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Appendix A: Naipaul's Family, a House for Mr Biswas and the Mimic

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Appendix A: Naipaul's Family, a House for Mr Biswas and the Mimic Appendix A: Naipaul’s Family, A House for Mr Biswas and The Mimic Men Naipaul’s fiction makes imaginative use of actual people. His father Seepersad (1906–53) is the model for Mr Biswas. After Seepersad’s father died when he was six years old, Seepersad and his impoverished mother became dependent on his mother’s sister (Tara of Biswas) and her wealthy husband (Ajodha) who owned rum shops, taxis and other busi- nesses. After some schooling Seepersad became a sign-painter; he painted a sign for the general store connected to Lion House (Hanuman House in Biswas) owned by the Capildeos (the Tulsis) of Chaguanas and married Bropatie Capildeo (Shama). Although his seven children were born in Lion House he usually resided elsewhere. After he had painted advertising signs for the Trinidad Guardian (the Sentinel in Biswas), the editor allowed him to submit articles, then hired him as a reporter. As Seepersad had a highly developed sense of humour his reports and interviews made him well known. After several moves Seepersad became the newspaper’s Chaguanas correspondent but lived by himself in a wooden house away from Lion House until he had a mental collapse – possibly influenced by his resig- nation from the paper after the editor had been fired and its policy changed, and possibly by a fierce quarrel with the very orthodox Hindu Capildeos about religious reform. After his nervous breakdown he became an overseer on a Capildeo estate (Green Vale) and then a shopkeeper (The Chase). He rejoined the Guardian, and moved to Port of Spain where for ten years he lived in various houses owned by the Capildeos before acquiring his own house (the Sikkim Street house). He spent three years with a new Department of Social Welfare, after which the Department was abolished and he returned again to the Guardian, although he lost his pension rights. He died of a heart attack during 1953 when V. S. Naipaul was studying in England. There is a specific family context to The Mimic Men and to the descriptions of Trinidadian politics in Naipaul’s early fiction from The Mystic Masseur to The Mimic Men. It concerns his mother’s side of the family. The Capildeos were descended from a minor Indian aristocrat and pundit who was kidnapped in Calcutta and sent to Trinidad as an indentured labourer. There he married Rosalie Soogee Gobin (Mrs Tulsi in Biswas) with whom he had nine daughters and two sons before he died (1925). Rudranath, the younger son, attended Queen’s Royal College, where he was (like Ganesh in The Mystic Masseur) for a time, as a rural Indian, a misfit who studied 207 208 Appendix A hard but did not do well, and after graduation taught. He (like Owad of Biswas) went to university in England where he was elected head of several student organizations, read the Statesman and became an avid supporter of Soviet Communism. He returned to Trinidad where he lived with his mother while he and his elder brother, Sambhoonath (Shekhar of Biswas) became involved in one of the new political parties (various details are used in The Mystic Masseur where Rudranath is a source for Indarsingh). Rudranath returned to England, for postgraduate research, then became the leader of the DLP when the Trinidadian opposition needed a well-known educated Indian to oppose Eric Williams’ PNM. Although predominantly Indian the DLP was multiracial and for a time included Uriah Butler and Albert Gomes among its leadership. Because of its mixed racial leadership, most of whom were the older, flamboyant, independent politicians, it was also unstable and when an Indian quit in 1957 Butler declared that all Indians were traitors. Rudranath Capildeo (Ralph Singh of The Mimic Men) was wealthy, politi- cally ineffective, divided his time between England and Trinidad, wrote spiritualistic autobiographies (like The Mystic Masseur and Singh in The Mimic Men) but won a majority in the 1958 election. As Williams saw his PNM leading Trinidad to independence and hoped to head a Caribbean federation, both of which the Indians opposed as leading to black domina- tion, he accused the Indians of treason, of being a ‘hostile and recalcitrant minority’, the ‘greatest danger facing the country’, and violence followed. The 1961 elections, which the PNM won, were particularly brutal with PNM supporters looting Indian shops and homes while the predominantly black police made house by house searches for arms in Indian areas. Rudranath foolishly declared the Indians would overthrow the government by force but did nothing. Williams declared a state of emergency. Rudranath broke down and returned to England where he lived in Brighton. Gomes also soon fled.81 This is part of the material which has been transformed in The Mimic Men. Appendix B: Naipaul, Trinidad, Guyana and Africa Trinidad and Guyana are among the new nations whose populations