Memory, Race, and Coloniality

COSMOPOLITAN MEANDERICITY:

SURINAMESE ENTANGLEMENTS OF

MEMORY, RACE, AND COLONIALITY

Doctoral Thesis by Praveen Sewgobind

Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms

University of Potsdam

Submitted to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Potsdam in the year 2019 2

I hereby declare that this dissertation has been prepared independently, that I only used the resources stated in this dissertation, and that all text and contents have been referenced properly.

Praveen Sewgobind

This book is dedicated to my parents and all other meandering members of the Sewgobind and Kisoensingh families

TABLE OF CONTENT

PREFIX...... 6

PREFACE...... 9

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... 11

INTRODUCTION...... 13

CHAPTER ONE: THEORETICAL ENTANGLEMENTS...... 33

CHAPTER TWO: HISTORICAL ENTANGLEMENTS OF HINDUSTANI...... 89

CHAPTER THREE: ANIL RAMDAS...... 172

CHAPTER FOUR: HINDUSTANI AND AFRO-SURINAMESE COLONIALITIES...... 289

CONCLUSION...... 446 5

CODA...... 477

WORKS LISTED...... 481

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES...... 498

PREFIX

“In mijn hart ben ik zuiver, maar ze sluiten me buiten

Er wordt niet geluisterd, dus ik voel me anders, ik ben een Amsterdamse Nederlandse buitenlander”

Rocks

“Our freedom of speech is freedom of death, we got to fight the powers that be”

Chuck D.

One visual image is said to be able to capture more than a thousand words. The image on the cover of this work-in-progress - a designation that could be attached to any discursive material - does more than capturing. It allows for the emergence of a whole array of cultural memories, which engender, in line with the conceptual threads and aims of this book, horizons and curvatures, processes and dimensions, underscoring two fundamental notions: entanglement and inflection.

What seems to be a rather straightforward dish, i.e. fried rice with certain vegetables and spices, is a metaphor for what will be discussed in the following pages. The dish was made on a cold winter day, in a white neighbourhood of Berlin, Germany. There we go. ''What does ''white'' have to do with a dish ?,'' some readers may wonder. The answer is: everything. The seemingly normal unraced whiteness of a certain environment in a European city does not seem so normal to me. It shakes me to my core, and stirs up memories that are, in this instance, expressed in a culinary fashion, in a bid to connect to my dear and distant cultural heritage. It is a wilful attempt to 7 revisit, relive, reconstitute, reconsider, relate, and so much more. It is a road against entanglements and into entanglements. In the former case, a desire to counter forces of integration/assimilation in a dominant culture. In the latter case an urge to capture my own histories that have been entangled in a spatio-temporal matrix of several hundred years and three so-called continents (critical note: I don't consider Europe to be a continent, it is a rather small Asian peninsula). Fried rice...or nasi, as we,

Hindustani, Surinamese, Javanese, and yes, some Dutch people call it, is not a metaphor for a melting-pot, nor a salad-bowl. It is so far more complex. The ingredients sometimes dissolve, sometimes stick together, sometimes remain fiercely sovereign and independent.

One begins with rice. Grown in the foothills of the Himalaya, preferably. Then, importantly, a mixture of herbs and spices is selected, originating from Java, India,

China, possibly West-Africa, Suriname, and the Netherlands. The rice then is fried with the spice-mixture, and finely-chopped fresh vegetables are added. Then, the travel begins. A whole plethora of aromas enters the kitchen. Aromas generate memories. Javanese restaurants in Paramaribo. Madame Jeanette plants in Suriname.

Chinese supermarkets in the Netherlands. Spice plantations in Kerala. Afro-

Surinamese ingredients that come to mind but are not used (no salted meat in my nasi). Family gatherings, wedding parties, and trips to the Haagse Markt. Oh my.

Memories intermingle, and emotions are geared up. The double migration, from South

Asia to Suriname to the Netherlands now feeds into a political identity flexed with academic analyses. British and Dutch colonialism. Powerful experiences of racism. My bag being checked at the airport. Anxious faces of executers of the Law. Apprehend 8 suspicious looking people. Scan suspicious materials. Investigate odd looking herbal mixes ! Might be explosive ! ''Could you please come with me, sir ?'' My nasi is bomb- proof, I know that. See, no explosives, thank you very much. Racially profiled herbal mix is good to go.

Memory, race, coloniality. These ingredients are mixed into my recipe, they are inflected by my travels, by journeys of my family, by voyages made by my community.

They, we, meander into this world...and what comes out, what is produced in the end, is what the reader will experience as, hopefully, a worldliness that does not chose, but one that boldly goes beyond borders of nations, of cultures. It is my interpretation, and even more than that, my lived experience, my, to put it eloquently, phenomenological account of a dynamic cosmopolitanism. I live it every day. In many ways. One way can be seen on the front page. The nasi that feeds me. It nurtures me, becomes me. Entangled through time and space, bound with power and knowledge, inflected with concepts that condition the will to keep on rocking the boat. Meander along, dear reader. The boat has left the harbour and will sail the waters of the Ganges

River, onto the Suriname River, and even penetrate the Rhine Delta.

On that journey, I would bring to the fore a type of confronting issues that need to be reconsidered, an academic and oratory mode that is so eloquently and forcefully practised by philosopher and critical race theorist George Yancy, namely parrhesia, or courageous speech. May courage be a stimulus to critically engage with traditional conventions and received wisdoms, and go against the grain, if necessary.

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I first of all would like to thank my parents, my sister, and my brother-in-law, without whom I was not able to proceed with this PhD project as an associate fellow.

Also, I want to thanks my dear friends Ella Kolodenna, Anna Danilina, Julia Peetz,

Shailoh Phillips, Sachita Kaushal, and Maike Stoepker.

