In the month of May, before his death on 9 July 2023 at the age of eighty-three, Brinsley Samaroo was one of the main speakers invited to launch a book on Indian entrepreneurs in Trinidad. 1 The master of ceremonies Mr Hans Hanoomansingh reminded the audience that Professor Samaroo had already during the morning given another public address. 2 Brinsley walked slowly to the podium and laid out his printed speech, and with a stub of a pencil in his right hand as if he was still poised to scribble notes on the paper, he began his well-paced delivery. The pauses and repetitions with brief upward glances demonstrated such confidence and comfort with his audience, that at times you would think he was reading this over to himself in privacy, savouring the ideas he had pulled together. The text he delivered was evidence of a lifetime of experience, demonstrating an extensive knowledge of global and Caribbean history, and an informed appreciation of literatures and cultural difference. Peppered by occasional translation of an English word, phrase, or sentence into Hindi, he showed not only a facility for language but revealed his personal politics, preferring to quote in the language of his forefathers than the European ones which are generally held in more prestige for a Western speaker.
He had titled his short review of the book ‘Antecedents’, a fitting one for the way in which he filtered knowledge, selecting details and ideas from the past that connected to the present to reveal parables. Brinsley thought in antecedents.
The Indians who came to the Caribbean, half a million of them, were not new people, they were the products of an ancient civilization which by the sixteenth century had matured into the leading industrial nation of the world alongside China. Two seventeenth century sources from two authors, one in India, other in England talked about the opulence of India. The one in England is William Shakespeare and other, Sant Tulsidas. (Samaroo 2023).
He cited brief references to India in Shakespeare’s plays Othello and A Midsummer’s Night Dream and paralleled this with quotes from Sant Tulsidas, 3 the latter of which he also translated into Hindi. He berated the fact that while we in the Caribbean are taught and examined on Shakespeare at secondary and tertiary level schooling, the Indian author Tulsidas, whose poems have similar merit on the history, geography and the splendour of India is to be found nowhere in our syllabus. Each platform for Brinsley was an opportunity to enlighten and advance current civilization in new and informed directions.
India and China concerned themselves with productivity and philosophy rather than with military might. For India the whole world is one family. India’s philosophers thought there should be unity in diversity but not uniformity. That is the culture that was brought to the Caribbean … The narrative tells of the people whose DNA was infused by their ancient antecedents of achievements, impelled by the strength of this biogenetic memory they were able to see the tasks ahead not as scavengers but as opportunities and in this land of ours, they sensed the energy of the place because Trinidad and Tobago were two later colonies of settlement so there was much potential for productivity – they sensed the dynamism of the place. (Samaroo 2023).
As Gabrielle Hosein has written:
An educator at heart, in almost every conversation he would unspool the roots of Indo-Caribbean words, surnames and place names. One of the last times I saw him, he explained how the Sanskrit roots of the word ‘industry’ come from Indian women’s labour in the Indus valley. (Hosein 2023)
At the book launch, like a magician, he conjured the philosophy from which the concept of industry among Indians was born. ‘Not as scavengers but as opportunities’. This was Brinsley Samaroo’s brilliant rebuttal of the societal attitudes to Indians, a society that had viewed post-migrant Indians as interlopers or thrifty misers, only acquisitive of wealth and property. He provided the illustrious legacy of productivity and forward thinking from which the first Indian entrepreneurs had descended, the traditions on which they were building and thus the contributions they would make to this society into which they were now settling.
Richard Drayton picks up on his creative intellect. Drayton (2023) writes
If you want a window into the beautiful generous genius of Brinsley Samaroo, look at Glimpses of the Sugar Industry: The Art of Garnet Ifill (2003), where Samaroo juxtaposes Ifill’s extraordinary photographs of labour and survival on the plantation to historical commentary and verses from the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib (1797–1868) and others.
