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CHAPTER-II

Diasporic Consciousness and V. S. Naipaul

Of late, expatriate writings have become an emerging feature and engaging subject of

critical discussion in the backdrop of postcolonial studies. There is no denying the fact

that during the post- II World War period, the colonized countries encountered new

dimensions of thought and that under the impact of globalization, advancement of

technology, new modes of transport, commercial and cultural transaction, people from

third world nations were fascinated to utilize their potential for social stability and

secured identity. On the one hand, globalization fascinated migration and the flourish of

immigrant sensibility by exercising decided influence on intellectuals, ambitious people

of third world nations to go in search of better fortune and economic stability in alien

countries. V. S. Naipaul is one of those expatriate writers who tended to develop his

diasporic sensibility by encountering a new world of memory and hope, culture shock

and desire for a settled and secured identity.

Diasporic consciousness is as such grounded upon the rise and growth of

expatriate experience and immigrant sensibility which can be defined in the light of

Safron’s observation (1991:83) that the feeling of alienation after dispersal from his/her

homeland constitutes the core of diasporic sensibility. At the same time, Safron

maintains that the immigrant consciousness of diasporic person is enriched through an

imaginary relation with homeland which the diasporic writers idealize and

imaginatively reconstruct the place constantly desired to return for. It is this expatriate

sensibility that prompted V. S. Naipaul to make a significant remark that “Most of the

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imaginative writers discovered themselves and their world through their works” (REP,

1981: 21). These imaginative writers tend to mirror the condition of the immigrants and

more predominantly their incessant travel and displacement, homelessness, trauma and

cultural shock despite their desperate attempt to acclimatize themselves to the alien

cultural condition.

Diasporic consciousness as a dominant phenomenon in world literature also

encompasses the mental flight of diasporans who constantly try to reconstruct their

present on the basis of their past that haunts them to a frozen and fractured

consciousness – a state of mind in which they search for locating and relocating their

identity. Their quest for the past and their bitter realization of dislocation and

marginalization in the alien land and the assimilation into the culture of adopted country

posits the conflicting state of ‘ambivalence’. In the words of Viney Kirpal, the

marginality experienced by an expatriate is itself the “result of his race, region and

history” (1993:76) and Naipaul writes with this realization in his bone.

The diasporic sensibility of V. S. Naipaul, the person and the writer can be

situated in the light of the remarks of Kripal and the concept ‘diasporic ambivalence’

articulated through such critical terms as ‘liminal space’,‘in-betweenness’ and dilemmas

of colonial natives and expatriation. Moreover, the immigrant suffers from

discrimination and prejudices on account of various psychological factors that affect

them and even affect the host society. These very often lead to create group favoritism

in search of social identity and social influences like mass media. Their psychological

effect of discrimination Allport (1954) divided as “blaming oneself” that is moving

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towards the oppressor through integration and “blaming others” that is moving against

the oppressor by fighting back. Their integration resulted in the stigmatization of non-

Western and fails to eliminate their discrimination.

In the postcolonial era, the writers who live as expatriates in metropolitan

countries and contribute to the literature, show their exile status, incessant travels,

displacement, rootlessness and homelessness. Their diasporic consciousness forces

them to experience the cultural and social disorder even though they acquire citizenship

and home in abroad. This condition is true to Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul who

inherited the seeds of diasporic ambivalence from his birth.

V. S. Naipaul was one of the most acknowledged literary figures of the

contemporary world who had experienced for long life in terms of an ‘exilic’. Nanda

Kishor Mishra, in his article “Trajectory of Displacement: Expatriate Sensibility of V.

S. Naipaul” maintains that in establishing a sturdy link between exile as a literary theme

and his personal history, Naipaul has emerged as a rare individual writer with a self-

autonomy as measure of his ostracism (Mohit K.Ray ed, 2005:147). Naipaul took

writing as his sole profession and his creative writings become the live record of his

progress as a writer. His sensibility is increasingly enriched by his personal experiences

as a displaced and exile person.

Born in Changunas, Trinidad (1932) where his maternal grandfather had built an

Indian- style large house which provided him the first link with his Indian origin,

Naipaul was the seventh son of an orthodox Brahmin family, whose ancestral root was

in Gorakhpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh, India. In Finding the Centre (1985: 53)

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Naipaul asserts that for him India was a far off dream because he knew nothing about

his ancestral roots. But later he came to know about his family history. His grandfather

came to Trinidad as a child with his mother who was an indenture labourer in the sugar

cane fields in Trinidad and he was trained to be a Pundit so as to follow the family

tradition. Naipaul’s father Seepersad Naipaul was also trained to be a Pundit, but he

never wished to be a pundit and therefore he took a job of sign painting at the beginning

of his carrier. This job took him to the Lion- House at Chaguanas where he met

Droaptie, whom he married and settled down with her family. Later he became a

journalist and wrote articles to the ‘Trinidad Guardian’. After the birth of V.S. Naipaul

he left ‘Trinidad Guardian’ and did various jobs here and there, staying in his wife’s

family or with his uncle who was a rich man. He himself being a poor, belonged to the

agricultural labour class, lived and changed his life in half-independence and half-

esteem between these two powerful families. Naipaul writes:

Chaguanas was in the heart of the sugar area and the Indian area of Trinidad. It

was where my mother’s family was established. Contract labour was far behind

them; they were big landowners (FC, 1985:34).

