their perceptions. Cricket will follow.