A Bong Coolie - Poonith: A History of Bonne Aventure Estate
from Amerindian Occupation to Slavery to the East Indian Diaspora as exemplified
by a Bong Coolie, Poonith, Xlv,275
pages, 2013. Privately published Leila Jailal. Printed in Trinidad by Eniath’s Printing
Company Limited.
SUMMARY
A Bong Coolie-Poonith (2013) by
the late Harold Phekoo (1940-2012) is a well-researched work put together in an unorthodox and
surprisingly effective way. Covering ground similar to V.S.Naipaul’s fictional
work A House for Mr Biswas (1962),
it tells the history of an indentured Indian and his descendants over three
generations from 1885 to the 1960’s. This family’s history is presented along
with and within the history and evolution of Bonne Aventure (close to
Gasparillo in the county of Victoria) from the Amerindian period right down to the 1960’s, the
history and evolution of family and village reflecting in many ways the history
and evolution of Trinidad itself.
The focus is on Poonith
and his descendants, and his historical ‘coolie’ identity is proclaimed without
shame or embarrassment. By the end, the ‘ordinary’ Poonith comes over as an
extraordinary person and a representative figure.
The book is a virtual museum of the religion, folk
culture, social and economic arrangements, domestic life and household
artefacts of the Indians of Trinidad in the latter part of the nineteenth
century and the first half of the twentieth. It is not a static museum of dead
people, customs and objects however.
It is alive and moving, and
its displays adjust themselves to
register change and adaptation, and the results of the meeting of cultures.
Of special interest is
its capture of the part that song, dance, music and performance played in the
life of the Indians, and what
music meant to the indentures. It contains valuable references to and descriptions of the music of Indian
Trinidad and its sources.
The work is an interesting
example of oral history and of community history. It is told in bits and pieces by members of the community about the
daily life of the community. The
author does not use the actual words of his informants to any great extent. He stitches together in his voice the
things he has been told. Where he can, he verifies his oral information by
checking official records. When the author died, it was left to other members of the community to come
together and complete the work. Great value is added to the book by the
inclusion of a number of rare photographs, some of which have never been
published before.
This article is broken up
into seven separate parts to facilitate reading. The quotations may be skipped
but they are inserted for those who may never read the book or for those who
want to get the flavour of the book while reading one person’s interpretation
or commentary.
I. Overview of the life of Poonith
Harold constructed the life
of Poonith out of oral sources, mainly old people in the village and in the
family who knew or knew of
Poonith. His main informant was his youngest uncle Nackchadee also called Gocool. The construction is quite a
feat when you consider that Poonith left nothing in writing and nobody ever wrote
anything about him as far as is known.
Poonith came to Trinidad as an indentured labourer
on the Clipper ship Brenda in 1885.
“At Pointe-a-Pierre Railway Station three mule carts arrived to take us
to the Bonne Aventure Estate. The sun was already moving to the west and we
were subjected to the sweltering heat. We all hopped on to the carts, each of
us sitting in two rows of four facing each other. We were like prisoners devoid
of rights and feelings with nothing to say to each other except to be
subservient and to comply with our plight.”
The twenty-seven year old Poonith was allocated to
Bonne Aventure Estate. After serving out his indenture he attached himself to
the Estate as a worker, choosing never to live or work anywhere but in Bonne
Aventure. He worked as a field labourer until a happy accident (for him) gave
him an opportunity to show his
skill in handling horses. This led to his being pressed into service at the
Manager’s House as “horseman,
trainer, buggy driver, and caretaker of the harnesses and buggy”. He had
brought this talent from his work of grazing cattle and horses for the wealthy
land-owners in his Indian village of Rownia.
His main place of work in Trinidad was at the Manager’s/Owner’s Grand
House set in a well-ordered five acre plot on the corner of Aladdin Trace and
Bonne Aventure Main Road. Poonith enjoyed the great house and its extensive grounds.
He got to understand the networking of the planter families as he drove the
buggy taking them on shopping trips to San Fernando, on visits to other estates, and to parties where the butler and the cook made sure that domestics had their tots of alcohol and
food from the party.
Poonith loved most of all, to take the boss and his family
on shopping trips to San Fernando where they spent most of the day replenishing
the household domestic and other supplies and delighted in taking them to
suppliers and merchants at the San Fernando Wharves, High Street and Mucurapo
Street. It was also the profoundest of pleasures to take the Manager’s family
on inter estate visits. Most of the Planters maintained a system of friendship
through social networking. One of the Planters by prior arrangement would host
all the Planters from the surrounding estates as well as specially invited
guests to a grand afternoon party generally held on a Sunday afternoon with
music, dancing, drinking, merrymaking and feasting very often late into the
night. These parties, according to my grandfather, would have touches and
characteristics of the nationality of the host. For example, the proprietor of Madion Estate
was of French origin and his party was famous for a wide variety of French
cuisine and cheeses; one cheese Poonith tasted for the first time in his life
was called “rotten cheese” or gorgonzola served with pieces of bread called a
French Stick with the famous French wine, Beaujolais. The music would be
dominated by the accordion. The owner of the Harmony Hall Estate was English
and his party had tinges of English characteristics. The Manager of the
Williamsville Estate was Scottish and his party was the wildest of them all
with music supplied by bag pipes accompanied by the finest of Highland folk
dancing and believe it, the drink was the “wee dram” of Scottish whiskey. In these wild parties there was good evidence
to believe that wife swapping, lesbianism and homosexuality were all part of
the life styles of some of the elites. While the masters and mistresses were
busy frolicking, the buggy men joined with the domestics, the butler and the
cook and also had a small party of our own. Although alcoholic beverages were
strictly tabooed, with the cunning of the cook and the butler, we were able to have a couple of
tots and some of the Master’s food followed through their own styles of merrymaking.
