Excerpt from ‘Plantation Port Mourant and the arrival of Indo-Guyanese cricket after the war’, to be published in Brij Lal (ed.), Girmitiyas: Making of Their Memory-Keepers (New Delhi: Primus Books, forthcoming)

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.1.1.0125
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Date: 01 September 2021
• Pages: 125-148
• Author: Clem Seecharan

Journal of Indentureship 1.1 September 2021

Excerpt from ‘Plantation Port

Mourant and the arrival of

Indo-Guyanese cricket after

the war’, to be published

in Brij Lal (ed.), Girmitiyas:

Making of Their Memory-

Keepers (New Delhi: Primus

Books, forthcoming)

Clem Seecharan

Clem Seecharan is professor of history (emeritus), London

Metropolitan University

A SEMINAL INFLUENCE: GUYANESE

FUTILITY AT THE END OF EMPIRE

AND THE FALL OF CHEDDI JAGAN

A significant component of my work as a historian has been on West

Indies cricket. In fact, since my ‘retirement’ in 2012, most of my writ-

ing has been in this area. My first cricket book was a co-authored one,

Indo-West Indies Cricket (1988). Since then there have been several oth-

ers: Muscular Learning: Cricket and Education in the Making of the British

West Indies at the End of the 19th Century (2006); From Ranji to Rohan:

Cricket and Indian Identity in Colonial Guyana, 1890s–1960s (2009);

Hand-in-Hand History of Cricket in Guyana, 1865–1897, vol. 1. The

Foundation (2015) and vol. 2. A Stubborn Mediocrity (2018). The latter

126 CLEM SEECHARAN

Journal of Indentureship 1.1 September 2021

two are parts of a four-volume study on cricket in colonial Guyana,

from 1865 to 1966, the year of Guyana’s independence. I have also

compiled, edited and annotated 100 essays on sport (mainly cricket)

by the poet and distinguished public intellectual, Ian McDonald, An

Abounding Joy: Essays on Sport by Ian McDonald (2019).

This essay focuses primarily on the origins of this passion that, I

am sure, will stay with me to the end of my innings. But I have also

written on Indians in Guyana, Jock Campbell’s ‘Booker’ and sugar;

and I’ve just finished a study of Cheddi Jagan (the Guyanese Marxist

leader) and the Cold War. The book on Campbell, Sweetening ‘Bitter

Sugar’: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934–66

(2005), was awarded the Elsa Goveia Prize by the Association of

Caribbean Historians. Brij Lal’s classic, Girmitiyas: The Origins of the

Fiji Indians (1983), has been a seminal force in shaping my writings

on Indian indentureship and on ideas of India in the making of the

Indo-Guyanese. But it is the foundation of my writing on the history

of cricket that is my principal concern here: cricket and politics are

interwoven in Guyanese and West Indian social history.

It was a few weeks before Guyana’s independence, in May 1966,

that I came upon the Guyana Independence issue of New World

Quarterly (edited by George Lamming and Martin Carter), the radi-

cal journal of the New World Group of intellectuals. It is the product

of an inspired idea, conceived, monitored and funded by David de

Caires and Miles Fitzpatrick (editors of the highly respected 50

issues of New World Fortnightly, 1964–6, published in Georgetown).

As David, who became a good friend, told me decades later, the

independence issue was fraught with a multitude of problems at

every stage: from conception to composition and its completion, in

conjunction with its unresolved financial implications. But I have

no reservation in identifying this special issue of New World as a

ground-breaking document in my intellectual formation. It com-

prises articles by an impressive range of thinkers and writers, most

of whom I had not encountered previously, but who were germane

to the shaping of my eclectic – and tortured – intellectual vison.