I also would like to thank Heidi Niggeman, Dana Dolghin, Laura Boerhout, Britt

Broekhaus, Margriet Fokken, Gabriel Dattatreyan, Gracie Dixon, Ibrahim Wani,

Anouk Madörin, Gabi Bockaj, Silvia Wolf, Bel Parnell-Berry, Jenny Oliveira, and Mikki

Stelder.

Many thanks to my supervisors Dirk Wiemann and Regina Römhild, as well as all the other members of the RTG supervisor team and its first cohort of Fellows.

Moreover, I wish to thank my former teachers at the University of Amsterdam, some of whom have played an important role in stimulating me to pursue an academic career as a researcher. I would like to thank Manon van der Laaken, Imogen Cohen,

Niall Martin, Jannah Loontjens, Roger Eaton, Jane Lewty (your dedication I will always remember), Murat Aydemir, Joost de Bloois, Esther Peeren, Jules Sturm, Noa Roei,

Ihab Saloul, and Robin Celikates (forever thankful that you sent me that link). My return to academia, first in the English Department, and then in the excellent Cultural

Analysis program was the right thing to do. Thanks also to all my former fellow

Cultural Analysis students, with whom I had the best academic group discussions ever.

Rigour and audacity against the grain. 12

Beyond the University of Amsterdam, I need to thank Markus Balkenhol, Arjun

Appadurai, Mieke Bal, Ernst van Alphen, Chan Choenni, Ruben Gowricharn, and

Frans-Willem Korsten (thank you so much for that crucial conversation in the heart of the beast).

I further would like to thank Müge Özoğlu, Jiyu Zhang, and Tingting Hui (your powerful brilliance illuminates the world), for providing me with some genuine humanity during hard times at Leiden University.

Special thanks goes to Judith Butler, who arguably was responsible for the most memorable conversation ever at De Jaren in Amsterdam. Stellar energy was generated because of that electrifying hour.

Finally, I feel obliged to pay tribute to the passion of real hip-hop artists who have managed to energise me with wisdom and strength, such as Médine and Dead Prez.

And if you are out there, Stephon, my dear Louisville brother, I will always be grateful that you introduced me to Revolutionary Volume 2, during that hot summer years ago, representing my point of no return in Jenin, Occupied Palestine. I will always remember to speak truth to power.

Berlin, February 2019

INTRODUCTION

“The subway stays packed like a multicultural slave ship”

Immortal Technique

“N’oublie pas ton histoire ou bien le monde t’oubliera”

Médine

The coming into being of this book was stimulated by three important processes of realisation. Three separate but interrelated developments led to an urge to come to terms with what I came to see were grave injustices and utter hypocrisies that necessarily resulted in the ongoing system of racialised colonialism that thrives today. The first process was caused by a personal connection that was made with the history of my community, the Hindustani community in the Netherlands and Suriname. On 8 November 1905, a Hindustani man, contract number HH/154, arrived in Suriname via neighbouring Demerara. He was travelling on a ship named Rhone, which had embarked from Calcutta in the colony of British India.

The man was subsequently handed a contract and was transported to the plantation Alliance, run by the planter A.F. Williams. The name of his man was Mahanand Sing Sewgobind Sing, and most probably an ancestor of mine, possibly a great-grandfather.

When the data of 28,775 Hindustani were digitalised and published online at the beginning of the 21st Century, many Hindustani were able to track their ancestry to villages in the provinces of Bihar and U.P. (United Provinces, which became Uttar Pradesh). The person

I assume to be a relative of mine came from the village of Narykher in Unoo district in U.P. 14

When I learned about the connection that solidified the limited knowledge about my family history, I started to feel the urge to know more about the conditions under which people in the

Ganges Delta were “contracted” and put on ships to sail to the faraway colony of Suriname.

After studying documents – minutes of meetings of a committee that was set up by the British after complaints had been heard about malpractices in the recruitment process – I concluded that many so-called kantrakis had been lured into signing a contract, that beautiful stories had been told by the recruiters about a land where they could make a lot of money. These recruiters went to the poorest areas of the colony of British India, because they knew they would have the highest success rates there. And so, the narratives of my ancestors became alive, and fed into a growing set of memories that were then linked to a critical understanding of what had actually happened, as to how these workers lived on the Surinamese plantations, after slavery was de facto abolished in 1873. Because the arrival of Hindustani in Suriname coincided with the formal freedom of enslaved Africans who had been brought to Suriname by the Dutch from the moment the space had become a Dutch colony, in 1667. This era, and its consequences for the Netherlands could said to have generated the second process of realisation that was the cause for making a plan to write about Surinamese colonialities. To be more specific, the shameful way that in the Netherlands, the important national cultural event of Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet is celebrated, I argue, a direct result of a wilful negation and a moral downplaying of the role of the Dutch in organising and sustaining slavery.

Growing up in the Netherlands as a migrant was like living in a constant inculcated reminder and a pressing stimulus to focus on the future, and, hence, to not look back at a history of colonialism and racism. Yet, some images and traditions began to cause reason for anxiety and anger. For those who are not from the Netherlands, it is perhaps difficult to imagine the profound cultural impact and the deeper layers of coloniality that underlie the phenomenon of hundreds, possibly thousands of white Dutch people, who would put on a 15 blackface, dress up in a “Moorish costume,” put on a wig representing Afro-hair, and paint thick red lips onto their blackfaces, to complement the transition. Some even began to talk in a Surinamese-Dutch accent, to finalise the tradition, before they would be the dumb, subservient, and jolly servants of the white saint Sinterklaas, who would go around the country and give children candy and presents. This tradition would start around mid-

November, and would culminate every 5 December. However, resistance against what I came to see as the annual re-enactment of slavery, began to grow over the years. In 2011, during the so-called national entry celebrations, two black men, Quinsy Gario and Kno‘ledge Cesare staged a protest by wearing T-shirts with the text “Black Pete is racism.” They were consequently arrested and beaten by aggressive police officers, in a manner that indicated that a lot more was behind the repressive action. This was a breach by uppity black people who had dared to stand up to a proud Dutch cultural phenomenon, often described as “our national heritage,” which should not be touched and spoiled by people who dared to use the term racism.