(p.116)
Unlike his son who took over the job of buggyman
later, Poonith was neither intimidated by the planter life-styles nor stirred to imitation. The move from
the fields to the Grand House did not bring an increase in earnings. When he
retired medically unfit in 1915 he owned only what frugality had allowed him to
purchase. There was no pension or golden send-off except that his job was passed on to his oldest son
Phekoo. (p.117)
But there was a house for Mr
Poonith. In 1888, Poonith put an end to the horrors of barrackroom life by
building, with the help and
blessings of the Shivanarayanee Sect to which he belonged, his own tapia
and grass-covered ajoupa that would “create a peaceful private space of his own
in which he could live peacefully, joyfully and lovingly.” (102-103) The ajoupa
blended naturally with the surrounding green and became the seat of the Poonith
extended family. Poonith was the centre. He reigned as patriarch. He decided
the menu, made policy, and imposed order and degree. As holder of the memories
of the tribe, story-teller and entertainer up to the 1930’s, he gathered them
around him often.
Evening pastimes and
entertainment centered on Poonith himself who would talk about his upbringing. He was schooled in an oral
tradition which placed much emphasis on verbal communication, singing, dancing and storytelling all of
which required amazing memory and powers of recall. Story telling time took
place mainly on evenings just before bedtime and particularly during periods of
inclement weather which curtailed outdoor activities. Poonith kept his family
entertained by enacting favorite family kahanies or stories which were passed
on to him through a long line involving generation after generation from times
immemorial. These stories had a rich variable flavor involving music, singing
and dancing, humor, stories of deep historical, moral and ethical significance – all intended to set the pace of
acceptable family behavior. p.164
Poonith spent his last
moment in the presence of his extended family. The final Samskar was performed
by the Shivnarayanee Mahant . The eldest son Phekoo was chief mourner. The funeral was a grand
Shivanarayanee affair conducted with due solemnity; and the life of
the departed was celebrated with tassa drumming, singing and dancing. (See p. 199-200 )
II. Poonith’s Illumination
(The
argument here is that Poonith’s
success is not a materialistic one)
Poonith knew that he was being taken advantage of by
his employers, but this did not affect the thoroughness with which he performed
what he regarded as his duty. According to Harold, Poonith approached his work
“through the enterprising spirit of ‘seva’ , service to fellow human beings,
not for reward or for recognition but for its own sake …” (p.161). From the
reports of his youngest uncle Nackchadee, Harold saw that Poonith lived in the certain knowledge that “extra
powers are in the mind of man”; held the conviction that suffering in the
world is unchanging; and lived the belief that pain
and suffering are a passage to illumination:
He was convinced that life has
meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable one. The little
freedom he possessed was to find meaning in doing whatever he was asked and
whatever he experienced in the light of unchangeable suffering. Poonith found
the meaning of life by doing his daily task, by experiencing the value of the nature
of his work through pain and suffering. He found that through the medium of pain he was able to dwell in
the “within” where there was a store house of relief in coping with the
drudgery of work on an ongoing basis. (p.162)
The success Harold is
celebrating is not the success of someone who pursued money power and the love
of women. It is a spiritual
success, one deeply conditioned by ancestral religion and philosophy.
III. Falling Apart
(After
the death of Poonith, the extended family broke up into nuclear families in
response to social change; the next two generations as represented by Phekoo
and then his son Harold are discussed.)
Writing seventy-five years
later about the funeral of his grandfather, Harold ruefully observes: “The ritualistic
practices of celebrating samskars and all the traditional pujas exist even at
this moment but are enacted as family conventions sometimes devoid of meaning
to younger Hindus, as they are not very well explained by officiating priests or
Mahants.”
On the death of Poonith, Phekoo became head of the
extended family: “My grandfather had passed away in 1933
and for the first time Father had to shoulder the full responsibility of
conducting his own affairs. Grandfather had carved out a template for survival
and unhesitatingly passed on worthwhile techniques for survival to his
sons.”p.213. The second part of the book from chapter 36 to chapter 41 covers
the second generation and centres on Phekoo’s family. Harold’s
descriptions of his father Phekoo’s lifestyles and activities are based largely
upon his own experience of Phekoo as father, food crop farmer, canefarmer,
coconut grower and entrepreneur. They show Pekhoo as a descendant continuing
the family traditions but a descendant who cannot and perhaps does not want to
resist change; and who, in any case, does not have the cultural self-confidence
of Poonith and the clarity about his identity to negotiate on equal terms with
change.
As the family grew, people in Poonith’s small house
began to get in one another’s way and on one another’s nerves. After the
patriarch’s death, the deteriorating
house was not repaired or preserved. As nuclear families began to break out in
the area, the idea of using the savings accrued from living in the extended
family to branch out on their own entered the minds of Poonith’s sons. (201)
When, with the cooperation of his brothers, and in keeping with the dictates
of Poonith himself, Pheeko moved
into his unique wooden house in Marjadsingh’s Lands in 1939, it was confirmation
that Poonith’s family were ready to accept a change from the old way. They
would respect what their father’s establishment had done for them, and maintain
kinship ties but without all living in the same house or on the same compound.