While Brinsley had spent his whole career at the University of the West Indies campus at St Augustine in Trinidad, achieving the position of Professor of History, he is also as well known for his work in politics. Drayton notes that
During the 1970 Black Power Revolution and in the 1970s turbulence, he was a quiet interlocutor with both urban and rural insurgents, even covertly assisting the National Union of Freedom Fighters. He was Opposition Leader in the Senate for the United Labour Front from 1981–86, and a Member of Parliament and Minister in the government of the National Alliance for Reconstruction from 1986–1991. (Drayton 2023)
This unstinting sharing of his knowledge, a consistent striving to deepen understanding and thought among his listeners, appears effortless when he weaves the narrative together. That capacity to synthesize knowledge is not automatic. It was earned from a lifetime of study and writing, from his courage to change professions and enter the world of political struggle, from his gregariousness, an ability to talk without condescension or artifice to everyone. Kavita Samaroo, his daughter, said:
He had his ear on the ground – he really always knew what was going on and how to get information. He was good at socializing with people and letting everyone feel comfortable. He could talk to a security guard and to the President in the same breath. He had no airs, starting up a conversation easy like ‘ah boy boy your father there’. He thought everyone had a story and something interesting to say. He felt every story was valid. It was less about information gathering and rather about people story gathering. He had a way of being present when he was with someone, His whole body was giving them attention, he had a way of talking to everyone and getting something valuable from all. 4
Although quintessentially a scholar, what made him better as an intellectual and what made him the important public intellectual that he had become, was that his interests butterflied into the many interrelated parts which occupy the agile mind and could not be pinned down. He carried in the bloodstream of his capacious memory the minutiae of historical fact, news, observation and gossip.
This event was the last public engagement I shared with Brinsley Samaroo. It was also the final time I would see him, a university colleague I had known for decades and had interacted with countless times in different capacities. With no prescience of what was to come, I recall being so moved by his presentation, that I began my own gender review of the book that day thanking him for tracing this lineage of Indian industry and placing all our collective reviews in that long wave of history and philosophy. Afterwards I asked him for a copy of the document, which, of course, he did not send. Brinsley who still wrote with pencils on paper, was not a man who had travelled mercilessly into the world of technology, although he was by no means disconnected from it. By covering this event, I have provided one scenario that I hope has conveyed some depth and breadth of his intellectual and emotional reach.
An equally important characteristic of Brinsley’s life however was his generosity as a mentor to another generation who benefitted from his kindness, knowledge and disciplined work ethic. I dip into the cauldron of his bubbling and richly flavoured life through vignettes provided by four other primary sources who tell in first person about their memories and debts to him. They are his daughter Kavita Samaroo, a trained medical doctor, Dr Gabrielle Hosein, a feminist colleague and senior lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Dr Sharda Patasar, a gifted classical sitar player whom he supervised in her PhD dissertation carried out for the University of Trinidad and Tobago, and Mr Richard Charan, an outstanding journalist with the Trinidad Express Newspaper. With his daughter I carried out an interview, reached into his biographical details to learn a little more about his origins and private life and transcribed what she said, staying very close to her words and phrases as far as possible. The other three written vignettes were willingly provided by each of the other informants, in such rich language and metaphor in describing Brinsley that it would be criminal to change their voice.
Although each of them gives a personal perspective, there are some recurrences in all which bring Brinsley Samaroo very alive to the reader who would have never met or known him. And to those who had, they touch on the quirks that one took for granted, but which gave him his unique personality. He was such a colourful character that he deserves a full biography which undoubtedly will be written one day, the same way he himself has given voice and lasting existence to many lives he has uncovered, among them Howard Noel Nankivell, 5 Adrian Cola Rienzi 6 and several women whose lives he has made more visible in the public documentation.
Kavita Samaroo: He carried his heritage with him wherever he went
Brinsley Samaroo was born on 14 April 1940 in Rio Claro, a little village towards the south-east coast of Trinidad in the West Indies. Rio Claro is the largest town in south-eastern Trinidad, lying east of Princes Town, west of Mayaro, the south-eastern beach shore. It currently serves as the major commercial centre for south-eastern Trinidad but in the early days, before Brinsley was born, it was still becoming the hub it is today. The town was named for a small stream, which was named Rio Claro by Spanish surveyors in the 1770s. As cacao planters settled the area, the village on the banks of the Rio Claro came to be called by that name. When the Trinidad Government Railway extended its line to this village in 1914, the name Rio Claro was formalized.