What is underlying the extreme polarisation that followed in the years after (on the one hand a growing yet still small group of activists who take to the streets, opposed by a powerful and massive lobby to mark the tradition as profoundly and culturally Dutch) is the notion among many white Dutch there is an powerfully operating taboo to designate white

Dutch people as racist. The act of doing so can said to be more criminal that being racist itself, or rather, this is what is often felt to be the case by those who speak out against overt racism. Doing so is perceived as a direct attack on the good and moral character of people who cannot, in no way, be equated with “racists.” The binary that comes to mind is a binary of good/bad white people (cf. DiAngelo): in the latter category one can find those who exterminated Jews in concentration camps and those who organised the racial crime of

Apartheid in South-Africa, violently oppressing black people with shameless vigour. Those 16 instances of images are not to be extended to include a definition of systemic racism that stems from the Dutch colonialism, and which feeds into the widespread Dutch notion that blackfacing is not a racist act. This realisation, then, of white Dutch people being unable and unwilling to analyse, and come to terms with racism and colonialism, to be unable to empathise with people who are affected by the displays of Zwarte Piet (an often heard reply would be: “don’t be so sensitive”) has been a prime reason to radically problematise the workings of the white Dutch self in relation to colonialism.

A third reason why I embarked upon this research project was the self-chosen death of

Hindustani writer Anil Ramdas in 2012. I dedicate a whole chapter to his works, which have, unsurprisingly, led to a renewed interest of Dutch and Surinamese readers after he had died.

His texts are unfortunately not yet translated into any other language, but the future is unwritten. Unheard of, I want to suggest, were many of the narratives that Anil Ramdas wrote, and in particular, the way he maintained his position as a critic of every possible angle and perspective, yet grounded in what I will elaborate on extensively, his in-betweenness of hovering between Indian, Surinamese, and Dutch cultural worlds and histories. And so, when news broke that he was dead, that he had ended his life on his 54th birthday, a shock went through the hearts of many who had known him personally, or who had heard him speak, or read his works. Soon, I began to realise that socio-political considerations may have at least played a role in his decision to not want to live anymore in a country that had, as he would say, turned its back on him. Even more so, I would argue that he was branded a traitor by some Dutch people who resented his critical voice, for committing the crime of - having been in the wonderful opportunity to receive an academic education – openly questioning some very fundamental and precious Dutch values. For he tended to expose truths that were rather hard to swallow for those who identified as Dutch, and in particular perhaps for self- proclaimed progressive anti-racist whites. Ramdas passionately and shamelessly verbally 17 attacked the very people he thought he felt connected to: white progressive Dutch people who felt wonderfully cosmopolitan and “open-minded.” The glaring contradictions of these people ignited Ramdas, and he became increasingly vocal to pinpoint what he came to see as their false sense of commitment and fake solidarity. Yet what was the most powerful force that drove his resentment of Dutch society was the rise of the racist right, and the normalisation processes that enabled them to climb and be allowed to position themselves at the centre stage of Dutch politics and society. That development can be traced in the only novel that

Anil Ramdas wrote, Badal. The inevitability of the rise of the PVV, and the collaboration of other politicians with their nationalist and racist agenda, and the inability of the so-called left to counter the upsurge of fascist tendencies is described in the novel, as is the inevitable consequence that the protagonist draws as he bangs his head against the wall of Dutch intolerance, ubiquitous hypocrisy, moral weakness, and easy disavowal. The decision by Anil

Ramdas can therefore not be seen as an act of a single person and his struggles. I believe it is safe and just to blame co-constructing dominant narratives that were uttered by many in

Dutch society for paving the inevitable way onto which he ventured until he saw no other solution. And so, the hypocritically embodied racism in the Ramdas case, the enduring colonial racism in the Zwarte Piet example, and the deceitfully collaborative racism that was enacted to transport Hindustani to the plantations of Suriname, became entangled in a desire to devise a coherent project.

Hence, the three realisations forged an emerging and sustained mindset from which I have come to feel, most passionately and most profoundly, that I myself am a brown person who grew up in a white supremacist society. I did not allow myself to see the extent to which the white race - and I wilfully use that ‘controversial’ term - has dominated and is dominating the earth for many hundred years, through a racial colonial project that lasts until this day. Importantly, whites continue to enact their white privilege – which informs and 18 sustains white racism – on a daily basis. This book cannot have been written without realising the injustice that white supremacy is unleashing over people of colour. Whites are complicit with, and are invested in white racism. That premise guides my motivation to fight racism, and to name and analyse the social construct of race and its operations. I will elaborate on the theoretical necessity of this in the first chapter of this book.

Here, I feel obliged to explain that, obviously, a so-called objective positioning towards questions of race is not possible, and that extends to anyone who is embedded in and embodied by the dynamics of global racial disparities, for that matter. White supremacy and it ongoing colonial continuity is the reason why my family were lured to leave the poverty- stricken rural areas of Bihar and the United Provinces in the colony of British India, in order to replace the enslaved African population on the plantations in the colony of Suriname.

White supremacy is the engine that has generated and fuelled this project, and I use the definition that Mills employs in his text Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race

(91), which points to: “...a particular mode of domination, with its special norms for allocating benefits and burdens, rights and duties; its own ideology; and an internal, at least semi-autonomous logic that influences law, culture, and consciousness,” and which,

“encompasses de facto as well as de jure white privilege and refers to more broadly to the

European domination of the planet that has left us with the racialised distributions of economic, political, and cultural power that we have today.”