In 1935, Naipaul’s father joined in ‘Guardian’ as a city reporter. At that time they

moved to Port of Spain and lived in a house owned by Naipaul’s grandmother. There,

most of the time Naipaul’s father kept himself away from home. The life and the

personality of his father remained mysterious to Naipaul. He admits this situation in the

following lines:

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I have lived before them in my mother’s family house in Chaguanas. I knew I

had a father, but I also knew and accepted that like the fathers of others of my

cousins he was not present (1985:34-35).

Though Naipaul’s father wanted him to be a writer, he realized that their colonial land

could not be able to provide him this opportunity. Therefore, he moved from Trinidad to

Oxford on a scholarship and actively engaged there with his literary writings.

Naipaul utilized his formative years in England for rigorous study and for

inculcating his own literary practices. After the B.A. degree in literature from the

Oxford University, Naipaul took broadcasting as a career. At that time he was engaged

in several activities such as editing a literary programme for B.B.C.; publishing book

reviews; wrote features for several magazines and journals. Without these professional

assignments Naipaul would not find peace because there was a deep agony within him

to find his own literary voice and his own identity as a writer. He again emphasizes his

determination to become a writer as no other occupation could make him free from his

traumatic condition. His state of mind and his search for identity find a candid

expression in In Finding the Center:

On this floor, the B.B.C. had set aside a room for people like me ‘ freelancers’-

to me then not a word suggesting freedom and velour, but suggesting only

people on the fringe of mighty enterprise, depressed and suppliant class

(1985:143).

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With this enigma in his mind he arrived in London and got on to a real take off as a

writer. In its freelancers’ room, working to the rhythm of his typewriter, he launched on

his writing that pursuit his numerous memories back home in Port of Spain. However,

his problem was not solved because the reviewers had regarded his writings as weird

and fantasies when all the time he thought he was realistic in his description of

Trinidad. The greatest hurdle for him was that he was from colonial background and no

one considered him as British.

His problem as a colonial writer in an alien land however made him a genuine

writer because of his thematic aspect that created an impression of its being ‘exotic’ and

became a full time writer and during the span of his 60 years he had produced fiction,

nonfiction, travelogues and autobiographical essays. His literary works have been well

known worldwide as he has won several awards and has received unambiguous praise

from literary critics for the high excellence achieved in his fiction. In exploring the

societies and culture, Naipaul is able to build a place for himself in the postcolonial

English literary spare. His deep understanding of the situation facilitates him to present

his diasporic ambivalence not only in his fiction but also in his travel writings.

As a writer Naipaul has a splendid vision and voice that arise from his rootless,

fluid and insecure socio-cultural background. He was never at ease with the subjugated

identity and his agony and restlessness is quite obvious when he narrates his childhood

memories through his works like Finding the Centre, A House for Mr. Biswas. His

belongingness to an uprooted traditional Hindu family indentured by the colonial power

puts him to an odd indefinable situation where all the immigrants live in a predicament

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of rootlessness and homelessness. The geographical separation in the countryside of

Trinidad brings these Indian immigrants in such a position that they could hardly come

in contact with the outside world. Their ancestral homeland also became a distant

illusion for the new generation and gradually the mixed culture of Trinidad led them to

Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘cultural hybridization’ (1994: 235).

It became impossible for the West Indians to preserve their socio-cultural identity

because they were bound to the influences of overpowering heterogeneous culture

which brought them away from their past. To Naipaul this exposure marks a departure

but not arrival and it is a perpetual journey in time and space. Moreover, as a stranded

Indian born in exile, Naipaul was bound to create literature in order to forge alternative

identity for those stranded migrants. In such agonizing situation, Naipaul was desperate

for his own identity and an indefinite fear hunted him from the very beginning of his

life. For him the historical past of his family and community became a part of darkness

and also an “imaginary homeland” (Salman Rushdie, 1991).

There is no denying the fact that Naipaul’s creativity has flourished voluminously

to the mainstream of British fiction. For him, London remained the land of his literary

practices, but on the other hand it is his journey through various countries including

India and Trinidad which provide him sources for his literary writings. His literature

originated from his own odd situations experienced in different countries such as

Caribbean Island, England, Africa, Europe, Pakistan and other Islamic countries while

being separated from his family and he constantly challenged the received wisdom of

time with the problems of the people who belong to the marginalized societies,

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reflecting the background of the Caribbean island from where he has departed and

shifted to live in the cosmopolitan country. His literary trajectory is never restricted by

national boundaries and his freedom is emphasized by his existential status as an exile.

