Rereadings
One man's search for identity along lonely streets
Farida Shaikh looks at a writer with sympathy
A House for Mr Biswas is the story of a man's search for his own address. Does every individual have an address, an abode, a house, a shelter, a home of his own? Is Mr Biswas a vagabond, a rootless identity with no place of his own? It is a man's quest to free himself from the social shackles, to break away from tight traditions of joint family and conservative community customs and find a place and an identity of his own. A House for Mr Biswas is a semi-biographical work in fiction with innumerable accounts implanted with the comic and the ironic, the humorous and the tender, touching on episodes and incidents in the life of a settler Indian Hindu community in Trinidad before and after 1937. Fate in colonial society is final for both man and woman. Life is a travel towards the set destination, and living is a process of accommodation and compromise. For a woman '…it was her fate to be childless, but it was also her fate to have married a man who had, at one bound, freed himself from the land and acquired wealth . . .' Later, it is a mother who speaks, '… it is my fate, I have no luck with my children and with Mohun, I have the least luck of all.' The protagonist, Mr. Biswas, is developed after the writer's father --- Hindu, Brahmin, pandit and minor journalist --- whose dream was for his son to become a journalist someday. The narrative covers two generations. The book was written between 1957 and 1960. Mr. Biswas suffers many humiliations, marked by his incomplete education, the splitting up of his family, and his mother's poverty. Even more tragic is the death of his father that leads him 'to leave the only house to which he had some right.' And so he becomes a wanderer for the next thirty five years of his life, with no family, and no place 'he could call his own….it seemed to him that he was really quite lonely.' The challenges that confront Mr Biswas is the process of disintegration and a situation of indifference combined with the feeling of fear and anxiety of living 'in one room, worse to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated'. Biswas fears people but fears solitude even more. The dilemma for him is that time is precious, every human action a part of life and 'life was not to pass, but to use and enjoy to live. The house was unimportant.' It is protest against communal culture and lifestyle; he is a rebel who rejects assimilation into the extended family milieu, leading to disenchantment and tension throughout his married life. His full name, the same as Lord Krishna's, meaning beloved, is Mohun Biswas. Previously a journalist with the Sentinel, and now no more than a community welfare officer working for post-war development, he has also worked at other jobs. While working as a sign painter, he meets and falls in love with Shama, whom he marries. She belongs to a family that has a strong hold on its members. Sons-in-law are assimilated into the rambling household, thus losing their identities in the sprawling joint family. There is rivalry between families, like the 'unexamined and unexplained' enmity of Hindus and Muslims. Within the settler Hindu community sharp thoughts on reform are expressed '…after thousands of years of the religion idols were an insult to human intelligence and God' . . . 'birth was unimportant; a man's caste should be determined only by his action.' The Aryan Association passes a resolution . . . 'that education was important, that child marriage should be abolished, that young people should chose their own spouses.' Hindus are already adopting the practices of Roman Catholics; and 'idols are stepping stones to the worship of the real thing… necessary only in a spiritually backward society.' The low castes convert to Presbyterianism and speak in broken English: buth suttificate for birth certificate, and munnih-munnih for money money. Naipaul's writings deal with the cultural confusion of the Third World and the problem of an outsider, a feature of his own experience as an Indian in the West Indies, a West Indian in England and a nomadic intellectual in a postcolonial world. Women are regular victims and witnesses to domestic violence. Wife-beating 'made all women sisters.' A House for Mr. Biswas is the story of an ordinary man told in an extraordinary way. There are no surprises, thrill and twists in the narration to keep the reader on edge. It is straight forward, chronologically built up. The strength of this book is in the portrayal of a man from a simple background, a loser with nothing going for him. But within him is strong human character. There are three kinds of readers of this book. Some who immensely enjoy reading the comic and tragic story, and read it again and again, and decide to read the other titles of Sir Naipaul. Some read the book and find it depressing and bleak, an ordinary story about a distasteful character and far too long to boot. In places the book just drags on. And another set of readers cannot proceed with the reading of the book, finding it pretty difficult to get through. And yet there is another kind of reader, this reviewer being one, who earlier had a prejudice against the author, had heard and read of his arrogance. However, A House for Mr Biswas came the way of yours truly as a birthday gift from my daughter and the title was also selected for our Reading Circle in May. So I read the book and reread many parts of the book. I kind of got hooked on to the book. The human and natural elements, are interwoven in flawless smooth language. The New York Times once hailed V.S. Naipaul as one of the few "living writers of whom the English language can be proud". Naipaul's essays and travel writings are often negative, unsentimental explorations of West Indian society as in The Middle Passage. Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey was accused by Muslim readers of depicting a narrow and selective vision of Islam. Naipaul searches the sources of the new Islam - and the ideological rage. "Islam sanctified rage - rage about the faith, political rage: one could be like the other. And more than once on this journey I had met sensitive men who were ready to contemplate great convulsions." Naipaul's relatively new travel books include Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, intimate portraits from his journeys to the non-Arab Islamic countries of Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. Naipaul tries to understand the fundamentalist fervor that has marked the Western image of the region. "There probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs," he writes. In Iran he meets war veterans, who express their disillusionment and their sense of being manipulated by the mullahs, and in Indonesia he meets his former friend, who opposed the Suharto regime, and later became an establishment figure, an advocate of an Islamicist future. On his first visit to India after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Naipaul said: "We are not here to celebrate the antiquity of literature in India, but to celebrate modern writing." Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, has noted: "Although Naipaul was writing about Africa, he was not writing for Africans." The scholar and critic Edward Said, who died in 2003, called Beyond Belief "an intellectual catastrophe." The history of the relationship between the American writer Paul Theroux and Naipaul is depicted in Sir Vidia's Shadow ,1998. In this angry and unforgiving book, Theroux, rejected by Naipaul, comes out of Naipaul's shadow. Theroux earlier considered the older writer as his mentor but the friendship ended in breakup, which Theroux sealed with his bitter accusations. "I had admired his talent. After a while I admired nothing else. Finally I began to wonder about his talent, seriously to wonder, and doubted it when I found myself skipping pages in his more recent books. In the past I would have said the fault was mine. Now I knew that he could be the monomaniac in print that he was in person." That is Theroux.
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