Having stated the general motivation for writing this book, I feel stimulated to pay tribute to those people who are suffering from the ongoing legacies and operations of racial colonialism, in particular the descendants of enslaved people, and the descendants of the contracted labourers. Indigenous peoples, Afro-Surinamese, Hindustani, Javanese, and

Chinese people were reduced to commodified bodies to function as pegs in the murderous machine of colonial capitalist exploitation that was so successfully set up and run by white 19

Dutch people and their British counterparts. The suffering and the injustice continue to this day, as intergenerational trauma feeds into a sustained sense of being maltreated and condescended by white Dutch society, whose white dominant segment perpetuate to benefit from the profits that Dutch colonialism has brought. Many of the beautiful and opulent canal houses in Amsterdam were built with money that directly came as profits from the Dutch colonies, and many “old rich” white Dutch families live off wealth that was generated by exploiting black and brown bodies. Their enormous wealth enables them to live luxurious lives, oblivious of the fact that it is blood money they own, that the wealth could only be extracted because of the murder, torture, and rape of black and brown bodies. And meanwhile, many descendants of people exploited in Dutch colonialism, live in the poorest areas of Dutch cities, continuing to live in a system of racial hierarchy and capitalist exploitation. The terror that was unleashed under slavery, that is tied to the wealth of white

Dutch people, is tied to the conscience the Netherlands as a whole. Yet it is exactly the wilful negation of this history of exploitation and terror that is contingent upon dominant narratives and what I argue is a racist practice normalcy of the good, moral Dutch. The histories are not forgotten, and young people are standing up to demand change, to demand the emergence of counter-narratives that show the guilt of a racist colonial system, and shame the way that ignorance about it is still being elevated as a good Dutch virtue. This project is situated in that discourse, and is part of that demand, as a scientific and political tool to enable change, which means the challenging and the deconstruction of the white racist bedrock that I believe, is integral to academia and society as a whole.

After finishing my research master Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, the idea to dedicate a PhD to research to Hindustani coloniality began to materialise. At first, an idea was born to perform an ethnographic study of Hindustani communities in the

Netherlands, focussing on Hindu and Muslim youths in the region of The Hague. I performed 20 several interviews with Hindustani youths at two locations in the Schilderswijk neighbourhood, one of the poorest and most non-white neighbourhoods of the Netherlands. I conducted these interviews at a Hindu temple, and in a nearby mosque, frequented by

Hindustani Muslims. I realised that the way that Hindustani address the colonial past could not be separated from a much more complex colonial dynamic between Hindustani and Afro-

Surinamese, and, importantly, the subordinate position these groups have historically had in relation to the white Dutch colonisers. Once I had written a proposal, I was able to attain an unpaid position at Leiden University, and started the project on Hindustani coloniality. Yet, tacit and overt effects of white racism, both in the white spaces of Leiden University, and in the broader Dutch society, created an urge to pursue the project at another location. I then got an opportunity to continue the project – again by getting an unpaid position – at the

University of Potsdam.

Before starting the project at Potsdam University in Germany, some adjustments were made in the proposal. As stated above, the inextricable colonial histories and continuities of

Afro-Surinamese and Hindustani altered the framework of the project, although the main focus still remains to be the construction of Hindustani memory and identity. As I continued to perform research on the topic, I also realised that current political developments in South

Asia, Suriname, and the Netherlands were having a profound influence on Hindustani in

Suriname and the Netherlands. These developments urged me to embed the writing about

Hindustani coloniality in a more critical and contemporary framework, to avoid locating the topic too much in the past. The danger of “merely” writing about the past is following a common mode of “doing historiography,” I feel, which often supposes a positivist and

Eurocentric serialilty of historic events that can then all to easily be closed off from the

“enlightened” and “morally advanced” present. Yet, first of all, the continued colonial project that the Netherlands is involved in, should give an incentive to radically break with this 21 tradition. What has been tried by Dutch politicians – to wilfully cut off the history of colonialism by not referring to the colonised Caribbean islands as colonies anymore – is an insult to those descendants of (formerly) colonised spaces who feel tied to their cultural heritage and indicative for what I believe is the ideological negation of the continuity of the murderous system of racial colonialism. The supremacy of a white Dutch mindset continues, as Dutch marines flock and control a part of the Caribbean, as the Dutch-British multinational corporation Shell owns an oil refinery on the occupied island of Curaҫao, as white Dutch tourists spend their money on the “holiday islands,” and whose spent money does not flow into the local economies. The continuing and shockingly shameful non-engagement with atrocities perpetrated by Dutch soldiers in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies is another example of how contemporary Dutch colonialism operates. There has not been any justice for the descendants of the thousands of murdered Indonesians. Responsible Dutch politicians and Dutch soldiers, some of whom are still alive, remain comfortably silent, while trying to hush the attempts to bring justice to the victims and their families. And in the 70s,

Moluccas who protested the racist treatment of their community were executed by Dutch marines as they performed their militant actions.

All these examples have made me realise that Dutch colonialism, through the ubiquitous belief that white Dutch people are entitled to live their white moral superiority over people of colour, is a thriving political and cultural force. In 2018, according to opinion polls, racist right-wing populist forces combined are the largest political force in the

Netherlands. And the minister of foreign affairs, the VVD minister Stef Blok, in a bid to win back voters from these more extreme racists, enters into a classical Darwinian racist rant1; thereby proving that racist colonial discourse has not been discarded, and continues to operate in the highest echelons of Dutch society. Contemporary Dutch society – far from isolated in a

1 See the following article on the Aljazeera website: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/dutch-fm-fire- making-discriminatory-remarks-180718174215063.html 22 world rife with extreme nationalism and bigotry – radiates practices and discourses of injustice and inequality, and should, I believe, be countered unequivocally and passionately.

This is the reason why I felt attracted to the political and theoretical critical cosmopolitan framework that was formulated by the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms, and subsequently wrote the following abstract to summarise the research project, which was titled “Entanglements of Hindustani Coloniality: Transcultural Belonging in the Age of

Globality:”

The quest for belonging among Hindustani communities in The Netherlands has triggered diversified sets of multiple cultural affiliations. Embodying a history of double migration

(from India to Suriname to the Netherlands), members of these Indian-Surinamese-Dutch cultural groups seem to engender memory practices that transcend national boundaries, reshape outlooks on coloniality, and disrupt notions of collective memory.

