India of Romantic Remembering
India of Romantic Remembering
David Dabydeen is probably Guyana’s first celebrity fiction writer, that is if the 12 years he lived in Guyana qualifies him as Guyanese “to the bone”. His celebrity status has more to do with his achievements in England where he now resides: five novels, three collections of poetry, the Commonwealth Poetry prize, the Quiller-Couch prize, the Guyana Prize, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, PhD in 18th century Literature, Guyana’s Ambassador to UNESCO. Given his impressive literary credentials you would expect Dabydeen’s fiction to be accomplished, well researched and smoothly executed. And so it is.
The Counting House (1996, 2005) is about a journey of indentured labourers recruited in India during the early 19th century to work on the sugar plantations in British Guiana.
Part 1 of the novel attempts to explain what motivated Rohini and Vidia to leave India. If scholar Dabydeen is to be trusted sexual longing, sexual frustration and sexual cunning play important roles. His depressed characters in India, like depressed people in Guyana today, talk obsessively about getting money and moving away; they dream of “a better life” in the larger world; they wish to be “transformed”, but their dreams are tied to the vagaries of the human body. Young, nubile bodies, throwing caution to the wind, are keen to hoist & fly; older, sagging or “scowling fat” bodies wake up to terminal anxieties; they worry about being left behind.
Rohini’s mother, for instance, trying to come to terms with her daughter’s decision to leave for Guiana, strips naked before her and wails, “What will happen to me?” After Rohini was born she’d stopped having sex with her husband. Worried about her daughter’s prospects, she cautions Rohini to be rational with men, to ration their lust even in marriage
Rohini seems sexually savvy in an imagined 19th century way: she knows there’s a wide world outside her village; and when the Guiana labour recruiter tells her, “A rupee and your scunt can take you to Guiana. And back. Well? What you say?” she appears to give the matter some thought. If these opening chapters, simmering with sexual tension, are designed to make sure the wired 20th century reader reads on, they certainly succeed.
At times a trace of (Guyanese) humor creeps in the characters’ conversation. Here’s Rohini’s mother, back in the village in India, talking to her married daughter about her new life at her in-laws:
“They treating you good?”
“Yes, ma.”
“They working you hard?”
“No, Ma.”
“Nothing?”
“No, Ma.”
“Well, take some slaps and next time bring me some castor oil. I have worms.”
Part II of the novel, which opens in a fast forward way, examines what happens when Rohini and Vidia, now fully-fledged, signed-up indentured labourers, come ashore and find their way to Plantation Albion in British Guiana.
Dabydeen’s authorial hands shepherd his characters like stunned arrivants through situations of surprising cruelties and unfamiliarity. Generally he voices-over or voices-through their inner conflicts to give depth & cultural complexity to their thoughts. (No matter how harsh conditions are in this novel, there’s plenty of food for thought.)
Here is Rohini musing on what she has to deal with now outside her logie: “It was neither greed nor guilt which motivated old Gladstone but the idea of endeavour, the idea of making a structure in the bush. Plantation Albion was a single factory with only so many thousands acres of cane, but whole continents were drawn into its creation - slaves from Africa, coolies from India, managers from England, tools from America.”
The words “coolie” and “nigger” litter the pages like fallen mangoes as Indians and Africans pelt each other with foul speech and thoughts. We are reminded that at the time women were in short supply; rum drinking, work gangs, body-wrecking labour, theft and lacerating punishment, diseases, Diwali lights and harmonium sounds, unrelieved lust, “people talking stupidness” – all filled the days and nights on the plantation.
You get the sense, however, that although the scholar-poet-novelist’s enriched language works hard to create the novel’s prism of ideas, tiny details that might transport you back there to get the feel, sounds and smells of Plantation Albion are missing. The reader is told, for instance: “Sundays became occasions of festivity, the coolies squatting in the grass and unwrapping rotis and potato curry whilst their children ran about with home-made kites. A nigger fiddler, glad for a taste of free food and rum, joined the picnic, slapping the frail backs of a few coolies in a show of instant camaraderie.” You might pause open-mouthed at the prettiness of that scene; but you’re expected to take it as it plays, read on.
Central to the goings-on in the novel’s Pt II are three characters: Gladstone, owner of the estate, his housekeeper Miriam, a fat black woman, and Kampta, a born-in-Guiana Indian. As characters Miriam and Kampta enjoy the status of “unusuals” and are awarded special authorial depiction.
Miriam lives and works in the Gladstone Great House; she roams with enviable freedom among his possessions; her broodings offer insights into domestic secrets in the Gladstone estate. Sharp-tongued and folk-wise, she provides solace to punished labourers. She sits with her legs carelessly apart sometimes, and has this strange habit of taking picnic baskets to the Gladstone family cemetery.
