A House for Mr
Biswas as a novel
V. S. Naipaul
The renowned writer V. S.
Naipaul, a third generation Indian from Trinidad and Tobago and a Nobel Prize
laureate, is a person who belongs to the world and usually not classified under
Indian Writing in English. Naipaul evokes ideas of homeland, rootlessness and
his own personal feelings towards India in many of his books.
A House for Mr Biswas
V.S. Naipaul’s magnum opus,
A House for Mr. Biswas, can rightly be called a work of art that deals
with the problems of isolation, frustration and negation of an individual.
Vijay Mishra writes about the novel that
“It is a mixed, sprawling, quasi-epic, ‘hyphenated’ text, so very sad
and tragic and yet bursting with immensely comic moments.”
A House for Mr. Biswas tells the story
of its protagonist, Mr. Biswas from birth to death, each section dealing with
different phases of Mr. Biswas’s life. Here, Naipaul has a more subjective
approach towards the problems of identity crisis than the objective one a
reader finds in his travelogues, especially on India.
At the first sight A
House for Mr Biswas strikes to be a simple and direct novel. This is so
because V. S. Naipaul wants to achieve an effect of directness and precision.
Yet Naipaul obtains simplicity by employing a sustained structure of imagery
and symbolism. This feature of the novel makes one recognize to be a typical
Naipaulian novel.
Naipaul’s A House for
Mr. Biswas is a tragicomic novel set in Trinidad in 1950s and was published
in 1961. It deals with an East Indian’s struggle for a place to settle his
identity. In his book, Benoit writes
“Naipaul tries to bring forward the life of an ordinary double exiled
and marginalized man, Mr. Biswas and his struggles to find a place of his own in
the Caribbean country of Trinidad.”
1.
Post-colonial
Elements:-
Vijay Mishra writes
“A House for Mr Biswas is the grand proof-text for the placement of the
postcolonial in an alternative, enunciative epistemology even as it grounds
itself in an experience formed out of plantation culture.”
Many readers of A House for Mr Biswas have seen
the novel as a symbolic representation of the colonial experience. According to
this view, the Tulsis represent the mother country, Great Britain, which
strictly controlled the colony’s daily life and development. Mr. Biswas would
represent the colonized people. He is economically and psychologically
dependent on Mrs. Tulsi. He struggles for independence and freedom, but his
progress is slow and difficult. Like many former colonists, Mr. Biswas has not
had the opportunity to learn the skills needed to manage in an independent
society. His attempt to run the store at The Chase is a disaster and he is
ill-suited to oversee the sugarcane workers. Even his self-identity has been
jumbled and his traditional roots obscured; he does not know the location of
the house he lived in as a boy. One book reviewer believed that the Tulsi
family represented colonial slaveholders and pointed out similarities between
the Tulsis’ activities and those of the slaveholders of the 1800s.
The post-colonial elements impart significance enough
to secure important place for the novel among the best post-colonial writings. Rosmary
Pitt argues
"The main changes which are recorded are the decline of the Hindu
culture and rituals as they undergo the process of creolization and the
accompanying changes in attitude."
These
cultural changes, which form their identity during their encounter with the
colonizer and the other people of their race, are psychological, spiritual,
religious and educational. What is of great importance in the novel is that
these changes occur along with the changes in the Creole society in which
different cultures are clashing with one another and they all are to adopt
themselves to the norms and values assigned to them by the dominant culture.
The novel treats of the confusions
of the hero Mr. Mohun Biswas in Hindu society in Trinidad. It depicts an
orthodox Hindu family gradually losing the traditions within a multi-racial
social society. Mr. Mohun Biswas enters as an outsider and becomes a member of
the family by marrying one of the daughters. Mr. Biswas becomes a witness to
the changes overcoming the family. Naipaul writes in the novel
“There was no longer a Hanuman House to protect them; everyone has to
fight for himself in a new world, the world Owad and Shekhar had entered, where
education was the only protection.”
The
outside world proves to a great threat to the age-old traditions which was the
peculiar identity of the house.
2.
Symbolism
Naipaul
has successfully used various symbols of convey and additional or deeper
meaning to the reader.
2.1 ‘Hanuman House as a symbol’
Here ‘Hanuman House’ is not only Mrs.