Carrying with him three conflicting identity- Indian, Trinidian and British, Naipaul

never stopped to have his association with India, the ancestral homeland and Trinidad,

his birth place even though there is no yearning for return. At the same time his multiple

heritages allow him to present the experiences of living with multiple culture and

identity. After departing from the feeling of being unhoused, displaced and alienated in

Trinidad, even in England, Naipaul was not free from the existential despair and felt

lonely and miserable. His flight to England was a sort of ‘escape’ from Trinidad and

therefore, a deep sense of alienation even followed him in England. As a diasporic

writer he asserts this feeling of alienation as:

I had dreamed of coming to England. But my life in England had been

savourless and much of it mean….. And just as once at home I had dreamed of

being in England, so for years in England, I had dreamed of leaving England

(EOA, 1987: 220).

The mixed society of Trinidad made Naipaul uncomfortable and he keeps

returning to this society of Trinidad through his fiction which is well known to him.

Both Trinidad and Trinidadian Hindu family have become irrelevant and meaningless

for him even though he appreciates his father. His father stood in front of him as a

guide, mentor and a source of inspiration. It was his father who aroused in Naipaul the

first interest to write stories on colonial and marginalized life of the people of Trinidad.

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While expressing his love–hate relationship with Trinidad in The Middle Passage

(1962: 43) Naipaul observes that Trinidad is unimportant and uncreative and that it is a

place where the stories are not stories of success but of failure. But he positively

observes about Trinidad in an interview with Derek Walcott: “I have grown out of

Trinidad and in a way I am grateful to the Trinidad I knew as a boy for making me what

I am” (1965:5). These quoted lines succinctly show that Naipaul aversely and rather

frankly acknowledges the impact of Trinidad that has sharpened his sensibility, a

sensibility that has been enriched by the experiences of an exile.

Though Naipaul was born and brought up in Trinidadian ethos, his ancestral root

in and from India cannot be undermined. Moreover, his father’s inspiration reveals that

the problem of rootlessness experienced by him in Trinidad and for that matter in

England reminds the reader of his ancestral root in India which looms large in his sub-

conscience. As his original home, Naipaul dreamt of India but after his visit he was

somewhat disgusted with superstitious and irrational believes, practices that he found in

India and remains alien. As an immigrant Trinidadian with strange and nostalgic feeling

of Hindu originality, he visited India and very soon realized that his diasporic sensibility

was twice removed from India.

Naipaul’s Indian background is submerged in a mixed culture along with other

components which are equally threatened. This turbulent relationship finds expression

in his passionate concern for the land of his ancestors. His vision being coloured by the

diasporic consciousness gave birth to his quest to encounter India which was the

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background of his childhood memories and “historical darkness” (Literary Occasions,

2003: 89), a mythical imaginary land from where his ancestors had come.

Naipaul has gone through a proper sense of disillusion at the time of his stay in

England because of his detachment with Trinidad and India and this sense of

detachment can be understood in the context of his conditions which were almost a

second diaspora in his life. There he experienced exile life and struggled to establish a

connection with Trinidad and India. His colonial experience forced him to live with

such circumstances that exposed him to three societies and yet left him with a deep

sense of homelessness. He was not able to make himself free from the problems of

rootlessness and enigma of colonial subjects and therefore, tried to portray the condition

of the people of his homeland and other Third World societies through his works. In this

regards he was inspired by his first hand encounters with these societies, his keen

observation and an objective reaction to this colonial experiences. Naipaul tried to

understand the people of those countries which were under the cultural backdrop and

had engaged in constant search for the roots both in India and Trinidad. Born as an exile

and separated from his roots he experiences another exile life in England. Thus one can

understand his diasporic condition from his constant movement from one country to

another country.

Naipaul’s marginalized existence directly effects his diasporic sensibility that

his sense of alienation counts his emotional adjustment with the race and allows him to

live with “willed homelessness” (Mishra, 1996: 148) and there is no possibility to return

to Trinidad. Paul Theroux echoes Naipaul’s rhetoric of displacement by emphasizing

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that transplanted people can claim no country as their own. He observes them as

follows:

They travel because they belong nowhere, they are constantly moving- in a

sense they never arrive- and much of their travel is flight. Rootlessness is their

condition; it is opposite of those for whom being metropolitan is a condition.

The homeless are not calm; their homelessness is a source of particular pain, for

as with all travelers, they are asked, “Where are you from?” and no simple

answer is possible: all landscapes are alien (1972:76).

The above observation of Paul Theroux emphasizes that Naipaul always occupied the

‘no man’s land’ because he belongs to neither India nor Trinidad and nor even England.

Travel gives him refreshment and proves to be an important stimulus for the

development of his literary art.

