It’s worth remembering that this act of rendering the register of Trinidadian lives as universal marks an ambition that few postcolonial writers possess even today.
Mr Biswas ( A House for Mr Biswas 1961), Ganesh Ramsumair in The Mystic Masseur (1957) (who would retitle himself Ramsay Muir) and others were characters that spoke to the world much as did characters from the books of French literary artist Balzac: small people who occupied the world in large ways. His novels were not simply quaint local evocations as became clear in the literary accolades that came his way so easily. This act of temerity is often forgotten, as every word committed treason against a colonial enterprise of education. Naipaul’s early novels affectionately and grittily recreated the Indo-Trinidadian argot at a time when postcolonial writing was marked by the well-behaved cadences of the Queen’s English. A House for Mr Biswas, Flag on the Island, The Suffrage of Elvira, The Mystic Masseur, and his brother Shiva’s Chip Chip Gatherers and Fireflies were the first great novels coming out of the history of indenture.īoth Vidia and Shiva went up to Oxford, but their writing was both an act of faith to their origins as much as an act of treason against the language bequeathed them by Empire. Never has so small a community been mined for so large a literary canvas. He, and his sons, Vidia and Shiva, mined the messy intricate lives around them for affectionate and searing portrayals of ambition, intrigue and ennui within the Indo-Trinidadian community. He wrote short stories that he hoped would be published in London and lift the family from its genteel poverty. Vidia’s father Seepersaud Naipaul was the first Indo-Trinidadian reporter for the Trinidad Guardian. Men and women living in countries as disparate as South Africa, Trinidad and Fiji were trapped in small lives of drudgery, gossip and congealed tradition yet still aspiring to a life of the mind. The memory of Indian civilisation was scattered along an archipelago of labour across two oceans – the Indian and the Pacific. Between 1833 (the abolition of slavery) and 1922, 3.5 million Indians were transported under a system of debt bondage to work on sugar plantations in European colonies. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s early life was lived in the detritus of the colonial history of indenture and the vast forced movement of people from the South Asian subcontinent to Africa and the Caribbean.
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