V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas is a story of Indian Hindu migrants whose grand-parents have been migrated in Trinidad and Tobago as indentured labourers on the sugarcane estates and started living there permanently. Two families have been described particularly in the novel in the main plot. One is Mohun Biswas’s family and other one is Tulsi family in Arwacas. Hindu rituals, rites and customs have been criticized in the novel at many places. Mr. Biswas tragic Hindu life starts when he was a mere child. According to Cudjoe, “Given the Hindu sensibility that informs the text, Mr. Biswas’s tragic dimension can be perceived as poetic necessity. (Cudjoe 74) When Mr. Biswas’ father drowns in the pond and subsequently dies in an effort to find his son in the pond, then this family loses the respect which is reserved to Hindu Brahmins. They eat food in Sadhu’s house as per Hindu rituals. Biswas’ family belonged to a Hindu Brahmin family and as per Hindu customs the garlic and even onion is not used in their food as it is considered a tamasik bhojan; then how this family eats the meat served to them and there is not mentioning of any resistance or reluctance of non-vegetarianism by any of the member of family. They eat non-vegetarian food there. It is only Mr. Biswas who feels nauseated and vomits all the food:
Because no cooking could be done at their house, they ate at Sadhu’s. The food was unsalted as soon as he began to chew, Mr. Biswas felt he was eating raw flesh and the nauseous saliva filled his mouth again. He hurried outside to empty his mouth and clean it, but the taste remained. (Naipaul 33-34)
According to Hindu rules, dead body is always cremated but in the novel the body of a Brahmin father, Raghu’s body is buried ...
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...nald. V. S. Naipaul: A Materialistic Reading. Amherst: University of Mississippi Press.1988. Print.
2. Timothy, Weiss. On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V. S. Naipaul’s. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1993. Print.
3. Naipaul, V. S. A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). London: Picador, 2011. Print.
4. - - - . Miguel Street (1959).New York: Vintage, 2002. Print.
5. Prasad, Amar Nath. “Identity Crisis in V.S.Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas”. Critical Response to V. S. Naipaul and Mulk Raj Anand. Edited by Prasad, Amar Nath. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2003. Print.
6. Mehta, Kamal. “Naipaul as a Short Story Writer”. V. S. Naipaul: Critical Essays Vol. 3. Edited by Ray, Mohit Kumar. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2005. Print.
7. Arlart, Dietrich. Order and Chaos in Colonial Trinidad: V. S. Naipaul’s Novel “A House for Mr. Biswas” (2004).GRIN Verlag, 2007. Print.
The complex nature of ‘agency(or agencies) of change’ in Guyana in the 1960s must be underscored. The new forces that were emerging and stimulating breaches with the past arose out of earlier divisions and pre-independence deformations whose origins are located in t...
When someone dies their bones are burned and crushed into ash and consumed by the relatives. It puts a persons soul at peace to find a resting place within their family, it would be an abomination to bury them in the ground. Once this ceremony is finished the person is gone. Their name or person is never to be mentioned again.
The narratology contains three major key terms and these includes story, plot, and narrator. The story is about events of sequence or actions that occur within a story timeline. The plot is the order of the events that have occurred in the timeline of the story. The narrator is the recounts of the story event or experience of the novel. In this essay will demonstrate that the story is “not a thing” with the narrative art in the story. These short stories are “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe and “The Night Watchman’s Occurrence Book” by V.S. Naipaul. These two short stories are specifically different from each other, thus the first one is about a murder/ crime and the second one is about the humour of the night man with his manager.
The Caribbean region is known for its very unique history which is as a direct result of colonization by the Europeans. Within the domains of these islands, lies a shared colonial and post-colonial experience amongst its peoples which has inescapably left them with a fractured psyche. Postcolonial literary writers, through their works, have addressed, criticized and highlighted many issues faced by Caribbean people. This ‘quarrel with history’ is centered on issues of race, social class structure, gender, culture and identity. Writers such as Sam Selvon in his novel ‘The Lonely Londoners’ and V.S. Naipaul in ‘The Mystic Masseur’, through their writing, have disempowered various factors that affects the colonized. The literary techniques used
Funerals are very important ceremonies in Hindu tradition. Hindus see cremation as an act of sacrifice to God and...
