Clem Seecharan
speaker
199 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 21 May
Clem Seecharan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Some middle-class Indians in British Guyana launched something called the Colonization Scheme.
It was headed by two very distinguished Indians, a lawyer and a legislator, a man named J.A.
Lockhoo, and a
a man named Dr. William Hewley Wharton, who was actually Indian, who was the first Indian in the Caribbean to graduate in medicine.
He studied at the University of Edinburgh.
And they thought that the Indian population was stuck at something like 42 or 43 percent, precisely at the time when no more indentured laborers would be taken into the colony.
And they felt that that left them very vulnerable.
Because unlike Mauritius, and they were citing the case of Mauritius, where the Indian population was already well over 60, maybe 70 percent, the Mauritian Indians had the instruments to begin to fight for greater political rights.
But that in British Guyana, they didn't have that numerical strength to be able to fight in the same way.
Well, with the British authorities, but any kind of political battle of that nature inevitably acquired an ethnic dimension because the Africans were not in favour of the continuation of Indian indentured labourers.
In fact, they were trying to get more Africans to come in from West Indian islands and from West Africa because they thought that...
their position in the future, their political and economic position in the future, would be gravely undermined if the Indian population was further increased.
So that created a big battle there already between the two of them.
Well, I think, Misha, I've called it a social revolution.
And in this respect, I think I was greatly influenced by Professor Brijlal, who had a great impact on me.
One of the most important things here was that...
The caste, notions of caste, were largely incompatible with the capitalist rationale, the capitalist ethos of the sugar plantations.
But the whole process, from the depots in Calcutta that Perver writes about in a very fine book,
From there, onto the ships, onto the plantations, into the lodges, the barracks, there was no recognition of one's caste background.
And therefore, people of necessity started to integrate and to create a new identity.
Showing 101–120 of 199 · page 6 of 10
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