Harold cites frequent visits,
consultations on important matters, help in the planting and reaping of crops, and financial cooperation.
Poonith had been an elder of the Shivanarayanee Sect, a
democratized form of Hinduism he had followed in Rownia that used the teachings
of Guru Anyas “as a guide to becoming individuals of repute irrespective of
caste distinctions and status in life”. Phekoo stayed with the sect in his
fashion, but time was now secular, it was moving faster than in the old days
and religion did not necessarily mean spirituality.
Phekoo took on the role of story-teller to the family but his
audience was not the extended family and there was no ritually-appointed time
and place as in the days of the patriarch. He adhered to Poonith’s belief in the arranged marriage,
but was more absorbed in the marriages of his three daughters than
in those of his sons. There is nothing in the weddings of Phekoo’s children to match the joy of the marriage of
Poonith’s youngest son Nackchadee in 1926. Harold’s mother Mahadaya told him
about the maticoor with Shivanaraynee ladies singing and dancing Bhojpuri
songs. Ironically, it was Phekoo who told Harold about that joyful day for the
family and the community:
Scenes were enacted against specially prepared props and the
play was called the Raja Harrischandra Dance. They portrayed snapshots of real
life situations such as courtship, marriage and life thereafter. The actors
hailed from a diverse background of the descendants of street performers in the
Indian tradition and included actors specially noted for their specific skills
in singing, dancing, musical abilities and talents such as juggling and
acrobatics.
Costuming was carefully designed and the choreographer used
a blaze of color to effect stage presentations to fit the expectations of the
pleasure of the audience.
Singing and musical presentations represented the soul of
Indian culture which witnessed interesting variations in styles of
presentation. The setting of the play was typical as the bride and groom were
the representative king and queen, resident in their palace. It was the duty of
the artistes to entertain them in their domain amidst invited guests. The
messages of each scene were directly conveyed through the complexity of voice
intonation, mudras, singing and dancing with added colourful facial make up.
The opening scene depicted the bride groom on his horse
entering the village amidst a fanfare of shehnai music. After all the due
ritualistic welcoming of the bridegroom by the host the bridegroom refused to
alight from his horse and in the flamboyance of a cow boy style the queen’s
brother skilfully roped him off his horse which was a source of great laughter
amongst the receptive audience.
For the scene which depicted the consummation of the
marriage, instead of the groom leading off the circumnabulation of the
sacred fire in a clock wise direction, he commenced in a reverse fashion moving backwards.
One other scene which grasped my childhood memory was the
one in which the bride was an expectant mother. Amidst the splendor of Bangra music and dancing there was the
symbolic honoring of the new arrival of “pota” presumably a boy child and with
prayers of a safe delivery, gifts were given. The arrival of a baby boy was portrayed as Lord
Krishna with special mythical powers that were able to inflict just punishment
to those who victimized their parents.
As a brief comment on the style of presentation, it was not
typical of any one Indian traditional style but a combination of Odissi,
Manipuri, Kathak, Bharathnatyam and many more mudras with costume styling taken from renowned folk performances. (156-157)
Of the boys’
weddings, only Chautee’s had the ceremony, solemnity, display, drumming,
dancing and singing as of yore (p.218). But that marriage came to a bad end.
The other sons had small family- sized table weddings; and one of them got
married at the Registry office in San Fernando. Harold returned from England in
1981 without his four children and Sylvia Ragoo with whom he had what he calls
an “association”.
The world was changing fast. Harold observes without criticizing
that Phekoo was moving up: “In
hindsight, the exposure he gained
by being in the company of the circle of elitist Planters served him in good
stead along the road to prosperity. He grew to become one of the larger cane
farmers with superb managerial skills and a dogged love for the soil and hard
work. I have seen Father’s overflowing joy when at the beginning of the crop
time he would plough his fields and allow the sun to roast the soil free of all
harmful insects, termites etc and upon arrival of the April showers the soil
gave off the richest of aromas intoxicating enough to make Father dance with
the glee of immense joy shouting; ‘I love the smell of the soil’’. (p.204)
Everything hasn’t changed but Phekoo is the new man. In the nuclear family, Harold
did not thrive on the way the new
economic man fathered him. Harold is only
saved from the food crop business because his mother reminds Phekoo that
Poonith left instructions that all his grandchildren should be sent to school.
Two of his sons had disappointed Phekoo as regards education. Harold only got
Phekoo’s permission to go to secondary
school when the boy was able to show that he could help to pay his way.
The mobile Phekoo is a successful food crop producer; a big cane
farmer, and the best copra
producer of 1942. It is not for nothing that he was “selected by his peers as a
model entrepreneur in our village”. (207) Although Phekoo is as resolute as his
father in the pursuit of his goals,
he tastes a different kind of success from his father and he pays a
human price. Harold tries to be cool in his assessment:
Phekoo’s lifestyle can be described as puritanical which took its cue
from being employed as a buggy driver…Being absorbed in service of his masters,
he was therefore not free like others in the village to take part either in
hunting , fishing, bird –catching or gambling.He did not even have the time to
join the local cricket club, or do like his father who grew his own ganja or
marijuana and smoked his pipes openly. p.206.
The third
section runs from Chapter 42 to the end of the book and presents the third generation, not a family this time but Phekoo’s individualized son Harold.