The project is therefore designed to clarify, firstly, the operations of Hindustani diasporic memory: how are such memories constructed, invoked, reworked, rejected, amalgamated and expressed?

Secondly, an analysis will be made of the entanglements of Hindustani and Afro-Surinamese colonialities, and their co-constructing and reciprocal relation with dominant Dutch modes of engaging/non-engaging colonial history in the contemporary Netherlands.

The ensuing ongoing negotiation of belonging and non-belonging among

Hindustani arguably highlights how the enacted interconnectedness of cultures could be feeding into both local and global mnemoscapes, simultaneously and serially, prompting novel perspectives on migrant subjectivity.

The project will analyse literary and theoretical texts generated by and about Hindustani and

Surinamese that indicate such hybridised memory practices, in order to understand how 23 novel diasporic realities forged by the dynamics of history, memory, and “identity” inform new modes of decoloniality, and point to the need for a radical reconsidering of the very notion of a “major,” Eurocentric cosmopolitanism.

As is often the case, research plans develop over time, as new insights emerge, foci shift, and theoretical threads get realigned with those novel realities of a work-in-progress.

Exactly this occurred while writing the text, and thinking through the complexities of the subject matter. Aided by comments from several people, a readjustment became necessary, in order to provide more clarity and show how the many problems I wished to tackle are interrelated. And so, as I tend to do, I delved back to some personal memories of mine, that often take the shape of metaphors, through which I then make sense of the world, or rather, attempt to at least structure the immensely complex task of coming to terms with forgotten, suppressed, and twisted versions of history, and how they, then, continue to inform contemporary subjectivities and epistemologies.

The delving back into memory landed my thoughts, or, perhaps plunged my thoughts into the mighty rivers of Suriname, that inconspicuous space on along the Atlantic, just e few degrees north of the Equator. These rivers, the Marowijne River, the Suriname River, the

Coppename River, and the Corantijn River, to name some of the longest, meander through the land mass just North-West of the mouth of the mightiest river in the world, the Amazon.

These rivers have been fundamental in enabling colonial powers in Suriname, first the British and then the Dutch, to build plantations. And onto these rivers enslaved and indentured people were taken to work the plantations. As I will elaborate in the next chapter, the conceptualisation of a meandering river has become a source of inspiration, in the sense that I have imagined migration itself to be akin to the processes that constitute meandericity.

Wilfully using that term as a travelling concept borrowed from physical geography, I theorise 24 a cultural meandericity as the process by which a dynamic identity is continuously formed and reshaped, as people, in this text I primarily follow the journeys of Hindustani, meander through time and space. While doing so, they absorb cultural traits from the environment, but also, importantly, sediment, or leave a residue, i.e. their cultural influence onto the ‘shores’ of their fluvial pathways. And the ways in which, and the extent of this absorption and sedimentation, I argue, engenders a myriad of entanglements. These entanglements, as I will show, are to be analysed on several levels. On an intercultural level, Hindustani, as will become clear, are inexorably entangled with Afro-Surinamese and Dutch histories and cultures. On a more conceptual level, I bring to the fore three major inflections that the process of meandericity both produces and is produced by, in other words there is a reciprocity at work that informs the becoming of a particular meandericity in the case of

Hindustani. These three interrelated inflecting and inflected concepts are memory, race, and coloniality. By examining the history of Suriname, mainly through the lens of narratives produced by Hindustani and Afro-Surinamese, I will unravel and contextualise these complex entanglements. Crucially, the spatio-temporal process of dynamic identity formation, i.e. meandericity, produce social, lived realities that are always already in motion, as, for example, because of activism or academic work, suppressed histories are being salvaged, reinterpreted, and given new meaning in our contemporary age. As we will see, dominant

Dutch historiography generates a very particular version of events as they occurred in

Suriname. All too often, I have heard myself to “just forget about the past,” to “get over it.”

But why ? So as not to create tension or speak about “unpleasant” histories that deviate from the often still glorified greatness of the Dutch Golden Age (roughly the 17th Century) ?

Exactly the opposite is the goal of this investigation. In order to do justice, one has to rock the boat, and in a literal sense, this image should remind readers of the tragic and deadly journeys on the ships that transported people as commodities from Africa and Asia to the colony of 25

Suriname. Again, these journeys across the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, and onto the rivers of Suriname, were loci of meandericity. The intrinsic social realities that followed engendered modes of diaspora, which, as we will see, in their turn shapes what I theorise to be a novel conceptualisation of cosmopolitanism.

To reiterate, meandericity refers to spatio-temporal processes of cultural identity formation, always already engendering historical, social, and cultural global entanglements, and is, as i will lay out in this book, inflected by, and inflecting conjoined processes of racialisation, colonisation (I will elaborate on my insistence to delete the prefix post- from the commonly used term postcolonialism), and what I would refer to as mnemonisation. The latter term refers to dynamic practices and ways of remembering, and should be seen in a critical light of being culturally and historically specific.

The notion of entanglement is, as should be understood from the contextualisation of meandericity, a key concept that I will employ to analyse the inextricability of the historical, social, and cultural developments that affect all those who have lived and live in Suriname and the Netherlands. One could perhaps envision entanglement in the model that I am proposing as a gravitational force that works to set in motion a meandering river, i.e. an immanently, all-encompassing tendency that cultural traits, I argue, tend to characterise. The characteristics are akin to a drive to connect, in many forms and to variegated extents, depending on the cultural connections that are operative in a certain context. To be able to assess the ways that these connections have been shaped, it is crucial to acknowledge and problematised the variety of colonial trajectories, as they have developed for Hindustani and

Afro-Surinamese. Yet it is also imperative to recognise and specify how dominant colonial political strategies and practices were outlined and executed in Suriname, and that these were influenced by other colonial contexts. The Dutch, for example, used their experience and skills developed in the former Dutch East Indies to organise the colonisation of Suriname. 26

And the location of Suriname, in-between British, French, and Portuguese colonies, prompted colonial influences from those spaces onto the Dutch colony. A broad and multiperspectival outlook is, therefore, necessary, and I underline what Epple and Lindner remark in their text

Entangled Histories: Reflecting on Concepts of Coloniality and Postcoloniality:

Most importantly, coloniality and postcoloniality do not necessarily refer to a

bounded time period, a given world region, or a specific system of power relations.