The quest for identity in Indo-English writing has emerged as a recurrent theme, as it is in much of modern literature (Pathak preface). Indeed, often the individual's identity and his quest for it becomes so bound up in the national quest for identity, that the individual's search for his identity becomes allegorical of the national search (Pathak pr...
Biswas is a “ wanderer with no place he could call his own, with no family
Lewis, G. (2004). Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: the Historic Evolution of Caribbean Society in its Ideological Aspects 1942-1900. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press ,.
There is no question that Mulk Raj Anand has fashioned with Untouchable a novel that articulates the abuses of an exploited class through sheer sympathy in the traditionalist manner of the realist novel He is, indeed, the "fiery voice" of those people who form the Untouchable caste. Yet if the goal of the writer, as Anand himself states, is to transform "words into prophecy," then the reader's struggle for meaning in the closing scenes of the novel become problematic and contestatory. It is reasonable to assume -- and as I would argue, it is implied -- that Anand has ventured to address a specific question with writing Untouchable; this is, how to alleviate the exploitation of the untouchable class in India? He then proceeds to address this question through the dramatization of Bahka, the novel's central character. Having said this -- and taking into account Anand's notion of the novel as prophesy -- I will argue that the author has failed to fully answer the question he has set before him.
Puchner, Martin. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Vol. 1. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2013. Print.
There are people bustling, merchants selling, Anglo-Indians watching, and birds flying overhead. How many perspectives are there in this one snippet of life? They are uncountable, and that is the reality. Modernist writers strive to emulate this type of reality into their own work as well. In such novels, there is a tendency to lack a chronological or even logical narrative and there are also frequent breaks in narratives where the perspectives jump from one to another without warning. Because there are many points of view and not all of them are explained, therefore, modernist novels often tend to have narrative perspectives that suddenly shift or cause confusion. This is because modernism has always been an experimental form of literature that lacks a traditional narrative or a set, rigid structure. Therefore, E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, uses such techniques to portray the true nature of reality. The conflict between Adela, a young British girl, and Aziz, an Indian doctor, at the Marabar Caves is one that implements multiple modernist ideals and is placed in British-India. In this novel, Forster shows the relations and tension between the British and the Indians through a series of events that were all caused by the confusing effects of modernism. E.M. Forster implements such literary techniques to express the importance or insignificance of a situation and to emphasize an impression of realism and enigma in Chandrapore, India, in which Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, takes place.
Trinidad and Tobago has long been home to talent, particularly so when it comes to the arts. With a Nobel Prize win from 2001 under his belt for his gifts bestowed upon the world of West Indian literature, V.S Naipaul boasts impressive thirty or so novels published. Despite the number of books written, I have only had the pleasure of reading one, Miguel Street, which explores his time spent on the assumed Nepal Street of St. James, Trinidad, during his adolescent years. The novel itself is quite different than the traditional as it consists of interconnecting chapters each focusing on a different character as the narrator, the young boy, grows up on the street. Like many other East Indians in Trinidad who lived in rural areas, Naipaul and his
The protagonist in this novel is very simple man who comes to the city with lots of hope to get a good and respected job. Contrary to his expectations, in reality he has to face number of hardships to survive in the city .He is disillusioned in this course of job search. Gradually all his ideals, morals and enthusiasm wane and he started a life full of compromises. Ratan Rathore is a young man whose soul has two distinct aspects- the higher self and the lower self. All through the course of novel, his soul is torn by these conflicting pulls of lower and higher self, between idealism and realism. In fact he is the child of double inheritance. He has taken the patriotic and idealistic values from his father and worldly wisdom from his mother. H...
Sindney W. Mintz, “The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area,” in M. Horowitz, Peoples & Cultures of the Caribbean (Garden City, N.J., 1971).
The Das parents’ negligent relationship with their children in Clear Light of Day mirrors India’s independence from Britain. Before their deaths, Mr. and Mrs. Das were preoccupied and inattentive to their four children, Raja, Tara, Bim, and Baba. They spent most of their time at the club, playing “their daily game of bridge” (Desai 50). This pastime is so important to them that they neglect to take care of their kids. For example, Mrs. Das tires of “washing and powdering” Baba, her mentally disabled baby, and she complains, “My bridge is suffering” (103). Mr. Das also does not focus on his children and “he [goes] through the day without addressing a word to them” (53). Unfortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Das are unable to ever form a loving relationship with their children because they both pass away. After Mrs. Das falls into a...