Chapter 42 describes Harold’s
childhood; his years at Bonne Aventure CM School; some of the self-seeking
of the better off Presbyterians; and the secondary school education he was
determined to get : “I was conditioned into believing in myself and at the back
of my mind I knew that the canefield was patiently awaiting my return.” He was
cheated of a chance to go to Naparima College so he had to go to a College that was less
hallowed. He left Kenley College
to benefit from the teaching skills of Mr Parray Ramnarine who was just
starting his St John’s College in San Fernando. At the end of this chapter, Harold
age 21 is turning his back on the canefields and waving goodbye to family and friends.
Frustrated by
bleak economic prospects, and with a thirst for learning and for England inspired by Parray Ramnarine he made his journey to an expectation
on a Dutch cargo/passenger vessel ‘The Prince of the Netherlands’. He had as
sole jahaji a Mr Bachan Boodram who had been a
fellow student at Mr Ramnarine’s
St John’s College. Harold summarises his activities in England thus in
the last sentence of Chapter 42: “I worked slowly and progressively into
becoming a business entrepreneur.”
The story as
story really ends in this Chapter.
The book tells us little or
nothing about Harold’s life in England or about what he calls his “association”
with Sylvia Ragoo with whom he had four children. Harold returned to Trinidad
in 1981, met Leila Jailal in 1982, and they went into a meat business in Couva
in 1983 from which he retired in 1999. There are no references to the death or funeral of Phekoo or to
Harold’s business activities. It is likely that he was gathering material for
this book and he appears to have written some poems. He visited Mr Ramnarine,in
2010 and about the same time he found a number of valuable documents including
Phekoo’s tenancy agreement of 1956 with St Madeleine Sugar Company and Poonith’s
Colonial immigration form and his Certificate (“free paper”?) dated July 18,
1885. There is nothing else about his life between 1982 and the time of his
death. Would Harold have gone into all this if he had lived or did he decide on
his subject, settle on his title
and determine to stick to that?
IV. All that History
( The history of
Bonne Aventure in general and of the Indians in Bonne Aventure. This is not a dry as dust section. As part of the history it shows the travails of the Indians and the institutions - social, cultural and religious that held them together. Poonith and his immediate descendants are active in this chapter.)
Harold tells us
that the idea of the book came to
him when he was twelve years old (which was in 1952). In the Acknowledgements,
he gives thanks for “the gift” of kidney failure which offered him a last
chance to set about “resurrecting that childhood dream of mine which was to
uncover my genealogy and most importantly the historical growth and development
of Lavantee or Bonne Aventure where I was born”.(p.3) [Note the word 'resurrect', which comes into play when Harold's reasons for going over Poonith's life are speculated upon]
He knew there were special
difficulties in writing a history of Bonne Aventure, and that the work would
take long : “The community of Bonne Aventure
belonged to an oral tradition with no written documentation of its historical
past. This publication consists of individualized accounts rendered by many
senior citizens giving intricate details of over two hundred years of the
history of Lavantee and Bonne Aventure and its environs.” (p.3) [Note: ‘Lavantee’
is probably related to Old French ‘eventer’ meaning to let out or expose to air hence, for
us, ‘opening’ or ‘prospect’. The
name ‘Bonne Aventure’ given by Lewis Pantin who established the estate in the
early 1800’s can be said to retain the sense of the original name. ]
It would be difficult
enough to write the history of what
was really an obscure village. It
would be harder still because Harold wanted the work to reflect a discovery he had made in putting together the
intricate account of Poonith’s life:
“What was most interesting was that his
life story influenced at the core and revealed or uncovered in a unique way the
very history of Bonne Aventure and its environs. In other words, Poonith’s daily activities became history
itself.” ( xli)
Harold naturally formed strong bonds with the Bonne
Aventure into which he was born
and he found that Poonith’s arranged marriage to it, as it were, had led
to a lasting love. It is true that to the end Poonith nursed a dream to make a fleeting return
to Rownia, the village of his birth, but
“Poonith developed a special love for Bonne Aventure. He felt within his
psyche the vibrations of the past , the tamasha of the present and the
promising future. He became attached by family ties , the availability of work and
the development of fibrous roots which bound him fixedly to Lavantee” p. 57-58
Not surprisingly, therefore, thirty-five of the
forty-nine chapters are about the
work and life of Poonith in the
matrix of the Bonne Aventure Estate
and the village of Bonne
Aventure.
Even when we are focused on Poonith, we are never allowed to forget Bonne
Aventure. The longest chapter by far in the book is Chapter 11 ‘History of Lavantee and the Bonne Aventure
Estate.’ Incidentally, Harold drops
this chapter into the book when we are not looking for it.
This is how it happens. In Chapter 10, the indentureds are about to commence
their first day’s work on the Bonne Aventure Estate. They feel something in the
air, in the quality of light, in the clouds:
As we gazed around we observed
that the sun was just about to peep out of an overcast sky. It was wet and damp
and there was a strange, uncomfortable feeling which engulfed us. There was an unusual stillness
and the sugar cane field stood silently like soldiers awaiting the next
command. In the distant fields there were a few isolated coconut palm trees,
evidence of sugar diversification. They were heavily laden and offered us a
moment’s silence before we commenced our tasks. Such silence was occasionally
broken by the barking and howling of dogs and immediately above our heads were a
flock of parrots speaking with one another on their way to their feeding
grounds. P.39
Harold leaves the indentureds right there holding
their brushing cutlasses and
crooksticks in the midst of
portents, while he presents the long Chapter 11 which concentrates on Bonne
Aventure as village and estate. Bonne Aventure and its environs are not detachable from the whole region of estates stretching in all directions from the
Gulf and Pointe-a-Pierre reaching across the Churchill Roosevelt
Highway and including more estates up to Bonne Aventure. Harold does not expand
on it sufficiently perhaps, but the history of Bonne Aventure and the
surrounding cane-lands is strongly affected by the encroachment
of oil upon sugar and the
impacts upon people and place of
the refining operations spreading outwards from Pointe-a-Pierre in the early
decades of the twentieth century.