Kampta, a darkskinned Guianese Indian – perceived back then as “a blackskinned coolie of suspected Madrasi ancestry” – embodies the horror and uncertainty of fate that trailed miscegenated souls. “The coolies feared him immediately, his negroid appearance presaging what awaited their daughters in the future, if they lingered too long in the colony.” He behaves badly; he’s tied to a tree and whipped badly. A colonial unaccommodated man, he lives to brood and plot and dream of one day running away with Miriam.
As for Rohini and Vidia, whose young lives grabbed our attention in Part I, their fortunes as newcomers are not entirely forgotten. Their lives are “transformed”, and it is to Dabydeen’s credit that they lose some of their Indian representative- ness.
When Vidia looks out on the colonial estate he feels the stirrings of improbable entrepreneurship: “Nigger people turned Christian so they could mimic English god and laze on Sunday, but he, Vidia, was on the hunt for a job…..Money was everywhere, even in fowl belly and fowl-battie, he only had to get at it. And if you lent it out, money could breed money, a miracle.” (p. 63) He will live his coming years with the shame of a childless wife, but he makes up for this with a stubborn work ethic.
Rohini, now 19 yrs. old, stays faithful in the face of starved male desire all around her; but after two years the marriage is bewilderingly childless. With the instincts of a modern social climber she wants “more” out of life than Vidia can provide. On occasion she hints at a free-spirited readiness to give away her body to any of the overwhelming number of womanless workers on the estate.
The thought she might betray him – “Niggerman digging in your belly for gold that belong to me,” Vidia screamed, hitting Rohini in the face.” – so enrages Vidia he loses his sexual timidity and turns into a raging bull of possessiveness. Rohini runs away; she returns to him, a docile, Guianese Indian wife. At least for awhile.
What Dabydeen examines even-handedly in paragraphs of posh prose are his characters’ emotional turbulence, the scramble among the colonised to establish new norms of coexistence; to forge working and civil relationships even as ethnic “dissimilarities” keep groups & individuals suspicious and apart. Friendships are tenuous at best. Newcomers must endure the hostility of those already there. The fabric of plantation relationships gets ripped and mended then ripped again by resentment, childish beliefs and fear.
By laying bare these tensions Dabydeen helps us understand the source of the factional/ethnic strife that would engulf Guyana after Indentureship (when the Gladstones leave the Great House) and after Independence (when the Burnhams & Jagans take over.) He might also be suggesting we take into account the possibility of smaller, potentially subversive (& liberating) identities inside our enclaves of Indian & African solidarities.
Stereotypes, for instance, are set up only to be cleverly undermined in the novel. Vidia will remain focused on earning & hoarding wages, but he’s not your rum-drinking, wife-beating “coolieman”. Rohini, her mind and body already far down the road to personal emancipation, dreams of moving up in the world; she inveigles her way into the Great House and works alongside the (none too pleased) Miriam; she accepts “favors” from Gladstone and before you know it she is pregnant with his and her first child.
This single, worlds-colliding act, so much out of “Indian” character, so curiously out of step with the journey that began in a poor village outside Calcutta, sends the novel into a spiral of imagery and reflectiveness. This becomes the focus of the final section. The cast of characters, Kampka, Miriam, husband Vidia, Rohini herself step forward to offer ruminations. Author Dabydeen weighs in with creole language intensity, and contextual clues & explanations for readers to form their own judgment.
To end the novel like this, with lyrical disclosures from the characters’ interlocked lives, might disappoint readers looking for neat affirmations or uplifting virtues or heart-wringing scenes of victimhood in “Indo-Guyanese” fiction. But Rohini and Vidia are not your ordinary canefield-broken folk (still considered ‘underresearched’ and ‘underrepresented’ in our literature.) They are colonial exceptions; their lives are textured with the best poetry Dabydeen can provide. On the page they give off that surface sheen you associate with celebrity success; or a Merchant-Ivory movie.
The Counting House is dedicated to Janet and Cheddi Jagan Jr. It might not count as an “historical” novel with plausible melodramas and characters teeming with Kaywana passion and detail. Still, there’s a readership out there ever ready for serious books that “wind down” the old Empire; and scholarship always eager to debrief long-journeyed souls, or extrapolate from heightened self-conscious narratives.
Anyone else just curious about the truth of the matter when indentured labourers gambled and lost their life investment in British Guiana will have to wait for another writer to come along. Someone just a tad less prose-superfluous than author Dabydeen; a writer who perhaps has lived a little closer to his roots, a little longer in his native land. (W.W.)
