V.S. Naipaul and diasporic representation

If Salman Rushdie represents the modern diaspora, it was V.S Naipaul who could be considered as the founding father of old diaspora. Nobel Prize winning author, V.S Naipaul represents the multifaceted characteristics of the old diaspora with anxieties and loss of inheritance as well as hopes and aspirations for a better life in adapted soil.

V.S Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932 and his lineage can be traced back to indentured Indian labourers. A seminal characteristic of Naipaul’s life and literary career is that he belonged to several categories of diaspora; Victim Diasporas, Labour Diasporas, Imperial Diasporas and Cultural Diasporas.

In an introduction to The Writer and the World Essays, Pankaj Mishra wrote the backdrop against which Naipaul’s life and career evolved. Mishra writes: “ …Half a century later , these “displaced persons”, who Evelyn Waugh feared would break into and upset the world order , contribute, with increasing confidence , to the cosmopolitan life and culture of cities like London and New York. In England itself, there is an ever-growing literature that describes their varied lives: the experience of colonial subjects who have had to remake themselves out of a bewilderingly diverse material for a new life in the old imperial centre. Much publicity and excitement currently attends this literature. Various academic categories-Commonwealth, Multicultural, Diasporic, Indo-Anglican, Caribbean, African, have proliferated around it, encouraging among individual writers a correct political passion that often compensate for the maturity and skill only a few of them have fitfully achieved.”

Literary career

But even this young literature, still only developing its own traditions, would have been hard to imagine in 1945, when the prospect for Britain as well as its new immigrants looked bleak. This is why it is astonishing to realise that less than five years after Waugh’s grime vision of a post-war world, V.S Naipaul travelled to England as a scholarship student from the tiny Caribbean island of Trinidad; and by 1957, decades before our glamorous multicultural times, had already begun, with scarcely an audience in sight, in what now looks like a dispiriting vacuum, one of most brilliant –and by far the unlikeliest –literary career of the last hundred years.

In England, Naipaul was doubly, or trebly, displaced. The dereliction of the late-nineteenth-century North India had forced his Brahmin grandparents to make the long journey by sea to the plantation colony of Trinidad, where they worked as indentured labourers. In 1932 when Naipaul was born, his father, Seepersad, had barely begun to lift himself out of his family’s near –destitute circumstances in the Trinidad countryside.

There was little place in Trinidad for people in Naipaul’s position, to whom the larger, more complex societies elsewhere alone promised an escape from a life of squalor and deprivation. And then, as if life in a foreign land as a young man a long way from home wasn’t arduous enough , the promise of escape , in Naipaul’s case had become tied to absurdly high literary ambition.

Journalist

As a badly paid journalist for the Trinidad Guardian, Seepersad had written some short stories about the village life of his childhood. His son inherited his quite miraculous-given the general background of peasant poverty- literary aspirations, and took it with him to England where it became confused , during a time of poverty and insecurity, with a longing for metropolitan glamour and serenity: with the desire to be a writer like Evelyn Waugh, “ aloof everywhere, unsurprised, immensely knowing.”

Six long years of struggle and futility followed before Naipaul discovered, in such books as Miguel Street (1959), The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), his true subject. It was a discovery that was essentially of his own self: of the colonial who had grown up on a tiny, backward island in the Caribbean, amidst an insular Indian community, and then with the racial mixed population of Port of Spain: the man who had no clear past or affiliations, and who had to figure out the world he had been thrown into while attempting to perceive many strands that made up his self”

His diasporic existence and the perennial issues such as crisis of identity, formation of social networks and in simple terms how one could have his or her cultural foot hold on a fragile ground of multi-ethnic and multi-cultural constituency is amply manifested in A House for Mr. Biswas. It is a journey in search of roots.

Wanderer

“ … And so Mr. Biswas came to leave the only house to which he had some rights. For the next thirty-five years he was to be a wanderer with no place he could call his own, with no family except that which he was to attempt to create out of the engulfing world of the Tulsis. For with his mother’s parents dead, his father dead, his brothers on the estate at Felicity, Delhiti as a servant in Tara’s house and himself rapidly growing away from Bipti who broken, became increasingly useless and impenetrable, it seemed to him that he was really quite alone. “

What Naipaul eloquently expressed were the fundamental issues that the early immigrants confronted with in the process of settling themselves down on a foreign land. One of the prominent characteristic of this inevitable process is the loss of roots or loss of inheritance. The new immigrants are often disposed of their cultural roots such as language (they will eventually have to work in an alien tongue and acquire a new life and cultural codes of the host culture) and they were also deprived of their relations and the close-knit support network they used to enjoy in their native land.

The sizeable corpus of Naipaul’s work sheds light on the universal issues that diapora represents in general and the early and the first generation of immigrants represent in particular. V.S Naipaul’s prolific literary career is marked for strong and manifold diasporic representations and the issues that the diasporic existence entailed.