Harold’s research into the history of Bonne Aventure
and its environs is painstaking, comprehensive, and in general reliable. All
the social cultural and political changes are covered including
changes in patterns of settlement,
the shifts in the distribution of religions, and the tensions between free
Africans and the Indians who were being used to deny them better wages and
working conditions.
From the evidence that came to him, Harold saw a
great positive in the African presence for the meeting of cultures and the
making of Bonne Aventure: “Within the community of Bonne Aventure,
the African slaves represented a potent force drawing from their multi- faceted
traditional cultures which tightly meshed with the Carnival spirit. They had
within their culture the age old traditions of moving in circles with their colorful costumes and
indigenous masks. Circulating through villages had a religious significance
mainly to bring good fortune, healing to their pressing problems of famine and drought, and to appease the spirit of the dead
in helping in the transition to a better world. “ p. 186
The history of Bonne Aventure written by Harold
suggests that this village experienced the meeting of peoples and cultures
which is the Trinidad experience. In his Introduction p.xliii-xlv, the late Parray Ramnarine praised this aspect of
the book: “Harold wanted to tell the untold
stories about all our peoples and all of us. Hindus, Muslims, Christians, East
Indians, Africans, Chinese and all else. He wanted to show us the full picture
of life at those times of which he writes , and about how we have travelled up
to this point in time.”
The chapter on Bonne Aventure includes a subsection on the
‘History of Education in Bonne
Aventure’: a general account of the provision of primary education informed
by Harold’s revolutionary belief that the primary school is the base and
foundation of the education system and the only guarantee of a just and
democratic society; an appreciative but critically measured account of the
Presbyterian mission of educating Indians at a time when nobody seems to have
thought it necessary; and a
tribute to the Bonne Aventure CM School for the role it played in a process
that produced such fine fruit even though its favouritism towards the children
of elders and members of the Church (232)
denied him the opportunity to attend Naparima College:
The influence of the school was felt throughout the village and
transformed the community of mainly sugarcane peasants and small contract
farmers into a society of young entrepreneurs, nurtured by dedicated
teachers. . The school recorded a movement of upward
social mobility in the personalities of teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers,
tradesmen, politicians, entrepreneurs; men and women who became the foundation
of nation building. (74)
In another sub-section, ‘The Hindus in Bonne
Aventure’, there is a realistic assessment of the challenges to identity and
religion faced by young Hindus. The Shivanarayanee Sect that Poonith belonged to
was in the majority in Bonne Aventure in the days of Poonith (its head was a
member of the panchayat), and there
was no stigma attached to Kali worship. The Sect lost ground as Hindus became
better off and more anxious to seem respectable. At a certain point Poonith’s
son made open declaration that he was not going to make sacrifices to Kali
anymore. Harold writes about “the slow loss of religion
and culture among the Hindus, about the revival that took place (incidentally
pushing Shiva Narayanee to the fringe), and about more recent challenges by more
aggressive and evangelical Christian sects. There is no hatred in this, only
encouragement to Hindus to see that you did not have to shed your religion to
take part as an equal member in the social, economic and political process.
(79)
Harold acknowledges the help given by the planters
to the Presbyterian mission but in
this chapter as throughout the book he finds the planters flouting the
indenture agreements to squeeze more time out of the workers, and to pay them less money. They seem to have discouraged remittances to
family in India and did their best to prevent too many immigrants from leaving for
India at the same time. They schemed to settle Indians on nearby plots of land in order to
encourage them to form attachments and develop roots so that they would not
move to other estates or claim their return passages when the time came. This
policy took its grossest form with
the opening up of what the Indians called Dangla Bangar “the road or way to derelict or unwanted
lands” where the poor were doomed to appalling slum existence:
It was located in the vicinity
of the animal pens which housed bison and mules. It was also used by the Bonne
Aventure Estate to dump the carcasses of dead animals. This area, located at the foot of the
Caratal Hills, was lightly covered with black sage and guava trees interspersed
with thick patches of needle grass with heavier wood patches in the valley
areas. Agriculturally, this area was of little or no value to the Estate as the
soil cover was thin, sandy in composition and acidic and not aptly suited for
the cultivation of sugar cane or general gardening . (118)
It was in Dangla Bangar, however, that Poonith’s
Shivanarayanee Sect was based, and it was here that, with their help and
blessing, he built his tapia house in 1898.
Harold follows up the history of Bonne Aventure with
Chapter 12 entitled ‘Problems Experienced by the Indentureds on the Bonne
Aventure Estate’. It was close to a declaration of the need for political action and it
reminds us that there were rumblings from the indentureds, that the way was
being prepared for political action. Harold does not connect all of this to the
Muharram Massacre or Hosay Riots of 1884 and he does not register the formation
of the East Indian National Association in Princes Town (1898) or the East
Indian National Congress in Couva after that. It would have been
interesting to know how the people of Bonne Aventure felt about such
developments. But one of the philosophies in the book is to recognize your
blessings, and Harold makes no bones about the achievements of Indians and
their contributions to the development of Bonne Aventure:
The East Indians labored and
contributed substantially to the growth and development of Bonne Aventure. By
sheer numbers they were responsible for increased demand and they were
innovative in a variety of ways such as in the growing of food and devising the
necessary wherewithal, such as tools and equipment, necessary for survival in the process of tilling the land.
