Thoughts on A House for Mr. Biswas

Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas is a deliciously humorous and sometimes absurd epic novel from the cradle to the grave of Mohun Biswas, a colonial Trinidadian of Indian descent, lower socioeconomic status but of Brahmin roots according to Hindu traditions from a distant Indian homeland. Mr. Biswas, as he is referred to throughout the long novel, though coming from a poor family, marries into a wealthier family also of Brahmin backgrounds in India, and thus begins the majority of the novel: the tale of Mr. Biswas struggling to free himself from the confines of the Hanuman House and other family homes dominated by the family of his wife, Shama. Thus, the novel provides an interesting look at Indian Trinidad and identity in colonial Trinidad, with all of its ugliness, contradictions, and beauty. This can be seen in the conflict between Indian Hindu traditions and English, Christian, and ‘modern’ Western life, percolating the lives of Mr. Biswas and the Tulsi clan in terms of religion, caste, race, gender relations (should women be educated, or, should husbands be able to beat their wives, or even, should girls be married off by their parents?), and the potential future of Hindu and Indian identities in a colonial Caribbean context. As the novel reveals throughout its pages, despite the Indian-centred narrative and apparent segregation of country Indian-descendants on the sugar plantations and rice-growing regions of the island, Chinese, “Negro,” Creole, and European identities converge, especially in the capital, Port of Spain, with likely ramifications for how Naipaul’s Trinidadian background impacted his perception of race, class, colonialism, caste, Hinduism, and the West.

First, however, as a novel about a house, as the title suggests, or home, and the tale ends after Mr. Biswas attains his dream of having his own house, where, he can establish his independence and make a mark on the earth, Naipaul’s epic is a universal tale of the search for identity, belonging, adult autonomy, and, as mentioned previously, leaving something for the future, to indicate one lived and was not, as Naipaul suggests in A Bend in the River, simply allowing oneself to become nothing in the world. This sentiment is exactly captured in the concluding paragraph of the prologue, which, prior to the novel’s early beginning on the birth and youth of Mr. Biswas, establishes that he does indeed succeed in obtaining his own house in Port of Spain, a house he was cheated into buying by a coloured solicitor’s clerk (Mr. Biswas’s funny naiveté would get him into trouble again in the novel, particularly regarding an attorney and his lackey in the Chase, where he ran a small store in the country town for the Tulsis because he could not stand living in the Hanuman House, or the “monkey house” as he referred to it, Hanuman being the monkey god from the Ramayana). His successful attainment of his home, especially in light of numerous feeble attempts in the past (in the Green Vale, he hires a Negro carpenter to build him a home near the plantation run by Seth, who had married into the Tulsi family through Padma, the sister of Mrs. Tulsi, the matriarch of the family and widow of Mr. Tulsi, the Hindu pundit and deceased patriarch who, for some reason, left India decades ago for Trinidad and established his family there) and natural and unnatural events causing the demise (the house in the Green Vale was destroyed by rain of proportions similar to God’s flooding of the world in the Old Testament while his home in Shorthills, not too far from the subsequent Tulsi house after the family moves from Arwacas and the Hanuman House, is destroyed by fire, seemingly of Biblical proportions), are part and parcel of the life of a hero, an adventurer who, from a sign-painter, manager of an estate, shopkeeper, journalist, and civil servant, succeeds in rebuilding and restarting his life over and over despite the trap of Shama’s family and four children. Thus, when he, at the novel’s end, dies knowing his family has its own home and his daughter (for one places one’s hopes in their children in old age), Savi, who makes more money than he did as a journalist and civil servant, can look after the family, he left his mark on the world accommodated, independent (of the Tulsi family, at least), and remembered.

