Tuesday, January 10, 2017

A House for Mr Biswas as a novel

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.

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