Naipaul’s commencement as a writer was not an easy task because he started

writing without a tradition. He himself asserts that his material has not been ‘hallowed

by a tradition’ and reflecting this situation Naipaul tells the truth: “all the time that

every writer is, on the long run, on his own; but it helps in the most practical way, to

have a tradition. The English language was mine but the tradition was not” (OB, 1984:

28- 32). Thus, without a tradition Naipaul promotes his literary writings and he stands

alone authentically because of his postcolonial background. His literary works achieve

universal fame as he experiences different cultures by reflecting the idea that alienation

is the universal predicament of the contemporary world. Naipaul’s basic concern is with

the displaced individual of postcolonial societies, but obviously it becomes one of the

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aspects of modern man too. It was Trinidad that made Naipaul a sensitive diasporic

writer with its diverse races, cultures and religions. All the heterogeneous people lived

in this land, have sharing common characteristics of diaspora. They live in the dilemma

of uncertain affiliation. Mel Gussow rightly observes: “Wherever he goes, it is a foreign

country. For Naipaul home has lost its meaning… wherever he has gone, he has been an

outsider (1976: 8-9). Mel Gussow’s observation makes it clear that Naipaul belongs to

new version of Indians, a British like immigrant Hindu in West Indies. However, in

England he remains an ‘outsider’ because of his cultural difference.

Naipaul’s literary career can be classified into five successive stages. The first

phase is the Caribbean where Naipaul envisages novels on the basis of his Trinidad

memories and analyses the postcolonial scenario on the island. This Caribbean phase is

characterized by his own experiences and therefore, the Caribbean roots, culture and

experience define the central thrust of some of his novels such as The Mystic Masseur

(1957), Miguel Street (1959), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) and A House for Mr.

Biswas (1961). Through these works Naipaul brought about the culmination of the first

phase of his artistic development as a man of letters.

Naipaul is not only displaced from his Indian root, but also from the Anglo-

American political and literary trends. The rhetoric of his displacement can be found in

his travel writings too. He travels through India, Trinidad, South America, Africa and

Islamic countries and the experiences of travelling in such countries provide him with

deep understanding of postcolonial concerns. As a writer without roots, Naipaul has

occupied a distinct place in postcolonial literary writings. He travels through India with

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a hope of belonging. As a third generation displacement from India, Naipaul fails to

identify himself with Indian culture and myth and therefore, his visit to India makes him

to feel as stranger except having some childhood memories in his mind. Through the

travel writings he exposes his harsh feelings not only about India but also Trinidad,

America, Pakistan and Argentina.

His first travel writing The Middle Passage (1962) broadened the scope of his

travel writings. An Area of Darkness (1964) and India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)

are the record of his experiences in India and he finds India as moral darkness

contradictory to his childhood memories. Among the Belivers: An Islamic Journey

(1981) and Beyond Belief (1998) are other travel books that record his journey through

Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Malaysia and Indonesia.

After twenty years of his first visit to India, in 1989, for the second time he visited

India. In his second visit, by analyzing Indian culture he identified himself as an

outsider as well as insider because his formative mind had continued in the diversified

multi-cultural atmosphere of Trinidad and his strong inherited Brahmin sensibility

makes him to view India like a neutral observer. His visit to India was such kind of

mystery for him and the tension between his irrational memory and rational analysis

results in his critical view of India. He asserts this feeling about India in the following:

It was only now, as my experience of India defined itself properly against my

homelessness, that I saw how close in the past year I had been to the total Indian

negation, how much it had become the basis of thought and feeling. And

already, with his awareness, in a world where illusion could only be a concept

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and not something felt in the bones, it was slipping away from me. I felt it as

something true which I could never adequately express and never seize me again

(AD: 266-67).

In his second visit to India, he observes India as “an imperfectly understood

civilization” (IWC: 104). His visit to Amarnath in Kashmir stresses his childhood

memories and after looking at the sights of the place, his Hindu self starts hunting his

mind. He experiences there a special pleasure because he was acquainted with these

religious pictures in his childhood in his grandmother’s house and these all become the

part of India as he writes in An Area of Darkness ‘of his fantasy’ (176).

The second phase of his writing started with the return to England and his

decision to settle there. Mr. Stone and Knight’s Companion (1963) was his first attempt

which was based on English setting. Again in this phase of writing, Naipaul brought out

his material from the postcolonial Trinidad as the prominent theme. The Mimic Men

(1967) wrote to show Trinidad as an imitative country and the people living there only

as mimic men. His another fiction A flag on the Island (1967) views the political

changes in Trinidad since 1940 and The Loss of El Dorado (1969) examines the early

history of Trinidad and dives an account of Europeans’ search for gold and the effects

of American revolutions.

In the third phase of his writings, Naipaul considered England as his steady

home and he came to term with his exile status forever. Here he took new stride as a

writer without any futile search for his roots. His third phase of writing include In a

Free State (1971) that explores the meaning of freedom; The Overcrowded Barraccoon

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(1972), the collection of longer essays proves that the act of writing is not merely a

matter of self expression, but an instrument to modify social reality and Guerrillas

(1975) which is based on the Black power demonstrations in 1970s and the Guerrilla

movement in Trinided. A Band in the River (1979) and The Return of Eva Paron With

the Killings in Trinidad (1980) also belong to this phase of writings that focus on the

conflict between freedom fighters and forces in the ex-colonial countries in the

aftermath of independence. Here, again Naipaul’s world is one of the nomadic homeless

migrants making a middle passage from Africa or West Indies to England and coming

back again, there is no authentic identity in their world in which they strive to create

roots. Thus, Naipaul exposes the themes of his novels that deal with the ‘paradox of

freedom and the problem of neocolonialism in the ex- colonies’ (Champa Rao, 2004:8).