Naipaul’s preference for British, Western ways and civilization and the origins of that perspective become clearer in this novel, too. Published in the early 1960s, as Trinidad & Tobago and the rest of the British West Indies became independent states, Naipaul had already studied in Britain and likely saw himself as English rather than Trinidadian, a country of “monkeys” he once derided several years later as unable to comprehend his work. However, this early masterpiece brands him as a Caribbean literary figure and giant, despite his adopted British homeland and Anglophile behaviour and rhetoric. Nevertheless, this novel’s depiction of black and African-descended Trinidadians is disturbing and suggestive of deep segregation and racist views held by Indian-descended Trinidadians, or at least within the Tulsi family and their associates. Ms. Blackie is the name for a black maidservant of Mrs. Tulsi, and her words and behaviour indicate black inferiority (she complains in the novel about black laziness, black backwardness, etc.) and black servility for the upper class, upper caste Tulsi family. In addition, during World War II, Negroes are mentioned as thugs who demanded money from Mr. Biswas on his late night walks, which, arguably, is not racist, but, when added to the general depiction of black Trinidadians, is not very flattering. Shama also offends a black woman in the novel during that first week she met Mr. Biswas, who was hired to paint the Tulsi store in Arwacas, by offering her black colored cloth, presumably to match her skin color, sparking a fit from the black woman who demands an apology. This, while indicative of colorism and perhaps self-hatred on the black customer’s part regarding her skin, also conveys Indian colorism and condescension toward “Negro” compatriots. In fact, when a Negro is mentioned at all in a positive way, such as the Negro who won first place in the exhibition exam (Anand, Mr. Biswas’s son, won third place in the entire island), he is also presented as oversexualized and eager to downplay his intelligence to maintain his stories of sexual encounters with older women to his peers. This, once again, is not inherently racist, but the narrator’s surprise at the fact that a Negro won can easily be perceived as such.

Of course, not every black or African-descended character is a thief, thug, alcoholic, ashamed to be black fool. But the references by the narrator to Shama’s discomfort regarding people of other religions and races, the fact that the Indian community especially looked down upon all interracial marriage with African-descended women (such as Bhandat, Biswas’s wealthy uncle, Ajodha’s, brother, with a Creole woman, or even both of Bhandat’s sons, who informally have a family with non-Indian, non-Hindu Spanish-Negro women and other races). This, however, is hardly surprising, considering that the Hindu Indians also despise intermarriage with those tainted by Islam, to paraphrase the narrator’s description of Muslim Indians, but also highly suggestive of the sometimes tense or, more often than not in the novel, the non-existent relationships between people of different races. Even white women are not spared, as illustrated when, for a second, Owad’s Tulsi sisters feared he came back from studying medicine with a white woman on the ship. Chinese Trinidadians, whites, and essentially all non-Indian people are absent from the world of most of the characters, except in Port of Spain or in terms of authority, where black policemen could harass and ask for bribes from Indians in the rural countryside, or white colonial authorities and Western literature, course curriculum, and Christianity infiltrate the Hindu worldview of Indo-Trinidadians. Moreover, in Port of Spain, a cosmopolitan port city, all residents have to interact with whites, blacks, mixed-race, Chinese, and Indians in the workplace, the city’s streets, restaurants, and squares, such as Mr. Biswas’s encounter with a black man working as a hunter for a solicitor, his prey consisting of illiterate people in need of birth, marriage, and death certificates in what was probably Marine Square, occupied by homeless and deprived individuals. And besides, before Mr. Biswas realizes that the coloured solicitor’s clerk cheated him for thousands on a poorly built house, he was comfortable drinking and eating with the man, as well as his work as a journalist, particularly as a seeker of destitutes for a special column for the Sentinel, requiring him to work amidst and interview people of all class and race backgrounds.

Naipaul’s anti-communist, anti-socialist views can also be surmised through his treatment of Owad’s ‘fad’ of pro-Soviet Union, pro-Communist fervor upon return to Trinidad after the Second World War. On return, Owad’s naïve praise for the Soviet Union and the glories of Russia, Russian literature’s Gogol, advanced Soviet rice-agriculture with aeroplanes shooting the rice into the earth, and each man earning his keep by working (and there’s always work) betray a youthful optimism after witnessing WWII on European soil. His brief obsession spreads among his family however, and Anand learns to quote and mimic the sayings of his uncle, Owad, at school while the rest of the family begins to expect an anti-capitalist revolution that, of course, never comes. In due time, Owad moves on and drops his Communist ideal for reality in the capitalist, post-war, American-influenced Trinidad where capitalism continues to reign, political parties emerge (Sheckar, Owad’s wealthy brother who operates a number of cinemas, leads a party that opposes the government welfare department that employs Mr. Biswas, which is eventually sacked, but not because of Sheckar’s party, which pledged in island elections to make everyone rich in Trinidad), and, as usual, one can assume that the narrator and the novel’s characters, like Naipaul, prefer Western, liberal capitalism and see it as the natural order of life, even though Mr. Biswas’s family experiences poverty and go into extreme debt just to have a house and survive. Mr. Biswas, however, probably like Naipaul, seems to accept this as a natural part of life, and during his failed attempt at being a shopkeer, rues the fact that he did not engage in the sale of beef as many Hindu merchants, abandoning their religious commands, did for the new god of profit.

