A house for Mr. Biswas - V.S Naipual (Social and political chronicles)

[https://www.amazon.in/House-Mr-Biswas-Picador-Collection/dp/1529077192]

A House for Mr Biswas is a 1961 novel by V. S. Naipaul, It is the story of Mohun Biswas, a Hindu Indo-Trinidadian who continually strives for success and mostly fails, who marries into the influential Tulsi family only to find himself dominated by it, and who finally sets the goal of owning his own house.

A house for Mr. Biswas can be analysed as a chronicle of socio-political changes that occurred in Trinidad over an extended period of time.

Trinidad’s cultural and ethnic melange stems from its 500-year history of conquest and foreign occupation. Originally, the home of Amerindian peoples, the island was sighted in 1498 by Admiral Christopher Columbus, who claimed it for Spain. With the Spanish came thousands of European settlers and African slaves to develop the colony, driving out native peoples and dramatically transforming the landscape. By the 1790s the immigrant population, mainly French Catholics settlers and African slaves, had wholly displaced the indigenous peoples.

Lured by the lucrative trade, the British seized control of the West Indian colony in 1797. A wave of British settlers followed the Spanish and French, while African slaves continued to comprise the bulk of the workforce. In 1834, slaves in the British Empire were emancipated, and indentured servants from another of Britain’s colonies, India, were brought to Trinidad as replacements. From 1838 to 1917 some 144,000 East Indians moved to Trinidad under a policy of unrestricted immigration to support the sugar industry. Typically indentured for five years, East Indians received land grants at the expiration of their contracts or after ten years of residence—often in place of return in this case is India—in the interest of keeping a low-wage workforce on the island. Approximately, one-third of the servants returned to India, while the majority stayed and established shops, opened businesses, and farmed sugar on their newly acquired land.

Ironically titled "Pastoral", the first chapter in Part One looks at first generation "girmitiyas" who had finished their indenture and had decided to stay on in the colonies, working as farm labourers and straining to make both ends meet. The social set up was colonial and the clerk and the overseer in the farm were immediate representatives of the colonizer.

Because of its colonial heritage and legacy of slavery and indentured servitude, twentieth-century Trinidad lacked a unified national cultural identity. White Europeans dominated the government and upper classes, yet people of African or East Indian descent comprised 80 percent of the population. Racism and discrimination were rampant in society, with the inhabitants strictly divided along economic and color lines.

There was no positive incentive  to develop the arts, to inculcate a sense of national identity that was faithful to the plurality of the peoples.

The novel studies how changes took place with second and third generation immigrants.

• Money and success were considered more important and people possessing these were gaining more importance such as Tara, Mrs. Tulsi, Ajodha. Whereas people like Mr. Biswas were getting marginalized with the yearning for and beeming aspiration and a longing of owing his own in Trinidad. 
• Later on when Trinidad made contracts with west, tables were turned, people like Tulsis lost their position of power and authority and Mr. Biswas almost neglected at every step gained prominence as he stepped in social strata with his job as a journalist and the community welfare officer.
• Mr. Biswas anticipated changes in Trinidad society. Like Seepersad Naipaul he was contemptuous of old icons statues of king gods that Pundit Tulsi had brought home from his Indian visits. 

Education came to fore:

In keeping with these changes, western education gained importance. While the English medium school in Trinidad imparted western education in colonies for a specific purpose. It was clearly the ambition of every immigrant parent to try and send their children abroad for higher studies. The situation in India in the fifties and sixties was much the same. 

This can be contrasted with the earlier part of the novel where no parent, except someone well off like Mrs. Tulsi could think of sending their children abroad to study. Mr. Biswas had to make do with whatever rudimentary education he could avail of locally and did not cost too much only because he was supposed to train as a Pundit. His brothers had no such privilege; they worked as farm labourers.

He, on the other hand, educated all his children; Savi and Anand got scholarships to study abroad. The importance attached to the scholarship examination which Anand cleared, reminds one of the zeal and hard work which young people put into their preparations for exarninations interviews, which if cleared successfully, enable them to study abroad on scholarships and get well paid jobs there. While Mr. Biswas generation did not send daughters to study abroad, preferring to spend money on their marriage and their sons-in-law, the focus shifted with Savi getting a scholarship to study abroad even before her elder brother Anand does.