Many became small cane farmers, businessmen, merchants and shop keepers. They
became self sufficient in the production of rice which they considered as the
safest form of insurance against hunger. Poonith remarked that once rice was available it was not too
difficult to find some “talkari” even though it was bhagee . p. 55
Harold turns directly to the social institutions of Bonne Aventure in Chapter 25 ‘Money
Lending in Bonne Aventure’ ,Chapter
24 ‘Child Labour in the Bonne Aventure Estate’, Chapter 23 ‘Child
Marriages’ and Chapter 22 ‘The Panchayat System in Bonne Aventure’. This
chapter includes a description of the ‘chaupal’, a regular forum and gathering
of all villagers, “the founding bedrock for the functioning of grass –root
democracy”, and an oral database for the collecting and transmission of technical information and news.
The titles of these chapters might frighten off a
reader who is looking for story, but story is what you get when you read
them, for in these accounts
Phekoo invariably shows the Poonith family or other individuals involved with
the institutions. Poonith used the chaupal with good results as “a Vivah Sabha or a
marriage mart to announce to the public his intention to get his granddaughter
married.” And the Poonith family’s involvement animates Phekoo’s description of
the panchayat which was vibrant in Poonith’s day.
Harold’s book is at pains to inform us that these institutions were
in existence in the India from which the emigrants came, and in their new place they functioned to hold the
Indians together as families and as members of a community. This was crucial in a society that made no concession to their customs and traditions, and for a long
time gave them no access to political power, influence or equal opportunity.
The book provides some telling instances of the
subscribing of the Poonith family to the moral authority and the power of the panchayat. which was vibrant in early
Bonne Aventure. Poonith’s oldest son, Phekoo was hauled
before the Panchayat for having “an extra marital affair with Nassiban who was
the daughter of an orthodox Islamic family and who bore him a son. The child
was sent to his father, and my mother, Mahadayah, wife of Phekoo who willingly
took care of the child for a while. Nassiban was unable to withstand the
anguish of being separated from her child; she defied her family and reclaimed
her child. Nassiban’s father referred this matter to the Panchayat, and Phekoo
was ordered to pay a child support fee of one dollar per month.” (131) This compressed little story is one of several in
Harold’s book that offer us intimate and tantalizing cross-sections of life in Bonne Aventure.
The
panchayat seems to have been
flexible. Poonith’s wife had died in childbirth in 1910. In 1913 the panchayat
agreed to his marriage to a widow identified in the book as "Etwaria’s mother". In another case they conducted professionally and with humanitarian concern a
long discussion on the pros and cons of child marriage . The panchayat was
considering the application of Poonith to marry his first two sons to two sisters from an
impoverished family. “Taking into account the homeless plight of Mahadaya and
Sahadaya, the fact that they were
left with one ailing parent, and the fact that Poonith was willing to adopt the
girls as virtually his own daughters, the Panchayat voted in favour of the
children’s marriages in this case.” (136)
Just as
significant for our understanding of how important the transferred institutions
were for the development of the indentures and their descendants, we notice that in 1910 the panchayat
held a major debate (139-143): "Be it resolved that East Indian parents should
be encouraged to send their
children to school instead of joining the Child Labour gang of the Bonne
Aventure Estate". Such child gangs were common in the period of slavery. A
representative of the estate defended the continuation of the practice on the ground that “the owner had a social, moral
and ethical responsibility to create and maintain full employment for all his
employees”. Harold lets us know that Mrs Sheldon the wife of the estate manager
was a member of the panchayat by invitation. To the surprise of many, she
supported the motion, doing so with wit, liveliness and sound reasoning. Mr Bedaysee
represented the views of parents
with passion and analytic rigour.
The matter
had been brought to the panchayat by Poonith’s youngest son Nackchadee who, in
the closing contribution, called
for the drawing up of a charter of
children’s rights and freedoms. By a brilliant stroke, Naka put the fear of slavery among the
audience. He read, one after the other, without comment a notice of 1833 offering a reward for
the recapture of runaway slaves and a recent one of 1910 for the capture of two
runaway Indian labourers. The panch had no hesitation in adopting the motion.
V. All the Aeons
(the drift of this section is
indicated in its first three lines)
Although Harold’s book is an attempt to present
history, its ‘history’ is allowed to proceed in the shadow of a humbling and
liberating consciousness of Time or Eternity. History is virtually displaced by
Time.
A Bong Coolie- Poonith tells us a lot about its own time and it is palpably rooted in a
particular place whose features are presented to us with precision and with realistic
descriptions. But it often reads like a book steeped in several ages or aeons.
The account of Bonne Aventure’s development begins
with the Amerindians and proceeds to a careful survey of all the peoples who
came: why, when, what they
did, and where they went. Harold
describes this in such a way that you feel Bonne Aventure with its meeting of
peoples and cultures is a code word for Trinidad.