The fourth phase of his writing career is marked by a series of books that blend

literary genre and are also highly autobiographical. Finding the Centre (1985), The

Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Turn in the South (1989) belong to this phase of his

writings. As an observer and interpreter of ex-colonies, Naipaul exposes the

inadequacies of such societies which he believes to be the outcome of the

unconsciousness acceptance of the norms and values of the colonizing forces. India: A

Million Mutinies Now (1990), the third travel book on India, is different from his earlier

two books. Here, he portrays the modern Indian scene from social, political, religious,

economical and cultural perspective. His concentration on political issues on Kashmir,

Punjab terrorism and Babri Masjid shows his deep knowledge and understanding of the

Indian mind and people. His novel A Way of the World (1994) is also based on the

familiar theme again emphasizing the expatriates’ search for an authentic identity.

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The final phase of his writing starts in 21st century with his work Half a Life

(2001) followed by Magic Seeds (2004). Here, again Naipaul depicts India as a fictional

material but he views India without disillusionment as he has overcome with his old

notions about India. He told ‘India Today’ on the eve of the publication of Magic Seeds:

‘I can’t reject India. It’s going too fast, even beyond me. I’m sitting back and feeling

quite happy actually (India Today: 54). This statement of Naipaul shows the progress in

his sensibility and again he states the meaningfulness of roots in one’s life even he/she

has learnt to grow without it.

As far back as 1960, Naipaul would reject the homeland myth and denounce both

his lands of origin with seeming detachment. He would have no home except the one

that would not have him. But he has acknowledged the three traditions that shape his

consciousness and it is rooted in the originary myth of a homeland in earlier imaginings

of the nation and the diaspora. The nation state has always been the defining unit in

configuring diaspora’s relations with the homeland as well as with adopted lands. India,

West Indies and England are configured as essentially homogeneous identity spaces,

which may claim or reject the travelling writer. Naipaul himself supports the boundary

making impulse by living in England. It is still impossible for a writer to weave in and

out of nation spaces. To choose between homes, Naipaul settles for the romance of

being a writer in exile and from here he returns to the sending land in ‘an enigmatic

mixture of nostalgia and patrician disdain’ (Bhabha, 2001).

Without any doubt Naipaul’s themes of his subject revolve around the growth of

the writer as well as the anguish and pain of diaspora. His works depict his attempt to

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understand his own past and brings his nagging awareness of not being too close to

India but also too far from it. Though Naipaul’s intellectual bent is towards western

habits, yet his works reflect the problems of the Third World people, especially the

expatriates and in the last phase of his life India has occupied his mind. Therefore, his

vision has widened to be called cosmopolitan and to acknowledge the completion of his

world view. Naipaul himself asserts: “all his life he had to think about ways of looking

and how they alter the configuration of the world” (The Sunday Express: 3). Thus, ever

progressive vision and sensibility and unfailing commitment towards truthfulness

makes him a prominent writer in this movement of decolonization and globalization. In

this context, Sudha Rai’s work “V. S. Naipaul: A Study in Expatriate Sensibility”

focuses on Naipaul’s non-fiction and attempts to assess the merits of his judgment on

India. She argues that due to a complex and confusing identity as Hindu-self and

Western-self Naipaul applies the dual cultural norms in his works that actually reflects

in his personal life (1982: 26). As a result he looks India by Hindu norms of ‘Dharma’,

‘Karma’ and western norms of individuality and freedom.

By travelling across the seven seas, Naipaul found every country he travelled

to be nightmare for the uprooted people like him. A close exploration of Naipaul’s own

soul and psyche, as depicted in his works, is a necessary pursuit to make a righteous

appraisal of his treatment of the theme of the immigrants stranded in foreign land and

confronting with alien culture. Three generations of diaspora are portrayed in his work

who trying to find their feet across the seven seas (Rishi Pal singh, 2011:35). In his

works, Naipaul has not only displayed traditional Hindu ways of life but also the

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indenture Indians who are trapped in the Caribbean Island without any hope of going

back to India, their original homeland.