Importance of place of residence:

The sense of displacement and lack of a national community in Trinidad are key concerns in A House for Mr. Biswas, as they were for Naipaul personally. Both Mr. Biswas and Naipaul seek identity—a “home”—a sense of place and self that did not readily exist for East Indians in Trinidad at the time. As an East Indian colonial in a British colony, Mr. Biswas is physically in one place and culturally in another, and so struggles to find his identity.

Just 48,000 houses existed on the island in 1911, which together with an additional 45,000 barrack rooms (former slave quarters) had to provide shelter for the bulk of Trinidad’s 300,000 inhabitants. Housing was scarce, poverty soared. As evidenced in the novel, dozens of East Indians lived in a single dwelling or squatted in ramshackle squatter’s cabins erected illegally on others property, as Mr. Biswas’s mother and many aunts and uncles do in the novel. 

Ideally, the East Indian household sheltered one nuclear family or one extended family (traditionally a mother, father, unmarried children, and married sons with their wives and children), with the family sharing “a common kitchen” and “family purse”. 

But the complications of life in Trinidad, including the dearth of dwelling places, often interfered with realizing the ideal. The acute housing problem among East Indians helps explain why home ownership is an all-consuming passion for Mr. Biswas in the novel, as does Biswas’s search for individual identity.

Architectural changes in the houses described minutely are indicative of changes that were applied in the construction of the houses. “The crumbling mud hut in the swamplands” in which Mr. Biswas was born, belonged to his mother's father drained of life and energy by hard work on the sugar plantation. Whereas, Pundit Jairam lives in a "bare, spacious, unpainted wooden house smelling of blue soap and incense." A house was more than a home to the immigrant, it was an anchorage.

The house on Sikkim Street where Mr. Biswas spent the last few years of his life was different from the other houses described in the novel. The house didn’t remind the occupants of their indenture or Indian origin. The garden with its rose trees, anthurium lilies and breadfruit tree, indicates a desire to adapt to the new environs, borrowing from-the west only to bring order in their lives.

Changes in trade and commerce:

The store now was no more wholly owned by Seth or Tulsis. It was replaced by the Scottish name of a Port of Spain firm. The Sindhis "who had taken over the shop next door" seemed to have migrated to the Caribbeans much later for business purposes, and had stranger links India.

Second and third generation immigrants had no plans of going back to India.  Occasional trips to India in search of roots, and in case of older persons, to revive racial memory, were common. What this section of the unit proposes to do is to critique Trinidad society as it moved towards postcoloniality, socio-cultural shift were both sweeping and subtle. 

From being mainly agricultural at the beginning of the novel, society evolved into a more cornplex web, priorities changed, values became money-based and slowly individuals came into their own, shedding their group based identity. The women in the novel were more resilient and accepted the changes in their own stride while Mr. Biswas took time to adapt to them, as a result of which his relationship with his son Anand was often conflictual.

About the Author:

V.S. Naipaul

Photo by: www.britannica.com

V.S. Naipaul, in full Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, (born August 17, 1932, Trinidad—died August 11, 2018, London, England), Trinidadian writer of Indian descent. For these revelations of what the Swedish Academy called “suppressed histories,” Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Naipaul was knighted in 1989.

His earliest books (The Mystic Masseur, 1957; The Suffrage of Elvira, 1958; and Miguel Street, 1959) are ironic and satirical accounts of life in the Caribbean. His fourth novel,  is A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). 

Descended from Hindu Indians who had immigrated to Trinidad as indentured servants, Naipaul left Trinidad to attend the University of Oxford in 1950. He subsequently settled in England, although he traveled extensively thereafter.

Some other works include:

• The three stories in In a Free State (1971), which won Britain’s Booker Prize;
• Guerrillas (1975);
  
• A Bend in the River (1979); 
  
• A Way in the World (1994);
  
• The Mimic Men (1967);
  
• The Enigma of Arrival (1987);

Among Naipaul’s nonfiction works are three studies of India: 

• An Area of Darkness (1965);
  
• India: A Wounded Civilization (1977);
  
• India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990); 
  
• The Five Societies—British, French, and Dutch—in the West Indies (1963) and;
•  Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981). 

Subsequent works include:

• Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples(1998);
• Half a Life (2001);
  
• The Writer and the World (2002);
  
• Literary Occasions (2003);
  
• Magic Seeds (2004);
  
• The Masque of Africa (2010).

References:

[1] A house for Mr. Biswas, novel by V.S. Naipaul.

[2] MEG, IGNOU, India Study material.