But symbolic dimensions open up. The cruel
exploitation in quick succession of Amerindians, Africans, and Indians is
recounted, and before you can figure it out you are not responding to Bonne
Aventure or to imperialist exploitation alone but to something almost unchangeable - a ubiquitous landscape of
pain and suffering. I don’t know if Harold intended this but no author would
want to deny the interesting things that a good reader finds in his book. At its best this is for me
a book about presences - in the air, under the ground, and in the consciousness
of men and women: the sweat of labouring Indians dripping down to mix with the bones of
slaves already kneaded by time into the bones of the Amerindians, victims of the first
and most comprehensive genocide in recorded history. Their dust shining in the
sun. In the sky the voices of the parrots, birds reputed to host the dead, voices
from the future and the past, sweeping over the heads of the indentureds on
their first day in the killing fields. The footfall of the Amerindians whose
tracks were used to penetrate to the secrets of the country and which underlie
the layers of bridle paths and roads that came later. The free Africans passing
in and out of the plantation as casual labour, or secreting themselves in the
surrounding Crown lands as squatters,
their drums reaching out in the night. And Rownia too. In Rownia, Poonith had slaved, herding cows and
horses for the rich, and in Kolkata he experienced slum life as horrific as in
the barracks and Dangla Bangar. One of the effects of Harold’s account of
Poonith’s growing up in Rownia is to make the village another one of the places
of pain and suffering on earth and
in history.
The whole area in Harold’s account is replete with
all the aeons, ghosts of all times and places, a landscape of pain and
suffering, intimating to the indentures that it was always so and will always
be so. In passing through the pain and the suffering they will find and
make their soul.
VI . Harold as Agent and Vessel
(Harold was a poet and some of
the inspiration for his book came to him from unidentifiable sources. It is
argued that Harold came to get the feel of Poonith so completely that at times
he is Poonith.)
Harold’s book
is a demonstration of the
importance of oral history in countries like ours. In Chapter 46 he lists his
sources and explains what each person
in their life and in their report contributed to the making of the book.
He depends upon oral sources to give focus and immediacy to his recap of the history
of Bonne Aventure and its environs and to bring Poonith into our consciousness.
Harold wrote
that “Poonith’s daily activities became history itself.” When you see how
much the live sources contribute
to the book, you realize that this
is not just oral history stitched together by the industry of one man. This is
community history lived and told by the community. Harold is not simply an individual author writing a book. He
is an agent of the community who
share in the making of the history and the writing of it.
The idea of
agency is far-reaching, and that is what I want to look at now.
The poems in
the book are crucial to the
meaning and value of the book. When you read them you realize that Harold had
one of the prime capacities of the artist. He was a vessel chosen to receive
inspiration. The sources Harold used to make up his book are identified by the researcher. But there is more in it than that. I think that in groping for
Poonith’s story Harold was guided by voices that entered his head from unidentifiable sources. The
same voices that inspired the poems.
Poonith was
seven years dead when Harold was born. He never knew the living Poonith. Harold’s
father Phekoo was an important
source not only for things Poonith might have said or done but also for
conveying impressions of the one whose place he took as head of the extended
family.But the main informant was his uncle Nackchadee, Nacka, sometimes called
Gocool (1907- 1995) who appears to have listened to Poonith, studied him, and
remembered more about him than anybody else. It is Nackchadee’s reportage that
allows Harold to work out Poonith’s way of seeing himself in the world:
Poonith left a verbal legacy of
the seeds of life’s experiences with his family and this was patiently
communicated to his youngest son Nackchadee. From day one, it was the ambition
of Poonith to transform himself to do well in the light of pervading difficult circumstances.
He took his cue from the goldmine of India’s spiritual heritage of re
programming the human character. This he accomplished mainly through the
concept of “Sadhana”,188 persistent effort in attaining a specific goal. This idea was used
individually to purge his weaknesses and vices which were likely to interfere
with imbibing correct human values irrespective of “prarabhda”, inherited
conditions and tendencies, Purushartha189 that is, effort to take care of one’s thoughts followed by
actions taking care of themselves. The principle follows that through thoughts
you can sow an action and reap a tendency; from a tendency a habit in which the
seeds are sown for character building and reap a destiny. It followed that
destiny was of one’s own creation.
p. 161
Neither of
these informants tried to reproduce Poonith’s speech so we don’t know when he
spoke bhojpuri or when he spoke a form of English and how mixed the two became.
Harold is careful not to attempt to put Phekoo before us in the way a novelist
would create a character. Harold got the facts but more than that he got the
feel of Poonith. The bits and pieces of identifiable information Harold received were digested and fused with
whatever came from the fusion of facts and material from unidentifiable sources. The process turned Harold into
Poonith when he was writing about
Poonith. This may not have been cultivated or even noticed by Harold. Harold impersonated
Poonith quite deliberately in some of the poems, where the poet or person
speaking is Poonith. But there is more than impersonation at stake. It is as if
the seeds and germs that entered Harold grew a Poonith inside Harold and the grandson who came
to know the Poonith he had never met better than any of those who actually knew him. He knew what Poonith would think and
feel, he understood Poonith’s religious and philosophical views. At certain
moments in the book, often without knowing it, Harold is Poonith.
VII. Till I Collect
(Harold’s putting together of
the book happened at a time when he needed to find himself. Writing and
learning about Poonith was a voyage of self-discovery.)
In an email of May 28, 2013 Leila Jailal wrote in response to a general query about Harold and Phekoo that Harold “always said his father was a generous person to family members and villagers but not to children”. She also reported that he “talked about his admiration for Poonith and was curious about the family he left behind in India, and in his research found out that he has a grandson in India but very old and weak”, now most likely dead.
