HIGHWAY 2: CLEM SEECHARAN

November 22, 2025

This little paper was prepared in February 2024 for a seminar at the Senate House, University College London, to celebrate the work of the Guyanese historian Clem Seecharan, winner of the Howard Milton Award for an outstanding contribution to cricket scholarship.

 

LANDMARKS IN THE OEUVRE OF CLEM SEECHARAN

‘The printed word has long entranced me; I still see magic in the final product. A book.’

Finding Myself, p.153

 

1988

Indo-West Indian Cricket (London: Hansib)

Clem’s first book, co-written with Professor Frank Birbalsingh, was also the first book to properly recognise the contribution made to ‘West Indian’ cricket by ‘East Indians’ (a now anachronistic colonial term devised in British Guiana). Clem’s sections are (i) an extended essay on how the Indian-Guyanese environment formed Kanhai, and how Kanhai helped form a new Indian-Guyanese consciousness; (ii) an interview with Ivan Madray, a leg-spinner who might have become the ‘twin’ of Lance Gibbs but for selectorial neglect – some of his vernacular is lovingly preserved: ‘When me fe bat, dem na wan’ gimme battin’.

1993

India and the Shaping of the Indo-Guyanese Imagination, 1890s-1920s (Leeds: Peepal Tree)

Published by Jeremy Poynting’s independent press (which has continued to encourage Caribbean writers of all backgrounds for nearly 40 years) this slim volume provides a potent synopsis of how the rediscovery of heritage in the Indian homeland interacted with the search for identity in the Guyanese ‘logies’. A history of ideas is, characteristically, leavened by the personal stories of W.H. Wharton, the first Indian-Caribbean to study at a British university, J.A. Luckhoo, the first Indian-Guyanese legislator, and Joseph Ruhomon, ‘the first Indian intellectual in British Guiana’ – Clem later edited a scholarly edition (Mona, UWI Press, 2001) of the lecture Ruhomon gave in 1894, at the age of 21, on ‘civilized, enlightened India’.

1997

‘Tiger in the Stars’: The Anatomy of Indian Achievement in British Guiana, 1919-29 (London: Macmillan)

Based on Clem’s Ph.D. thesis and published as part of the remarkable University of Warwick Caribbean Studies series nurtured by Professor David Dabydeen. Rich in primary archive research and statistical analysis, this is an unashamedly ‘revisionist’ study: (i) it punctures the myth that naïve girmitiyas (the indentured) were duped by shadowy arkatis (the recruiters): in fact, the ‘push’ of chronic land and food shortage in Eastern UP and Western Bihar proved stronger than the ‘pull’ of family and village ties; (ii) it argues that the concept of indenture as a ‘second slavery’ is too simplistic and that Indian labourers were often able to preserve their dignity even in the midst of dereliction; (iii) in the Ruhomon tradition, it places women at ‘the centre of Indian achievement in British Guiana’, proposing that their motivation was to escape the worst parts of their culture and adapt its best parts. While Tiger in the Stars emphasises Indian agency and mobility, it also demonstrates in withering fashion that the opportunity to make the region the rice-bowl of the Caribbean was wilfully obstructed by the vested interests of the sugar monoculture.

1999

Bechu: ‘Bound Coolie Radical’ in British Guiana, 1894-1901 (Mona: UWI)

Part of another important sequence of monographs, the University of West Indies Press Biography series dedicated to the ‘unsung’. Clem’s study of the Kolkata-born, Presbyterian-educated Bechu builds on earlier work by Alan Adamson and Tyran Ramnarine to show how this ‘indefatigable gadfly’ gave a voice to illiterate Indian-Guyanese at the turn of the century. The first half of the book is a contextual biography; the second a contextual selection of Bechu’s letters to the Daily Chronicle, where indenture is characterised as an agreement ‘which appears to be binding on one side only’.

2005

Sweetening ‘Bitter Sugar’: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934-66 (Kingston: Ian Randle)

Awarded the Elsa Goveia Prize by the Association of Caribbean Historians

Clem’s magnum opus – and it is indeed a long book – was over a decade in the making. Already an oral historian of the Corentyne, he became an oral historian of the metropole, conducting many interviews with the post-war chairman of the London-headquartered sugar company which seemed to reach into every facet of Guyanese life. Jock Campbell emerges as an enlightened but complex character: immensely proud of the family heritage, but racked with guilt about the legacy of slavery and indenture; focused on practical, incremental gains in areas as diverse as hydrology and epidemiology, but capable of the romantic or emotional gesture (reverting to planter type during the emergency of 1953/54). Central to the book is the clash between Campbell and the nationalist leader Cheddi Jagan, a relationship of enduring frustration but grudging admiration on both sides. As so often in Clem’s work, this human story opens out into a wide-ranging survey of Guyanese society, economics, culture and politics.

2006

Muscular Learning: Cricket and Education in the Making of the British West Indies to the End of the 19th Century (Kingston: Ian Randle)

Muscular Learning is Clem’s Beyond a Boundary. It develops one of C.L.R. James’s central concepts, ‘Shannonism’, coined in homage to the cricket club of the Constantines and their pride in being both competitive and representative. The book endorses the Jamesean view that a colonial sport designed to ‘canalise’ popular frustrations was over time triumphantly ‘creolised’. It stresses that the early development of the game owed most to ‘muscular’ education, now so liable to critique in its original English public-school setting, but adapted enthusiastically by the ‘coloured’ middle-class, and in turn by the emerging bourgeoisie of African and Indian heritage. Muscular Learning is at the same time a highly original work and a painstaking synthesis of Caribbean scholarship, drawing explicitly on local historians such as Bridget Brereton (Trinidad) and implicitly on cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall (Jamaica).