It was in this area that Brinsley Samaroo’s paternal grandfather Gobindaye Samaroo settled when he came to Trinidad as an indentured labourer. Gobindaye married another labourer and had two boys, George who was Brinsley’s father and another son Sookhoo. Sadly, their mother died when the boys were young. Gobindaye died at the age of 79. The family established their home in Ecclesville a village near Rio Claro. The Canadian missionaries who pioneered the development of Ecclesville hired Gobindaye as their ‘man of business’. Thus, Brinsley’s father George grew up in a Presbyterian village environment and became an interlocutor. He spoke both Hindi and English. Asked how Brinsley himself had learnt to speak Hindi, Kavita says:
He picked up a few words here and there from the family and people in the village, from the Canadian missionaries. It was also spoken at home but he learnt it when he went to India to study. He was raised as a Presbyterian and his eldest brother is a practicing Presbyterian Minister.
She notes that he was very open to all religions though, had possibly ‘read all the religious books and could in fact speak on all. He could pull on all for information that he needed for a point he had to make, so perhaps he did’.
George, his father, would marry Myra, the second child of an Indian indentured labourer. Myra’s mother was brought to Trinidad as an infant from India with her parents who were indentured. George and Myra had seven children. Brinsley was the last of the seven. Brinsley remembered his father as a proud man, strict and highly disciplined, traits that he would also continue. He describes Myra, his mother, as hard-working and having a very hard life taking care of all her children. Being the youngest of the family, he was entrusted into the care of his eldest sister Mina who took him under her wing before his thirteenth birthday. Mina was the first to be educated as a teacher and had a great influence on his education and outlook on life. That caring relationship between him and Mina was very important to Brinsley, and he continued to spend time with her, visiting every other weekend up until her passing at 98 years old.
Kavita was born in Farfan Avenue, Santa Margarita, in St Augustine where Brinsley had moved into in September 1971 when he married Joan Ramdeen. She is one of two children that Brinsley had, the first Naila, two years older than her, was born with disabilities. The family took care of Naila and incorporated her into family life with a naturalness that Kavita thought was normal for all families. Brinsley brought with him when he moved to Santa Margarita after his education and travels abroad a closeness to the land that he had had in his home village of Ecclesville. In the Santa Margarita house, the back garden was his domain. He planted every manner of local plants or fruit that he had known in his childhood. Kavita faithfully lists each of these as they remain part of his legacy to the family: Noni, Governor Plum, Moringa, Praying Hand Banana, Neem, Carapole, Pomegranate, Coconut, Orange, Grapefruit, Lime, Bay Leaf, Mango, and Soursop. Her mother manicured the front garden with plants like Heliconia and Bottlebrush while he worked in the back garden. As a child Kavita spent a lot of her time in the garden with him, barefoot and running around the fruit trees. She remembers he ‘used to pick the fruit and give us all the time, the coconuts, and fresh orange juice from the garden. If I got ill, he would go and make bush tea – usually lemon grass tea for me’.
She remembers him as always a kind, gentle and soft-spoken father. ‘We did not know the public persona, to us it was just Dad, and Dad was very quiet, he did not say much, and when he did everybody listened, he never got angry. The angriest I have ever seen him was during politics and then he was under pressure’.
In the difficult teenage years while she was growing up, and had difficulty communicating with her mother, ‘Dad would come in the room and say don’t upset mom. He appealed to me with calmness’. They both shared a love of reading so when she was trying to decide to do medicine, ‘he left a poem on my desk; “The Road Less Travelled” by Robert Frost, which I’ve kept all these years as it made me feel quietly seen and supported by him’. Even if he did not speak to her about some things, he guided her with reading. And when she studied abroad in Jamaica and England, they exchanged numerous letters which she treasures.