Naipaul’s lack of roots is a burden that he carries with him during his travels

around the world and on the other hand it becomes his weapon with which he could

examine the countries he visits. However, his cross-cultural experiences place him at a

position that shapes his sensibility to render a detached account of this world. His

extraordinary vision and sensibility have come to him through a long exposure of

struggle, migration, and memory. Moreover, it is the personal nature of the anguish

experienced by Naipaul that defines his vision and sets the tone of his work. Dr. Horace

Engdahl, Secretary of The Swedish Academy says in the presentation speech for the

2001 Nobel Prize in Literature:

Sir Vidia! Your life as a writer calls to mind what Alfred Nobel said of himself:

“My homeland is where I work, and I work everywhere.” In every place, you

have remained yourself, faithful to your instinct. Your books trace the outline of

an individual quest of unusual dimensions. Like a Nemo piloting a craft of your

own design, without representing anyone or anything, you have manifested the

independence of literature (Quoted in Mohit K. Ray ed, 2005: xvi).

Twice displaced from his ancestral roots, V.S. Naipaul seems to epitomize the

diasporic writer (Gillian Dooley, 2011:83). But it is not easy to categorize such an

extraordinary individual. Satendra Nandan observes, ‘Unlike some other diasporas, the

Indian consciousness of India is not linked by a single region or transferred institutions,

nor by colonial hierarchies transplanted, nor by politics or economics or military

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considerations. Indeed not even by language. It is essentially and vitally one of cultural

imagination (54). He emphasizes that Naipaul belongs to the old diaspora of

exclusivism by distinguishing between two types of Indian diasporas, ‘the old diaspora

of exclusivism and the new of the border,’ (227). Naipaul’s diasporic community where

he was born is easily characterized by Safran’s definition, though he has used his

background differently. He has made his difference into a distinction, and turned his

alienation into an abiding preoccupation (Dooley, 84) instead of drawing heavily on

memories of the homeland and the collective identity. Again, Gillian Dooley observes

that Naipaul has never described himself as ‘diasporic’, from his earliest fiction; the

diasporic nature of the world he came into has both been his subject and informed his

sensibility. But his non-fiction writing is highly marked by this tendency (Dooley, 84).

As a sensitive person living in trauma Naipaul’s perspective on rootlessness of

people is different from other diasporic writers. He has the first hand experience of

diaspora and he himself regards as a colonial who has become a homeless immigrant.

He has the ability to establish homeless situation, his unique personal experiences of the

contemporary world through his fiction. As a nationalist, he has strongly opposed the

drawback of the newly independent nations. Moreover, he is humiliated by the

weakness and exploitation of the colonized and maintains an ambivalent attitude

towards European imperialism that accounts for exploitation and degradation in the

formerly colonized countries.

Naipaul’s early works are the exploration of his personal experience and

representation of Hindu- Indian of the Caribbean community where he was born and

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brought up. As he grew up, he was trapped between two worlds inheriting two different

cultures, one was his colonial world and another was his old Hindu world and none of

these two worlds really constitutes his ‘home’. Through his works, he explores the life

of the multicultural Trinidadian community that exclusively reflects the life of indenture

agricultural labourer. They carry with them their rural Indian experiences and their

native culture through the process of migration. Their love for home becomes the

integral part of their being. However, their longing for certain whole states of being is

coupled with the Knowledge that such authenticity has been ruptured by the history of

colonialism and therefore, it becomes impossible for them to return to their original

culture and history or wholeness. Their return to ‘origin’ resulted in illusion and even in

alien land they cannot feel at home. Dennis Porter claims that Naipaul asserts his

preference for “continuity over discontinuity, identity through time over dispersal,

linearity over a broken periodicity” (1991:332).

Naipaul wishes to see the condition of his hybrid community in a positive way

which stems from his own unique history. He is unable to celebrate his mixed culture of

the Caribbean like Afro-Caribbean writer George Lamming. The East Indian

community of Caribbean Island was largely a homogenous group isolated from other

cultures because they came to the Caribbean island after many years of the arrival of

Africans. It becomes difficult for the Indians to shake off a sense of transience and

homelessness (Birbalsingh, 1997: xvi).

The settlement of Africans in West Indies is different from those of Indians. They

were far more dislocated and remained homeless. In this context Victor Ramraj asserts:

68

“while the Afro-Caribbeans are arrivers, however dislocated and ambivalent, the Indo-

Caribbean assimilationists are perpetual arrivers, who find themselves at the habour

contemplating the enigma of their arrival” (1992: 84). Although many Afro-Caribbeans

emigrated to England and America, they also had the opportunity to integrate in the

Caribbean to the greater extent. Like Indians who were politically marginalized, many

Afro-Caribbeans became part of a national movement of liberation from slavery and

colonialism.

For the many West Indians the main history of West Indies stresses the African

slaves and their descendants and the ‘difference’ and ‘selfhood’ of West Indies focus

not only the experiences of Indo-Caribbeans but also the Afro-Caribbeans because they

are the ones who suffered the brunt of colonialism whereas the Indian descendents had

other recourses. Michael Neill argues in favour of this statement:

Naipaul’s family history gave him, as the grandson of an indentured labourer

from Uttar Pradesh, a degree of detachment from the brutal mainstream of West

Indian history which Fanon, as the descendent of African slaves, could not

enjoy; and another kind of detachment was fostered in him by the particular

imperialist ideology of which he was a product (1982:23).

