Secretary General of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha Satnarayn Maharaj says the Mighty Chalkdust (Dr Hollis Liverpool) got it wrong with his rendition Learn from Arithmetic, in which he focused on the issue of child marriage with the refrain “75 can’t go into 14.”
According to Maharaj, Hindu children who get married under the age of 18 must do so with the consent of their parents and it is never to a 75-year-old man.
But Chalkdust says Maharaj is missing the message in the song which is a warning to young women to be wary of older men who only want to prey on their innocence.
The calypso which won Chalkdust the first place prize in the Calypso Monarch Competition with a prize of $700,000, focused on Maharaj whom the calypsonian accused of conducting child marriages at his home.
Speaking to the T&T Guardian yesterday, Maharaj said he was “flattered” to have featured in the calypso, but he said Chalkdust was using poetic licence because “that is part of the calypso culture, in calypso it is 75/14, that is certainly not part of the Hindu culture.”
Maharaj said the whole issue of marriage is written in the Hindu books and is one of the “sixteen religious rights in the Vivah Samskara, so when he sings about 75-14 that might be in their cultural strain but in Hinduism we are talking about parental consent.”
He said calypsonians had for years been attacking him in song “long ago it used to be six of them now is just one, but I am flattered that they could focus their calypso on me.”
Maharaj believes Chalkdust was “misguided, because he sang on the basis of what Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi has been saying, but this is about religious freedom which Hindus enjoy under the Constitution.”
Although the amendment to the Child Marriage Act was passed by a simple majority in the Upper House, Maharaj said “the battle is far from over.”
He said the change made by AG which meant that the changed legislation did not require a three-fifths majority “will be challenged in the courts, our attorneys are looking at it and they will advise us. There is always recourse in the courts, the first challenge will be whether they are right in saying there is no need for a three fifths majority.”
The legislation still has to return to the Lower House, and Maharaj said “we will see how that goes. We are of the view that the change requires a three-fifths majority because it affects our religious rights which are enshrined in the Constitution.”
The SDMS Secretary General said “we will not be guided by the calypsonians who are anti-Hindu, anti-Indian, anti-anything that they believe is not their brand of culture, but they have to remember that Trinidad is a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious society. It does not belong to any one ethnic group.”
But Chalkdust said Maharaj had missed the whole point of the calypso. He told the T&T Guardian “it was never meant to be an attack on any one person or anyone’s religion. I was simply singing about an issue, I will never attack anybody’s religion.”
Liverpool said he referred to “Sat in the calypso because when Al-Rawi spoke in Parliament he (Sat) is the one who attacked him.”
He said Maharaj and others who feel that he was out of line are “missing the message of the calypso, it was meant as a warning to young girls to be wary of older men who like to fool them. The calypso is more than Sat Maharaj, it is a warning to young people not to be fooled, people feel teenage pregnancies involve two teenagers, but in most instances young teenaged girls getting pregnant because they are fooled by older men who prey on them.”
Liverpool said he spoke to two “13-year-old girls and I asked them about the issue and they agreed that I was right to sing about it. It is an issue. The calypso is really in defence of young women, so that school children will understand they have to be wary of older men who only want to fool them,” he said.