Unapologetically Hindi

Guyanese minister Vikash Ramkissoon’s calm defiance in Hindi turned a parliamentary slight into a lesson in power, memory and India’s farthest civilizational echo.

Some politicians raise their voices when challenged. Vikash Ramkissoon raised a language. In Guyana’s Parliament, where debate usually proceeds in the safe neutrality of English, an opposition lawmaker chose to question Ramkissoon’s knowledge of Hindi. The insinuation was familiar and faintly patronising, the sort meant to diminish without appearing overtly hostile. Ramkissoon’s reply, however, was neither angry nor theatrical. He asked the Speaker for permission to respond in Hindi—and then did so, fluently and without notes. Calmly, he challenged his opponent to name the subject, choose the venue, even take it to television, promising that the entire debate could be conducted in Hindi. “Vishey woh tay karein, main jawab dunga bina kagaz dekhey.”

While the Guyanese chamber fell silent, the internet did not. Within hours, the clip went viral, and Ramkissoon’s composure was widely cheered, particularly in India.

That composure is not incidental. It reflects a temperament shaped less by slogans than by systems. Before entering politics, Vikash Ramkissoon worked in banking, eventually managing a branch at Demerara Bank. The habits that he imbibed during his banking career - patience, caution and respect for facts - were on display in Parliament. Ramkissoon spoke evenly, refused to personalise the slight and allowed competence to do the work outrage usually performs.

His biography straddles continents. Educated in Delhi, where he studied commerce and finance, he encountered an India that was both aspirational and argumentative, confident in its inheritance yet impatient with its limits. Returning home, he trained in law at the University of Guyana, graduating with distinction.

Appointed a minister within the Ministry of Agriculture in September 2025, Ramkissoon’s brief is resolutely unglamorous: modernising and diversifying farming, strengthening food security and keeping agriculture relevant in a country newly transformed by oil wealth. Guyana’s petroleum discoveries have altered its economic trajectory and tempted policymakers to treat farming as legacy rather than strategy. Ramkissoon treats it as both. His earlier tenure as parliamentary secretary in the same ministry, particularly in the Essequibo Islands–West Demerara region, earned him a reputation for listening to farmers and translating policy into practice.

The Hindi exchange mattered precisely because it was unscripted. Guyana’s history gives it resonance. From the mid-19th century, indentured labourers from India were brought to work the colony’s sugar estates after the abolition of slavery. They arrived with little property but considerable memory. Over generations, those inheritances were reshaped by Caribbean life but never erased. English became the language of administration while Hindi remained a language of memory.

Few writers captured that condition more sharply than V. S. Naipaul, who chronicled the unease of Indo-Caribbean societies suspended between ancestral India and colonial modernity. One can only imagine how Ramkissoon’s Hindi in Parliament would have intrigued Naipaul.

Ramkissoon underscored that evolution when he accused the opposition of using ‘coded language’ to divide society. His response inverted the tactic. By speaking Hindi openly, he stripped the code of its power. Culture, he suggested, need not be whispered or weaponised. It can be stated plainly and then set aside.

The timing amplified the symbolism. India’s engagement with Guyana has deepened in recent years, capped by Narendra Modi’s visit to Georgetown in November 2024 the first by an Indian prime minister in more than half a century. Energy, healthcare, training and cultural exchange now form the scaffolding of a revived relationship, part of India’s broader Caribbean outreach.

For India, the episode invites a particular kind of pride. Its global presence is often measured in markets, military reach and multilateral forums. But its most durable export remains its civilisational confidence and the ability of language and culture to travel, adapt and endure. When a Caribbean legislator can summon Hindi not as nostalgia but as a pointed argument, it testifies to a reach deeper than strategy papers.

Ramkissoon’s confidence was not rehearsed bravado but the assurance of someone long accustomed to being underestimated.

He belongs to a generation of Indo-Guyanese leaders shaped not by the trauma of migration but by its aftermath, the descendants of indentured labourers for whom India is neither lost homeland nor political slogan, but an inherited presence. Identity, for them, is not something to be defended or disavowed, but a settled fact absorbed into public life rather than performed within it.

In an age when politics increasingly rewards performance over preparation, his reply offered a quieter lesson that history speaks through those who have learned to live with it.