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3 - Mimicry and Experiments of the 1960s
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 65-82
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Summary
V. S. Naipaul’s travels to Trinidad and India led him to create a narrative ‘I’ for his race-class-ethnic-gender-time specific experience of travel writing. Due to his travel writing experiments, Naipaul got interested in the point of view technique and the resultant fiction of the 1960s produced a narrative emphasis on the protagonists’ limitations in knowing the world. Naipaul had protected his writer self from public scrutiny through the use of boyish narrators (adults writing from the point of view of their younger selves) in his social comedies of the 1950s. His travel writing of the early 1960s created a narrator who voiced his insecurities and anxieties with reference to an issue or geographical area but also hid his constant need for social and financial support. Naipaul the narrator could be under the critical eye while Naipaul the person retreated from the public space. Naipaul’s writings of the 1960s, more generally, are dominated by a schizoid personality as he watches himself construct various narrators who are sometimes only observers, sometimes participants and most times participants and observers to their own drama of life.
Though it is often thought that Naipaul did not write about Trinidad after the first four books, Naipaul, in fact, began to write about Trinidad from his own experiences in the 1960s and the 1970s. The differences are manifold: while the fiction of his 1950s books was based upon his father’s transference of material and techniques, he now came to write directly from his own experience. This is not to say that the material used by him for his 1950s writings were not his experience, but to emphasise that those experiences were his while ensconced in his father’s care. A second difference is that just as he produced a difference between his narrator and writer personae, he now created the landscape of a fictional Caribbean island, that was like Trinidad yet not exactly so, whether it was as an unnamed island in the short story ‘The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book,’ the island in the novella ‘A Flag on the Island’ or the island of Isabella in The Mimic Men. This marks a growth in Naipaul’s oeuvre as he felt distanced enough from his raw experiences to write about Trinidad as a fictional landscape (Poynting 1985, p. 775). He was no longer transforming reality into art but artfully crafting a distance between his experience and his writing.
Dedication
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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Conclusions
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- 09 January 2024, pp 183-190
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V. S. Naipaul and the Caribbean
I hope that through this analyses I have achieved the aims that I set out in my introduction. Naipaul began writing using his early childhood exposure to the East Indian culture in Trinidad as a basis for writing about the Caribbean. When he embarked on his travel writing, he explored ‘areas of darkness’ that were related to his limited knowledge about his own complex heritage: ‘The land; the aborigines; the New World; the colony; the history; India; the Muslim world, to which I also felt myself related; Africa; and then England, where I was doing my writing. That was what I meant when I said that my books stand one on the other, and that I am the sum of my books’ (‘Two Worlds’ 2001e: 2003, p. 190). As he expanded his horizons, so did he expand the history of Trinidad. No idea or event in Trinidad escaped his scrutiny—it included an exploration of Trinidad’s pre-Columbian past, its ‘discovery’ and plantation history in The Loss of El Dorado, his childhood in post-indentureship Trinidad in ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ and Reading and Writing, the 1946 Trinidad general election in The Mystic Masseur; the 1950 Trinidad general election in The Suffrage of Elvira; the preparations for Independence in The Middle Passage; the first elections in Trinidad post its independence in 1966 in The Mimic Men; the Black Power Movement in ‘Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad’ and Guerrillas; the installation of the first non-PNM government in 1987 and the 1990 coup in A Way in the World. He further explored various aspects of his East Indian heritage in the Forewords to The Loss of El Dorado and The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories, and once again in A Writer’s People. Perhaps Trinidadians could fault him for not commenting directly or obliquely on the first East Indian-dominated UNC government in 1995. However, this move away from Trinidadian politics was accompanied by a focus on what his own life had to offer the next generation. Eight out of 12 novels that Naipaul wrote, namely, The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, Miguel Street, A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, A Flag on the Island, In A Free State, and Guerrillas, are based in Trinidad.
4 - Displacement Across Borders in the 1970s
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 83-116
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People with causes inevitably turn themselves off intellectually (Naipaul in conversation with Michener 1981, p. 71).
I have divided the 1970s writings into two sections: the first section deals with In a Free State, the Black Power Movement, ‘Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad’ and Guerrillas; the second section deals with the impact of the Black Power Movement on Naipaul’s writings with a focus on The Return of Eva Perón, India: A Wounded Civilization and A Bend in the River. The 1970s saw Naipaul establish himself as an independent writer with a steady income and readership in England and America. The readership in the Caribbean remained steady but small. Political unrest in Trinidad that finally took the shape of the Black Power Movement had many political and cultural ramifications. It had a personal dimension for Naipaul and his relationship with Trinidad. There are clear indications that Naipaul began to feel alienated from the Trinidad he knew as a child.
The 1970s were also undoubtedly the busiest, controversial, yet most rewarding time for V. S. Naipaul. In 1970, the Trinidad government awarded him the Hummingbird Gold Medal. In 1971, Naipaul received the Booker Prize for In a Free State. The advent of the new academic disciplines of Commonwealth Literatures and/or New Literatures in English at British universities and other places established Naipaul as a writer of repute. His popularity in academic and intellectual circles led to many book-length studies being written about him. At least six book-length studies, Paul Theroux’s V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to his Works (1972), William Walsh’s V. S. Naipaul (1973), R. K. Morris’s Paradoxes of Order: Some Perspectives on the Fiction of V. S. Naipaul (1975), Landeg White’s V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (1975) and Robert Hamner’s V. S. Naipaul (1973) and Critical Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul (1977) further established his stature within English literature. In 1977, V. S. Naipaul switched publishers, choosing Secker and Warburg with Gillon Aitken as his agent. After all, he was aware that Paul Theroux and even his younger brother, Shiva Naipaul, had received better remunerations for their first books. But he was unhappy with the new publisher for calling him a West Indian writer and returned to Deutsch later.
2 - The Interloper in Travel Writing
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 47-64
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While Naipaul was in Trinidad in 1959, Eric Williams, soon to be the First Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, invited him for lunch and asked him to write a book on the Caribbean (French 2008, p. 207). Naipaul accepted the offer looking for new material for his writings. In retrospect, Naipaul said that his social experiences in Trinidad had lent the material for his first four books. But he had exhausted his memories and imagination. This was an important juncture in his writing because he realised that England had failed to provide him any solace or comfort while he no longer saw Trinidad as home. He was an oddity in British society; though he tried to enter the society, he felt constantly pushed away as an immigrant. Naipaul felt personally betrayed by the Notting Hill riots of 1958 and the 1962 Immigrants Act and the suggested trip around the Caribbean provided a new way forward. It was a challenge because he had never travelled with a view to write about his experience. He had seen his travel to England as a necessity and not fit for any account. His travel back to Trinidad in 1956 was long overdue since he had not returned on his father’s death in 1953. In Naipaul’s mind, travelling and travelling for writing were two distinct activities.
Further, travel writing had its own history and tradition within which it operated. Race, gender and class affinities were strongly built into the tradition of English travel writing. In the nineteenth-century, English travellers journeyed through British colonies within a certain secure travel circuit and, in general, wrote in favour of the colonial rule. Fawzia Mustafa and Rob Nixon argue that Naipaul unapologetically wrote as a Victorian traveller. I argue that Naipaul did not have the supporting structures of colonialism in place and thus, could not write as a Victorian traveller. Further, he was deeply aware of this. The nineteenth-century English traveller was an authoritative figure. Most colonial texts presented the colonised as people lacking subjectivity. They were subjects to be written about with a focus on their clothes, looks, manners and low professions. They were things to be gazed at but could not be interacted with because of their lack of language (the onus of learning the language of the traveller lay with the travellee/local).
Index
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- 09 January 2024, pp 209-213
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Appendix B - A Note on V. S. Naipaul’s Terminolog y and Use of Spellings
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 193-194
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V. S. Naipaul was a man of his times. Historical references to Guyana before independence appear as Guiana or British Guiana. Surinam, which was also known as Dutch Guiana until 1948, appears as Surinam and not Suriname.
V. S. Naipaul constantly uses the terms Negro, Indians, and East Indians in his books to refer to the Afro-Trinidadians, Amerindians (People of the First Nation) and Indo-Trinidadians, respectively. Frequently, these are simplifications because a large population is mixed, and the culture is definitely mixed. In the 1930s, when Seepersad Naipaul wrote, and in the 1950s and 1960s, when V.S. Naipaul wrote about Trinidad, the Indo- Trinidadians constituted one third of the Trinidadian population. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Afro-Trinidadians identified themselves as Blacks.
V. S. Naipaul uses the spelling Ralegh for Sir Walter Raleigh in The Loss of El Dorado but reverts to the more commonly used spelling of Raleigh in A Way in the World. I have used Raleigh throughout the book except when in actual quotes.
V. S. Naipaul uses the spelling of Anantamurti for the Indian writer U.R. Ananthamurthy in India: A Wounded Civilization. I have used the spelling Ananthamurthy except when quoting Naipaul directly.
Naipaul uses the term ‘Mohemmedans’ for Muslims in A Way in the World. I have used Muslims to refer to the followers of Prophet Mohammed.
5 - The Imperial Vision of the 1980s
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 117-142
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By the 1980s, V. S. Naipaul (as an extrapolated creation from his books) was well established in England and America and supported by his personality that was abrasive, rude and selfish. He had bought a dilapidated dairyman’s cottage, in Salterton, up the valley from Wilsford Manor in England. After getting it fixed, he moved into Dairy Cottage in 1982. Naipaul’s reputation in America bloomed in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when the Americans began warming up to colonial writing (French 2008, p. 252). An early and seminal anthology, Critical Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul, edited by Robert Hamner, was published in 1977. It contained fourteen essays that gave full representation to Naipaul, with critics, both from the Caribbean and elsewhere, quoting from his newspaper articles, interviews and short pieces. The anthology enhanced Naipaul’s reputation as a self-fashioning writer because most of the critics quoted from his journalistic pieces to endorse him as a postcolonial satirical writer who rejected ‘Hinduism and the colonial society into which he was born’ (‘Introduction’ 1977, p. xvi). Meanwhile, The New York Review of Books, which had turned into ‘the house journal’ of ‘America’s liberal intelligentsia’ (French 2008, p. 281), welcomed V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul began a new phase in his career where he stayed in England but catered to the tastes of an American audience (the new West). The writings of the 1980s are imbued with American concerns, whether through his travels to Iran, where the Americans had been expelled from, Grenada, which the United States had invaded and occupied, or the American South. Naipaul was determined not to return to Trinidad. It had never been a real option. Yet the more he tried to get away, the more he felt connected to the early world of his childhood in Trinidad. All his attitudes and all his analyses reverted back to those early memories.
The decade began with Naipaul travelling to the non-Arab Muslim world of Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. This was a path-breaking journey for Naipaul. His Indian travels had led him to analyse the slow death of Indian civilisation. He now analysed the Islamic civilisation, not in its birthplace but in countries which had subsequently adopted Islam, suppressing their own histories and civilisations.
Appendix A - A Note on Trinidad
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 191-192
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The Caribbean is geographically situated between the Americas, almost like a bridge connecting the continents of North and South America. The population in Trinidad identifies itself as being of African, Indian, mixedrace, European, Middle Eastern and Chinese descent.
Trinidad was part of the Spanish empire from the time of its ‘discovery’ by Columbus in 1498 until 1797, when its political control was transferred to the British. Trinidad remained a plantation economy during the whole period of its colonial occupation. While there are no official estimates about the number of slaves brought into Trinidad until the abolition of slavery in 1834, it is estimated that 3.1 million Africans were shipped to the Americas across the Atlantic between 1662 and 1807.
Between 1838 and 1917, a total of 147,592 Indians had been imported to the sugar plantations in Trinidad and 239,000 in neighbouring Guyana (Deen 1998, p. 6). Of those indentured, 85% were Hindus and close to 14% were Muslims. Though indentureship was outlawed in 1917, the actual indenture period for those last indentured continued until 1920, when all the existing contracts were annulled.
According to the 2011 census, the so-called ‘East Indians,’ or the more politically correct term Indo-Trinidadians, constitute 35.43%, with 18.2% Hindus and 5% Muslims. The others are 34.22% Afro-Trinidadians, 7.66% mixed of African and East Indian and 15.16% mixed-other.
Culturally, East Indians are a strong community, maintaining their Hindu culture. Only 17% of Indians had converted to Christianity by the 1960s in Trinidad. The two main political parties, the People’s National Movement and the United National Congress, advocate an inclusive creole culture. Creole culture has a strong slant towards the steel band, the calypso and the carnival, which have traditionally been dominated by the Afro-Trinidadians. However, the Sanatan Dharma Hindu Mahasabha, the Swaha Satsang, the Chinmaya Mission and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Iskcon), among many other Hindu bodies, have a strong presence on the island of Trinidad. The Sanatan Dharma Hindu Mahasabha is the central body that operates over 150 temples, 50 schools, a radio station and a television station in Trinidad. They bring out their own almanac based on the coordinates in the western and southern hemispheres. The strong presence of a central body has led to the consolidation of the Hindus in Trinidad.
Contents
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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7 - Composing again in the 2000s
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 161-182
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This was a time when Naipaul felt rejuvenated by his travels. He won the Nobel Prize in 2001. Since the 1970s to the early 1990s, Naipaul remained a favourite to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The rumours stopped only when Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize in 1992. After this, nobody thought it was possible for another writer from the Caribbean to win this award until Naipaul actually won it in 2001. A long-cherished dream came true, and Naipaul was very gracious in accepting it. Earlier, he had come to believe that he would not be given the Nobel Prize because he didn’t ‘represent anything’ (Blandford 1979, p. 51). But, true to himself, he sparked an immediate controversy by leaving out Trinidad in his initial response upon receiving the news of the award. There was a huge response from Trinidad and the Caribbean, with most people calling him an ungrateful son of the soil. Naipaul did little to make amends. In his Nobel Acceptance lecture, ‘Two Worlds,’ he did pay a lengthy tribute to Trinidad, though the lecture was more about his journey from Trinidad than about Trinidad. On his visit to Trinidad for a conference in his honour in 2007, his wife addressed a press conference upon his arrival at the airport, taking the blame for his initial reaction. It was a ploy to reduce resistance to his visit.
After a gap of nearly two decades, Naipaul got back to writing two novels. Having pronounced the novel dead quite early in the 1970s, Naipaul returned to the form. He wrote a story about the life of Willie Chandran, an Indian from India and his journeys across England, Africa, Germany and India. The story was narrated in two parts, Half-a-Life and Magic Seeds, each good as standalone novels by themselves. Naipaul’s scope of writing was truly international. The protagonist studied the consequences of his actions, not the world at large. Naipaul had come to accept that the world is what it is and it is the actions that make or break an individual. The decade began with Naipaul paying another tribute to his father and Trinidad with a long essay, ‘Reading and Writing’ followed by the Nobel Acceptance lecture.
Introduction
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- 09 January 2024, pp 1-24
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The aim of this book is two-fold: one, to show how Trinidad was central to understanding Naipaul’s evolving literary, racial and religious politics over the years; and two, how Trinidadians have acknowledged and owned him in spite of Naipaul distancing himself from Trinidad on numerous occasions. His writings endeared him to Trinidadians because they held a ‘truth’ value, a liveliness of environment and vividness of character that went beyond his slanted attacks at their ineptness in handling the newly independent nation. Being born in Trinidad during colonial times, Naipaul grew up under the colonial system of education learning and studying English language and literature. He realised only later how the English education system had not only coloured but tainted his vision of Trinidad, England and the world. Everything appeared faded and jaded in contrast: ‘There was, for instance, Wordsworth’s notorious poem about the daffodils. A pretty little flower, no doubt; but we had never seen it… Dickens’s rain and drizzle I turned into tropical downpours; the snow and fog I accepted as conventions of books’ (‘Jasmine’ 1964b: 1972, 23) This essential difference between what he saw and felt and what he learnt in school led him to trust his instincts rather than his scholarship. He devised new ways of learning about his environment using his experiences in Trinidad as a touchstone to know the world. This book serves to complement established Naipaulian criticism by presenting a case for viewing Naipaul as ‘typically Trinidadian.’ This premise is not based upon personal whim or any desperate attempt to claim Naipaul for Trinidad, but it is based upon a commonly held opinion in Trinidadian circles regarding Naipaul and his repeated antics in disclosing yet distancing himself from his humble beginnings. This endeavour finds support amongst numerous commentators such as Llyod Best who reiterate Naipaul’s Trinidadian-ness. Yet, Naipaul escaped any stereotyping because he inculcated within himself a sense of contradictoriness that made him challenge commonly held opinions. An example of this is that by staying on in Britain, Naipaul challenged the boundaries of the British literary canon, more so by hardly writing about the British. Similarly, Naipaul challenged the boundaries of Caribbean literature by not staying in the Caribbean but writing about it most often.
The book brings into sharp focus Naipaul’s background and how the first eighteen years of his life in Trinidad shaped and defined his writing in the following six decades.
V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
- Nivedita Misra
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- Published by:
- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024
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The book is about V. S. Naipaul who was born in Trinidad in 1932. At the age of 18, Naipaul left Trinidad on a scholarship to study literature at Oxford. He never returned to live in Trinidad. His first book was published in 1956, and by the time Trinidad achieved political independence in 1962, he had published four books and was firmly established as a writer in England. By the time Trinidad became a republic in 1976, Naipaul had written 13 books and had travelled through much of the postcolonial world. This book highlights how Trinidad and Naipaul were bound in a love-hate relationship where Naipaul continued to pass Trinidad off as a cynical island where 'nothing was created' while Trinidad had its share by laying back a claim on him and his writing. It is generally perceived that Naipaul shunned his place of birth as he called his birth in Trinidad a 'mistake,' Trinidad an 'unimportant, uncreative, cynical' place and the Caribbean as the 'Third World's Third World'. His refusal to acknowledge Trinidad in his initial response to receiving the Nobel Prize added insult to injury. Yet, he was deeply bound to the island of Trinidad and his roots in the Indo-Trinidadian community. This book makes Naipaul's connection to Trinidad more than evident and as such adds to the present body of knowledge.
Frontmatter
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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Works Cited
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- 09 January 2024, pp 195-208
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Foreword
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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The idea for this book is an old one. I first read V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas in the third year of my undergraduate course at Delhi University in India. I did not particularly enjoy the book then. Later, when I came to Trinidad and read it again, I found in it a reflection of my interest in Indian writing in English. The book laid emphasis on documenting the everyday lives of Indo-Trinidadians in a joint family set-up. Its use of English and the familiarity of the subject matter helped me re-discover a deep-rooted Indian culture within Trinidad.
I am a recent migrant from India to Trinidad, a non-resident Indian (NRI), who shares strong ties with my motherland through internet access and social media platforms. As such, I am part of a huge NRI population overseas, but Trinidad is not a typical sought-after destination. A majority of the NRI population resides in the Middle East, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. My distance from these ‘diasporic metropolitan centres’ provides me with a unique standpoint from where I can negotiate postcolonial and postmodern discourse away from the typified Indian diaspora critic working in the US or UK academy. However, this book is neither ostensibly about me nor my diasporic point of view.
The book references an older diaspora that came to Trinidad over 178 years ago. That diaspora is no longer a diaspora but a strong community that is deeply enmeshed in the political, economic, social and cultural life of Trinidad. Stories abound about how the Indians were tricked into coming so far from home to Trinidad, or ‘Chini-dad’ as they called it. Vijay Mishra qualifies the differences between the older and the newer diaspora as between those who could not return and for whom India became a land in their imagination, distant and pure, and those who frequently return to the homeland, replenishing their connections to an actual India. My book, in a way, seeks new ways of bridging the gaps between the older and the newer diaspora.
I contend that reading Naipaul in Trinidad has made a difference because location, in spite of recent scholarship on globalisation, has to be lived to be felt.
6 - Redemptive Journeys in the 1990s
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- 09 January 2024, pp 143-160
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V. S. Naipaul was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. Many centuries ago, Sir Walter Raleigh received his knighthood from Queen Elizabeth I in 1585. Sir V. S. Naipaul was in a long line of those who received the Order of the British Empire from the West Indies, both pre- and post-independence. In 1989, he was also awarded the Trinity Cross by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago. He called the latter the ‘greatest award’ in his life. He was happy that he received this award before the announcement by the British Queen. It made the award special in a personal way. On his way back to London from Trinidad after receiving the Trinity Cross (now the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago), Naipaul spoke to reporters at the Diplomatic Lounge at the Piarco International Airport in Trinidad. Suren Capildeo, the son of Simbhoonath Capildeo and Naipaul’s cousin brother, had recently voiced concerns regarding the continued political alienation of Indians in Trinidad. Naipaul, in response to a question, said: ‘The seeds of that (political alienation) were sown a long, long time ago in the (19)30s and 40s with the extraordinary pettiness of Indian political life and I think we’re paying the price of that pettiness’ (Cuffie 1990, p. 1). He refuted the claims of racial hostility by stating, ‘I don’t see a lot of (racial) tension here. I see a lot more community of interest and culture than most places. We certainly share a language, we share pleasures, we share an economy very much. […] I think a lot of it is in the head’ (Cuffie 1990, p. 1). This was a rare instance of Naipaul speaking benignly rather than nostalgically about Trinidad.
In Trinidad, there is a distinct bonhomie between the different races and religions, and in general, a creolised culture exists. However, this bonhomie is intermittently broken, as it was when a coup was attempted and the Trinidad Parliament was held under siege for six days in July and August of 1990. The political coup was a simultaneous attack on the Trinidad and Tobago parliament, the police headquarters, the National Broadcasting Service, Radio Trinidad and the Trinidad and Tobago Television station.
1 - Early Fiction of the 1950s: The Trinidad Years
- Nivedita Misra
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- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 25-46
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I think it was in ‘58 that I ceased to be destitute, really (Naipaul in conversation with Walcott 1965, p. 9).
V. S. Naipaul was the eldest son in a family of five daughters and two sons. Naipaul’s mother, Droapatie Naipaul was one of the nine daughters and two sons of Kapildeo Maharaj and Soogie Rosaline Capildeo. This large household was a well-established family settled in Chaguanas, in central Trinidad, in a house with an impressive facade, with its concrete balustrades, elephants and lions with a shop on the ground floor. It was originally called Anand Bhavan (House of Happiness), but due to the decorative lion heads, it came to be known locally as the Lion House. Droapatie had had a basic education and had been married informally but was not sent away with the man due to the emergence of some last-minute questionable details (Akal 2018, p. 26). Even though she was very young when she was married to Seepersad Naipaul, it was a late marriage according to the customs of the time. She did odd jobs in her family’s establishments and, after the death of her husband, became the breadwinner for her family.
Naipaul’s father, Seepersad Naipaul, was a second generation East Indian whose parents had not thrived in Trinidad. Seepersad’s grandmother had come as an indentured labourer, carrying her little son, who was a free Indian. Seepersad’s father died early, leaving behind two sons and a daughter. Seepersad’s mother married again and had another son from the second husband. At a certain time in the family, it was decided that they would all go back to India. However, Seepersad developed cold feet at the thought and hid in a toilet to avoid the journey back to India. The family stayed on in Trinidad. Since Seepersad’s father died early, the family was left at the mercy of richer relatives. His life, recapitulated in A House for Mr Biswas, typifies the tale of the common man working in a hostile environment. He did odd jobs, learnt English, painted signboards and finally got employed at the Trinidad Guardian newspaper. However, unlike Mohun Biswas, Seepersad began work as a freelance reporter on the Trinidad Guardian in 1929 before his marriage with Droapatie. Seepersad’s marriage had also been fixed early but his bride had run away on the day of the marriage (Akal 2018, p. 27).