Exile is strangely compelling to think about but
terrible to experience. It is the unbearable rift forced between a human being
and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness
can never be surmounted. (173)
Such kind of
experience is so rife among the writers of the twentieth century, such as
Joyce, Sartre, Camus, Kafka. Two World Wars, decolonisation, cold war have made
this century a century of exile. Home has become an ever-elusive signified for
this estranged generation. The encyclopaedic the experience, the intense the
concept of home has become. This experience is more enriched by the advent of
postcolonial thinkers who use their memory of dispersion to de-territorialize
the history of slavery and re-territorialize an identity devoid of the trauma
of exploitation and indenture.
Displacement
shapes the life of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, known as V. S.Naipaul. He was
born in 1932 in the British colony of Trinidad, displaced from Indian
indentured labourers brought to work the island’s sugar plantations following
the abolition of slavery. Naipaul was an alien in his homeland as his Hindu
roots thwarted a total assimilation with the multiracial Trinidadian society. In
an antique land away from home his forefathers attempted to maintain their
identity. However, they failed completely to do so because the project of
colonial hegemony has annihilated the roots and instilled into them a
fragmented identity. Naipaul depicts this culture in his The Middle Passage thus:
A peasant-minded, money-minded
community, spiritually cut off from its roots, its religion reduced to rites
without philosophy set in a materialistic colonial history: a combination of
historical accidents and national temperament has turned the Trinidad into a
complete colonial, even more philistine than the white.(MP 89)
This aversion to the Trinidadian society
prompted him to depart for London though his experience in London was no better
either. His aspiring dream to start his publishing career ended in a fiasco.
His maladjustment in London was a corollary of his maladjustment in Trinidad.
In his autobiographical work Letters Between a Father and Son we come
across numerous episodes of his sense of unhomely in London.
This sense of placelessness shapes the
framework of Naipaulean fictions creating in his protagonists a sense of
non-belongingness. Mr Biswas in A House for Mr Biswas, Indar in A
Bend in the River, Santosh in In
a Free State and Willie in Half a Life search for an
identity in a fluid universe. A House for Mr Biswas is an attempt to
retrace the roots in a derelict land and create a universe out of chaotic world.
‘Biswas’s perpetual quest for a house as home, conceptualizes the challenges
and anxieties experienced by the diaspora. A house of his own, in this sense,
constitutes for him a sense of belonging. This disturbing sense of exile,
alienation and uprootedness are the malaise originally experienced by exiles
like Naipaul and his father. In an extended sense, the feeling presages the
many journeys undertaken by Naipaul himself and his arrivals at no fixed destinations.’(Ormerod)
Mr Biswas’s quest of having his own house
starts off with the death of his father which results in a dispossession of his
ancestral house. As the security of the house is dispossessed, Mr Biswas is
forced to live with strangers sans maternal guidance. The effacement of
ancestral lineage haunts Mr Biswas when he goes to school and finds that the
world has carried no witness to his birth. When Lal insults him by saying ‘you
people don’t even know how to born’ he presents before us the legacy of non-
belongingness inherited from his indentured father. Kavita Nandan writes,” Biswas's story, although unique and
fictional, represents the post-indenture diasporic subject's efforts to protect
himself against destitution. This predicament is reinforced by the fact that he
has to struggle against a history of homelessness which was a legacy of his
parents.”
His humiliating experiences as a neophyte at
Pundit Jairam’s house, depressing encounter at his sister’s house are a mere
prologue to his further deprivation at the Tulsi household. His momentary
infatuation for Shama forces him to marry her by virtue of which he finds
himself ensnared within the colonial structure of Hanuman House; a bastion of
totalitarianism which bears strong resemblances with the patriarchal world of
Ayemenem House in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things .The power
structure of Hanuman House comprising Mrs Tulsi; the matriarch, her right –hand
man Seth and Govind the policeman encroaches upon the individuality of Mr
Biswas. They always remind him of his non-entity. Unable to sustain the soul
crushing system, he bursts into such sporadic rebellious acts as dumping his
food on Owad, calling Mrs Tulsi as the ‘old she fox’ etc.
It has been pointed out by critics that Naipaul
explores landscapes in order to provide characters with a real home, a true
place of belonging. Against the slippery and fluid universe his nomadic
characters try to seize upon something to give permanence – Biswas’s desire for
a house, Mr Stone’s scheme for the aged, Ganesh’s desire for the goals of
education and religion. Through the likes of Biswas, Naipaul tries to resurrect
the roots that have been erased in the Caribbean culture channelizing the
feelings of exile and loss into an enchanted vision. Bruce king, thus, in West Indian Literature rightly remarks that A House for Mr Biswas “has a reputation
as a New World epic celebrating the struggles of an immigrant towards
acculturisation and success.”
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