Life & Background
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932 into a family descended from indentured Indian labourers brought to the Caribbean; his father was a journalist whose thwarted literary ambition became the subject of his son's best novel. A scholarship took him to Oxford at eighteen, and he stayed in England for the rest of his life. He wrote comic Trinidadian fiction first, then the travel books on India, the Islamic world, and the American South that made his reputation contentious — An Area of Darkness was banned in India. He was knighted in 1990 and won the Nobel in 2001. His authorised biography, published in his lifetime, documented his treatment of his wife and his mistress with a frankness he permitted, and did his reputation lasting damage. He died in London in 2018.
A House for Mr Biswas
Mohun Biswas is born in rural Trinidad with six fingers and the wrong horoscope, and blamed for his father's drowning. Apprenticed unsuccessfully to a pundit, he drifts into sign-painting, and a flippant note to a girl in a shop results in his absorption into the vast Tulsi family, who marry him to her and house him among dozens of dependent relations at Hanuman House. The novel is the story of his lifelong campaign to own a house of his own, and so to exist independently of them: a mud house that collapses, a period as a rural shopkeeper, journalism in Port of Spain, and finally, in debt and with a weak heart, the purchase of a jerry-built house on Sikkim Street with rooms that do not fit. He dies at forty-six, in his own house.
The novel takes the smallest possible ambition — a man wanting somewhere to live — and makes it an epic of colonial displacement, since the house stands for the selfhood a colonised society does not readily grant. It is also, unusually for Naipaul, warm: the comedy is affectionate, and the Tulsi household is rendered with an anthropologist's precision and a novelist's patience. His later work is another matter. The travel writing on India and the Islamic world, and the phrase about half-made societies, drew sustained attack — Edward Said accused him of supplying Western prejudices with a native witness, and Derek Walcott wrote against him in verse. That the prose is superb and the politics repellent to many readers is the standing critical problem.
Why Naipaul Matters
Naipaul is one of the most accomplished prose stylists in postcolonial literature and one of its most divisive figures, which makes him doubly useful in examinations: A House for Mr Biswas is a set text on the Caribbean and Indian diaspora novel, while the Said–Naipaul and Walcott–Naipaul disputes are standard material on the politics of the postcolonial writer. His account of Indian indenture and its aftermath is also historically significant in its own right.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Mystic Masseur1957
- Miguel Street1959
- A House for Mr Biswas1961
- An Area of Darkness1964
- In a Free State1971
- A Bend in the River1979
- The Enigma of Arrival1987