2009

From Ranji to Rohan: Cricket and National Identity in Colonial Guyana, 1890s-1960s (London: Hansib)

Clem’s first full-length publication with Arif Ali’s admirable Hansib imprint applies the thesis of Muscular Learning more specifically to the Indian-Guyanese experience: (i) it shows how the Test career of Ranjitsinhji was as symbolic to the diaspora as the Nobel Prize of Tagore; (ii) it pays tribute to inter-war pioneers such as J.A. Veerasawmy and ‘Doosha’ Persaud; (iii) it returns to the central figure of Kanhai and the post-war social context; (iv) it seeks to write Basil Butcher ‘into the Indo-Guyanese narrative, where he belongs’.

2011

Mother India’s Shadow over El-Dorado: Indo-Guyanese Politics and Identity, 1890s-1930s (Kingston: Ian Randle)

This monograph draws together the strands of Clem’s earlier work on what Nehru famously called the ‘Discovery of India’. During the long years of indenture in BG, a mixture of romance and amnesia paradoxically created a sense of identity that was less sectarian, caste-ridden and patriarchal. However, the formal abolition of indenture in 1920 (a year after the Amritsar massacre) marks a surge in nationalist feeling and Hindu revivalism. This tended to combine with the old myth of Guyana as a promised land, producing more insular and inflammatory structures of feeling.

2015

Finding Myself: Essays on Race, Politics and Culture (Leeds: Peepal Tree)

This volume collects Clem’s shorter essays: (i) a fascinating set of autobiographical pieces on ‘sugar in the blood’, a caste heritage of cattle-farming, and intellectual formation in the New Amsterdam Public Free Library; (ii) assessments of the legacy of Cheddi Jagan and other members of the People’s Progressive Party; (iii) appraisals of some of the writers who have most influenced Clem: Martin Carter, C.L.R. James, Brij Lal, V.S. Naipaul, Walter Rodney.

2016 to date

Hand-in-Hand History of Cricket in Guyana (Hertford: Hansib)

While there are several excellent histories of pan-Caribbean cricket, there were no notable single-country histories except for Arnold Bertram’s survey of the sport in Jamaica. Clem has embarked upon a monumental history of Guyana’s national game, informed by extensive research of contemporary newspapers. Two volumes have appeared to date: (i) 1865-97 explains how the rivalry with Barbados helped establish Guyanese cricket and traces the evolution of Georgetown Cricket Club (as influential as Queen’s Park CC in Trinidad if not as enlightened); (ii) 1898-1914 shows how GCC presided over a malarial cricket environment, initiatives such as the importation of Barbadian fast bowlers outweighed by the club’s wider policy of apartheid against West Indian professionals.

2017

(ed.) An Abounding Joy: Essays on Sport by Ian Macdonald (Hertford: Hansib)

A collection of articles by Ian McDonald, the prize-winning poet and Davis Cup tennis player, mostly written for David de Caires’ Sunday Starbroek. Clem’s selections reflect Ian’s belief that intellectual and sporting pursuits should mix easily, ‘each reinforcing the other in the enhancement of life’. The introduction attends to influences both creole and canonical, including William Hazlitt on aesthetic ‘taste’ and Edmund Burke on athletic ‘grace’. Perhaps the celebratory vein risks underplaying the disenchantments of life (Hazlitt came to view Burke as the arch-apologist for ‘hereditary power’). But as a considerate curation of a body of work and an investigation of the writing life by a fellow writer, An Abounding Joy takes high rank with Alan Ross’s anthology of R.C. Robertson-Glasgow and Stephen Chalke’s recent celebration of David Foot.

2022

Joe Solomon and the Spirit of Port Mourant (Hertford: Hansib)

Awarded the inaugural Guyana Prize for Literature in Non-Fiction

Clem has always been attracted to unsung heroes. This biography of the cricketer once described ‘as laconic as he is iconic’ was timely in that it was published on Joe’s ninety-second birthday. Solomon’s achievements are read through the ‘bizarre milieu’ of Port Mourant, where a rapid improvement in economic conditions and a multi-racial cricket culture evolved against a national backdrop of political instability and racial tension. The accounts of the cricket, climaxing in the Brisbane Tied Test where Solomon effected the last-ball run-out, are enlivened by player interviews, recently discovered archives and Clem’s own vivid childhood memories.

2023

Cheddi Jagan and the Cold War, 1946-92 (Kingston: Ian Randle)

Clem’s most recent book renews his long professional association with Ian Randle, the doyen of scholarly publishing in the Anglophone Caribbean. It is also the culmination of a lifelong fascination with the figure who once bestrode Guyanese politics and still inspires strong emotions. The book acknowledges Jagan was sometimes stymied as much by his own personal integrity as by his political ideology. It conveys the mixture of cynicism and paranoia in American policy towards a potential ‘second Cuba’. But it is essentially the passionate polemic of a historian who grew up thinking Jagan asked all the right questions but now believes he found few of the right answers.

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