Book Reviewed: The Counting House: David Dabydeen: 157 pps. Peepal Tree Press, England, 2005
David Dabydeen is probably Guyana’s first celebrity fiction writer, that is if the 12 years he lived in Guyana qualifies him as Guyanese “to the bone”. His celebrity status has more to do with his achievements in England where he now resides: five novels, three collections of poetry, the Commonwealth Poetry prize, the Quiller-Couch prize, the Guyana Prize, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, PhD in 18th century Literature, Guyana’s Ambassador to UNESCO. Given his impressive literary credentials you would expect Dabydeen’s fiction to be accomplished, well researched and smoothly executed. And so it is.
The Counting House (1996, 2005) is about a journey of indentured labourers recruited in India during the early 19th century to work on the sugar plantations in British Guiana.
Part 1 of the novel attempts to explain what motivated Rohini and Vidia to leave India. If scholar Dabydeen is to be trusted sexual longing, sexual frustration and sexual cunning play important roles. His depressed characters in India, like depressed people in Guyana today, talk obsessively about getting money and moving away; they dream of “a better life” in the larger world; they wish to be “transformed”, but their dreams are tied to the vagaries of the human body. Young, nubile bodies, throwing caution to the wind, are keen to hoist & fly; older, sagging or “scowling fat” bodies wake up to terminal anxieties; they worry about being left behind.
Rohini’s mother, for instance, trying to come to terms with her daughter’s decision to leave for Guiana, strips naked before her and wails, “What will happen to me?” After Rohini was born she’d stopped having sex with her husband. Worried about her daughter’s prospects, she cautions Rohini to be rational with men, to ration their lust even in marriage
Rohini seems sexually savvy in an imagined 19th century way: she knows there’s a wide world outside her village; and when the Guiana labour recruiter tells her, “A rupee and your scunt can take you to Guiana. And back. Well? What you say?” she appears to give the matter some thought. If these opening chapters, simmering with sexual tension, are designed to make sure the wired 20th century reader reads on, they certainly succeed.
At times a trace of (Guyanese) humor creeps in the characters’ conversation. Here’s Rohini’s mother, back in the village in India, talking to her married daughter about her new life at her in-laws:
“They treating you good?”
“Yes, ma.”
“They working you hard?”
“No, Ma.”
“Nothing?”
“No, Ma.”
“Well, take some slaps and next time bring me some castor oil. I have worms.”
Part II of the novel, which opens in a fast forward way, examines what happens when Rohini and Vidia, now fully-fledged, signed-up indentured labourers, come ashore and find their way to Plantation Albion in British Guiana.
Dabydeen’s authorial hands shepherd his characters like stunned arrivants through situations of surprising cruelties and unfamiliarity. Generally he voices-over or voices-through their inner conflicts to give depth & cultural complexity to their thoughts. (No matter how harsh conditions are in this novel, there’s plenty of food for thought.)
Here is Rohini musing on what she has to deal with now outside her logie: “It was neither greed nor guilt which motivated old Gladstone but the idea of endeavour, the idea of making a structure in the bush. Plantation Albion was a single factory with only so many thousands acres of cane, but whole continents were drawn into its creation - slaves from Africa, coolies from India, managers from England, tools from America.”
The words “coolie” and “nigger” litter the pages like fallen mangoes as Indians and Africans pelt each other with foul speech and thoughts. We are reminded that at the time women were in short supply; rum drinking, work gangs, body-wrecking labour, theft and lacerating punishment, diseases, Diwali lights and harmonium sounds, unrelieved lust, “people talking stupidness” – all filled the days and nights on the plantation.
You get the sense, however, that although the scholar-poet-novelist’s enriched language works hard to create the novel’s prism of ideas, tiny details that might transport you back there to get the feel, sounds and smells of Plantation Albion are missing. The reader is told, for instance: “Sundays became occasions of festivity, the coolies squatting in the grass and unwrapping rotis and potato curry whilst their children ran about with home-made kites. A nigger fiddler, glad for a taste of free food and rum, joined the picnic, slapping the frail backs of a few coolies in a show of instant camaraderie.” You might pause open-mouthed at the prettiness of that scene; but you’re expected to take it as it plays, read on.
Central to the goings-on in the novel’s Pt II are three characters: Gladstone, owner of the estate, his housekeeper Miriam, a fat black woman, and Kampta, a born-in-Guiana Indian. As characters Miriam and Kampta enjoy the status of “unusuals” and are awarded special authorial depiction.
Miriam lives and works in the Gladstone Great House; she roams with enviable freedom among his possessions; her broodings offer insights into domestic secrets in the Gladstone estate. Sharp-tongued and folk-wise, she provides solace to punished labourers. She sits with her legs carelessly apart sometimes, and has this strange habit of taking picnic baskets to the Gladstone family cemetery.