The argument of Michael Neill brings the distinction between slavery and indenture and

examines that slavery was more barbaric than indenture. By keeping in mind the

experiences of those slaves, Naipaul exposes in his narratives the brutal reality of the

indenture system which Hugh Tinker actually asserts as a “new system of slavery”

(Hugh Tinker, 1974).

69

Writers have presented their own performance of the community in their works as

they lived in or imagined by them. The three major writers: Henry James, James Joyce

and Joseph Conrad had worked at distance and they were separated from their roots.

Henry James left America and settled in Europe, James Joyce was a child of polish

parents who were exiled to Northern Russia. After the death of his parents he lived with

his uncle and became a sailor. Later he became a naturalized Briton. He exposed an

impulsive reaction to his circumstances and exile condition through his works. Naipaul

can be compared to James Joyce because both of them are culturally exile as both had

left their native lands and had settled in Europe. They used their self imposed exile and

the societies that they had left behind. He also can be compared with Henry James

because both of them were aware of their exile life and the realities living far away from

their native lands. But it was Joseph Conrad the author of The Heart of Darkness and

his father who shaped his carrier as a novelist. He shares his world and materials only

with Conrad and Values him for a faithful recording of his experience and vision. Like

Conrad, Naipaul has also steadily worked to record his observation of the peoples and

societies of his time and therefore, he abandons the novel form and moves to non-

fiction so that he could faithfully articulate his vision of the disordered people in the

fractured societies of our time. Besides these, his childhood time in the large Hindu

family forced him to present the angry and anguished response to the half –made

society of the Trinidad. This family became crash for him. Even his father was too

struggled in this family and lived in a critical condition without any self respect. This

condition brought Naipaul closer to his father and both felt to protect each other. He

reacts in Prologue to an Autobiography:

70

In Chaguanas the family had been at the centre of a whole network of Hindu

reverences…..our Hindu system began to fail. There were desperate quarrels...

nothing was stable. I didn’t see my father for days. His nerves

deteriorate...Disorder within, disorder without. Only my school life was ordered;

anything that had happened there I could date at once. But my family life my

family at home or my life in the house, in the street-was jumbled, without

sequence (FC, 1985:73).

Today writing has become an increasingly personal affair to expose the

various combination of experience and personal circumstances for the writers who

choose to live voluntarily in one’s society and after breaking up the societies. They

experience multiple visions that are different from each other. This difference identifies

such conflicting visions between the diasporic writers and the writers who stay at their

own land; specially this difference can be found between the Writers like Naipaul,

Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, George Lamming, and Rohinton Mistry. Writers are

shaped by their inhabitant world which they represent through their writing. Both

Naipaul and Chinua Achebe merge from their colonial past and this colonial past

becomes the subject of their writing. The difference between these two writers is that

Naipaul is far from his native soil and Achebe is strongly rooted in his homeland.

Achebe, the representative author of Africa is committed to create a national African

culture through African literature. His vision of optimism which reflects in his writings

is to format the notion of African identity against colonial rule and to identify histories,

cultural tradition and knowledge. But Naipaul has his own vision and he sees only ‘half-

made societies’. His unique combination of circumstances relating to Indian, British and

71

African identities shows that his vision is not within a particular country and culture but

goes beyond geography and history. In this context we can say Achebe is patriotic in

approach because Achebe’s particular concern was with emergent Africa at its moment

of crisis.

Like George Lamming, Naipaul also experiences such similar circumstances

that both of them travelled through the Caribbean and to their ancestors’ land and have

recorded the history of West Indies. But their visions are different. Lamming finds that

Naipaul sees himself as an ‘ashamed colonial’ (1960: 225) for his colonial cultural

background and acknowledged as a conservative traveler. Like Naipaul, Salman

Rushdie had also chosen exile as the dominant theme for his writings. It was Rushdie

who had brought out the significance of ‘home’ and ‘exile’ because he was born and

brought up in Bombay and then he went to Britain for education. Again he was

alienated when his family migrated to Pakistan in 1964.

We can compare Naipaul’s character Mohan Biswas in A House for Mr.

Biswas with Salman Rushdie’s Salim Sinai in Midnight Children. Both the protagonists

were born at midnight, both were victims of circumstances, both were narrators of the

stories, both were isolated and struggled for self assertion and both died at the end of

the novel. But both of them differ in one respect that Salim Sinai is a political creation

and Mohan Biswas is above politics, religion and even history. It is the difference

between Naipaul and Rushdie that Naipaul accepts history for future circumstance

though it is shameful. But Rushdie casually looks with the possible rejection of

shameful history. As Namrata Rathore proclaims that Rushdie never finds any

72

difficulties to come out from his roots because he has spent a happy and secure

childhood in India. Therefore, he can easily accommodate the pain. But for Naipaul this

aspect of India stirs up a kind of traumatized rage (2004:16).

