Sat – the good, bad and ugly

EDMUND NARINE

SATNARAYAN MAHARAJ, tenacious fighter for Hindu equal rights in a hostile Afrocentric society, has departed; passed on to join the pantheon of TT’s most illustrious ethnocentric promoters, foremost among them Eric Williams, Rudranath Capildeo, Bhadase Maraj, men reacting to zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, who could see only the empowerment of their own ethnic communities as compared to a quest for the illusive, all-inclusive and harmonious TT we so desire and truly deserve.

Maharaj was born April 17, 1931, 86 years after the Fatel Razack sailed from Calcutta to drop anchor in the Gulf of Paria on May 30, 1845, to unload the first human cargo of Hindus and Muslims destined for cane-cutting, and a clash of civilisations that reverberates to this day.

Contracted from India as indentured labourers, the Hindus, like the indigenous Caribs, Arawaks, and newly emancipated Africans, soon found themselves dominated by European capitalism and culture – Eurocentrism.

Hindus embraced capitalism but rejected European customs, especially Christian religious worship, as compared to their practice of over 5,000 years of Hindu religion, philosophy, and culture.

The newly emancipated Africans, having no choice under Eurocentrism, practised a convoluted version – Afrocentrism. The Europeans struck back. If Hindus were unwilling to accept European cultural institutions, then Hindus would have to pay a price.

That price was succinctly described by Marina Salandy-Brown: “During my childhood I witnessed first hand the illiteracy, abject poverty and isolation of rural Indians from the rest of TT” (Newsday, November 24). In essence, Hindus were ostracised from TT society.

In 1952, determined to combat the effects of Eurocentrism, concretised in the Hindu community as “illiteracy” and “abject poverty,” a young Hindu entrepreneur and wrestler, Bhadase Sagan Maraj, founder of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, and fighter against Eurocentrism and its lesser evil, Afrocentrism, launched a school-building programme in predominantly Hindu areas of Trinidad.

Upon Maraj’s death in 1971, his son-in-law, Satnarayan Maharaj, assumed leadership of the Maha Sabha.

Like Maraj who struggled against Eurocentrism, Maharaj struggled against Afrocentrism, the step-child of Eurocentrism.

Writing in the Express of October 21, 1971, Augustus Ramrekarsingh described the struggle as a continuity to make the “Indians proud of their heritage in a society which was Christian and Afro-Saxon, hence hostile to them.”

As head of the Maha Sabha, Maharaj built and improved schools, built and refurbished Hindu temples, and, most importantly, dedicated his life to maintaining both schools and temples.

Maharaj was no Gandhi who pursued equal rights for all Indians including Muslims, Dalits, and Brahmins in an independent India, and neither was he a Martin Luther King, the African American civil rights leader who dreamed of a day when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls” in an integrated American society, a society of equal rights for all.

Like King, Sat Maharaj dreamed of a day, not of African boys joining hands with Hindu girls in an integrated TT, but a day when educated little Hindu boys and educated little Hindu girls would arise from the ashes of the “recalcitrant minority” – Eric Williams’ label of the Hindu community – and take their rightful place as full-fledged citizens of TT.

If Maharaj was no Gandhi, no King, he certainly was no Makandal Daaga, the student activist who in 1970 sought to unite blacks and Indians in an effort to destroy the Afrocentric government and policies pursued by Eric Williams for the building of his “new society” guided “neither by liberal capitalism nor by Marxism…” – the dead-end concoction Williams’ latter-day acolyte, Selwyn Cudjoe, extols as “the middle way;” a rejection of capitalism to the Afro-Trini’s economic peril.

Unlike Cudjoe’s middle way, Maharaj’s Hindus embraced capitalism. To his credit, he not only built schools, he also fought the Afrocentric People’s National Movement (PNM) government all the way to the Privy Council to gain a licence for the creation of a “Hindu” radio station.

Maharaj practised an orthodox Hindu religious culture, while conversely engaging in an oftentimes acrimonious public race debate with Afrocentrist Cudjoe.

Those Maharaj-Cudjoe debates pursued very shallow ethnic interest, characterised by Cudjoe’s recollection of a Maharaj remark when he received public money for his private projects, “I got mine, you go and get yours.” The debates have deepened and widened the chasm between TT Hindu and African communities.

Sat Maharaj is dead, but his erstwhile fellow race debater, Selwyn Cudjoe, is alive to continue the divisive narrative.

In his latest Afrocentric salvo against the Hindus, Cudjoe writes: “I wonder if she (Kamla Persad-Bissessar) is willing to tell the national community, in concrete terms, what the UNC (read Hindus) is willing to do about the disturbing disparities that exist in our society with regard to black young people” as compared to young Hindu people, I might add” (trinicenter.com November 20).

In the US that inherent accusation would be labelled “passing the buck.” Williams’ “middle way” or state capitalism provided jobs for Afro-Trinis while removing them from significant participation in business enterprise in the booming oil and gas economy. Now that state capitalism is in decline, so too are state jobs in decline. Thus, like Cudjoe, we must ask who should be blamed for “the disturbing disparities that exist in our society with regard to black young people?”

If Maharaj was no Gandhi, no King, no Daaga, then who was the real Maharaj? In private there must have been the virtuous Maharaj, but the public Maharaj that we know was the embodiment of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

To his credit, the good Sat created schools of excellence, created a Hindu radio station, made “Indians proud of their heritage,” while the bad Sat played an important role in deepening and widening the destructive schism between African and Hindu communities. The ugly Sat showed in his description of Tobago men as lazy and only looking for white tourists to rape.

Yet just as Eric Williams, Rudranath Capildeo, Bhadase Maraj have taken their place in the pantheon of tenacious ethnic Trini promoters, so too will Satnarayan Maharaj take his place.

Maharaj will be remembered – and even memorialised – not only as a Hindu-to-the-bone but for generations of educated little Hindu boys and educated little Hindu girls to come, he will be remembered as a hero, as an icon, and to his greatest satisfaction, as a Hindu Trini-to-the bone.

Sat Maharaj