Kampta, a darkskinned Guianese Indian – perceived back then as “a blackskinned coolie of suspected Madrasi ancestry” – embodies the horror and uncertainty of fate that trailed miscegenated souls. “The coolies feared him immediately, his negroid appearance presaging what awaited their daughters in the future, if they lingered too long in the colony.” He behaves badly; he’s tied to a tree and whipped badly. A colonial unaccommodated man, he lives to brood and plot and dream of one day running away with Miriam.
As for Rohini and Vidia, whose young lives grabbed our attention in Part I, their fortunes as newcomers are not entirely forgotten. Their lives are “transformed”, and it is to Dabydeen’s credit that they lose some of their Indian representative- ness.
When Vidia looks out on the colonial estate he feels the stirrings of improbable entrepreneurship: “Nigger people turned Christian so they could mimic English god and laze on Sunday, but he, Vidia, was on the hunt for a job…..Money was everywhere, even in fowl belly and fowl-battie, he only had to get at it. And if you lent it out, money could breed money, a miracle.” (p. 63) He will live his coming years with the shame of a childless wife, but he makes up for this with a stubborn work ethic.
Rohini, now 19 yrs. old, stays faithful in the face of starved male desire all around her; but after two years the marriage is bewilderingly childless. With the instincts of a modern social climber she wants “more” out of life than Vidia can provide. On occasion she hints at a free-spirited readiness to give away her body to any of the overwhelming number of womanless workers on the estate.
The thought she might betray him – “Niggerman digging in your belly for gold that belong to me,” Vidia screamed, hitting Rohini in the face.” – so enrages Vidia he loses his sexual timidity and turns into a raging bull of possessiveness. Rohini runs away; she returns to him, a docile, Guianese Indian wife. At least for awhile.
What Dabydeen examines even-handedly in paragraphs of posh prose are his characters’ emotional turbulence, the scramble among the colonised to establish new norms of coexistence; to forge working and civil relationships even as ethnic “dissimilarities” keep groups & individuals suspicious and apart. Friendships are tenuous at best. Newcomers must endure the hostility of those already there. The fabric of plantation relationships gets ripped and mended then ripped again by resentment, childish beliefs and fear.
By laying bare these tensions Dabydeen helps us understand the source of the factional/ethnic strife that would engulf Guyana after Indentureship (when the Gladstones leave the Great House) and after Independence (when the Burnhams & Jagans take over.) He might also be suggesting we take into account the possibility of smaller, potentially subversive (& liberating) identities inside our enclaves of Indian & African solidarities.
Stereotypes, for instance, are set up only to be cleverly undermined in the novel. Vidia will remain focused on earning & hoarding wages, but he’s not your rum-drinking, wife-beating “coolieman”. Rohini, her mind and body already far down the road to personal emancipation, dreams of moving up in the world; she inveigles her way into the Great House and works alongside the (none too pleased) Miriam; she accepts “favors” from Gladstone and before you know it she is pregnant with his and her first child.
This single, worlds-colliding act, so much out of “Indian” character, so curiously out of step with the journey that began in a poor village outside Calcutta, sends the novel into a spiral of imagery and reflectiveness. This becomes the focus of the final section. The cast of characters, Kampka, Miriam, husband Vidia, Rohini herself step forward to offer ruminations. Author Dabydeen weighs in with creole language intensity, and contextual clues & explanations for readers to form their own judgment.
To end the novel like this, with lyrical disclosures from the characters’ interlocked lives, might disappoint readers looking for neat affirmations or uplifting virtues or heart-wringing scenes of victimhood in “Indo-Guyanese” fiction. But Rohini and Vidia are not your ordinary canefield-broken folk (still considered ‘underresearched’ and ‘underrepresented’ in our literature.) They are colonial exceptions; their lives are textured with the best poetry Dabydeen can provide. On the page they give off that surface sheen you associate with celebrity success; or a Merchant-Ivory movie.
The Counting House is dedicated to Janet and Cheddi Jagan Jr. It might not count as an “historical” novel with plausible melodramas and characters teeming with Kaywana passion and detail. Still, there’s a readership out there ever ready for serious books that “wind down” the old Empire; and scholarship always eager to debrief long-journeyed souls, or extrapolate from heightened self-conscious narratives.
Anyone else just curious about the truth of the matter when indentured labourers gambled and lost their life investment in British Guiana will have to wait for another writer to come along. Someone just a tad less prose-superfluous than author Dabydeen; a writer who perhaps has lived a little closer to his roots, a little longer in his native land. (W.W.)
Book Reviewed: The Counting House: David Dabydeen: 157 pps. Peepal Tree Press, England, 2005
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