They rather stress the varieties of entanglements within (post-) colonial societies and

cultures. Combining the approaches of coloniality and postcoloniality allows not only

an analytical separation of colonial power from actual colonial rule but also a

concentration on entangled an connected histories. (7-8)

The perspectives from different cultural groups and political actors, and colonial influences from various regions in the world inform the complex make-up of the Surinamese society, which, the, as we will see, continued to shape the Dutch society, as about half of the

Surinamese population migrated to the Netherlands, and “Empire” brought back its histories and narratives, cultures and conflicts.

This book that is the result of the urge to analyse colonial entanglements, the questions posed in the abstract above, and renewed theoretical questioning, is structured as follows:

In Chapter One I lay out and problematise relevant theoretical approaches of Critical

Race Studies, Memory Studies and Coloniality Studies, and show why I believe it is necessary to critique and innovate some assumptions circulating in the interrelated fields to 27 be able to comprehend the complexities of a Surinamese-Dutch “colonial past.” The latter notion has been put in quotation marks, because I will explain the fundamental difficulty that

I feel is embedded in the notion of the past, especially when considering the subjectivities of those who are the now grappling to counter the dominant narratives and an hegemonic ideology that are generated by an ongoing practice of colonial distortion and amnesia. I will highlight the aforementioned conceptual inflections as they operate and inform my hypothesised entangled meandericity. The dimensional inflections of memory, race, and coloniality will be discussed separately, yet obviously interact, as will be shown in the chapters that will follow.

Approaching memory as an ongoing, relational, social phenomenon that is always already situated in the unfolding present, I will discuss theories formulated by Halbwachs,

Assmann, Rothberg, and others. I will show that the entanglements of Afro-Surinamese,

Hindustani, and dominant white Dutch views on memory require a novel model that allows us to come to terms with, on the one hand, the antagonisms between Afro-Surinamese and

Hindustani mnemoscapes, and between these two sets of memory practices with the dominant

Dutch one. Intertwined with these dynamics is a necessity to rethink and go beyond the concepts of postcoloniality and decoloniality. The premise is that a planetary colonialism persists in hegemonic colonial politics and mindsets that did not end in the era of so-called decolonisation. Apart from the powerful mental and embodied colonisation that can be discerned, a factual - in terms of sovereignty – colonialism continues to exist in the Dutch context, one that urges us to reconsider Surinamese-Dutch colonialities more critically.

Crucially, the concept of race will be discussed as it operates and morphs approaches and understandings of both memory and coloniality; the latter two notions are also inextricably connected as we consider the ways that memory practices are highlighted, neglected, and even actively repressed. 28

In Chapter Two I will provide a historical overview of the double migration that

Hindustani communities who now live in the Netherlands have undergone. Also, I elaborate on the methodologies that will be employed to perform the analyses in this research project. I will discuss and explain why I use critical discourse analysis, theorised by Teun van Dijk and others, and a method of visual analysis, which was developed by Ariella Azoulay, in her text

The Civil Contract of Photography. I then begin with the analyses in this book by problematising the autobiography of Munshi Rahman Khan. In my view, he is an example of a Hindustani, who, because of his family history and life trajectory, can said to be an example of a Hindustani cosmopolitan. The translators of the autobiography, Kathinka Sinha-

Kerkhoff, Ellen Bal, and Alok Deo state in the introduction of the text:

Here we present the translation of a unique document in the history of these

indentured labourers in the Caribbean: the autobiography of the contract labourer

Munshi Rahman Khan. After finishing his 5-year contract, he settled as an

independent agriculturalist in Surinam, where he stayed until he died in 1972, at the

ripe age of 98. This Rahman Khan had kept a diary on a day to day basis (Gautam

1995), which he later on developed into his autobiography entitled Jeevan Prakash,

Life’s Light, thereby bringing forth the only written autobiography of a first

generation indentured labourer in the Caribbean (xii)

It is with a certain pride that this book was published, as it is a unique text that provides an insight into colonial relations in the colonies of British India and the Dutch 29 colony of Suriname, from the perspective of a colonised person. The analyses of Munshi

Rahman Khan’s text are then supplemented by analyses of Bidesia songs and poems, narratives from Hindustani who went abroad and who relate to their life in the colonies, while referring to issues of belonging, loss, and oppression.

In Chapter Three I analyse the works of Hindustani novelist, essayist, journalist, and television host Anil Ramdas Anil Ramdas. I will hypothesise three phases of Hindustani

‘cultural affiliation’ to highlight Ramdas’ developing his often difficult, controversial, and conflicting attitudes and practices. Firstly, quotes from his works grouped under the rubric exploration will be analysed. These quotes are mainly descriptive in nature, yet of course give a sense of perspective: what does Ramdas envision when he starts to observe his environment as a journalist in India, Suriname, and the Netherlands ? Which register does he use, what is his tone, why does he uses his specific vocabulary, and to what ends ? The way he positions himself in relation to the three cultural realms already sets him up for the inevitable second phase of analysis in this chapter, that of critique. Thirdly, I will analyse text that can be grouped under the rubric ambiguity, which can be seen as a result of the two previous rubrics: what is the aftermath of Ramdas’ observations and points of critique ? How does he come to terms with a structural in-betweenness that often emerges, and where does that leave him as a Hindustani, as a son of a Brahmin teacher, as a Surinamese-born intellectual, as a Dutch citizen, as a journalist and Hindustani who visits the land of his ancestors ? What are the tensions that reside in this in-betweenness ? And what do these tensions show us about concepts such as collective memory and coloniality ?

