Maurice Lee
Locating Naipaul: "Not English, Not Indian, Not Trinidadian" Author(s): Harish Trivedi Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Spring 2008), pp. 19-32 Published by: Maurice Lee Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40986250 . Accessed: 05/02/2013 09:25
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This content downloaded on Tue, 5 Feb 2013 09:25:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Locating Naipaul: "Not English, Not Indian, Not Trinidadian"
Harish Trivedi
Few writerseven in the moderntimes of widespreadmigrancy could have inheriteda sensibility so widelydislocated and so deeplydisjointed as V.S. Naipaul. He was bornin 1932 in Trinidadto parentswhose own parents on bothsides had emigratedas bondedlabourers, or girmitiyas (a Hindicorruption of "agreement" or thebond signed by them), from one ofthe poorest regions of colonial North India. To dislocatehimself further, Naipaul swore when still in schoolthat he wouldleave theland of his birthbefore he was eighteen;he did so in factand has nevergone back to live in Trinidad.It was to Englandthat he went,a countryhe was then profoundlyenough colonized to imagineto be his truespiritual and intellectual home,but it did not take him long to be disabusedof that good-native fantasy. Whileliving in England,he wroteof Trinidad in hisfirst four books of fiction, and whenthat seam was exhausted,he feltready to travelfurther to whatwas at leastputatively his genetic and historical home, India. But the disillusionment and indeedthe sense of alienation he experienced there was even deeper; it was so complete as tobe shattering.Never perhaps has Naipaul lived on the edge of constant "hysteria" (inhis own accurately chosen word) as duringthat first year-long sojourn in India in 1962-63;"it was a journey,"as he simplyenough summed it up later,"that broke mylife in two"(Naipaul, "Two Worlds"193). Ever since,Naipaul's life,though ostensiblytethered to a peg ofa homein England,has beenemotionally homeless andincurably footloose; it is as ifhe has chosento be peripateticby vocation. Paul Theroux'smemoir Sir Vidia'sShadow is factuallyenough sub-titled A Friendship across Five Continents,while Naipaul's own Nobel Lecturehas been published underthe title "Two Worlds," which in thecontext seems an understatementfor it refersto just the two parts, architecturally very different, ofthe house he livedin as a child. Manymore worlds were to unfoldbefore Naipaul as he grewup:
I had to clearup myworld, elucidate it, for myself. I had to go to [thehistorical records] ... to getthe true feel of the history of the colony[Trinidad]. I had to travel to India . . . Andwhen that Indian needwas satisfied,others became apparent: Africa, South America, theMuslim world. The aim has alwaysbeen to fillout my world picture,and thepurpose comes frommy childhood: to makeme moreat ease withmyself. ("Two Worlds"191)
This is of course(and foronce) too modest.Naipaul's great achievement as a writerhas beento "elucidate"not only his owndeeply commingled and confused worldbut also thatof his less dislocated readers, and to fill out their "world picture" as wellas hisown. But whether this has left them also "moreat ease" withthemselves remainsa mootquestion; in fact, judging by their anxiety in manycases to disown Naipaulrather than to identify with his world- view, they have often been put seriously ill atease byhim, and that perhaps is equallya partof his achievement. The anxiety
This content downloaded on Tue, 5 Feb 2013 09:25:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 20 Journalof CaribbeanLiteratures tolocate the pathologically dislocated Naipaul in any locus except where oneself is comfortablyand unquestioningly located seems to havebeen a constantstrand of thereception of Naipaul by his readers. Unsettled himself, he has unsettled countless others,and many have sought to distance and disown him for he hasheld up tothem a mirrorso acutelysharp that the image has seemeddistorted. It maybe difficultto locateNaipaul; it's even more discomfiting to acceptourselves as locatedby him.
(Dis)owningNaipaul The HindiTV channelon whichI heardthe news of Naipaul's Nobel promptly wenton toadd that he was theseventh Indian, or person of Indian origin, to win the prize.Wait till Naipaul hears of such knee-jerk chauvinistic appropriation, I thought; he will surelyhave somethingcharacteristically stinging to say. But, always unpredictable,Naipaul in hisbrief statement responding to thenews of the award acknowledgedaffiliation with two countries: England where he worksand writes, andIndia, "the land of my ancestors." In India,however, the tide turned very quickly. It appeared that though Naipaul mayhave wanted to own us inhis hour of glory, what we wereanxious to do was to quicklydisown him. He has,after all, been for several decades now the undisputed worldheavy-weight champion in the sport of India-bashing, and just because he had wonthe big prize, we werenot going to forgive him. Forsaking for once the colonial cringeby which we immediatelyiconize anyone even remotely Indian who has made itbig in theWest by winning a prizeor even got rich quick through a largeroyalty advance,we choseto tellNaipaul that either he was no Indianat all or,worse still, he was a bad Indian,and we weregoing to havenothing to do withhim at all.1 In a pieceI was askedto do withina coupleof days of the news for the Sunday editionof a Hindinewspaper, I began by saying that Naipaul's Indianness began to unfurlas soon as one speltout his favouredcryptic initials "V.S." as Vidiadhar Surajprasad,and the half-foreign "Naipaul" too derived from "Nepal;" indeed, his migrantancestors from both his father'sand mother'sside had sailed outunder Brahminsurnames all toofamiliar in North India, "Pandey" and "Dube." Buteven thisfactual exposition raised the hackles of a youngMarxist critic who alleged in a rejoindera coupleof weeks later that I hadn'tjust been explicating the name, I had infact been claiming Naipaul for India. Meanwhile, the foremost Hindi critic Namvar Singhhad kept at the head of the rising chorus, in the topical context of the U.S. war onAfghanistan, that the Nobel had been given to Naipaul by a gratefulWest for his anti-Muslimstance expressed in his books, Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, of whichthe latter contained formulations which were "pretty much the same" as thoseexpressed by Samuel Huntington inhis essay (as itwas initially),"The Clash ofCivilizations" (Singh 2). Soon,this emerged as thestandard reductive reaction in Indiato Naipaul's Nobel. It was a politicalaward and not a literaryone, said writers andintellectuals who themselves claimed to be progressiveand radical by ideological convictionand who therefore had always maintained that there was no suchthing as the"literary" exempt from the "political." On theother hand, Naipaul claimed: "I haveno politicalagenda. I havenever had one. I writewhat I see,"while he turned
This content downloaded on Tue, 5 Feb 2013 09:25:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LocatingNaipaul 21 aroundthe charge that he hadoffended "Third World sensitivities" by calling them "untutoredsensitivities" ("I'm notEnglish" 3).
Muslim-basher/Hindu-basher In anycase, it maybe argued,if thereis a Nobel forMuslim-bashing, how unfairthat there isn't one forHindu-bashing, for in thatcase Naipaulwould have wonit decades ago, perhaps with the publication of his very first book on India,An Area ofDarkness, He said in it,for example, that Hindus were inhumanly callous and insensitiveto thepoverty and degradationall aroundthem because of their religiousbelief that the world was maya[illusion] anyhow. This was also thereason whya writerlike R.K. Narayancould notreally write novels, because if,in the Hinduview, the world itself was maya,that led to "a profounddoubt about the purposeand valueof fiction" (Naipaul, An Area ofDarkness 216). Later,Naipaul felt,Narayan's novels were hardlynovels but rather"religious books, at times religiousfables, and intenselyHindu" (India 22). And,in a farless philosophical kindof objection to Hinduism, Naipaul refused to take his shoes off at the Jagannath templein Puri,arguing that "the temple floor was fardirtier and moredisgusting thanhis shoes and that the idea of defiling such a filthyunswept place was ridiculous;" thisapparently caused enoughcommotion for the incident to be reportedin the LondonTimes (Theroux 292). Again,if Muslim-bashing were the main criterion for awarding Nobel prizes, did notSalman Rushdie have a priorclaim, for hadn't he carrieda prizefor his head-on-a-platteras the result of a fatwa?And hadn'tRushdie gone even further thanGeorge Bush and in fact made him look like a namby-pambyby arguing, in an articlepublished in the wake of 9/1 1 inthe New YorkTimes and titled "Yes, This is aboutIslam," that there was no use pretendingthat the battle of the West was only againstterrorism and notagainst Islam, for of courseit was againstIslam, or at leastagainst "Islamists" anyhow? (Rushdie, "Yes, This is AboutIslam"). But whenwe in Indiaspeak of Naipauland Islam,we are perhapsconcerned less withwhat Naipaul has said aboutIslam worldwidein his two books on the subjectand rathermore with a remarkhe made in an interviewon the specific subjectof the demolition in 1992 ofthe Babri Masjid, a mosqueallegedly built on thesite of a Hindutemple. His observationthat such an eventneeded to be understood in thecontext of a longthousand-year old historyof theconquest of Indiaby the Muslimsled to his immediatelybeing branded as a Hindufundamentalist. In the contextof the opprobriumwhich such a chargecarries at least in the radical anglophonecircles in India, it was some turnaroundto findNaipaul not long afterwards,in 1996,marrying a lady named Nadira Khannum Alvi, who was not onlya Muslimbut also a Pakistani.It is toher that Naipaul's second book on Islam, BeyondBelief is dedicated.
The Language ofDiaspora Theonly occasion on whichI havemet Sir Vidia (as he is nowcalled according tothe protocol of address governing British nobility, and as I understandhe hatesto
This content downloaded on Tue, 5 Feb 2013 09:25:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 22 Journalof CaribbeanLiteratures be called) was at a partygiven by PenguinIndia in New Delhi shortlybefore the publicationof this book, Beyond Belief, in 1998.When I was introducedto Naipaul andsaid how much pleasure his books had given me over the years, he askedwith a littlegleam in his hooded eyes, "And what have you read?" I hadalready named, I think,his first dozen books in the right chronological order when he smiledand said: "I am sorry,but you see, David [Davidar,then CEO of PenguinIndia] introduced meto a younglady a momentago whoalso said howmuch she liked my writings, andwhen I askedher what she had read she couldn't name a singlebook." As Naipaulonce wrylyput it, he is thekind of writerthat people think other peopleare reading. Having established myself as one ofthose other people, I now pressedhome the advantage by being able to tellhim that I hadtaught A Housefor Mr.Biswas for about ten years at St. Stephen'sCollege, Delhi, where the students instantlyidentified with the book and enjoyed it with an inwardnessperhaps greater thanin thecase of anywork by anyother author in theirB.A. English(Honors) syllabus,from Chaucer to Hemingway. I added that more recently I had been teaching to my M.Phil, studentsother works of his such as An Area of Darkness,The Guerrillas,A Bendin theRiver, and TheEnigma of Arrival Shortlyafterwards, the talk turned to his forthcomingbook and to religious conversionin general.As Naipaultalks little and listens hard and at lengthas ifhe werequarrying you (unlike,for example, Rushdie, who is generallyhappy doing mostof thetalking), I foundmyself narrating to himan old storyabout a new convertto Christianity, on whom an olderconvert sneaked to the missionary, alleging thatthe new convert continued to worshipHanuman (the so-called Monkey god) justthe same as before.When the missionary investigated, caught him in the act and confrontedhim, the convert said, "Isai hui gaye to ka hua, apna dharamthore chhordenge." The dialectof Hindiused hereis of coursea markerof boththe convert'slow social statusand his unletteredsimplicity, and as one or twoother - people aroundus laughed,I waitedto see if Naipaul wouldget it ( just as, on anotheroccasion, after listening to Rushdie declare that Faiz AhmadFaiz hadbeen a rolemodel for him as a writer,I had asked him to reciteany favourite couplet by Faiz, andhe hadsaid, "No, no,I'm notgoing to do anythinglike that! . . . No- I'm notgoing to be tested!"(Rushdie, "Salman Rushdie in Conversation"12). Now,missing out on thegeneral mirth, Naipaul said, "Translate! Translate!!" andI did as bestI could ["All right,I mayhave converted to Christianity,but that doesn'tmean I amgoing to give up myreligion!"]. Naipaul as hegrew up inTrinidad heardhis eldersspeak a fairbit of Hindi,and the collection of shortstories by his fatherSeepersad Naipaul, Gurudeva and OtherIndian Tales (later reprinted as The Adventuresof Gurudeva and otherStories with a forewordby the son) has a large andunself-conscious presence of Hindi words such as "pukkabadmash" [confirmed rogue],"koorta-dhoti" [traditional Indian male dress], "beta" [son], "chulha" [earthen cookingplace, hearth], "singhasan" [throne], "kuti" [hut], "shanch," i.e., shankh, [conch-shell],and "ghanti"[bell] (S. Naipaul25, 64-65,68, andpassim). In fact,in A Housefor Mr. Biswas, Naipaul himself devised a novelway of renderingthis residual migrant Hindi into English. While the broken pidgin English
This content downloaded on Tue, 5 Feb 2013 09:25:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LocatingNaipaul 23 thatmost characters speak most of the time in that novel is representedwith (comic) realism["What happen, man?," "The house done bless" (163)], theHindi that some ofthe older characters speak in the early sections of the novel is, in contrast,given thedignity of correct standard English, even if the idiom and the collocation remain deeplyembedded in Hindi.For example, when the clan is gatheredtogether for a familyphotograph at the death of Mr. Biswas's fatherearly in the novel, the female characterwho has takencharge of the proceedings stops the waiting photographer whileshe rearrangeseverybody in theirproper places, and thenshe says to the photographerin an Englishcast clearly in theHindi mould: "All right.Draw your photonow" (31). In autobiographicalfact, this character, in thenovel called Tara, was Naipaul'sfather's sister who had picked up verylittle English and was carrying on by and largein Hindieven when Naipaul went to visither during her terminal illnessin Trinidad in 1972("Prologue to an Autobiography"93). ButNaipaul seems soon to have lostwhatever Hindi he had learntas a child: "No onetaught us Hindi... So, as Englishpenetrated, we beganto lose our language" ("Two Worlds"188; emphasismine). In anycase, by theage of eighteenhe had goneto England where he has livedever since. Thus, his excursion into rural India inAn Area of Darkness was conductedalmost entirely through helpful interpreters, as is explicitlyand poignantly acknowledged by Naipaul in the chapter in whichhe goesto visitthe place inU.P. his ancestors came from, "The Village of the Dubes." In thischapter, as he lies thenext morning in bed inhis hotel in the nearby town, he catcheswafting in from some radio set playing in the street below a Hindifilm song whichhe remembersfrom his childhood, except that even if he didthen, he cannot nowfollow the meaning; it is forhim, so to say,a melodybreaking through a mist (to use theHindi novelist Nirmal Verma's evocative phrase from another context). Inthe book of this Indian visit which he went on to write, Naipaul inscribed accurately somelines from the song and then got a colleaguefrom the external services of the BBC Londonto translate them, except that his knowledge of Hindi too turned out to be less thanadequate (An Area of Darkness 257). I haveit on thegrapevine that in lateryears, Naipaul made some effort to learn Hindithrough that widely circulated volume, Teach Yourself Hindi by Rupert Snell andSimon Weightman. The mindboggles at the speculation as tohow different the map of postcolonialliterature might have been had Naipaul and forthat matter Rushdiewritten their books originally in Hindi,thus incorporating in theirwork a differentset of cultural assumptions and an altogetherdifferent addressivity, which subsequenttranslation into English would not have been able to substantiallyerase. One wondersif this would have been a realoption for Rushdie even if he hadlived on inIndia beyond the age of 13,given what a thoroughlyanglicized upbringing he alreadyhad in Bombay, and Naipaul too, of course, could hardly have contemplated writingin a languageother than English. But, with his ruraland less thanaffluent backgroundand his greatersensitivity to languageas a markerof identity,how wouldNaipaul have developed, one mayspeculate, had he too,like his elder sister Kamala in 1949, gone out forhigher education on a governmentscholarship to - India andnot the following year to Oxford!(Naipaul, Letters Between a Father and Son 3-19 andpassim).
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The speculationis givenforce by thefact that but recently, a descendantof Indiangirmitiya migrants to Fiji, Subramani,who is professorof Englishat the Universityof the South Pacific in Suva, has actuallywritten a long novel entirely in the local Bhojpuri-inflectedgirmitiya Hindi, Dauka Puran [The Saga of the Simpleton],inan epic act of cultural retrieval of the life of Fijian Indians, a community muchbuffeted in the last decade or so byrepeated racist rejection by the indigenous Fijians.But, given the politics of thepostcolonial and thesystem of globalbook productionand dissemination,this novel will perhapsremain unread outside Fiji and a smallcommunity of readersin Indiawhere it was firstpublished, until it is translatedinto English and in the process has shedthe radical novelty of its chosen medium.
"Naipaul's India and Mine" Naipaul'ssavaging of India in An Area of Darkness (if not his own self-lacerating, humiliatingdiscovery of how savagehis ownreaction to Indiawas) arousedwide indignationin India at the time, and an Indianwriter who promptly came forward to writea passionateand thoroughgoing rejoinder to Naipaulwas NissimEzekiel, in "Naipaul'sIndia and Mine." As an English-languagepoet who had spent some years inEngland in his quest to become a writer,who taught English at Bombay University, and who in a poem of his characterizedIndia as "my own backwardplace" (Parthasarathy37), Ezekielmay have seemed a littletoo much like Naipaul himself to be a likelyadversary, but the fact that even a cosmopolitanperson like him was stungno less thanother more traditional or more chauvinistic Indians only showed whata deepwound Naipaul had inflicted on a countrywhich he was himselflater to call "a woundedcivilization;" he made protestingindignant natives of even the mostbroad-minded of us. At thetime Ezekiel's rejoinderwas published,in theheat of themoment, it seemedto mostIndian readers a necessaryand welcome counterblast, but after all theseyears, it seemsnearly as complicitwith Naipaul as it is contestatory.After summarizingatthe beginning of his essay Naipaul's main observations about India, Ezekielsaid, "I am notin factdoubting his veracity, only his approach towards the discoveryof thetruth" (175). He thenpitted against Naipaul's descriptionof a callous Indianclerk his own widerand deeperknowledge of his compatriots:"I knowthese clerks, their background, their problems, their conditions of work, their income"(77) etc.,but then somewhat tamely concluded: "Mr Naipaul is bothright andwrong about them" (77). Whilecalling Naipaul "too subjective"(83), Ezekiel stillgranted that all "his ravingand ranting"did not"decrease the impact of his criticism"but rather increased it, for "Mr Naipaul's book has the moral authority of hysteria"(76). Repeatedly,Ezekiel felt the need "to explain again that I see Indiain mostways as Naipaulsees her"(84) andthat "Mr Naipaul is rightto see us as we are in thestreets, in busesand trains, in ourkitchens and lavatories[or perhaps in open fields?]"(90), and in conclusion,he confessed:"In theIndia whichI have presumedto call mine,I acknowledgewithout hesitation the existence of all the darknessMr. Naipaul discovered"(88). The onlytrouble was thatin Naipaul's book,"truth is toldin sucha waythat it becomes a falsehood"(85).
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Really?Shall we then,while acknowledging the message, shoot the messenger? As a worldly-wiseSanskrit verse has it: "Speak thetruth. Speak whatis pleasant. Do notspeak the unpleasant truth." But Naipaul, not knowing Sanskrit, has madeit thebusiness of his life to tell the unpleasant truth not only about India but about the wholewide world. The verytitle of a criticalbook on himis Naipaul's Truth,and it quotesin its opening sentence Naipaul's avowed commitment "to deliver the truth" (Feder1). Thisis in starkcontrast with several other contemporary writers whose viewof theThird World is eithersentimentally nostalgic or uproariouslymagic- realistso thatthe whole thing sounds like either a lamentor a lark.The criticism that Naipaulis so criticalof the Third World because he views it from a loftyand alienated Westernpoint of view goes back a longway; in his first few novels, a Britishreviewer in TheDaily Telegraphalleged, Naipaul was "lookingdown a longOxford nose" at hisTrinidadian compatriots (Naipaul, "London" 11). But Naipaul's disappointment, contemptand even disgust with the Third World seems to be bornrather more out of an acute,instinctive and self-mortifyingidentification with the inhabitants of the ThirdWorld and their miserable state brought about by their material exploitation andcultural degradation by their colonial masters than by any sense of an assumed metropolitansuperiority on hisown part.
The Enigmaof England Naipaul mayhave swornas a schoolboyto leave Trinidad,for him a place withoutvitality or hope or even history,as soon as he could,but even afterlong yearsof stay in England (a countrywhich in fact he oncequite made up hismind to leave,going so faras to sellhis house), he does notclaim in any way to feel at home there.The Enigma of Arrival, probably his mostsombre book, is abouthow, long afterhis arrivalthere, England remains to him an enigma,a countryon whose emptyrural lanes he amblesaimlessly about, alone and bleakly loitering, and whose buseshe ridessilently catching stray phrases of conversation now and thenout of whichhe conjuresup a wholeimaginary life of his fellowcommuters whom he neveractually gets to know. Though he has since1970 lived in Wiltshire as a tenant of a half-madpedigreed aristocrat in a cottageon his vastestate, he remainsso unregardedand insignificantthat he nevereven getsto have a darshan(or ritual glimpse)of his landlord, merely casting a fleetingglance at his back once from some distance.It seemssymbolic of his whole relationship to the country of adoption, in fact.As the surrealistpainting by Chiricoevoked in thetitle of The Enigmaof Arrivalindicates, in Naipaul's own exposition of it, the enigma of arrival lies inthe factthat the ship that has brought one to the strange shore is alreadygone and there can be no possiblereturn. Thetone of not belonging, and indeed never being able possibly to belong, is set earlyin thebook, in thefirst of itsfive sections, "Jack's Garden." When Naipaul movedafter spending twenty years in Oxford and London to a cottagein the country, he"still felt myself to be inthe other man's country, felt my strangeness, my solitude" {TheEnigma of Arrival 13). On hisarrival, he hadto ask someonethe way and was struckonce again by "my own strangeness, and the absurdity of my enquiry" (15).
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He beganto lookon Jack,a neighbour,as "genuine,rooted, fitting: man fitting the landscape"(19), whereashe himself,apparently, had no senseof fittingin at all. AndJack was theonly neighbour anyhow with whom he hadany communication: "thepeople in the other cottages I nevergot to know, couldn't recognize, never knew whenthey moved in ormoved out" (20). Thoughthe farm workers driving in their carsor tractors"were invariably ready for a wave or a smile"(31) whenNaipaul had to stepaside in thenarrow country lanes to letthem pass, they never got any further."It was thelimit of communication; there was nothingto add to thewave, thesmile, the human acknowledgement" (31). WhenNaipaul moved to Wiltshire in 1970,he was already(to echo a keycomic sentencefrom Biswas) theauthor of nine books, and was to winthe Booker Prize thefollowing year. When he beganwriting The Enigma of Arrival in 1984,he had once morebeen nominated for the Booker, had gottwo honorary doctorates, from Columbiaand Cambridge, and not long after the publication of this book, was tobe knightedin 1990. Moreover,as an eagerimmigrant, he had alwaysbeen keen to assimilateand integrate into England; it was theinsularity and the impermeability ofthe English that remained the enigma. In hisreview of this book, Salman Rushdie called it "one of the saddestbooks I have read in a long while,its toneone of unbrokenmelancholy" ("V.S. Naipaul" 148). The ever ebullient Rushdie, who seems in comparisonmerely to be playingat beinga migrantor an exile,also foundthe bookloveless, lifeless and "just exhausting" ("V.S. Naipaul"151). Butalready, unlike Rushdie, Naipaul had madea valiantattempt to belongto Englandnot only materially but also imaginativelyand creatively. After his triumph, A Housefor Mr. Biswas, which brought to a culminationhis "East Indian" (Mishra, "Epigraph"40) phaseas a creativewriter, Naipaul actually attempted a novel set whollyin Britain and containing exclusively white British characters, Mr. Stone and theKnights Companion - an assimilativeand creative risk such as notmany other diasporicwriters have taken.It provedto be perhapsthe most complete failure amongstall hisnovels, the one bookthat seems to havesunk without a trace.2 Naipauldepicted in this novel a sixty-twoyear old bachelor who feels murderous towardshis neighbour's cat and sets up a trailof pieces of cheese to trap it (treating it stupidlyas if it werea rat){Mr. Stone 6-7), getsmarried to a womanwho has alreadyburied two husbands and whoseterm of endearmentfor him is "Doggie" (55-56),has a colleaguein office called Whymper whose vulgarly sexy talk may put one in mindof theword bang, and who is himselfaltogether so dryand dull and boringthat the novel seemsto be wastedon him(85, 89). The wittyexchanges whichinitially draw him and his future wife to each otherare so banalas tobe sad: she says,"The onlyflower I care aboutis thecauliflower" (11), encouragedand abettedby which he says,"I see thatyou are anxious to getme under the influence ofincohol" (12). All thecharacters are uniformly flat, they are all so mindlessand suchcreatures of habit as to be caricaturesand, unfortunately for the health of the novel,even thecaricatures seem to be based on receivedclichés about what the Britishare like - lonely,uncommunicative, eccentric, predictable, and dull. In the presentcontext, the only aspect of the novel which seems of interest is that,possibly
This content downloaded on Tue, 5 Feb 2013 09:25:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LocatingNaipaul 27 becauseit happenedto be writtenand revisedduring Naipaul's firstlong visit to India,there is a prominentamount of Indianparaphernalia in it: a "Kashmir"(as distinctfrom "cashmere") shawl (10), a largetiger skin complete with a sepia photographof whenthe beast was shotin India,a walk-oncharacter described as "theoffice Buddhist" (35), and theirfirst quarrel in whichMrs. Stoneholds up a pieceof fruit cake with a knifeto the fire and says, "In Indiathey always offer little bitslike this to the fire before they cook oreat anything"(42), an irrelevantand, in thecontext, even malicious remark which outrages Mr. Stone and to which he responds bysaying: "I - I don'tbelieve you've ever been to India" (43). Ifthis was thebest he coulddo withEngland, it surely was timefor Naipaul to moveon togo, observe and writeabout India.
Trinidadas Exile When Naipaul conspicuouslyfailed to mentionTrinidad in his statement acknowledgingthe award of theNobel, thatomission was seen by manyas his ingraterejection of his Third World roots and, more specifically, as a blatantdenial ofthe place wherehe was bornand broughtup and whichoffered him indeed the subject-matterof his firstfour novels including his masterpiece,A Housefor Mr Biswas.But as a memberof the Indian émigré community, he is, as he putit in one ofhis early essays, "East Indian," a personnot quite fully accepted in Trinidad as a WestIndian by theother black West Indians who had been takenthere as slaves fromAfrica and who, though not the original inhabitants of the island (which were theChaguana Caribbeans who had all beenexterminated by the white colonizers), had yetbeen on theisland for a couple of centurieslonger. Ironically, it was the liberationfrom slavery of theseblack West Indians of African origin in 1831 that led theBritish to launch a policyof bringing in bonded labour from India to run the old plantations,in what has aptlybeen called "a newsystem of slavery" (in thetitle ofa bookon thésubject by Hugh Tinker.) The liberatedblack slaves moved away from the land to thetowns, while the girmitiyalaborers from India moved in to workon theplantations and to livein the countryside,in a familiarenough pattern of social mobilityand peckingorder. Trinidad,as ithappened, had a largerproportion of Indians than any other colony in theWest Indies except British Guyana; it amounted in the year of Naipaul's birth in 1932, to aboutone-third of the totalpopulation, approximately 150,000 out of 400,000(Naipaul, "Two Worlds" 1 83), andis nowestimated to be 40 percent, with 37.5 percent persons being of African, and 20.5 percent of mixeddescent (CIA 2006). The mutualsocial and culturalapathy between the two ethnic groups was exacerbatedin someways into actual political hostility and antipathy with the rise of"Black Power" worldwide. With the coming of independence to Trinidad in 1960, theBlacks emerged as theruling ethnicity and the Indians, led byBasdeo Panday, seemeddestined to remainforever in opposition,until Panday did finallybecome PrimeMinister from 1995 to 2001. The complexmanifestation of Black Powerin theWest Indies is depictedfictionally by Naipaul in Guerillas,which has as its backgroundMalcolm X andhis Christina Gardens commune in Trinidad; this novel
This content downloaded on Tue, 5 Feb 2013 09:25:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 28 Journalof CaribbeanLiteratures has Blackand White characters but hardly any Indians, and is Naipaul'sonly non- IndianWest Indian novel. In thiswider ethnic context, the affirmation by Naipaul that it is notTrinidad butIndia where his roots are, where he "comesfrom," is notunreasonable, especially fora personwith a longview of history. The Indiangirmitiyas may have no longer livedin India but that had not erased their residual cultural Indianness and sense of identificationwith India. Many of themcontinued to look upon themselvesas involuntaryexiles, as helplesspoor people washed up on a strangeshore by the tides ofcross-continental colonial history, and they continued to livewithin a tenacious emotionalframe which was foundationallyIndian. WhenVijay Mishra,the postcolonial critic who is himselfa descendantof girmitiyamigrants from India to anotherBritish island-colony, Fiji, compileda bookof essays some years ago tomark one hundred years of the beginning of Indian emigrationto Fiji, he chose foran epigrapha coupletfrom the Hindi Ramayana, TulsiDas's Ramcharitmanas,written in the 16^ century,which has trulybeen the Bookof the Hindi-speaking community both in India and in the older Indian diaspora:
Tapas bhesbises udasi Chaudahbaras Ram banabasi.
[As an asceticutterly detached from the world LetRam be exiledfor fourteen years to the forest.] (qtd.in Mishra,"Epigraph")
TheRamayana is religiouslyenacted every year in the diaspora as theRamlila, a pageant-playbased on theepic, which Naipaul has extensivelyevoked as one of thehighlights of his childhood in Trinidad and remarks in "Prologue:Reading and Writing,a PersonalAccount" that "the story of Rama's unjustbanishment to the dangerousforest was likesomething I had always known" (8). EvenDerek Walcott recalledscenes from it at thebeginning of his Nobel acceptancespeech. It is this Indiaaway from India, this para-India or greaterglobal India, this maha-Bharat so to say,to whichNaipaul owes hisallegiance. This is wherehome is orwas andthis is wherehis roots are, rather than in the exilic cultural wilderness called Trinidad, to whichhe andhis folk were banished but yesterday and which remains for them no morethan a blipin the long evolutionary history of their cultural identity.
India away fromIndia In viewof this abiding racial and cultural affinity and affiliation, itwould perhaps be a mistaketo view An Area of Darkness, the vexed record of his first disillusioning journeyin 1962-63to the land of his ancestors, as Naipaul'sfirst book about India. Forwhat are his first four books of fiction about if they are not about India? In The MysticMasseur, The Suffrageof Elvira,Miguel Street and thensupremely in A Housefor Mr. Biswas, the location may be Trinidadbut the ambience is unmistakably Indian,with Indian characters, Indian social structuresand Indiancustoms and practicesforming the warp and woof of the whole fictional fabric. Non-Indians may
This content downloaded on Tue, 5 Feb 2013 09:25:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LocatingNaipaul 29 haveconstituted the majority community in that country, but one would never guess so fromreading Naipaul's earlynovels. Even in A Housefor Mr. Biswas, which movesfrom place to place in theTrinidadian countryside before the family settles downin "Sikkim Street" in Port of Spain, and which teems with countless characters, perhapsthe only Black or"coloured" character of any significance is thenameless solicitor'sclerk who wheedles Mr. Biswas intobuying that jerry-built ramshackle house on a plot actuallysmaller than it legally shouldbe, but whichBiswas neverthelesslearns to accept as a fulfilmentofhis life-long dream. (A comicmeasure ofthe mutual ethnic distrust surfaces when at one stage of the negotiations, the clerk saysto Mr.Biswas: "I alwayshear that Indians was sharpbargainers, but I never knowtill now just how sharp they was" (597).) Earlierin thenovel, Naipaul had describedthe birth and upbringingof his protagonistMohun Biswas witha sure grasp of the ritualof namingand the superstitionsattendant upon it as wellas an elaborateand graphic description of the time-honouredtechnique by which Indian mothers give their little babies their daily massage,the maalish that will helpthem grow and makethem strong. The Tulsi householdinto which Mr. Biswas is suckedhelplessly after his marriageand his infinitelycomplex and fraught relationships with his sisters-in-law and brothers-in- law,his nephewsand nieces,but above all withthe despotic matriarch who is his mother-in-law,are all depictedwith such intimate subtlety by Naipaul that a more detailedand authentic description of a Hindujoint family would be hardto find even in all ofHindi literature. Critics who complain that the Westernized Naipaul does notand cannot understand the vast rural hinterland of India which stretches beyond thefew metropolitan centres and thathe has thusa distortedview of thecountry maydo well to rememberthat though he maynow be to all appearancesa pucca sahib (and indeeda knightand burrasahib), it was a "littlerural Indian world" (Naipaul, "Prologue"8) in Trinidadthat he came from,and thatthis was the communitythat he renderedwith close fidelityin his early fiction. The Indianmigrant society in Trinidadwas a rootless,temporary, improvised society;some oldercharacters in A Housefor Mr.Biswas stillmeet daily in the eveningsand talk fondly of going back to India. If this society offered no stabilityin thepresent and no hopefor the future, and ifthe Indians left adrift there came to cravefor nothing more than a blindimitation of the colonial master culture, it was becausethey had no alternativemodels. It is suchwishful mimicry that leads Ganesh Ramsumairin Naipaul's first novel, The Mystic Masseur, to reconstitute and rename himselfas "G. RamsayMuir," with a comicabsurdity which Naipaul mocked later bysuggesting that he too should perhaps rename himself "V.S. Nye-Powell" (Theroux 231, 236). Butwhen Naipaul left his littleculturally arid desert island of Trinidad andfinally came to the Mother Country, which for him ultimately is not England but India,and found that the "Buntys" and the "craze-for-foreign" housewives in cities like Delhi and Bombayare no less dazzled and glamorizedby the superficial attractionsof the West, his disillusionment was thedeeper because he hadexpected a moreresolute resistance to theWest from India, with its ancient civilization as wellas itsrecent history of spectacularly effective nationalist opposition to British
This content downloaded on Tue, 5 Feb 2013 09:25:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 30 Journalof CaribbeanLiteratures rule.Instead, he foundthe situation in India no betterthan in Trinidad and possibly worsewith, as heput it in India: A WoundedCivilization, its "mimicry within mimicry, imperfectlyunderstood idea withinimperfectly understood idea" (123). IfTrinidad was thecolonial frying pan, in Indiahe foundhimself in the postcolonial fire.
