How Hindi teachers helped strengthen India’s ties with the Caribbean

In the 1960s, as Caribbean countries with large Indian diasporas were gaining independence, an idea popped up tens of thousands of kilometres away in New Delhi: let us teach them Hindi and Sanskrit.

The initiative was spearheaded by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, or ICCR, an agency under the Ministry of External Affairs. And its target were the descendants of indentured labourers sent from North India to Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Suriname, most of whom primarily spoke Awadhi and Bhojpuri.

For its initiative, the ICCR recruited teachers from the Central Institute of Indian Languages and paid each about Rs 2,000 a month, which is equal to over Rs 1 lakh in today’s money. The name they were given was “cultural lecturers”.

The cultural lecturers worked independently, unattached to any institution, and more than lived up to their title. Apart from teaching those of Indian origin, they would serve as cultural ambassadors, teaching even those who did not have roots in India but had an interest in its culture. One of those cultural ambassadors was Yogi Raj.

Yogi Raj was sent by the ICCR to Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, where 40% of the population was of Indian descent at the time of independence in 1966. During…

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