As for religion and modernity, Naipaul’s bias in favour of British, Western civilization, becomes clear. When Mr. Biswas joins the Aryans, a group of Hindu reformers opposed to idolatrous habits of Hinduism, lack of education for women and forced marriages, and open to the ideals of Western civilization, it is hard not to imagine Naipaul himself being or perhaps, someone he knew, was part of such an organization of ‘modern’ Hindus. Likewise, Mr. Biswas’s disdain for Hindu pundit’s blessings of homes and other reverent, typical Hindu prayers and behaviour, often directed against his Tulsi relatives, seems to indicate a certain degree of secularism and condescension toward “superstitious” Hinduism. However, in his youth, while under training by Pundit Jairam to become a future pundit himself, his failure on that road may have prejudiced him against the faith of his ancestors, in spite of his Brahmin caste, or, rather, because his caste did not save him from poverty in colonial Trinidad. He also, at times, mocks Mrs. Tulsi for sending her sons to a Roman Catholic school, and belittles their, at times, lack of proper Hindu faith, but seems to be not interested in Christianity or any religion himself save for frightening, harrowing experiences where he, for instance, asks his son to repeat the name Rama repeatedly during the torrential downpour at the Green Vale. But perhaps, due to his indigestion, which made him, for life, dependent on a stomach powder, and his love for Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, colonial curriculum from his missionary school days, and, more broadly, English literature and the European world beyond the tropical yet dull, unchanging shores of Trinidad, Mr. Biswas retained his love for Western ways and the English, culminating in his writing aspirations, his journalism, and his children speaking only English (though they understand Hindi, they communicate in English, etc. and learn to, like other Tulsi family children housed in large numbers at Hanuman House and in Shorthills, learn to exchange their mediocre curry lunches for cheese sandwiches at school). Even more indicative of a life of Western modernity that Mr. Biswas aspires to and longs for as a marker of a successful, worthwhile life and goal, is a “proper” house with ‘modern’ amenities of the Western world. Until then, all of his life is spent in huts, wooden homes little more than huts, and, even the Hanuman House, only offering some basic modern Western life essentials, such as electricity, an indoor bathroom with plumbing, and proper floors, windows, etc. The irony is, however, had he, like his brothers, illiterate sugar estate workers, stayed on, living in huts and working on a farm, he, like some of the rising Indian elite, could have went into land and agriculture, eventually building up the capital to build his own mansion…Oh well, Mr. Biswas tried in his own way, and try he did in multiple life trajectories.

Overall, Naipaul’s novel, though over 600 pages and exhausting at times, is a humorous tale of one Indian Trinidadian man and his sometimes ludicrous, sometimes hilarious Hindu family surviving under British rule. Never in the novel does one sense that the characters resent British imperialism or ever have true, close relations with African-descended Trinidadians, which, unfortunately, likely was part of Naipaul’s insular Indian community background in Trinidad. Regardless of nascent political views and Naipaul’s later generalizations about postcolonial India, Africa and the Caribbean, the novel’s endearing and its humour allows one to continue reading despite the many tragedies and road stops in the life of Mr. Biswas. For example, when his wife uncovers his numerous incomplete Escape stories, where he endeavors to rewrite his life as one escaping from his wife and children, he had foolishly given his wife the responsibility of filing his papers, including his Escape stories, leading to an amusing situation wherein Shama refers to him, herself, and their children by the nicknames he gave them in the stories. Naturally, many amusing moments abound in this wondrous life story, such as his letter to a doctor who callously checked the corpse and registered the death of Bipti, his mother, or his numerous fights, shout-outs, and nicknames for Mrs. Tulsi, Seth, and the gods, her sons, Sheckar and Owad, or Mr. Biswas’s ignorance and tragic circumstances. Finally, it is nice to read a great Caribbean epic of Dickensian proportions, too, of one of Trinidad’s literary sons, giants, really.