For Mr Biswas and the Mimic Men

Appendix A Naipaul's Family, A House for Mr Biswas and The Mimic Men As Naipaul dislikes writing about the unfamiliar his fiction makes imaginative use of actual people and events. His sources are useful to understand the autobiographical implications of the novels. His father Seepersad (b. 1906) is the model for Mr Biswas. Mter Seepersad's father died when he was six years old, Seepersad and his impoverished mother became dependent on his mother's sis ter (the novel's Tara) and her wealthy husband (Ajodha) who owned rum shops, taxis and other businesses. Mter some school ing Seepersad became a sign-painter; he painted a sign for the general store connected to Lion House (Hanuman House) owned by the Capildeos (the Tulsis) of Chaguanas and married Bropatie Capildeo (Shama). Although his children were born in Lion House he usually resided elsewhere. Mter he had painted advertising signs for the Trinidad Guardian (the Sentinel), 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. Mter several moves he became the newspa per'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 resignation 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 reli gious reform. Mter 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 153 154 v. S. Naipaul 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 re turned 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. The Capildeos 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) with whom he had nine daughters and two sons before he died (1925). Rudranath (Owad) , 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 hard but did not do well, and after graduation taught. He (Owad again) 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) became involved in one of the new pol itical parties (various details are used in The Mystic Masseur where Rudranath is a source for Indrasingh). Rudranath returned to England, for post-graduate research, then became the leader of the Democratic Labour Party when the Trinidadian opposition needed a well known educated Indian to oppose Eric Williams' People's National Movement. 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, independ ent politicans, it was also unstable and when an Indian quit in 1957 Butler declared that all Indians were traitors. Rudranath (the Ralph Singh of The Mimic Men) was wealthy, politically 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 lead ing to black domination, 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 Appendix A 155 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.5o Appendix B Naipaul, Trinidad and Mrica As some critics interpret Naipaul's writings as prejudiced against blacks or the third world, a summary of a few additional facts about the racial politics of Trinidad may be useful. Trinidad and Guyana are among the new nations whose populations are not native and where the coming of independence created mutual fears of domi nance between opposing ethnic groups. 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 People's National Movement, was charismatic, tough, unscrupu lous and influenced by the Marxist model of a one-party state. Having led Trinidad towards independence he believed opposi tion was treasonable. Although he spoke of the need for a multira cial Trinidad he used a rhetoric of religious deliverance in which national freedom meant government by those of Mrican 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' People's National Movement were fanatically anti Hindu Indian (although the PNM did include Moslem Indians).51 The violence and accusations of treason against Indians during the period 1946 to 1961 undoubtedly influenced Naipaul's view of de co Ionization in unhomogeneous, mixed societies, a view that would have been reinforced by the confiscation of the businesses and the expulsions of Indians from newly independent East and Central Mrican nations. The same liberal politicians and intellec tuals who in Europe and the United States favoured independence 156 Appendix B 157 and black rule in Mrica and the Caribbean seldom spoke up against the mistreatment of Indians, and sometimes justified it by arguing that the Indians were an alien entrepreneurial class who blocked black advancement into business. (Notice the comments of Linda and Bobby about Indian shopkeepers in 'In a Free State' .) Considering Naipaul's experience in Trinidad and his observa tions of Guyana and Mrica he seems surprisingly analytical about the causes of black discrimination against Indians; he distinguishes between nations, such as the United States and England, where those of Mrican descent are a minority subject to discrimination and nations where they discriminate against others or, as in parts of Mrica, among themselves. Those who believe that all post colonial literature consists of resistance to imperialist, capitalist, white patriarchy might remember that post-structuralism is founded on 'differance' and that deconstruction aims at demythification of stereotypes. Notes 1. Many of N aipaul' s sources and allusions are mentioned in John Thieme, The Web of Allusions (London: Hansib, 1988). 2. The factual basis of many of the writings can be found in Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1975). 3. Rhonda Cobham, 'The Caribbean Voices Programme and the Develop ment of West Indian Short Fiction: 1945-1958' in Peter O. Stummer (ed.), The Story Must Be Told: Short Narrative Prose in the New English Literature (Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neuman, 1986), pp. 146-60. 4. V. S. Naipaul, 'Our Universal Civilization', The New York Review of Books (31 January 1991), 22-5. 5. See Ben Whitaker (ed.), The Fourth World: Victims of Group oppression (New York: Schocken, 1973). The situation for Indians became worse in Uganda and Zaire. 6. It was not just Williams. Arnold Rampersad remembers 'the ever-present campaign of humiliation and demoralization and threats of violence aimed at Indians ... in the capital, Port of Spain, in the late 1940s.... I do not want to leave the impression that East Indians were not, for their part, hostile to Mro-Trinidadians. However, they were a minority, and their normal hostility took a different, far less physical form, and counted for almost nothing in Port of Spain, where few Indians lived.' Rampersad says, 'it is no more possible to understand Naipaul's mind and art without reference to racism, violence, and intolerance in Trini dad than to understand Richard Wright without reference to the same factors in the South.' He sees 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. 7. See Bruce King (ed.), West Indian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1979), and Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and its Background (Lon don: Faber, 1970). 8. See Naipaul's 'Foreword' to The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories (London: Deutsch, 1976); and Reinhard W. Sander, The Trinidad Awak ening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen-Thirties (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 150. 9. The Adventures, pp. 9-10. 10. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), pp.88-91. 11. Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 50. 12. Ivar Oxaal, Black Intellectuals Come to Power. The Rise of Creole Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago (Cambridge, MaSs.: Schenkman, 1968), pp.

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