His easy-going quiet nature was deceptive and masked a disciplined person who understood the value of conveying this lesson to those under his tutelage as we shall also see in Sharda Patasar’s narrative under. Kavita says:
He was a tough dad also, although he was soft, he was tough with me. When I went to Mona, 7 he would give me x amount of money and you had to find a way to make it work, you could not come back for more. He was teaching the lessons of economy. He never spoilt me. I always had to research things properly and come and propose things to him in an objective way and we would discuss rationally.
Mayaro, the seaside village, was very important to Brinsley. Kavita recalls:
When he was young and his family lived in Rio Claro, Mayaro would be the nearest beach, and the family would go there often. The only dream that he had in life was to have a beach house on Mayaro so that he could bring his family there. And he did achieve this buying a property on the beach in Mayaro. He went almost every weekend there up until he passed, him Mom and Mahadeo, a relative who helped him cut the yard and cook curried duck. He would invite everyone, friends, students, Ministers. He would talk and laugh and cook. He worked hard during the week and Mayaro was the break, his reset for the next week.
Brinsley’s priorities were not personal financial wealth or becoming famous. Kavita said:
He wore the same shirt jac, pants and Birkenstock shoes his whole life, with different variations for this or that event. He even went to hospital for that last week in a shirt jac. He was not interested in worldly possessions. He would buy a car and we knew the car would get hit. He would generally hit the car in the yard. Worldly things did not affect him at all.
Why did he choose to become a Minister of government and join the intensely combative world of politics? She replied thoughtfully:
He felt that this is the way that he can make change – he organized the markets down in Mayaro, he wanted to be most impactful to his community. His constituency was Nariva Mayaro, the county in which he had grown up, and he was made Minister of Agriculture, a field that was singularly important to him.
Ironically, the man who would know everything about others’ lives, never followed up the history of his own. Kavita said that it was only during the COVID-19 pandemic that he started to trace their family trees, doing one for her mother, and then starting to uncover some facts about his own. It was not a deliberate slight. He did not have the arrogance or self-indulgence to write his own. Perhaps he did not need to. As Kavita said, ‘He carried his heritage with him wherever he went’.
Gabrielle Hosein: He could confide all that wasn’t in history books
In my memories over nearly thirty years, from first meeting Professor Brinsley Samaroo, (he was Dr Samaroo then), as I helped with setting up the Indian Diaspora conference in 1995, to liming with him at his usual spot in the West Indiana section of the UWI library on a Monday morning three weeks before his passing, it is his deeply caring and slightly curmudgeonly personality that I most affectionately remember, value and will miss.
Professor Samaroo was extremely funny. His delivery was dry and you could catch yourself wondering if he was being hilarious or serious. But his humour was mischievous, and he would heap satire into his stories, explaining how corrupt politicians bought up the land around highways yet to be built and revealing old talk he heard while drinking expensive whisky with his Muslim friends.
To have known Professor Emeritus Brinsley Samaroo is to understand why historians, not just history, matter. Indeed, Professor Samaroo mattered, not just because of the love for life and learning which he shared with anyone who sought a moment with him, but because he knew so much history that he chose not to write into the historiography of indenture and the Caribbean. That history you could only get from him in snatches of conversation, while on some tour across Trinidad or perhaps at the edges of discussion in a conference or while visiting him in Mayaro or at ‘his’ desk in West Indiana, or even on the way back to the library after commemorating the anniversary of Samuel Selvon’s birth.
He deliberately kept some stories off the books, whether because he knew the families involved or because of some personal sense of ethics about what one does or doesn’t publish. Yet, he had no qualms about telling you all, enjoying his delivery of an insider scoop, revelling in the fact that it was both utterly truthful and consigned to virtual secrecy, away from the pages and pages of his writing. He could confide all that wasn’t in history books: scandal from across the twentieth century, from Adrian Cola Rienzi to Eric Williams to today; plantations that fell apart because of their drunken white owners and then were revived by the grit of their Indian child brides; brothels hidden in plain sight along the east coast; and land stolen by French Creoles from Indian women after their husbands died. By telling us all the stories which remained unwritten, he had taken us all into his confidence, had made us feel that we were deeply fortunate to know something only he could have told us or shown us through his eyes.
