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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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...
Knight, Franklin W., The Caribbean, The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism. 1990 Oxford University Press, N.Y., N.Y.
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.
In spite of the fact that the parents wish that their youngsters would hold their Bengali legacy by keeping alive their dialect and wedding other Bengalis, Gogol and Sonia are hesitant to do as such. They are American, they demand. While living at home, the youngsters are faithful; however, just hardly emulate their parents'
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Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus. "Slave Revolution in the Caribbean 1789-1804: A Brief History of Documents.” Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006.
A History of Modern Trinidad 1783-1962., Bridget Brereton., Heinemann Educational Books Inc.: New Hampshire. 1981.
According to Leming and Dickinson, Hindus believe that cremation is “an act of sacrifice” because they are offering their bodies to God. The body is usually cremated on the bank of a sacred river. The book, Understanding dying, death, and bereavement offers an “invocation” that would be close to what a priest would recite, “Fire, you were lighted by him, so may he be lighted from you, that he may gain the regions of celestial bliss. May this offering prove auspicious.” Leming and Dickinson (2011) state that between 10-31 days post cremation, a feast (shraddha) is shared among mourners and priests.
Funerals are very important ceremonies in Hindu tradition. Hindus see cremation as an act of sacrifice to God and...
Recent years have witnessed a large number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary world with their works. The topics dealt with are contemporary and populist and the English is functional, communicative and unpretentious. Novels have always served as a guide, a beacon in a conflicting, chaotic world and continue to do so. A careful study of Indian English fiction writers show that there are two kinds of writers who contribute to the genre of novels: The first group of writers include those who are global Indians, the diasporic writers, who are Indians by birth but have lived abroad, so they see Indian problems and reality objectively. The second group of writers are those born and brought up in India, exposed to the attitudes, morale and values of the society. Hence their works focus on the various social problems of India like the plight of women, unemployment, poverty, class discrimination, social dogmas, rigid religious norms, inter caste marriages, breakdown of relationships etc.
In this book writer has also used the perspective of psychoanalysis to examine lahiri’s fiction and it has also used different ideas of Sigmund fraud, Andre Greene and Julia kristeva. The book comprises of four chapters and the first chapter of the book Diaspora Hereafters pertains the gap between first generation and second generation. First generation In Unaccustomed Earth is Indian American Immigrants with their American born children living in a community of diaspora, maintaining their American identity and also resisting their parent’s love for past life, migration experience and their memories of their mother country (1). Jhumpa lahiri’s interviews always gives an indication that after her parent’s death she felt she had lost her identity (2). The second chapter is Revenant Melancholy which deals with Kaushik crime and exile. The third chapter is Dead Mothers and Haunting which describes intentions of Hema. The fourth chapter is Future of Diaspora which explains the loss of immigrants’ identity and loss of mother land. Still this books lacks in describing immigrants predicaments due to shift in their identities. Though researcher has defined the problems of immigrants but lahiri’s play of continuous shifting identities is not even touched by
In both of these short stories, both Naipaul and Lessing explore the topic of post-colonial cultural identity though a diverse lens. Primarily, these authors explore the context of race, and class, something that prevalent in all of our lives wherever we come from. By opening these diverse lanes of communication through literature, each author has only made their country a better but the world as well, i.e. the mission of Nobel Laureates.
There is a sense of a Caribbean writer’s role as a “revolutionary hero” who must paint his words to restore a Caribbean sense of identity. This dedication t to the Caribbean’s story of struggle is, without a doubt, far from “dismissed” in Walcott’s work. Walcott delicately articulates that “In the Caribbean, history is irrelevant. Not because it is not being created, or because it was sordid; but because it has never mattered, what has mattered is the loss of history, the amnesia of the races, what has become necessary is imagination, imagination as necessity, as invention.” In order to explain the present conditions of the modern Caribbean, he cannot avoid recounting the tragic phases of its colonial past, as he does in “The Sea Is History.”
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...
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.