are not native and where the coming of independence created mutual fears of dominance between opposing ethnic groups. In nearby Guyana during the 1950s the nationalist movement split into rival Indian and black parties; the Indian socialists who won the elections were twice deposed, first by the British and later with American help. There were bloody inter-racial riots and the country was long ruled by a tyrannical black nationalist govern- ment which led it to economic ruin and refused to hold fair elections. The period between 1946 and 1961 was particularly bad in Trinidad as the black urban population, led by Eric Williams, was pressing for complete independence from England and for a Trinidadian-led Caribbean Federation, while the Indian population opposed both, fearing domination by black majorities. Eric Williams, who led the PNM, was charismatic, tough, unscrupulous and influenced by the Marxist model of a one-party state. Having led Trinidad towards independence he believed opposition was treasonable. Although he spoke of the need for a multiracial Trinidad he used a rhetoric of religious deliverance in which national freedom meant government by those of African descent. When in power he appointed no Hindu Indians to the senior positions and, according to C. L. R. James, some of the leadership of Williams’s PNM were fanatically anti-Hindu Indian (although the PNM did include Muslim Indians).82 Those who in Europe and the United States favoured independence and black rule in Africa and the Caribbean seldom spoke up against the mistreatment of Indians, and sometimes justified it by arguing that the Indians were an alien entrepre- neurial class who blocked black advancement into business. (Notice the comments of Linda and Bobby about Indian shopkeepers in ‘In a Free State’.) Naipaul distinguishes between nations, such as the United States and England, where those of African descent are a minority subject to discrimination and nations where they discriminate against others or, as in parts of Africa, among themselves. 209 Notes INTRODUCTION 1. ‘n.b’, TLS, 19 July 2002, 16. 2. Many of Naipaul’s sources and allusions are mentioned in John Thieme, The Web of Allusions (London: Hansib, 1988). 3. The factual basis of many of the writings can be found in Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1975). 4. V. S. Naipaul, Between Father and Son/Family Letters, ed. Gillon Aitken (London: Little Brown, 2000). 5. Rhonda Cobham, ‘The Caribbean Voices Programme and the Development of West Indian Short Fiction: 1945–1958’ in The Story Must Be Told: Short Narrative Prose in the New English Literature, Peter O. Stummer ed. (Würzburg: Konigshausen & Neuman, 1986), 146–60. 6. Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 7. V. S. Naipaul, ‘Our Universal Civilization’, The New York Review of Books (31 January 1991), 22–5. 8. See Ben Whitaker, ed., The Fourth World. Victims of Group Oppression (New York: Schocken, 1973). The situation for Indians became worse in Uganda, Zaire and Fiji. 9. He regards both as exiles wounded by their ‘homes’, who turned to travel writing. Arnold Rampersad, ‘V. S. Naipaul: Turning in the South’, Raritan, 20:1 (Summer 1990), 24–47; 45–6. 10. Stephen Schiff, ‘The Ultimate Exile’, The New Yorker (23 May 1994), 60–71. 11. See Bruce King, ed., West Indian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1979, enlarged 1995); Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and its Background (London: Faber, 1970); Louis James, Caribbean Literature in English (London and New York: Longman, 1999). 12. See Naipaul’s ‘Foreword’ to The Adventures of Gurudeva and other Stories (London: Deutsch, 1976); and Reinhard W. Sander, The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen-Thirties (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 150. 13. The Adventures, 9–10. MIGUEL STREET, THE MYSTIC MASSEUR AND THE SUFFRAGE OF ELVIRA 14. Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1975), 50. Also see Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance (Burnt Mill, Harlow: Longman Caribbean Writers Series, 1986; first published 1979), 23. 210 Notes 211 15. Ivar Oxaal, Black Intellectuals Come to Power. The Rise of Creole Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1968), 100–1. As late as 1961 PNM posters described Eric Williams as Moses II. The use of Messianic rhetoric was earlier associated with Uriah Butler. 16. For the Capildeos see Oxaal’s Black Intellectuals Come to Power, 160–80. 17. George Lamming also regards the West Indian black community as absurdly mimicking the English and as racially sensitive. See Lamming, ‘A Wedding in the Spring’, Commonwealth Short Stories, Anna Rutherford and Donald Hannah, eds (London: Edward Arnold, 1971; Macmillan, 1979), 44–56. 18. The People’s National Movement was led by Dr Eric Williams and the Democratic Labour Party had Dr Rudranath Capildeo as its leader although, unlike Williams, his scholarship and display of knowledge had no political direction.
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