Parray Ramnarine saw that the book was as much about Harold as about Poonith . He says perceptively in his Introduction that “the one distinguished and most significant feature is a
passionate spirit that seeks perfection in thought, word and deed.” We see that
in Harold’s poems.
It is not speculation that young Harold was on the lookout for mentors. At Bonne Aventure CM School he looked
up to the highly evolved Mr
Narinesingh: “He was a gentleman of the highest order; he came from Hindu
background and was closest to the pulse of the ordinary folk in the village. He
was very much acquainted with the trials and tribulations of his students,
their Hindu beliefs and practices and in particular the crossover issues which
we Hindus and Moslems were confronted with in the process of attending a
Presbyterian School whose aims and aspirations were concentrated indirectly on
conversion. He had an in depth understanding of our poverty, deprivation, poor
housing conditions and all the social and psychological ills and in particular
the wishes of Hindu parents which bedevilled us and militated adversely against
our educative potential. His conscious efforts were designed to build bridges
across these gaps. He got us to believe in ourselves and motivated us into
learning, using both orthodox and unorthodox methods…” (232).[It would be interesting to identify this Mr Narinesingh] At the secondary
school level he found Mr Parray Ramnarine who he visited fifty years after leaving
school, sharing with the unforgotten teacher his poem ‘In Tribute to an
Eminent Teacher, Parray Ramnarine’. (p 235-237)
We have seen
Phekoo’s attitude to his sons and the resistance he put up to Harold’s
education. Harold tells us that it was his sister Janey more than anybody else
who shaped him into what he was to become. On the ship taking him to England he
discovered “a mentor educationally” who employed him for four months until he took the bold step of entering
London.
It is
reasonable to think that it was an alienated Harold who journeyed to England in
1961. This journey comes over as a
compressed analogue of the indenture passage: “As the boat sailed out of the
Port of Spain harbour, the waters were rough and most of us fell prey to
vomiting and sea-sickness. This lasted through the twelve day journey with
special baksheesh to the end with gale force winds as we crossed the Bay of
Biscay.” Harold’s struggles and searchings in London are like the struggles
with barrackyard existence and the searchings of the indentures: “The
complexities of that period of my existence took me at first to the noble quest
of learning, traumas of daily living at the basest level of poverty, failure in
the handling of new found freedoms and the dogged determination to shake off
the ugly shackles of poverty. I worked slowly and progressively into becoming a
business entrepreneur.”
But the son
of Phekoo was also the grandson of Poonith. His return journey to Trinidad
without wife and without child was the beginning of his true arrival. My
reasons for saying this relate to the decision to include Harold’s poems as
Chapter 45 and to name it ‘Epilogue of the Poonith Saga’. I don’t know if this
was Harold’s decision. Whoever did it
did what was right for our understanding of the book and its author. [Post-script A recent comment from Leila Jailal on this article states: "The poems were not part of the book as I read the script many times. About 5 weeks after his passing I was looking for a business document on his computer and came across the poems. I was shattered for days for not having the opportunity to discuss the poems with him. The only one I knew about is 'A Tribute to an Eminent Teacher'. "
The great themes and motifs in human life and art
– themes like departures and arrivals , births and deaths, continuity and
change , history and Time, season and eternity are the themes that Harold worried over in his poems. In
the poems you find an interfusion of all the ‘opposites’ that set us against
our selves and one another and cut
us off from the Universe:
Fleetingly I’m
blood, flesh and bone,
Just as I’m
the body and mind,
I’m the
firmament, the space, the sun too
Just as a
blade of grass, the earth, the trees, the stump am I,
In the
vastness of the forest, the ocean, the mountains, all an illusive scam
Know I the
non-dual eternal truth
In whose will
all activities and things are strung
For I’m
consciousness, the essence of
truth,
All in One,
One in All.
This consciousness should give us perspective and
some detachment, and free us from
obsession. That is what it did for
Poonith according to Harold’s poem ‘Epilogue of the Poonith Saga’. In this
poem, Harold allows the old man to go over in modern idiom the passages of his life between Rownia the village of
his birth and Bonne Aventure where he died:
Bound
by the pride of place to Karmic duties,
I’ve done that which was ordained of me;
I’ve walked the walk, talked the talk.
Done willingly whatever was required of
me in given circumstances
Without
hankering for the fruit,
But
the fulfillment of life’s dream in the Infinite Oneness.
Be
vigilant for the end of freedom is wisdom,
The
remnant of culture is perfection,
The
crowning glory of knowledge is love,
And
the end of life’s experiences is simply character.
That my offspring, my grand children
Would adequately
shoulder the burdens
Of worthwhile existences,
Ever present the memories of the enigma of the East Indian
Diaspora.
I surmise that after Harold's return to Trinidad in 1981, a long-drawn out process began. His own
personal life had taken some hard knocks. The island he returned to was not
heaven. The childhood project awoke. He began to engage with Poonith. He began to speak for Poonith. He began to write his poems.
It is possible and rewarding to think of Harold’s research
into Poonith’s life as more than an act of piety. He was going over Poonith's life but he was piecing together his own. Constructing Poonith's life was personal to Harold. It was a mental
journey or pilgrimage, a quest for knowledge and a voyage of self-discovery of the kind essayed by the Guyanese poet Martin Carter in the poem 'Till I Collect'. Afraid at first at what he might "resurrect to light", he eventually takes courage:
My course I set, I give myself the wind
to navigate the island of the stars
till I collect my scattered skeleton
till I collect...
