The Maha Sabha celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2002 and held poojas across the country in praise of Bhagwan (God) for giving us the opportunity to strengthen our dharma (religion) and establish Hindu schools and colleges to make formal education available to our followers’ children.

At the beginning, the schools were crude structures and were described as “cow-shed schools.” But these Hindu schools were responsible for the transformation of an entire community. From being rural- and agricultural-focused community, Hindus, today, have excelled in academics, the professions, industry and commerce.

We have commissioned a book to record the growth and history of each of these schools. Dr Kris Rampersad, former editor of the Sunday Guardian, has completed the long and time-consuming exercise and we now await the printing of the book, Hindu Education in a Multicultural Place.

I wish to provide readers with a glimpse of the material collected in this article. We begin at the beginning. It would have begun with one time-expired Hindu indentured immigrant.

He takes the pennies he has saved to pay the required tax on the land he occupies. From nearby trees he cuts posts to hold together his one room. Leaves of the carate tree provide roof cover and bamboo and grass pasted over with mud, packed and hardened to form its walls. Its dirt floor he leepays (plasters) with his hands using cow dung, mud and water, mixed into a paste. It helps keep off the insects.

He turns to dinner by blowing on a half-metre long, thin, hollow bamboo, (phookane) coaxing the flames at the base of a semi-circular mud mound (choolah) which serves as a fireside. Atop sits a blackened iron pot gurgling with white liquid through which peeps grains of soft rice. Around it is scattered a couple of tin cups, wooden spoons, a clay goblet, and a small heap of wood—his kitchen. In the corner opposite, a crumpled sheet suggests it’s his bedroom.

The fading colour of wilting flowers reverently placed next to a glossy smooth stone in another dark corner of the room signifies that there is his shrine where he pays tribute to the forces of life and nature that surrounds and sustains him. Within these mud walls are encompassed the foundations of a civilisation—education, religion and culture are all represented in the shrine.

The mud hut is the axis of his trek back and forth from the fields. His bare, calloused feet hardened, its skin peeling white and dried, stamp down towering grass, reveals a pathway that would one day become a roadway that may even carry his name—Sooknanan, or Bissessar, or Banwari or Ramai Trace.

With time, others acquire similar plots and a village is born and they create an outdoor shrine, under a mango or peepal tree. The shrine becomes the place (kootiah) where they teach the younger ones their ancestral language, religion, culture and beliefs.

It becomes their meeting place not only for prayer, but to exchange ideas, to expound philosophies about existence, the world, religion, the day in the fields, the weather, problems of survival, plans for the future, their place in this new world. It becomes the centre of social transformation. A community take root.

They meet with other groups, at each other’s shrines, and the discussions broaden as they recognise common interests, common concerns. They develop networks, first to sing bhajans and Ramayan and then to share instruments, musicians and to teach each other bhajan-singing. Ramayan recitation, dance and language and hold discussions on social and political concerns. Nationalism blossoms.

They organise cultural competitions and contest, like chowtal singing competitions around Holi time, and Jhal Ramayan competitions near Divali time, singers and dancers and musicians of one village trying to outdo the other; and other events that would evolve into district, then one day national events—Ramleela and Divali and Holi.

Religion, culture, community combine in a powerful catalyst to demand reform of social conditions and for recognition—recognition of their contribution to the place, not as temporary contract labourers, but as citizens who have peopled this earth and this sea and this sky with their gods and goddesses.

Their navel strings are buried in this land and they have buried the navel strings of their children in sacred spots on land they have watered with tears and nourished with sweat and sustained with humiliation, pain and degradation. They plant in this landscape their faith and hopes and dreams, loftily fluttering like colourful jhandis in the wind.

The education of migrant indentured Indians and their descendants in Trinidad does not really begin in 1952 with the formation of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha. It begins from the time the first Indian on an immigrant ship sung the first line of a verse from the Ramayan on treacherous seas. He appeals to his God to guide him safely to his destination. And that line is picked up by the man sitting next to him and the woman next to that man and the child on the woman’s lap.

Continues next week

SATNARAYAN MAHARAJ is the Secretary General of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha