Introduction

I INTRODUCTION The objective of the thesis has been to explore the rootlessness in the major fictional works of V.S. Naipaul, the-Trinidad-born English author. The emphasis has been on the analysis of his writings, in which he has depicted the images of home, family and association. Inevitably, in this research work on V.S. Naipaul’s fiction, multiculturalism, homelessness (home away from home) and cultural hybridity has been explored. Naipaul has lost his roots no doubt, but he writes for his homeland. He is an expatriate author. He gives vent to his struggle to cope with the loss of tradition and makes efforts to cling to the reassurance of a homeland. Thepresent work captures the nuances of the afore-said reality. A writer of Indian origin writing in English seems to have an object, that is his and her imagination has to be there for his/her mother country. At the core of diaspora literature, the idea of the nation-state is a living reality. The diaspora literature, however, focuses on cultural states that are defined by immigration counters and stamps on one’s passport. The diaspora community in world literature is quite complex. It has shown a great mobility and adaptability as it has often been involved in a double act of migration from India to West Indies and Africa to Europe or America on account of social and political resources. Writers like Salman Rushdie, RohingtonMistry, Bahrain Mukherjee, and V.S. Naipaul write from their own experience of hanging in limbo between two identities: non-Indian and Indian. 1.1 Life and Works of V. S Naipaul VidiadharSurajprasad Naipaul was born on August 17, 1932, in Trinidad, where his grandfather, an indentured worker, had come from India. An agnostic, Naipaul very early in his life experienced a profound alienation, both from the close-knit family life of his Brahmin ancestors and from the social and political life of his native Trinidad which was a place where the stories were never stories of success but of failure: brilliant men, scholarship winners, who had died young, gone mad, or taken to drink. A scholarship winner himself out of the QueensRoyalCollege, he used the award to 1 escape to England in 1950, where he attended UniversityCollege in Oxford. England, more than Trinidad, became his home in the early 1950s. The first fruit of Naipaul’s escape from the colony was a series of gently satiric short novels set in Trinidad. In The Mystic Masseur (1957) a semiliterate medicine man makes good as therapist to his village community because of the ignorance and gullibility of the local people. In The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Naipaul turned a critical eye on the first general election held in a town where possibilities for democratic reform abort because of longstanding petty group enmities: Hindu- Moslem, black-white, Indian-Spaniard. Miguel Street (1959) is a "Winesburg, Ohio" collection of vivid character portraits drawn from the author's neighborhood. It closes in the Sherwood Anderson manner: the young narrator leaves his neighbors to continue his education in life abroad, but will immortalize them in his future role of writer. Next came a big generational novel one of two Naipaul masterpieces A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). Set also in Trinidad, it echoes in some passages the light tone and fun of the earlier, shorter pieces, but achieves the stature of only a few other 20th- century novels largely through the detailed, compassionate picture of Biswas the fictional representative of the author's own father defeated in the struggle for a place of his own, alien both in a matriarchal Indian family and in the larger colonial society still not open to non-Europeans of talent in the 1940s. Using London as a permanent return base, Naipaul began to travel extensively after 1960. His prolific writing continued, alternating between autobiographical fiction and reportorial non-fiction based on these travels. The unifying persona is that of an alienated ex-colonial, cut off temperamentally both from his native roots and from the European culture upon which he attempts to graft himself. In the novel The Mimic Men (1967) the action shifts between England and Trinidad. The protagonist, Ralph Singh, is out of place in both worlds as a scholarship student in London, and later as a deposed political minister and real estate speculator on his native island; his marriage to a liberal white English woman ends miserably. At the end of the novel, Singh, a disillusioned London recluse, is left writing his memoirs: "We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World." 2 In two fine subsequent novels of the 1970s there is little trace of the earlier comic tone. In a Free State (1971) is set in a sub-Saharan African state in uneasy transition between incompetent post-colonial governments. Powerful descriptive passages juxtapose hauntingly beautiful natural settings with the detritus of European technology. New themes of sadistic violence and homosexuality link this work with the longer Guerillas (1975). In both novels the focus of alienation is on a liberal white couple whose pretensions political and sexual are ruthlessly exposed by the "Heart of Darkness" context. Naipaul himself explicitly pointed out his lineage to that earlier writer i.e., Joseph Conrad on authorial purpose to awaken the sense of true wonder. That is perhaps a fair definition of the novelist's purpose in all ages. Perhaps Naipaul's finest sustained writing is to be found in the 1979 novel A Bend in the River. Here, in a small village in "New Africa," the writer explores all of his important themes, treated separately elsewhere: the disorder left in the wake of imperialism; the problems of emergent but underdeveloped third world peoples caught between old tribal ways and the new technology of dangerous arms and tinsel consumer materialism; and the liberal white woman as sexual symbol of Third World political trust and ultimate despair. Here, fortunes are made and lost overnight in gold, copper, and ivory; Hindu couples from Africa’s East Coast, poor shopkeepers one day, strike it rich the next when they are awarded proprietorship of the sole Bigburger franchise of the region. Instability and alienation are indigenous; the Moslem narrator of the novel, back from a short trip abroad, finds his small store nationalized by the Big Man, president-dictator of the ProgressiveState. After a brief stint in a concentration-camp-like prison, he is lucky to escape with his life. But to what place? He has no "home": "There could be no going back; there was nothing to go back to. We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed." Many felt the village was based on Kisangani, Zaire, and in 1997 as the city crumbled, some even hailed his 1979 work as prophetic. A 1987 work, The Enigma of Arrival, was classified as fiction, although much of the material is indistinguishable from Naipaul's own life. The variety of Naipaul's interests as a traveller-observer is suggested by the following survey of some of his nonfiction. His two personal roots are explored in the fusions of history with contemporary political analysis which make up The Loss of El Dorado (1969), 3 about Trinidad, and India: A Wounded Civilization (1977). Among the Believers (1981) records impressions of the author's visits to several important Moslem nations, including Iran and Pakistan. Finding the Center (1984) includes an essay on his stay in the relatively stable and prosperous West African Ivory Coast. Here the observer analyzes sympathetically the balance of power between competing tribal and European values. In 1996 Naipaul released The World's Great Places An Area of Darkness to favorable reviews. Naipaul published several new works in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including A Turn in the South (1989), India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), and Way in the World: A Sequence (1994). Naipaul has been a victim of double diaspora as his ancestors migrated from India to Trinidad in 1880; since then, his family has lived there. He went there as a student of OxfordUniversityCollege and after that settled there. The sense of alienation was in his blood because he was born and educated in a country which was not his own and now he is residing in England. As he is victimized by double diaspora, he can’t call any place his home. He is a visitor wherever he goes. He suffers from the crisis of identity, a feature which one cannot ignore while reading Naipaul. He is a West Indian writer who is disinherited from all traditions and exposed to different settings. He has a strong desire of independence and identity. His works have connection to the Caribbean literary tradition from which it arose. His works give a sense of his biography of departure from the constructive close background of the Trinidadian society of the open literate and cosmopolitan culture of the world of England. He has found the Trinidadian society very hostile to him and England is the place where he could make his career and become a writer. His works comprise of contemporary reality. He has taken fiction as a tool of revenge against all views. At the same time, he is interested in giving shape to his own experiences. He has condemned the Trinidadian or Caribbean society as backward. He has opposed these societies and has never been forever in these societies. To him, that world was patented by fear, deceit and treachery. In Naipaul’s view the colonial society was the product of colonizers and the culture of those societies has come from other countries.

Load more