He proudly told the story of women, whether protesters or entrepreneurs, and would remind anyone interested about Phoolbassie, also known as Naidoo, and Josephine Charles, who spent a year in jail for her participation in the 1937 workers’ unrest. He believed women in the labour movement were ‘side by side’ with men, ‘not one behind the other’.
Conversation with him was like reading V.S. Naipaul’s Suffrage of Elvira: he had a handle on the society, both from behind doors and from paying close attention to what played out across the newspapers. If you asked, he would tell you what he really thought of all kinds of people to whom he was deferential in public. His would be an astute, ethical and honest point of view.
He took history to people and would speak anywhere he was asked, writing his notes with sharpened pencils at that very desk in West Indiana. However, more than that, he was an adventurer. He’d corral everyone on some hill, coastline, or past estate grounds to lecture in situ, pointing at one thing or another, marvelling with you as if he too was seeing with fresh eyes. He was deep in archival records, diaries, and newspapers, but also saw landscape as an archive.
To travel with him was to see places as he did – named after plantation owners, sites of riots and protests, built up by women’s survival spirit, marked by the legacy of indenture. A natural storyteller, he made history come to life.
For this reason, nearly every conversation with Prof was full of unexpected details. Those conversations were also full of encouragement and advice. When Professor Samaroo passed away, an astounding number of scholars and students told stories of him continuing to support their projects to the extent that they felt bereft and unmoored, certain they had lost someone without whom they wouldn’t know how to continue.
We drew on his writing, but we treasured the man. His contributions mattered, but something has gone with him. He may live on in his papers and books, but they do not archive the deep affection so many felt. I daresay we loved him too.
Sharda Patasar: On discipline and connectedness
No one who took the mandatory course at the University of the West Indies, Foundations of Civilizations I believe it was called, taught by Professor Brinsley Samaroo, will forget Inca potatoes. Every time I go to the grocery and read the labels, I inevitably mutter in his voice, ‘Inca potatoes. Inca potatoes. They never get it right’.
There was also the word proselytization which we wrote on the blackboard. In his characteristic way of not looking directly at people, clearing his throat and repeating sentences or words in a slow, deliberate manner, he said, ‘Proselytization. Proselytization. This is the way I spell it. You feel free to spell it your way, but this is the one I use. This is the one I will use for the exams’. Everyone knew what that meant.
I remember the angst I felt as his PhD. student when he would not reply to emails. There was always a dead silence, and one had the sensation of speaking to someone who would very well stare into space as if you were not speaking to him. I was supposed to pick up the phone and call. He disciplined people into what he needed.
His dedication to his work which he evidently delighted in was encouraging to a young researcher. His sandals, the shirt jac, the trousers gave him the air of a man comfortable in his skin. I didn’t have his light-heartedness and ease, however. As serious as he appeared, there was a lightness of spirit and a fluidity in the way he could speak for hours about the history of this place. He had stories that could only come from someone who was keenly interested in people and who also enjoyed every moment of his engagements. Even while he was bent over his desk at the West Indiana Library, writing with pencils that were mostly stubs, which I felt as an undergraduate student observing him, had a Gandhian ethos, he did it with the same discipline and ease. For years I believed he was a follower of Gandhi (I never asked) – the pencil stubs, the pieces of paper with printing on one side that usually had a diagonal line passing through it as he had crossed it off indicating it was no longer in use. Nothing seemed to go to waste. I tried it, cutting my own pencils, writing on scraps of paper, but never managed to keep them organized. Having failed, I tried time management (that too failed, unfortunately) – and the presence of the historian at the doors of the library before 8:30 on mornings. He didn’t have classes and when he was retired, still appeared there at that time to enter, read the newspapers, and then head to ‘his desk’ at West Indiana.
On one occasion I was supposed to meet him at the Lloyd Best Institute which was also one of his research hubs. He had a small office there as well. My time of meeting was 5 pm. I got there two minutes to five and there was no Professor. I called him to see if perhaps he hadn’t arrived yet.
He answered ‘Na man. I left’.
I was indignant.
‘It’s two minutes to five Prof’.
‘No man. No. I said 5’.
There was no argument to be had. There was no further conversation and I simply had to return the next day.