The analyses of the three thematic rubrics (exploration, critique, and ambiguity) will be followed by a tentative conclusion about a more general understanding that will ultimately will lead to formulating a theory about Hindustani meandericity (inflected by and inflecting 30 the concepts of race, memory, and coloniality), and, consequently, inform a novel perspective that could be understood as a particular diasporic, Hindustani cosmopolitanism.

In Chapter Four I analyse the monumental text Wij Slaven van Suriname (We Slaves of Suriname), as an exemplary text that highlights Afro-Surinamese history of Suriname. This text is pivotal, I believe, because it represents one of the few instances of a pre-independence critical Afro-Surinamese narrative. Not only has this text reached almost legendary status in

Suriname, but because de Kom spent many years in the Netherlands engaging in class struggle and anti-fascist activities, he intertwines many struggles that link several Dutch colonies with the Netherlands itself, thereby bringing the subordination and the atrocities that accompany colonialism into the public eye of the Netherlands. Secondly, I will problematise three textbooks written by Chan Choenni, who held a special professorship at the Vrije

Universiteit in Amsterdam. These texts will serve as a source for developing a specific

Hindustani coloniality, which will then he juxtaposed with the already established, and developing Afro-Surinamese coloniality. And thirdly, a case study will be performed to point to the ongoing antagonisms between Afro-Surinamese and Hindustani memory and coloniality by critically analysing two statues in Paramaribo. The first statue commemorates the abolition of slavery (officially on 1 July 1863) and was unveiled in 1963. This statue, at a central square in the capital city, is named Kwakoe, and depicts a fictitious formerly enslaved

Afro-Surinamese who is breaking free out of his chains. A visual analysis of this statue, and analysis of discourse that was generated by its erection, will then be brought into dialogue with a statue that was erected nearby. This statue, named Baba and Mai, depicts two

Hindustani immigrants, and was unveiled in 1994.

Finally, following Chapter Four, I will bring the conclusions of the abovementioned critiques in conversation with one of the prime research questions posed in the introduction, namely: is there a specific Hindustani cosmopolitanism that is lived by Hindustani 31 communities in Suriname and the Netherlands, which can be said to undermine the major

Eurocentric cosmopolitanisms that have been formulated since the 18th Century ?

The analyses that follow are united in their goal to provide a critical counter-narrative to a view that colonialism is situated in the past, and that it can be dislodged from a global system of white supremacy. Both views strengthen a very powerful preponderance that foregrounds individualism, universalism, and the underlying notion that we live in a world in which we have reached a system of meritocracy and racial equality. Yet, as I will argue, the fact that more than 85 % of the world was colonised by white people who came from

“Europe” (an Asian peninsula from my perspective) has left a racial hierarchical mark on the world, which still informs cultures and politics globally. The ubiquitous practice to derace the white race has been, as I will contend, a powerful tactic to try to erase blame for the continuing preponderance of white supremacy on a global level. Yet if one looks at income, wealth, positions of power, or education, for example, in multicultural societies, it is white people who still occupy the top of the hierarchy. The social construction of white identity, its concurrence with European colonialism, and its contemporary continuity urge us to carefully and critically assess the history of colonialism and its workings on existing entangled global systems and processes of subjectification and identity formation. So that one day, the subway will cease to be the metaphorical “multicultural slave ship,” that is so powerfully brought to the attention by rap artist Immortal Technique in the song “Harlem Streets.”

A final remark should be made on the use of quotes in this book. I have chosen to use what might be viewed as rather long quotes from texts written by Ramdas, de Kom, and

Choenni. The first reason is that I want to provide as much context as possible for the specific discourse analysis that I make. Secondly, I believe that voices like Ramdas’s and de Kom’s represent narratives stemming from the Global South that are quite rare in academic publishing, especially as they were written originally in Dutch and were subsequently 32 translated by myself. By doing so, I mean to give voice to under-represented groups in the wider literary world, voices that tell stories from the perspective of those who were subjected to colonial rule, and had to endure the consequences of being deemed inferior in the hierarchical matrix of colonial power. May this be an incentive, inch’allah.

CHAPTER ONE: THEORETICAL ENTANGLEMENTS

“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

Audre Lorde

Foundations

In this chapter I will problematise received theories of Memory Studies, Coloniality Studies, and Critical Race Studies, and show why it is necessary to critically intervene on some issues, and innovate interrelated fields to be able to comprehend the complexities of a Surinamese-

Dutch “colonial past.” The latter notion has been put in quotation marks, because I will explain the fundamental difficulty that I feel is embedded in the notion of the past, especially when considering the subjectivities of those who are the now grappling to counter the dominant narratives and an hegemonic ideology that are generated by an ongoing practice of colonial distortion and amnesia.

As suggested in the Introduction, the theoretical framework that I will use in this study evolves around and develops a practical currency by invoking and hypothesising the notion of meandericity. This notion that I employ as a travelling concept describes the dynamic formational development of Hindustani as they have relocated from South Asia to

Suriname, and then (about half of the community) onwards to the Netherlands. I have theorised in a paper that I presented at a Stuart Hall memorial conference that one could understand meandericity as a cultural conceptual tool, which originates from the field of geography, and could be employed to critically assess the processes involved in the 34 production, circulation, and consumption of cultural interaction by analysing the ways that in an interwoven matrix of Indian, Surinamese, and Dutch cultural affiliations, hierarchies dynamically interact, and shift towards a complicated novel constellation of cultural multibridity. I will map out my interpretation of the concept of meandericity in the following chapters as a way of coming to terms with identity formation as an oscillatory, reciprocal, contingent and entangled process of cultural affiliation that is characterised by transformative anchoring/de-anchoring, intervening, and unsettling of fixed and neat categories, which is informed by three disjunctive, yet entangled cultural worlds of Indian, Surinamese, and

Dutch historical configurations.

