Growing up with Mauritius Times

Personal Recollections

By Paramanund Soobarah

Since the demise of my wife about ten years ago, I have been in deep slumber. I was awakened by a call to recall, even momentarily, what my previous life had been like. I do now recall very clearly that in an earlier life I used to live happily, and that one my joys was to write for Mauritius Times. I also recall that one of my last articles was about the pride of belonging to the Diaspora. On my return from overseas, I had written that I had rushed to the Indian High Commission with my one thousand dollars and got myself a PIO card, and that was later transformed into an OCI card.

That action of mine had been provoked by a shrill call from Shri Narendra Modi addressing the Diaspora in Madison Square, New York. “Come all ye children of Mother India, wherever ye may be, and join me in our forward march across the world, with heads held high, to reclaim our dignity and our pride in our origins and in our great, ancient civilisation.”

That sort of reaction seems to have been a recurrent theme in my life. A similar reaction had occurred in my life all of seventy years ago, when I was leaving school to join adult working life, and when, at around the same time, Mauritius Times was born. Up to that time it had been drilled into me by the education system that I was—inferior!

It all started when, at the age of five or thereabouts. I was dragged, literally carried, off to school by a number of nasty boys cheered on in their awful action by my own father! At school everybody spoke a language I could not understand at all. It took what seemed like an eternity for me to learn their language and converse with them in it. I came to know that their language was called Creole and was told that the gibberish I spoke at home was called Kalkita. The Head Teacher was a Mr Valadon, and my own class mistress was the stern, forbidding Mrs Abraham. Mr Sithalee taught us to read “Bray the Donkey” from Palmerstone Readers; school-wide favourite teachers included Jean Valadon and Harold Chadien. My own favourite was Sixth Standard teacher Yolande Cheong Vee.

Early education and cultural encounters

The school was the Palma Church of England aided School, and it served the entire area from just after Quatre Bornes through Palma village right down to Beaux Songes and included Bassin Road and Montagne Corps de Garde areas. The Rughoos and Ganeshes, the Jeewoonarains and Jugnauths, the Bidessees, Dinapanrays and Beekarrys, and the Sithapas and Veerasamys were all there in their large numbers, and so of course were also the Soobarahs. These names might mean nothing to most readers, but to the villagers of Palma they meant a lot. One of the pupils there actually became Prime Minister serving as such for decades.

It was in those days that the concept of inferior/superior took hold in my mind. It was necessary to be good, both at home and at school. But to be good at home did not mean the same thing as being good at school. At home it meant being obedient to the wishes of all elders – the family was large with parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters all living together under the iron rule of Dadi, the Grand Mother.

B Ramlallah and Deoduth Bheenick at Nalanda Bookshop in the early 60s

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“Kher was among the contributors to Mauritius Times, and he took me along to meet the great man himself, i.e. Shri Beekrumsing Ramlallah. I was impressed by his simplicity; I had already been impressed by the English style of Mauritius Times: short, direct, hammer-stroke like sentences. I noticed during these visits that his small library included Roget’s Thesaurus. Across the road from his office was the Nalanda Bookshop, and the book was there also. As soon as I could amass sufficient money (as a “good” Hindu, I used to turn over my pay wholesale to my mum every month) I purchased the book. Thus started my love-affair with dictionaries and books generally…”

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I had also known Dada, the Grandfather and used to ride on his shoulders and get along very pleasantly with him, but he did not live to see the cruel way I was sent off to school. There, to be good meant to be quiet in class, to say correctly “Our Father who art in Heaven, etc.” on joining class in the morning and “Notre Père qui es aux cieux, etc.” before leaving school in the afternoon. The Bible was also read to us from time to time; I still remember that angels had six wings, “with twain to cover their face, with twain to cover their feet, and with twain to fly.”

There were a few boys and girls who were better than most; they attended church service in St Andrews Church in Quatre Bornes. There were many others who attended other churches, but they were not too popular. I learnt later that they were “Catholiques”. There were no Muslims in Palma, and I did not get to know about them until my transfer to Quatre Bornes Government School for the Junior Scholarship class. Thereafter the difference between being good and being bad became a very serious matter. And as ever, “good” and “bad” also carried connotations of “superior” and “inferior”. At home we faced the wartime difficulties like everybody else. My primary school years coincided exactly with the Second World War, 1939-1945.

I was moved to the Quatre Bornes Government School for the Scholarship class. There, under the tutorship of the very venerable Mr Deonarain Gajadharsingh, the amount of Arithmetic and French Grammar that I learnt was enough to last me for my whole life, even though I am not sure that I always get the “participe passé” right. Somehow, I cannot always get the difference between “les fruits que j’ai vus cueillir” and “les fruits que j’ai vu mûrir” right. That was about written French; my spoken French was what spoken primary school French still is today – not something to be proud of. However, regarding the English Language, the gulf between the written and spoken versions was much wider. I did get good marks in my written work at the Royal College Curepipe (RCC) where I went thereafter, but being awarded good marks by teachers for written work is not the same thing as being fluent in spoken English.

At the RCC I met with another setback. There the “better” and “superior” students spoke French among themselves. Indo-Mauritians, on the other hand, could not manage that language with the same degree of fluency and, wrongly rather than rightly, clubbed together and conversed in Creole. The teaching there also was mostly about writing; no attention whatever was given to pronunciation. English master Louis Besson sometimes commented upon how some VIPs mispronounced certain words – “particular” like the Indian “goropiti”, for instance. Science and Mathematics teachers Bathfield, d’Unienville and Perdrau were a source of emulation to many, for their spoken English as much as, if not more than, their science.