There were meetings that lasted all of five minutes in some cases, leaving me confused and surprisingly, not irritated, but bewildered as to why this wasn’t something that he could have communicated over the phone. He did not use his emails to attach documents or note corrections, did not respond to text messages, and yet stayed connected. Over time it left me with a feeling of awe at this ability to stay connected and deeply engaged without the humbugs that modern life had imposed on us. I have often wished that I lived in his world.
Richard Charan: Tell their stories. Correct the record
I have not got over his loss. There are so few male role models, father figures. I felt that with him.
I consider it one of the highlights of my life to have been there at the junction in Rio Claro that afternoon in June 2023, when Dr Samaroo attended what turned out to be his last public engagement. The occasion was the unveiling of a memorial for the 24 people shot in Rio Claro’s town centre during a labour protest in 1937, in which four died. Not a single person at that event could have foreseen us losing Dr Samaroo a week later. There he was, sitting at the head table at the side of the Naparima/Mayaro Road, in the village of his birth, surrounded by the people from his childhood, keeping us spellbound, as he explained why his hometown was so important to the working class, that blood was shed right there, so that poor people could have a living wage that was grudgingly approved of by a colonial government who cared little for the Blacks and the Browns.
He let us know of the importance of the Chinese shopkeeper to the oil explorations on Trinidad’s south-eastern tip that would ignite our hydrocarbon industry a hundred and something years ago. And of the South African connection to the oil companies, and the quiet racism and segregation that took decades to undo, an echo of which remained long after Independence. He slayed the oil company manager, a Mr Beaumont, who he said hated people of colour, and Dr Samaroo called on his audience to go down to Mayaro and rip down the Beaumont signage in several places on the east coast. I know quite a few people that day waiting to carry out that vandalism order.
This is the thing I admired most about Dr Samaroo, that passion and energy, that complete absence of airs, that connection to everyone, and not giving a damn what the ruling class thought of his contempt. He had done something similar not three months before his passing, when at the launch of ‘History Fest: An Examination of the Business History of T&T’ at the audio-visual room of the Alma Jordan Library at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, he left people gasping when he said that cartels were controlling food production in Trinidad and Tobago, and that the food import business was corrupted.
A month or so later, I recall Dr Samaroo telling me that the Trinidad and Tobago Fair Trade Commission were horrified by what he had said, and they had written to him, demanding evidence, or a retraction. That sounded like trouble to me. He didn’t think much of it. I highly doubt they got a response, because, at 83, Dr Samaroo was an old soul. He had seen and heard it all. And, he was an extremely busy man. Until the very end, he was working on multiple books, connecting with people across the Caribbean, pondering new projects, writing scholarly papers and essays on things he had come across.
And in the midst of all that, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, he reached out to me at a time in my career when I was rudderless and approaching a whirlpool. It is not an exaggeration to say that Dr Samaroo changed the course of my life. As Multimedia Editor at the Caribbean Communications Network, I had for years written a weekly article that mostly dealt with matters of history. Dr Samaroo saw its worth and called me to a meeting.
‘Don’t call me Sir. That is a relic of Colonialism’, he let me know that first time.
And to my uncertainty over whether my writing would be impactful, he let me know ‘you know what you are doing, and what you are trying to say’. It took seven months, but through his guidance and counsel, hundreds of my articles, which he read and critiqued (I don’t know how he found the time) have now taken the form of a manuscript, which is ready for publication. He thought that my work was important, that the storytelling was a unique way to deliver important historical information about the islands to its citizens, something so desperately lacking. I also got some advice I intend to take in this, the second part of my life and career. Dr Samaroo did not think that the story of the East Indian immigrant, all its tentacles and all its edges, had been all told, not by far.
‘Continue to find the people. Tell their stories. Correct the record’, he told me.
I will do my part.
Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks to Kavita, Gabrielle, Sharda, and Richard for responding on the first call and sharing their time and written scripts in record time. Thanks to Hemraj Ramdath for sharing with me the video recording of the book launch from which I was able to transcribe Brinsley’s review titled ‘Antecedents’.