Tulsi’s residence, According to Biswas; it seems to be a zoo with many monkeys
in it. He calls it ‘a monkey-house’. Secondly it is a symbol of traditionalism,
rigidity and cultural perfection. Hanuman House celebrated Chrisman too. This shows the influence of a foreign culture
on the old Hindu customs.
2.2
Symbolic significance of the title:-
The
title of the novel is significant. Mr. Biswas wants to have a house his own to
assert and preserve his independence. He is able to won a house at the end
though he does not live long to enjoy its pleasures. He dies a free man, with
his self-respect and individuality unbroken. His rebellion against the Tulsi
family has proved successful, and he has achieved freedom. The main theme of ‘A
house for Mr. Biswas” is an individual’s rebellion against social and economic
tyranny and the achievement of freedom as a reward of that rebellion. Mr.
Biswas’ ownership and possession of a house symbolize his freedom.
3.
Comic Elements :-
Naipaul
himself said that A House for Mr. Biswas contains some of his funniest
touch. Really, we find plenty of comic though in this novel despite an under
current of pathos and irony. Here the novelist has tried all the tree main
sources of comedy, comedy of character, comedy of situation and comedy of wit.
3.1 Comedy in the Portrayal of
Characters:-
Also
all there character, including Mr. Biswas, are more or less comic. Tara puts on
heavy ornaments. Here are leaded with silver banglies. Here arm with the
hungles are strong enough to defeat any attacks. Ghany, the solicitor is always
found in the midst of dusty books Lal, the teacher behaves in a very funny
manner with his students. Alec the boy, amuses us by his pranks Pundit Jairam
makes us laugh through the contradictions in his character. The novelist
describes the solicitors’ clerk as tout, crook, Nazi and even as a communists.
Tulsi is also a comic character. She faints often. At this time, her daughters
take her to the Rose Room and serve under the general supervision of Padma and
Sushila. Tulsi’s sons in law are also comic figure. Govind attacks his food
like a glutton. Hari is a comic figure who passes a lot of time in the toilet
and keeps other waiting eagerly outside. The gloomy predictions about Biswas’s
future are very funny.
3.2 Comedy of Situations:-
Many
situations are also beset with fun. Ragha drowns in the village bond while
trying to rescue his son who is actually safe and sound hiding under his
father’s bed at home. Biswas takes his son, Anand to cinema, but he has not
enough money to purchase tow full tickets,. So both of them return home without
seeing the film. Therese humorous situations provide enough laughter.
3.3 Wit and Sarcasm:-
Witty
remarks of some character are also full of fun. Mr. Biswas is the wittiest
character in the novel. He addresses Tulsi’s two sons as ‘little gods’ and
describe s Tulsi as ‘old hen’ and also she ‘she-fox’. He described Hanuman
House as zoo and Shama’s two brothers as ‘monkey’. Shama also mocks at Biswas
saying that when he first came to ‘Hanuman House, he had no more clothes that
could be hung a single nail.
4.
Autobiographical
Elements
Naipaul has expressed a
special affection for the novel. In the foreword that he wrote to the
1983 edition, he states:
“Of all my books, this is the one that is closest to
me. It is the most personal, created out of what I saw and felt as a child.”
Naipaul’s father,
Seepersad, is the prototype for Mr. Biswas. Both the real man and the fictional
Biswas were born in a village; lived with wealthy relatives; worked as a sign
painter; married into a conservative, well-to-do Hindu family; held a series of
jobs; and wandered from home to home. Like Mohun Biswas, Seepersad Naipaul
found work on a newspaper after moving to Port of Spain. The events in the life
of Mr. Biswas’s son Anand reflect those of the novel’s author. Anand, like the
young Naipaul, is pushed hard to excel at school and to share his father’s
involvement with writing. It is not difficult to imagine the character’s
growing up to become a world-famous novelist.
Conclusion
A
wonderful creation in many respects A House for Mr Biswas bears a
typical imprint of Naipaul’s genius. The issues targeted in the novel have
larger appeal. The journey started by Mr. Mohun Biswas provides enough scope to
Naipaul to present his ideas related to immigrants’ experiences, identity
crisis, post-colonial problems by way of symbolism and comedy. Naipaul
successfully mingles comic elements while dealing with the serious matters of identity,
alienation and survival in conflicting situations.