Naipaul believes that literature is the expression of society and therefore, he

draws realistic portraits of individuals, society and culture to analyze the various knots

of the individual behaviour and protagonist’s struggle to find himself in a different

atmosphere. Most of his writings are characterized by his own experiences and

influenced by the ethos of the community where he belongs. Naipaul believes that artist

creates something meaningful out of brute reality and so, he neglects the dream and

fantasy of romantic life and portraits the hard reality of day-to- day life. In his travel

writing, he keeps himself out of the picture but constitutes the soul of the narrative. His

uprooted and displaced individuals live without ‘home’ but longing for it. The unique

combination of three societies left him with a deep sense of loss and helped him to

determine his writing carrier. He set out to discover himself and his world through his

works. There is a strong autobiographical element in all his works. Bruce King

observes:

While the novels and short stories have seldom been about himself, they have

reflected the various stages of his disillusionment with Trinidad, his despair

with India and his concern with being a homeless ex-colonial (1995:108).

It is not easy to go back to the past when one yearns for home, for roots and for

stability. Naipaul is also trapped into same situation and it strongly effects in his

psychology. Through his writing, he seeks an answer to the problem that makes him as

73

a writer. His aim is on other lost individuals in the half made societies who struggle for

self- recognition. He feels that the people of these societies are crippled by the

borrowed culture and they could not say honestly that they belong to any particular

country, tradition and culture. The emotional deprivations of such life reflect the lives

of rootless, lost and lonely individuals. Naipaul deliberately establishes not only his

situation but also the modern homelessness as a product of historical process that he

represents typical postcolonial world.

Naipaul keenly observes the life and culture of the Indians in his works. His mixed

background gives him the multiple experiences of marginalized culture. He creates such

characters and situation that one can easily understand about the Indian myth and

culture. His observation and ideology about culture is progressive as he admits that

culture is ever changing and one cannot judge by the culture of his origin. In The

Middle Passage Naipaul asserts “Living in borrowed culture, the West Indians more

than most needs writers to tell him who is he and where he stands” (1962:73). In A

House for Mr. Biswas Naipaul brought out the cultural assimilation by describing

various incidents. He was forced to highlight the deeply rooted ambivalence of the

diasporic people.

Stephen Gill, the Indian origin Canadian writer has expressed the diasporic

consciousness of an Indian immigrant in his novel Immigrant that came to Canada and

physically and culturally alienates himself from his native place. He depicts the

hybridity of the immigrant who is strutting across two spaces that are geographical and

cultural and looking towards the country of settlement for acceptance. Writer like

74

Bharati Mukherjee detests the idea of being called immigrant writer and thinks herself

as an American. She distinguishes between ‘expatriate’ and ‘immigrant’ in her book

Darkness (1985) that examines the experiences of expatriates that manifest through

assimilation and immigrant welcomes it. She says: “In my fiction and in my Canadian

experience, immigrants were lost souls, put upon and pathetic…Like V. S. Naipaul in

whom I imagined a model; I tried to explore state- of-the- art expatriation (25).”

Naipaul’s consciousness of homelessness is at the root of his whole oeuvre, and he is

always one of the first writers mentioned in any general discussion of the Indian

diaspora. Leon Gottfried observes:

The writings of V.S. Naipaul draw upon an experience so totally based on

layered levels of alienation and exile that his works become paradigmatic of the

whole genre, and hence of a major current in twentieth-century life, thought, and

art’’ (Modern Fiction Studies: 1984).

Naipaul’s secret of art lies in his personal attachment to the establishment of

individual, tradition and culture but in his creative detachment beyond geography and

history. In this respect he is different from his contemporary West Indian writers like

Mill Moltzer, George Lamming and Wilson Harris. He has tried to project in his novels

a sustaining course for all those who are rootless or homeless. Commenting on this

aspect of Naipaul, Keith Garebian rightly observes:

Naipaul explores landscapes in order to provide characters with a real home, a

true place of belonging so that they will not continue to be homeless, wonders,

unsure of themselves and their fates. But the mythology of the land is tinged

75

with embarrassment, nervousness, hysteria and pessimism all products in some

way of Naipaul’s own history as a colonial with an ambiguous identity (1975:

23).

This chapter basically underlines Naipaul’s position as a postcolonial diasporic

writer. His origin and his literary background shaped him as a twice-displaced

individual with a unique diasporic sensibility. The evaluation of Naipaul’s diasporic

sensibility along with other diasporic writers explores Naipaul’s conception of diaspora

and his diasporic consciousness that differs from others diasporic writers. Writers like

Bharati Mukharjee, Salman Rusdie have consciously distanced from Naipaul’s stance of

authentic and cultural homelessness. His conception of diaspora arises from the feeling

that he is estranged from his ‘original’ home. Thus, the idea of belonging becomes an

impossible task because the authentic identity of his characters and even his own

identity has been forever undermined by history. However, a link has been cultivated

under the banner of diaspora to reflect the shared assumptions and ideologies.

Moreover, in this chapter, an attempt has been made to present the factors that are

responsible for the inculcation of the typical diasporic ambivalence in Naipaul.

76

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