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Necessity in New York City By Vishnu Dutt & Vidya Mahadeo-Dutt |
April 2003: With the growing presence of over 250,000 Indo-Caribbean immigrants in the tri state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the need for a serious non-partisan university program to stimulate, enhance, understand and promote academic study of the Indo-Caribbean experience has now arisen in the United States. Actually, it is seriously overdue. The Indo-Caribbean Institute (ICI) proposal does not envisage construction of buildings; rather, simply the incorporation of a concentrated program of studies dealing with Indo-Caribbean culture, history, politics, literature, art, economics, and other experiences within an already existing university that is receptive to house it.
We do not have to go too far to underscore the importance of the Indo-Caribbean Institute in the United States. In neighboring Canada, Toronto, the Ontario Society for Studies in Indo-Caribbean Culture (OSSICC) was established since 1986 with links to York University in Toronto. It is an institution whereby the Indo-Caribbean aspects of the immigrant culture are preserved, encouraged and treated with continued respect and appreciation in that neighboring country.
Even though Indo-Caribbean immigrants predominate in the Borough of Queens, New York City, there is no academic institution that caters for Indo-Caribbean studies. For example, Queens College has an Asian American Center, but it is oriented towards Chinese, Japanese and Korean history and culture while St. Johns University's Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program is overwhelmingly Hispanic. Their Caribbean program concentrates on the three Hispanic islands of the Caribbean even though there are 27 English-speaking islands. Medgars Evers College in the Borough of Brooklyn emphasizes a strong Afro-Caribbean program. York College on the other hand is situated in the heart of the Indo-Caribbean community of Jamaica and has a Black Studies department. According to Dr. Basdeo Mangru, a Professor of Indo-Guyanese history, who teaches at York College, students have expressed to him a desire for Indo-Caribbean oriented courses.
Can that experience in Canada of institutionalizing the Indo-Caribbean experience as an academic institution be done here in the United States? The answer is yes! Without a doubt.
In the creation of an Indo-Caribbean Institute (ICI) education is the immediate objective, but leadership and financial resources are engineering keys to its success.
While Indo-Caribbean immigrants have some 58 Hindu temples, a few Mosques and a number of Christian churches, no such Indo-Caribbean academic institution exist. It would make sense to have an academic component to go with the religious/cultural. It is at the college level where Indo-Caribbean minds are normally shaped to take on the leadership challenges facing the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora. Their intellectual minds can be oriented to find solutions that can prevent the drift into oblivion and help the community to live harmoniously with other races and cultures.
Functions and Impact of Indo-Caribbean Institute (ICI)
The creation of an Indo-Caribbean Institute (ICI) becomes of paramount importance as it will educate Indo-Caribbean students of their past heritage. Its mission would serve the purpose of promoting a better understanding of the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora in the United States by exposing its culture, art, economics, literature politics, history and other experiences in schools, universities, libraries, media and civic forums.
Summer programs and internships in the Caribbean would give students of the institute grounding in practical experience. Many Indo-Caribbean students who are born in America will never understand the Indo-Caribbean experience until they would have had cognitive connections in the Caribbean.
Seminars, conferences, researches, projects, workshops, lectures and symposiums are just the type of joint activities such an Indo-Caribbean Institute (ICI) can do in tandem with Caribbean Universities and other interested bodies to focus on problems facing the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora.
Obviously, there are many results what such an Institute can eventually produce for the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora. Graduates can be encouraged to return and offer their expertise and share their experience with peoples in the region.
The Indo-Caribbean Institute (ICI) can be the training ground for an Indo-Caribbean 'Peace Corps' model in the United States. Indo-Caribbeans would be trained for service and maybe return to the Caribbean. Isn't it an irony that the Indo-Caribbean experience is abandoning vast fertile agriculture lands that are rich in oil, diamonds, gold, manganese, bauxite and timber for the United States? How can this mentality be arrested, put on trial and reversed? Within such an Indo-Caribbean Institute (ICI) the preservation and study of Indo-Caribbean culture, politics, history, literature, art, economics can be kept alive by a future Think Tank devoted to an emphasis on Indo-Caribbean affairs. Such an academic program presently does not exist anywhere in the United States for Indo-Caribbean immigrants.
Role of Indian Diaspora, GOPIO and Business Community: A Challenge
Can the Indian Diaspora afford to allow the Indian peoples in the Caribbean to be absorbed and its culture to disappear? Actually, what fate awaits the growing presence of the Indo-Caribbean immigrant right here in his home in the tri state area of the United States? This is a question for the Indo-Caribbean community now in the 21st Century to solve. Unless it does something to academically enhance, protect and preserve itself, as a group, isn't the Indo-Caribbean community doomed to extinction and total absorption because it is also different in the United States?
If the Indo-Caribbean immigrant community is to become a permanent fixture of the Caribbean Diaspora and the American rainbow it must always ensure their particular color does not run! The Indo-Caribbean Institute may help to achieve that goal by serving as an intellectual academic El Dorado for its people. It must keep hope alive!
What Indian Diaspora wisdom would sit idly and not institute the Indo-Caribbean culture here in the United States when there is so much freedom and abundant financial resources? What are its limitations? What is at stake back in the Caribbean but the survival of nearly one million Indo-Caribbean peoples?
How can this be achieved?
The Indo-Caribbean Institute should become a meaningful arm of any university to which it becomes attached, preferably in New York City. The motivation to do it must be done in a coordinated and united business-like manner.
Most importantly, there has to be grand oversight godfather who will oversee the entire project. Who will play this role in the community?
The Global Organization of Peoples of Indian Origin (GOPIO), being an organization that looks into the interests of Indians internationally, and with the cooperation of Caribbean Indian Diaspora and business community leaders, can play a pivotal role and assist in the founding of the project. The target institutions would now be dealing with the Indo-Caribbean community as a compact group. While in the past there was always the fear that divisions could threaten the project, now that fear could be eliminated.
Appointment of a Commission
Now, after ten years since the idea was first published in the defunct Caribbean Indian American (CIA) newspaper, there has been rethinking on some issues and we suggest appointment of a Commission comprising relevant and qualified personnel to implement the project of the Indo-Caribbean Institute (ICI).
The Commission should undertake a feasibility study of the Indo-Caribbean Institute (ICI), and after deliberations, it should make the recommendations where it should be housed, what should be its goals and objectives and how those objectives be translated into actions.
Conclusion
While the idea to create such an institute is by no means new and would claim many fathers, its realization would present the greatest challenge to the Indo-Caribbean community. There can be no doubt there exists clear evidence for the creation of an institution, which will educate the Indo-Caribbean community of its existence in the United States and the Caribbean. With all the successful Indo-Caribbean initiatives in different walks of life it is possible that the Indo-Caribbean immigrants may rise to the challenge of institutionalizing the study of their culture, history, politics, art, literature and economics in academic institutions. Our failure to do so will mean we would have failed to leave our official print on our past. But our history tells us it can be done.