"NotEnglish, not Indian, Not TMnidadian" It mayseem overly fussy and even perverse of Naipaul to find himself at home in neitherTrinidad nor England nor India, but he has hisown good andconsidered reasonsfor such a stance.Asked by an Indianinterviewer in 2002 whetherhe had started"feeling more of an Indian"(3) afterhe had createda heroin Haifa Life, who was "forthe first time, an Indianfrom India" (3), Naipaul gave an answer whichmay be regardedas a fairsummation of his position on thematter:
Whatdo youmean more Indian ... ? I don'tlike such terms. I said whenreceiving the Nobel Prize that I was bornin Trinidad, I have livedmost of my life in England and India is theland of my ancestors. Thatsays it all. I am notEnglish, not Indian, not Trinidadian. I am myown person. ("I'm notEnglish" 3)
Needlessto add,it has takenNaipaul a longand arduousjourney through the wideworld to becomehis ownperson. His life-story,as narratedin his variously autobiographicalnovels as wellas travelbooks and explicitly autobiographical essays, constitutesperhaps the most acutely sensitive and anguishedaccount of a person, borndispossessed, to claimand reclaima numberof possiblelocations, with the questresulting at each renewed step in even more disillusioning failure. The variouscharacters that he has createdthroughout his careerwho seekto fulfilor at leastfill out their half lives by making their way in the world in one way oranother seem collectively to be symbolicof the destiny of the migrant man, as the epic or tragicheroes of old did in theirmore assured arid securely confined ways. Naipaul,not knowing who he was to startwith or wherehe belonged,decided to makea creativevirtue of his personal disability by going out to knock loud and long atall thepossible doors which could admit him into anything resembling home, and as noneof them opened more than a tinycrack for him, he has learntthe hard way hownot to belong, how (as he putit more defiantly) to be hisown person. Theending of Naipaul's masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas, is nearlyalways readas representinga triumph and fulfilment for the protagonist, who towards the end of his lifesucceeds, against all odds,in laying"claim to one's portionof the earth"and in dying not "unnecessary and unaccommodated" as he hadlived, but in a houseof his own (Biswas 8). However,it may be arguedthat this is onlyhalf the ending;the other half shows Mr. Biswas's beloved son and symbolic heir Anand far awayfrom this house, studying in Englandand not returning home even when his fatheris terminallyill andthen dies. In thisbook which Naipaul has acknowledged as being"the one that is closestto me ... [and]the most personal" ("Foreward to A Housefor Mr. Biswas 128) one needsto rememberthat it is notMr. Biswas but
This content downloaded on Tue, 5 Feb 2013 09:25:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LocatingNaipaul 3 1
Anandwho represents the author, and it is perhapsequally a triumphfor the father to havehelped to sethis son free, to leave whatnever truly could have been home, andwhat even Mr. Biswas neverclaims to be morethan a "house." Naipaul'slife-long quest for belonging, for being and feeling at home, may only go toshow that one cannot really shop around and choose one's home any more than onecan chooseone's parents,for it is equallypart of one's proto-history.And to be onceunhomed is tobe alwaysand forever after unhomed, if by home one understands an apt locationin history,community and culturerather than just "bedroom, bathroom,kitchen and hall."The contrarinessof Naipaulin rejectingeach of his threecountries as notbeing his home is thusnot really contrariness but a recognition- on hispulse - ofthis home truth. And, in any case, the compliment is fullyreturned, notonly by India but equally by the West Indies and England.
1 Incidentally,in theWest Indies too,judging by the apprehensivereactions of Derek Walcottand CarylPhillips, they were not exactly overjoyed at thenews of theaward of the prize to this"ungenerous bastard," this "most dyspeptic of sons" of thoseislands (Phillips 134, 137), a writerwhom Walcott had earlierrenamed as no less than"V.S. Nightfall." 2 Accordingto a conversationreported by Paul Theroux,it is one of his own books that Naipauldoes notlike; on theother hand, when a ladyat a Londonparty told him that this novelwas "dishonest"and untrue,he was so offendedthat he immediatelyleft the party (261, 290).
WorksCited CIA. The WorldFactbook (updated July 2006)
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. "East Indian."Ed. PankajMishra. Literary Occasions, London: Picador, 2003. 35-44. . "Forewardto A Housefor Mr. Biswas." Ed. PankajMishra. Literary Occasions.London: Picador, 2003. 28-38. . TheEnigma of Arrival. Harmonds worth: Viking, 1987. . "Forewordto TheAdventures ofGurudeva. Literary Occasions. London: Picador,2003. 112-127. . A Housefor Mr. Biswas. London: Picador, 2002. . Interviewwith Rahul Singh. "I'm notEnglish, Indian, Trinidadian. I'm my ownman: V.S. Naipaul."The Times of India. 18 Feb. 2002,New Delhied.: 3. . India:A WoundedCivilization. New Delhi: PenguinIndia, 1979. . Lettersbetween a Fatherand Son. London:Little, Brown and Co., 1999. . "London."The Overcrowded Barracoon. London: Andre Deutsch, 1972. 9-72. . Mr.Stone and theKnights Companion. London: Penguin, 1973. . "Prologueto an Autobiography."Literary Occasions. Ed. PankajMishra. London:Picador, 2003. 53-11 1 . . "Prologue:Reading and Writing, a Personal Account. Literary Occasions. Ed. PankaiMishra. London: Picador, 2003. 3-32. . "TwoWorlds (The Nobel Lecture)." Literary Occasions. Ed. PankajMishra. London:Picador, 2003. 181-95. Parthasarathy,R., ed. TenTwentieth Century Poets. Delhi: OxfordUP, 1976. Phillips,Caryl. "Reluctant Hero." The Humour and thePity: Essays on V.S.Naipaul. Ed. AmitavaKumar. New Delhi: BuffaloBooks, 2002. 133-37. Rushdie,Salman. "Salman Rushdie in Conversationwith Harish Trivedi." TheBook Review May (2002): 12-13. . "V.S. Naipaul."Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism1981-1991. London:Granta Books, 1991. 148-51. . "Yes,This Is AboutIslam." New YorkTimes 2 November2001. Singh,Namvar. "Naipaul ko Nobel: IslamVirodhi Lekhan ka Eenam."
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