In what follows, I will map out the three inflected configurations that I think both generate and are themselves altered by the cultural meandering processes. As noted, the very force that enables, triggers, and stimulates any cultural development, is precisely the cultural interaction that can be understood as entanglement, and is always already interlocked in the flow of culture through a particular space-time continuum. One could perhaps imagine a double-helix structure conjoining an entangled meandered cultural process, that is simultaneously operating in the three interrelated dimensions that inflect and are inflected, i.e. memory, race, and coloniality, in processes that I refer to as mnemonisation, racialisation, and colonisation respectively. Let us first turn to the much discussed notion of memory.

Memory as a concept

Approaching memory as an ongoing, relational, social phenomenon that is always already situated in the unfolding present, I will discuss theories formulated by Halbwachs, 35

Assmann, Rothberg, and others. I will show that the entanglements of Afro-Surinamese,

Hindustani, and dominant white Dutch views on memory require a novel model that allows us to come to terms with, on the one hand, the antagonisms between Afro-Surinamese and

Hindustani mnemoscapes, and between these two sets of memory practices with the dominant

Intertwined with a critical approach to memory and coloniality theory, is a specific critique that I wish to bring to the fore to point to the need to theorise a particular mode of social construction of race. The need to use a racial lens to analyse Dutch/Surinamese history and contemporary social structures and politics is fundamental to comprehend the deeper layers and colonial thrust that was and is part of a white Dutch self. But let us first come to terms with some issues that have been circulating in the field of memory studies

Figure 1: Albert Roessingh painting in Fortress New Amsterdam Museum

In Figure 1, a painting by Albert Roessingh which is displayed at the museum of the

Fortress New Amsterdam in Suriname is highlighted. What can be deemed particular about this painting is the separation between the Hindustani contracted labourers in the cargo hold of the ship, and the two blackened figures standing on the deck. The discrepancy becomes clearer because the Hindustani are dressed in white and due to the 37 spatial distancing that literally elevates the two figures above the rest. The ladder that is drawn does not appear to be fixed nor is it clear that it is retractable. This feature adds to the tension and radiating hierarchy that emanates from the painting. From the perspective of contemporary spectators, the space of the cargo hold becomes laden with meaning: Hindustani were, in the broader colonial context, reduced to cargo, as they were numbered, and transported to Suriname, commodified into the post-slavery economy. The two figures, onlookers who represent Dutch colonialism, can be said to view the cargo while holding a power position that is strengthened by their body language, e.g. exemplified by the kneeling one who has folded the arms and seems to express a gestural composition from which we could read an authoritative satisfaction.

In what is considered by many to be a groundbreaking text on collective memory, Maurice

Halbwachs argues that:

“...the necessity by which people must enclose themselves in limited groups (families,

religious groups, and social classes, just to mention these) - though less ineluctable

and less irrevocable than the necessity to be enclosed in a determined duration of life

– is opposed to the social need for unity, in the same way that the latter way may be

opposed to the social need for continuity. This is why society tends to erase from its

memory all that might separate individuals, or that might distance groups from each

other. It is also why society, in each period, rearranges its recollections in such a way

as to adjust them to the variable conditions of its equilibrium” (On Collective Memory

182-183) 38

If one is to understand the perspective and the subsequent colonial politics of the

Dutch in Suriname, it becomes clear that phrases like “the social need for unity,” and “the social need for continuity” were fundamental processes that the Dutch had to be engaged with. Having to cope with collective memories of more than two racial groups – yet in this discussion, I will limit myself to Afro-Surinamese and Hindustani - the equilibrium, in this case the colonial status quo as I would refer to it – was to be maintained while making sure the social cohesion of Surinamese society would not shatter. During slavery and during the so-called contract era, subordination and punishment (but also the incentives of a small reward for the contracted labourers) were prime tools to enable continuity of the colony, arguably the most important goal of the “project” of Suriname. What is lacking, however, in the theoretical framework, is precisely the tool of divide-and-conquer that was employed to ensure the distancing of groups from each other. The complexities of Suriname, where the elite wilfully had to subjugate all the racial groups in different ways, due to their different colonial continuities and, hence, collective memories, indicated a need to complicate the notion of collective memory. In another text, Halbwachs explicates the dynamics of historical and collective memory:

“The historical world is like an ocean fed by the many partial histories. Not

surprisingly, many historians in every period since the beginning of historical writing

have considered writing universal histories (...) History can be represented as the

universal memory of the human species. But there is no universal memory. Every

collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time. The

totality of the past events can be put together in a single record only by separating 39

them from the memory of the groups who preserved them and by serving them the

bonds that held them close to the psychological loves of the social milieus where they

occurred, while retaining only the group’s chronological and spatial outline of them”

(The Collective Memory 84)

Halbwachs’s point that there is no universal memory is correct, I believe, as the myriad cultural codifications generate vastly different perspectives on “history.” My critique here is on the issue of delimiting: my research has shown that notions of collective memory in the Surinamese-Dutch context have shifted, and are still shifting, as regards collective processes of recollection, memorialisation, historiography, and embodiment of what has occurred on the plantations and during the formal period of colonisation in Suriname. The process of recovery and preservation is ongoing, and the battle against a persistent dominant white Dutch version of history, largely a move to sustain a widespread colonial amnesia of even the glorification of past heroic Dutch deeds in the “colonial era,” is prompting novel ways to construct Afro-Surinamese, and Hindustani collective memory, and subsequently, memory practices. And these dynamics are deeply embedded in an emerging decolonial perspective that is intimately tied to an affective disruption of perceived notions of identity.

This point is underscored by Assmann, wh