But somehow in the end I came to believe that French and English were not important enough for any particular toil, and that one could easily get through the exams in those subjects with reasonable scores, and so I put all my efforts into Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, these subjects having captured my fascination. Wrongly so – because that cost me the scholarship, as there was only one on the science side in those days.

The Bissoondoyalists and the Ramgoolamists

During those teenage years I had a parallel life at home. Bhojpuri, as “Kalkita” was now called, remained the language at home. Respect for elders and use of respectful versions of verbs and references to others were the criteria for good behaviour. (Incidentally, I still use that version when speaking to household employees today; I honestly know no other, never having practised what I was made to regard as the “vulgar” form.) At the age of fourteen, my father gave me Romesh Dutt’s translation of the Ramayana to read and frequently had me read passages aloud in front of him. I enjoyed that.

After that he gave a copy of the Edwin Arnold’s Bhagavad Gita or the Song Celestial. I found that very difficult; I don’t think I ever got to the end of it. But even I remained steeped in what can loosely be called “religion”. In those days the sum-total of relatives – to me the “community” – was torn asunder, into the Bissoondoyalists and the Ramgoolamists.

Broadly speaking, Pandit Basdeo Bissoondoyal stressed upon the spiritual aspects of Hinduism for the progress of the community, whereas Dr Ramgoolam and his team, which included many western-educated intellectuals and also, surprisingly, Jay Narain Roy who was “made in India”, stressed upon the need for improvements to their material living conditions for their progress. My immediate family had elected to follow Pandit Bissoondoyal, our house was full of religious material produced by or procured through the Bissoondoyals. Much of it was by Mahatma Gandhi, and that has shaped my life. I have never feared to say or do what I believe to be right, and I have never knowingly committed an injustice. When faced with injustice in my own case, I have fought back with all my might. I have never ever taken any bribe or commission in the course of my work.

But to come back to my teenage years, I am still unhappy that I never studied Hinduism properly — I only encountered it in dribs and drabs, beyond the occasional Puja at home and occasional visits to the temple. My father led the effort to create the temple at Palma and my family still takes a leading hand in the running of it. The Baitka I used to go to for Hindi lessons is now a powerful secondary level institution. But I am still not sure that the Vedas and the Upanishads are being taught; that the major contributions of the early Indians to Phonetics and Phonology, Mathematics, Astronomy and other sciences, etc., are being highlighted. It is on the other hand possible that the inferior/superior cleavage that was still very much in evidence in the early and mid-fifties has now practically disappeared. It took hard work from many since those days to overcome that.

One the institutions that has helped in that struggle is Mauritius Times. When I was leaving school, Beekrumsing Ramlallah was preparing to launch the paper. I remember that he had written to the then Director of Le Cernéen, Noel Marrierd Unienville, better known by his initials N.M.U., to protest about something or other. In response, N.M.U. wrote one of his tirades, claiming he had thrown the letter in the waste-paper basket. That was normal behaviour from those people in those days: to offend and proclaim loudly how one has offended and taught the other a lesson. I am not aware whether he lived long enough to see the demise of his paper Le Cernéen, and to see many members of his tribe fleeing to South Africa (from where they had to flee again after the arrival of Nelson Mandela), and also finally, to see the rest of them withdrawing from politics altogether.

I left school in December 1954 at the age of twenty. My “old-fashioned” family had already arranged for me to be married, and I joined the Civil Service, thus fulfilling my father’s dream: his ambition was for his son to join the government service, something he had been denied because he (and his parents) had refused to be part of a “civilised and higher” religion. My pay was Rs 222.30 per month; that was inclusive of Cost of Living Allowance (COLA); when, a few months later, the cost of living had gone down (according to Government statistics), the pay went down to Rs 216 per month.

Encounter with Mauritius Times

I was posted at the Medical Headquarters where I came across Kher Jagatsingh, Dev Soopramanien and others. In addition to work, the conversation was all about our dignity and status in society. Kher was among the contributors to Mauritius Times, and he took me along to meet the great man himself, i.e. Shri Beekrumsing Ramlallah. I was impressed by his simplicity; I had already been impressed by the English style of Mauritius Times: short, direct, hammer-stroke like sentences. I noticed during these visits that his small library included Roget’s Thesaurus. Across the road from his office was the Nalanda Bookshop, and the book was there also. As soon as I could amass sufficient money (as a “good” Hindu, I used to turn over my pay wholesale to my mum every month) I purchased the book. Thus started my love-affair with dictionaries and books generally. (I had grown up without any dictionary.)

Married life was difficult. I dabbled with private tuition to be able to assist my wife. The Public Service Commission had just been set up, and I kept on applying for any jobs that were advertised with better pay. I first got a job at the then Department of Agriculture; the pay there was more than double what I was getting earlier but still was not enough. Finally, my tutor and friend Sanjay Padya brought me information about a job of Air Traffic Controller in the Department of Civil Aviation. I applied for it and got it and ought to be, I suppose, satisfied. But this interference by the Public Service Commission in the affairs of the Department of Civil Aviation, then under “superior” management, was strongly resented. Every effort was made to get rid of me, and I fought back with all my might. The result can best be expressed by way of Byron’s Lines as follows:

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

I became Director of Civil Aviation 1971. Plaisance Airport was very dangerous for arriving aircraft in those days, particular with the Boeing and VC10 jet aircraft that had started arriving after Independence. They could not fly in from the west across the Island to land at the Airport and had to come in from the sea to the East, go round the airport to land from the Plaine Magnien side. After private research carried out in my spare time, I provided a system for them to land directly from the West. That removed one major element of danger. I sought early retirement and left the country in 1982. I obtained employment in international organizations and remained abroad till the year 2000. 

On my return I found that Mauritius Times was still engaged in its original mission; I rejoined it as an occasional contributor.

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Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 16 August 2024