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Sir
Vidiadhar Surajprashad Naipaul
Famous writer and winner of the
Born: Trinidad
Page contents:
(1) VS Naipaul wins Nobel Prize for
Literature - AFP,
Stockholm, October 11, 2001
Trinidad-born British
writer V.S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for
"having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works
that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories". Naipaul,
said he was "utterly delighted" with the award, which he did not
expect....
(2) A Strong Hindu Response to Historical Humiliation - VS Naipaul
INDIA was trampled over, fought over. You had the
invasions and you had the absence of a response to them.
There was an absence even of the idea of a people, of a nation defending
itself. Only now are people beginning to understand that there has been a
great vandalizing of India...
(3) A Million Mutinies - VS Naipaul
I think that it would be wrong to ask whether 50 years
of India's Independence are an achievement or a failure. It would be better to
see things as evolving. It's not an either-or question. My idea of the history
of India is slightly contrary to the Indian idea. India is a country that, in
the north, outside Rajasthan, was ravaged, and intellectually destroyed to a
large extent, by the invasions ...
(4) Religion is often a
smokescreen for political oppression
- L K Sharma
It is a book of stories," writer VS Naipaul
announces in the preface of his new travelogue, Beyond Belief, during an
interview with L K Sharma in London. The writer keeps emphasising this point.
Soon one knows why. A journalist from India rings up to know his opinion on
Pakistan. am not an analyst. It is for the reader to find out." Naipaul
tells him. Beyond Belief is about his "Islamic excursions among the
converted people"...
(5) VS Naipaul's Hindu Influence - Sasenarine Persaud
Early in his career, Naipaul because of his harsh views
of India and on Sanatanist Hinduism in Trinidad was often seen as anti- Hindu.
While there is no doubt of the British influence and English literary
role-models on him at the time, there can be no denying the Hindu influence.
Niapaul was born into a Hindu household where both his parents came from
Sanatanist backgrounds...
■ VS
Naipaul wins Nobel Prize for Literature
AFP, Stockholm,
October 11, 2001
|
|
Trinidad-born British writer V.S. Naipaul won the Nobel
Prize in literature on Thursday for "having united perceptive narrative
and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of
suppressed histories".
Naipaul, said he was
"utterly delighted" with the award, which he did not expect.
In a short statement
Naipaul, who has lived in Britain since 1953, said: "It is a great
tribute to England, my home, and to India, home of my ancestors".
He added: "I am
utterly delighted, this is an unexpected accolade."
The Swedish Academy
singled out Naipaul's masterpiece The Enigma of Arrival (1987), saying
that in it the author created an "unrelenting image of the placid
collapse of the old colonial ruling culture and the demise of European
neighbourhoods".
V.S. Naipaul, who has at
long last been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is regarded as a pillar
of Britain's cultural establishment, yet has also become a symbol of modern
rootlessness.
Born in Trinidad, the son
of an Indian civil servant, he has been based in England since the 1950s yet
has spent much of his life travelling around the world seeking answers and
inspiration.
Much of his writing
examines the traumas of post-colonial change, which he explores with a
moralist's outrage.
One of his first major
works, A House for Mr Biswas, looked at the almost impossible task for
Indian immigrants in the Caribbean of trying to integrate into society while
keeping hold of their roots.
His ire has ranged from
corruption in Indian politics to the West's cynical treatment of its former
colonies to the cult of personality in The Return of Eva Peron.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad
Naipaul, now 69, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1990.
He was educated in
Port-au-Prince, then Oxford University where he studied English literature.
Shortly afterwards he
embarked on travels that, in the space of just over three decades, have taken
him around the world on a quest for home, as epitomised in works like
"The Enigma of Arrival".
He was one of the first
winners of the Booker Prize, now Britain's leading literary award, in 1971 for
In A Free State.
During his early career
he was dogged by money worries and loneliness. He met his first wife, Pat, at
Oxford and married her in 1955, although he later admitted sleeping with
prostitutes during the marriage and having a long-term affair.
Pat died in 1996. The
same year, he married Nadira Khannum Alvi.
Critics have spoken of
his feeling of "congenital displacement," of having been born a
foreigner, a citizen of an exiled community on a colonised island, without a
natural home except for an India to which he often returns, only to be
reminded of his distance from his roots.
"The strength of
Naipaul is the poignancy of Naipaul," one critic wrote -- "the
poignancy of a wanderer who tries to go home, but is not taken in and is
accepted by another home only so long as he admits he is a lodger there."
Last year, he vented his
spleen on the government of his long-term home, Britain, over its
"aggressively plebeian" attitude to culture.
He likened Prime Minister
Tony Blair to a pirate at the head of a socialist revolution that was
"destroying the idea of civilisation in this country."
"Despite being so
anti-elitist, the prime minister talks about the great geniuses of this
country, as if somehow there is something going on. There is nothing going on.
It is all over."
Vidiadhar Surajprasad
Naipaul is the seventh Indian or person with Indian roots to be awarded the
Nobel Prize and the second for Literature after Rabindranath Tagore.
Naipaul's prize comes a
good 88 years after Tagore was awarded the Nobel for Literature in 1913 for
"Gitanjali."
Other recipients are Dr C
V Raman - Physics (1930), Dr Hargobind Khurana - Medicine (1968), Subramanian
Chandrashekar - Physics (1983), Mother Teresa - Peace (1979) and Amartya Sen -
Economics (1998).
■ A Strong Hindu Response to
Historical Humiliation
Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publication : Afternoon (Excerpts from Los Angeles Times)
Date : June 29, 1996
INDIA was trampled over, fought over. You
had the invasions and you had the absence of a response to them.
There was an absence even of the idea of a people, of a nation defending
itself. Only now are people beginning to understand that there has been a
great vandalizing of India.
In pre-industrial India, people moved about
in small areas, unaware of the dimension of the country, without
any notion of nation. People seemed to say: We are all right here. The rest of
the world may be disastrous, but
we are not affected. Now, however things seem to be changing. What is
happening in India is a mighty,
creative process. Indian intellectuals, who want to be secure in their liberal
beliefs, may not understand what
is going on.
But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening: Deep down he knows
that a larger response is
emerging to their historical humiliation. The new Hindu attitude, the new
sense of history being attained by Hindus, is not like Mohammedan
fundamentalism. Which is essentially a negative, last-ditch effort to fight
against a world it desperately wishes to join.
The movement is now from below. It has to be
dealt with. It is not enough to abuse these youths or use that
fashionable word from Europe, 'fascism', There is a big, historical
development going on in India.
Wise men should understand it and ensure that it does not remain in the hands
of fanatics.
■ A Million Mutinies
Author: V.S. Naipaul
Publication: India Today
Date: August 18, 1997
I think that it would be wrong to ask
whether 50 years of India's Independence are an achievement or a failure. It
would be better to see things as evolving. It's not an either-or question. My
idea of the history of India is slightly contrary to the Indian idea. India is
a country that, in the north, outside Rajasthan, was ravaged, and
intellectually destroyed to a large extent, by the invasions that began in
about 1000 A.D. by forces and religions that India had no means of
understanding.
The invasions are in all the school books.
But I don't think people understand that every invasion, every war, every
campaign, was accompanied by slaughter, a slaughter always of the most
talented people in the country. So these wars, apart from everything else, led
to a tremendous intellectual depiction of the country. I think that in the
British period, and in the 50 years after the British period, there has been a
kind of recruitment or recovery, a very slow revival of energy and intellect.
This isn't an idea that goes with the vision of the grandeur of old India and
all that sort of rubbish. That idea is a great simplification, and it occurs
because it is intellectually, philosophically and emotionally easier for
Indians to manage.
What they cannot manage, and what they have
not yet come to terms with, is that ravaging of all the north of India by
various conquerors. That was ruin not by an act of nature, but by the hand of
man. It is so painful that few Indians have begun to deal with it. It's much
easier to deal with British imperialism. That is a familiar topic, in India
and Britain. What is much less familiar is the ravaging of India before the
British. What happened from 1 000 A.D. on, really, is such a wound that it is
almost impossible to face. Certain wounds are so bad that they can't be
written about. You deal with that kind of pain by hiding from it. You retreat
from reality. I wrote a book about that, and people thought I meant that India
hasn't really a civilization, or India can't go ahead. What I was saying is
that you cannot deal with a wound so big. I do not think, for example, that
people like the Incas of Peru or the native people of Mexico have ever got
over their defeat by the Spaniards. In both places, the head was cut off. I
think the pre-British ravaging of India was as bad as that. Muslims shouldn't
be too sensitive about this. Because in the Islamic world, a similar
vandalization occurred with the Mongols. Muslims all over still grieve about
that.
In the place of knowledge of history, you
have various fantasies about the village republic and the old glory. There is
one big fantasy that Indians have always found solace in: about India having
the capacity for absorbing its conquerors. This is not so. India was laid low
by its conquerors. There's an extraordinary work by the young Gandhi-his 1909
book, Hind Swaraj, about the need for Indian independence-where he says that
what is really wrong with India is modern civilization: doctors, lawyers,
railways (spreading famine and vice). His arguments are quite absurd. Rome has
fallen, Greece has fallen, every other culture has fallen, but old India
has survived. It is immovable and glorious. Now Gandhi is writing this at one
of the blacker moments in India's history and one of the blacker moments in
his personal life. He has seen South Africa and the abject, unprotected
condition of Indians there. Out of that despair, and out of his own lack of
education, all he can manage intellectually is that rejection of modern
civilization, which is a rejection of the tools of self-defence. It is the
deepest kind of despair. That's my starting point in understanding Indian
history. And so, I feel the past 150 years have been years of every kind of
growth. I see the British period and what has continued after that as one
period. In that time, there has been a very slow intellectual recruitment. I
think every Indian should make the pilgrimage to the site of the capital of
the Vijaynagar empire, just to see what the invasion of India led to. They
will see a totally destroyed town. Religious wars are like that. People who
see that might understand what the centuries of plunder and slaughter meant.
War isn't a game. When you lost that kind of war, your towns were destroyed,
the people who built the towns were destroyed, you are left with a headless
population. That's where modern India starts from.
The Vijaynagar capital was destroyed in
1565. It is only now that the surrounding region has begun to revive.
A great chance has been given to India to
start up again, and I feel it has started up again. The questions about
whether 50 years of India since Independence have been a failure or an
achievement are not the questions to
ask. In fact, I think India is developing quite marvellously. People
thought-even Mr Nehru thought-that development and new institutions in a place
like Bihar, for instance, would immediately lead to beauty. But it doesn't
happen like that. When a country as ravaged as India, with all its layers of
cruelty, when that kind of country begins to extend justice to people lower
down, it's a very messy business. It's not beautiful, it's extremely messy.
And that's what you have now, all these small politicians with small
reputations and small parties. But this is part of growth, this is part of
development. You must remember that these people, and the people they
represent. have never had rights before. So in India at the moment you have a
million mutinies-every man is a mutiny on his own-and 1 find that entirely
creative. It's difficult to manage, gets very messy, but it is the only way
forward. You can't get people from Bihar suddenly behaving very beautifully.
When the oppressed have the power to assert themselves, they will behave
badly. it will need a couple of generations of security, and knowledge of
institutions. and the knowledge that you can trust institutions-it will take
at least a couple of generations before people in that situation begin to
behave well.
People in India have only known tyranny. The
very idea of liberty is a new idea. Particularly pathetic is the harking back
to the Mughals as a time of glory. In fact, the Mughals were tyrants, every
one of them. They were foreign tyrants. And they were proud of being foreign.
There's a story that anybody could run and pull a bell and the emperor would
appear at his window and give justice. The child's idea of history. The
slave's idea of the ruler's mercy. When the people at the bottom discover that
they hold justice in their own hands, the earth moves a little. You have to
expect these earth movements in India. It will be like this for a hundred
years. But it is the only way. In a country like India, I don't want people at
the bottom to ever lose their say in their government, to ever lose
representation. That is a calamity that must be avoided at all costs. It's
painful and messy and primitive and petty, but it's better that it should
begin. It has to begin. If we were to rule people according to what we think
fit, that takes us back to the past when people had no voices. Old caste or
clan boundaries can't disappear. They are people's support system and I think
they will be with us for a long time. What is happening, of course, is that
within those boundaries people are beginning to have a greater sense of
themselves. Some people may feel unhappy at what they see as a breakdown of
old reverences. but they have to understand that this is part of an
intellectual movement forward. I don't believe in revolution. it's a bogus and
cruel idea. Things don't change overnight. They move very slowly, they move
over generations. And with self-awareness, all else follows. People begin to
make new demands on their leaders, their fellows, on themselves. They ask for
more in everything. They have a higher idea of human possibilities. They are
not content with what they did before or what their fathers did before. They
want to move. That is marvelous. That is as it should be.
>From India's point of view, the
Partition was extremely fortunate. The religious
question would otherwise have paralysed and consumed the state. By cruel
irony, this is what it's done across the border in Pakistan. In
India, there's the emphasis on human possibility. In Pakistan, there's only a
constant regression to greater and greater fundamentalism-it's quite
extraordinary and shameful that Pakistan, 50 years after independence, could
have created something like the Taliban. There's no future in the doctrine
that perfection in religion leads to perfection in men. That is the great
difference between India and Pakistan. The Iqbal idea that religion wasn't a
matter of conscience, that it needed a separate community and society, was a
wicked and rather foolish idea, and in the end it went against the polity he
thought he was creating. There are very talented people in Pakistan.
Unfortunately, they don't have much of a chance. The religious state is not
built around the idea of individual talent. So it remains half a serf state,
and there is little chance of .change. A country's wealth is its people, but
instead of drawing out strengths of the people, instead of drawing out their
talent, this use of religion debases, degrades and depresses them more and
more.
People ask me about the forces of Hindutva
in India. I got into trouble a couple of years ago when I said that with this
new kind of self-awareness in India, the Hindu idea is almost a necessary
early, stage. It contains the beginnings of larger, new ideas: the idea of
history, the idea of the human family, of India. I hope this self-awareness
doesn't stay there, and I don't think it will, but it's necessary. We are
dealing with a country that has started from a very low point, a very low
intellectual point, a low economic point. When people start moving, the first
loyalty, the first identity, is always a rather small one. They can't
immediately become other things. I think that within every kind of disorder
now in India there is a larger positive movement. But the future will be
fairly chaotic. Politics will have to be at the level of the people now.
People like Nehru were colonial-style politicians. They were to a large extent
created and protected by the colonial order. They did not begin with the
people.
Politicians now have to begin with the
people. They cannot be too far above the level of the people. They are very
much part of the people. The Nehrus of the world have to give way now to the
men of the people. It is important, in this apparent mess, for two things not
to be interfered with. One is economic growth. I would like to see that
encouraged in every way. It is the most important news coming out of India,
more important than the politics. I would like to see education extended and
extended. If this were to happen, and I feel it might, gradually, the actual
level of politics will reflect both the economic life and higher level of
education.
There's been great movement since 1962, when
I first went to India. It's not only the level of public debate, of
intellectual life. You look at the newspapers from those days, they are
reports of speeches, there is not much
news, nothing like investigations going on. In a way India didn't exist for
the Indian papers at that time. There would be various items sent in by the
local correspondent, saying that a woman had thrown her children in a well and
then jumped in herself, that would come as a line from the correspondent from
Faizabad or wherever. But they wouldn't send someone to investigate what would
make someone do that. They had no idea that could be done. So you get an idea
of the great intellectual change that has taken place. And that goes with the
economic change. That's why I think the two must go side by side. There was no
economic life really worth talking about. People blame Nehru for his slightly
socialist attitude to enterprise. But I don't think India in the 1950s had the
talent to resist international business. It would have been dreadfully
exploited. I think the old stringencies caused a lot of pain, but it's much
better that change is happening now. Every year that passes, makes the country
more able to cope 'with international business. In 1962, the number of
talented people, equipped people, would have really been quite small compared
to what you have now.
It is important that self-criticism does not
stop. The mind has to work, the mind has to be active, there has to be an
exercise of the mind. I think it's almost a definition of a living country
that it looks at itself, analyses itself at all times. Only countries that
have ceased to live can say it's all wonderful.
In India the talent is prodigious, really,
and it increases year by year. And in sheer numbers, in another 10 years,
India will probably be one of the world's most intellectually gifted
countries. The quality and the numbers are extraordinary, and I think this
makes India extraordinary. But India shouldn't have fantasies about the past.
The past is painful, but it should be faced. We should make ourselves see how
far these old invasions and wars had beaten India down and how far we have
come. I would say that India in the 18th century was pretty nearly a dead
country. India has life now. India is living.
(1997 VS. NAIPAUL. (This exclusive essay
evolved from a conversation With INDIA TODAY.)
■ Religion is Often a
Smokescreen for Political Oppression
Author: L K Sharma
Publication: The Times of India
Date: May 1, 1998
It is a book of stories," writer VS
Naipaul announces in the preface of his new travelogue, Beyond Belief, during
an interview with L K Sharma in London. The writer keeps emphasising this
point. Soon one knows why. A journalist from India rings up to know his
opinion on Pakistan. am not an analyst. It is for the reader to find
out." Naipaul tells him. Beyond Belief is about his "Islamic
excursions among the converted people" and as it happens, when Naipaul
holds up the mirror to Pakistan, the picture is not rosy. The book is a sequel
to Among the Believers which was published in 1981. Naipaul revisited the same
countries -Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia, collecting life stories. He
allows the people to speak, interrupting rarely. The main object of his
exploration this time is the pressure of the cultural identity of non-Arab
Muslim peoples The theme fits beautifully into his larger exploration of being
cut off from the roots in different ways. As he told a gathering of students
in his native Trinidad more than two decades ago: "It's very good to ask
yourself who you are and why you're here and what has made you.
Q: When you decided to revisit the four
countries, what was your brief to your self?
A: I go with a blank mind. I set out to
learn. I do not know the end. When I went for the earlier book, I knew nothing
about Islam. The people whom I went to were telling me what their faith was.
Even then, I travelled among the converted people, the non-Arab people, but I
did not make a big point about this in the earlier book. This time, I
understood it is very important. The theme of conversion is the prime thing.
It interests me when I look at the classical world too, to see how the
crossover occurred there, from the classical world to the religion of
Christianity. This is an extension of that. Here it is all very recent and it
is still happening. You have captured a sense of loss among the converted.
Their denial of their identity, a violation of their original forms of society
and the resultant neurosis and nihilism and easy inflammability.
Yes, what I found from the people of my
stories has been put in my own words in the preface: "a convert's world
view alters. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes,
whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn
away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense.
People develop fantasies about who and what they are."
I can see the book attracting a lot of
extra-literary criticism. If the book generates some heat it is because Arabs
try to pretend that they do not look down upon the converted people and the
converted people insist that they are Arabs. The latter have to accept a
second class status and they have no means of getting out of it. This is part
of the neurosis. Your exploration this time was more focused? The last time I
was finding out from them about their faith. This time, I was finding out
about their lives and their experience. I was not asking what their religion
was. I was trying to enter their life. These are true stories. That is why
they can say that these are bad stories but they cannot say these are false
stories. I never marshal the material afterwards. The thing is composed as I
travel. Every day there is a discovery. I go on learning. I was not looking
for change. I just wanted to have a second look. When I went in 1979, I
accepted what was said about the importance of religion to the state. When I
went again for this book, I found it is true that religion is important but
religion is also a great smokescreen for dreadful political oppression and
exploitation and its own misuse. There are people still being attracted to a
revealed faith because, as I found in the case of a Chinese in Malaysia, they
are looking for larger philosophical ideas and are not content with their
kitchen gods. Revealed religions made their impact because of their social
content. They talked about noble things, brotherhood, charity. that was, of
course, at the beginning. Now what is happening is different. Religion is
being used as a political weapon or as means of threat, as part of powerplay,
internal and at times, external. But it is not my business to draw
conclusions. Every reader draws his own conclusion. My business is to get the
stories, not to deal with profound questions. The reader should not look for
conclusions.
Q. During your travels, do you consciously
seek material to reinforce any core thesis?
You have no idea what you are going to find.
Many meetings are chance meetings. I am completely with the people. They talk
to me easily The case of a disfigured woman takes me to a court in Pakistan.
There, I don't know what to do but then the man I am talking to, that is what
I am looking for. His dismay, his disillusion. His aspirations. That is the
story. In Iran, I am checking out the consequences of the revolution. In
Pakistan, I wanted to see how the Muslim homeland worked. Well, it has not
worked out. Then I find out why. It will be wrong for me to say it has worked
out. Indonesia is a tyranny. People are trying to achieve an industrial
revolution in a strange way. I can't understand it. I try to follow it. In
Iran, the war in the name of Islam has left terrible consequences.
Q. Are you clinical in your approach to the
material? And what did you find in Pakistan?
I found interesting stories. Clinical is not
the right word. I am compassionate. I am Sympathetic. I wish to understand.
The people have to tell me what they want. In Pakistan, they are saying they
have nothing to do with the subcontinent and that they are part of some thing
else. Here is a Muslim country which after its creation in 1947 promptly
became a state of manpower exports. Lots of people came to Britain. The idea
of a state for Muslims began to undo itself very quickly. When I met people in
Karachi, I found them very strange. The way they spoke, at first, they
described a perfect world. Everything happening was good. The disturbances in
the streets were good. The life has been a success. Then the other thing came
out slowly. That the life was terrible. The people did not know whether they
would reach home safely in the evening. The teacher feels that his whole life
has been wasted. That comes out at the end of his talk. The people were so
upset, wounded. They talked in a strange way. I did not make that up. I found
that. You say this book takes the story on from Among the Believers. I feel it
takes the story on from many of the your previous books too. The larger story
about displacement, the loss of identity, robbed memories and the robbed past.
A fraudulent and tragic existence. Remember the tragic story in A Way in the
World of some one hiding Hindi film song cassettes in his bag because he is
masquerading as some one else? There is forced denial in the new existence.
There are all kinds of converts. I see a pattern of unity in the body of work.
Perhaps you are right. Yes, this book has
come out of that.
■ V.S. Naipaul's
Hindu Influence
Author: Sasenairne Persaud
Date: Winter 1997
Early in his career, Naipaul because of his
harsh views of India and on Sanatanist Hinduism in Trinidad was often seen as
anti- Hindu. While there is no doubt of the British influence and English
literary role-models on him at the time, there can be no denying the Hindu
influence. Niapaul was born into a Hindu household where both his parents came
from Sanatanist backgrounds, and despite his father's early dabbling with
preference for reform Hinduism, i.e. the Arya Samaj, his father too could be
describe as Sanatanist. All this is dealt with in A House for Mr. Biswas,
regarded as Niapaul's greatest work, and the novel most closely based on his
early life, and except for minor alterations, based on the life of his father,
the Mohun Biswas of the novel.
A number of critics have dealt with how
Naipaul was indebted to his father, Seepersad who published a volume of
stories in 1943 and was a journalist for Trinidad Guardian, not for this novel
but for his literary life. Naipaul has himself admitted this in interviews and
in the foreword to his father's stories republished in 1976.
In this interview with Antony Boxhill
referenced by John Thieme in his book on Naipaul, Niapaul states, "A
great deal of my vision of Trinidad has come straight from my father".
This is a significant aspect of Naipaul's pronouncement on Hinduism in
Trinidad; as important as the fact that he left Trinidad when he was 18;
living most that 18 years in Port-of-Spain - Anand's experiences in Biswas
based on this - as a sort of outsider to, and contemptuous of, the Hinduism
practiced by his country cousins and relatives.
Naipaul's father in real life was swayed by
Arya Samaj missionaries and this bias Naipaul picked up. A closer examination
of A House For Mr. Biswas, which in regarded as a novel of Hinduism (by a
Naipaul who knew largely second and third hand from his father's reports)
shows not only a confusion of and ignorance of Hinduism, but a mockery of the
Arya Samaj.
This is done when the Samajist missionary
from India, Pankaj Rai, "the purist" is discovered molesting and
trying to seduce Misir's, his host's, wife. And later when Biswas is building
his house he finds out that the same Samajist, Misir, is as unconscionable a
money-lender as any on the island, with his eye on the bottom line - profit.
It is during this "Aryan phase", while living in his mother-in-law's
house, the famed Hanuman house, that Biswas is a thoroughly repulsive person.
He does not contribute in any way to the household and yet abuses its
occupants: his mother-in-law, sisters-in-law, their husbands, his wife, and he
throws away food served him and which he is provided gratis, and spits on his
brother-in-law... His Arya Samajist principles has certainly not made him a
better person! In fact, it seems to have made him a moral degenerate.
Throughout the novel, Biswas is at his worst when he is rebelling against his
Sanatanist background, and that of his inlaws. When he does not fight it we
see his better side.
In this "Aryan period" too, both
Biswas and his creator, Naipaul, equate the aarti ceremony with idol worship -
clearly an ignorance of Hinduism. In a novel of almost six hundred pages, of
vivid, detailed descriptions even of different varieties of ants in a
thunderstorm, Naipaul is unable, in a novel teeming with rituals and pujas, tp
say what kinds of pujas are being performed, or what kinds of songs are being
sung during these pujas, or what kinds of instruments are being used:
shortcomings as a novelist, and exposing his ignorance of important aspects of
Hinduism as practiced in the West Indies. His vision of the Hinduism he was
purporting to write about was that of an observer and an outsider. That he
wrote the novel in London and that it was published when he was only 29 may
also have some significance.
Yet given his limitations, and that he was
writing of Hinduism largely through the biases of his father, what comes
through is that Hanuman House served all the occupants well as long as its
occupants observed its very complex ethics. The naming of the house as Hanuman
House is very significant. In real life the house is the Capiildeos' Lion
House in Chaguanas. Hanuman House, then as in the Hanuman of Hinduism, must be
seen as a symbol for dharma. And even if unconsciously, what Naipaul was
saying here was: if you look after dharma, dharma will look after you.
The greatest tragedy of A House for Mr. Biswas, and the greatest
character in the novel, despite all the critics (practically all non-Hindus)
and Naipaul himself, is Hanuman House and its fall into disuse. An older, more
mature Biswas, later in the novel is intuitively aware of this.
In the end there is no doubt that Naipaul
and Biswas are Hindus, even defenders of the faith. In Biswas's letter to the
Christian Indian Doctor who did not provide a certificate of death for his
mother he, "compared the doctor to an angry hero of a Hindu epic, and
asked to be forgiven for mentioning the Hindu epic to Indian who had abandoned
his religion for a recent superstition (i.e. Christianity, my bold)
that was being exported wholesale to savages all over the world..."
Almost 25 years later Naipaul would make,
what appeared to be a stunning reversal. In the Epilogue of his
autobiographical novel, The Enigma of Arrival (1988), the author is in
Trinidad for the cremation rites of his sister. Of this, Josh Getlin wrote in
the Los Angeles Times of Wednesday March 15, 1989, "Grief-stricken, he
comes to terms with his own mortality and the Hindu rites he once
criticized".
(This piece, "V.S. Naipaul's Hindu Influence" was written by
Sasenarie Persaud in the winter of 1997. Sasenarine Persaud is an award
winning author, poet, novelist, critic, and literary theorist. He is the first
Canadian and West Indian to win the K.M. Hunter Foundation's emerging artists
award in 1996. He is the author of six books. He was born in Guyana, South
America and currently resides in Tampa, Florida.)