V.S Naipaul's father joined the Arya Samaj which fiercely opposed the 'Puranic' Hinduism celebrated in the 'katha' (recitation of Hindu Epics) tradition of rural Trinidad. Instead, Arya Samajis were urged to focus on the Vedas & Upanishads and their spiritual message. In a previous post, I've explained how the notion of 'sampratti' is crucial to understanding Naipaul's 'Biswas'.
Sadly, a Carribean scholar- Vijay Maharaj- takes the opposite view.
A Mala in Obeisance: Hinduism in Select Texts by V.S. Naipaul
This was Published in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Naipaul declares in An Area of Darkness, “that, though growing up in an orthodox family,
His father was Arya Samaji (reformist). His mother's family were Sanathan Dharma (orthodox).
I remained almost totally ignorant of Hinduism”.
Nothing wrong in that. He did well at school and won a scholarship to England.
This sweeping generalization is, however, undermined immediately by the self-questioning that follows: “What, then, survived of Hinduism in me? Perhaps I had received a certain supporting philosophy. I cannot say; my uncle often put it to me that my denial was an admissible type of Hinduism”.
One can have a heterodox 'matam' (dogma) but if your praxis (vigyan) is the same as that of the well bred people of your community, you are 'observationally equivalent' to the orthodox. Thus a 'Sanatani' may say an 'Arya' is a sound enough Hindu.
That the thought of philosophical support should have come to him at all and that a conversation of this nature should have taken place between uncle and nephew are indications of the writer’s embeddedness in Hindu tradition.
He read Radhakrishnan who was a celebrity at that time.
The sceptic and the seeker-of-clarification are the two categories of interrogators to whom all the Shastras, or Hindu scriptural texts, are addressed.
No. They are addressed to Brahmin priests and, by extension, the 'twice born' castes who patronize them.
As his uncle may have well been capable of explaining, the deliberate installation, constant questioning and referencing of his Hindu background in his writing place him squarely within one or the other of these categories at various times.
Not really. He is like Niradh Chaudhuri, not G.V Desani who became a mystic. But since he didn't know Sanskrit, he was out of his depth on the subject. His sister, who attended Benares Hindu University, wasn't greatly impressed by the spirituality of the place. This was quite understandable. The future belonged to the engineers and economists and agronomists.
He may have told him that the pursuit of faith and knowledge are seen in the Bhagavad-Gita as two sides of the same coin: the first blossoms in acquiescence and the second in self-doubt, criticism, discussion and questioning.
Nonsense! The Vyadha Gita deals with the dharma (eusebia) of the principal. The Bhagavad Gita deals with the dharma of the agent. Discussion can't get you anywhere which is why Lord Krishna is forced to grant Arjuna 'theophany'- i.e. a vision of the supreme deity. However, very few people get this gift. Arguably, Arjuna could have got this anyway thanks to a boon given by a Yaksha (demi-god). True, he did not accept the book but the Yaksha didn't take it back either. Thus it remained 'unvested'. However, Arjuna's vishada (abulia) meant he was no longer his own master & thus the boon could vest in him.
The Gita can be easily understood by ordinary people but that doesn't mean it isn't very artfully constructed.
They lead one into the other.
No they don't. You may 'acquiesce' but still be tortured by doubt. There can be a 'dark night of the soul' in any and every religion.
This Hindu influence in Naipaul’s work is recognized.
It is recognised that he was a Hindu. However, few know anything about Hinduism and thus they can't say what Hindu influence exists in his work.
However, postcolonial theory, which is often applied to texts written by people from the fringes of imperial centers, privileges interpretation of the texts as responses to imperial culture. This is a debilitating approach to Caribbean literary texts because it tends to forestall and devalue interpretations that explore the texts’ relationships with the often fragmented, dislocated cultures the authors inherit from their ancestral groups or their relationships with the often equally fragmented and dislocated cultures of the populations among which the groups have settled.
West Indians are smart and as their affluence increased, they became very well educated. The Trinidadian Hindu or Christian or Muslim is just as good as any other co-religionist of theirs.
Exploring this aspect of postcolonial literary studies is a task in itself. This paper therefore problematizes postcolonial theory by reading Naipaul in relation to a local Hindu tradition, the katha.
Which his daddy rejected. Thus he had little exposure to it.
The underlying contention is that Naipaul’s work is not just influenced by his Hindu background but is part of a long Hindu tradition of religious and philosophical speculation intrinsic to the Caribbean katha tradition.
The katha was presided over by a hereditary priest. He could explain how events in the epics are related to rituals and sacred Vedic or Purnaic texts.
I argue that Naipaul’s oeuvre speculates about a number of key Hindu philosophical concepts and is a form of the Caribbean katha.
Only in the sense that his oeuvre is about elves, orcs & hobbits because he was Tolkein's student.
The folk katha is a practice of reading or reciting and interpretation of religious texts in relation to social texts of all varieties for the purpose of bringing meaning to events in people’s day-to-day lives.
It is a highly auspicious religious practice which gives you good karma.
In so doing, it provides spaces and techniques for self-examination, self-fashioning and re-fashioning.
Everybody already has such a space. There are umpteen self-help books. I particularly recommend 'dieter's guide to weight-loss through farting'.
But, the Caribbean katha is not a reproduction of an Indian practice; it is a reinvention specifically tailored to the contingencies of the lives of the indentured and their descendants.
The indenture system was abolished in 1920. Hindu pundits visiting Trinidad praised the katha tradition. It was more elaborate because Trinidadians had higher income.
Naipaul continues the process of reinvention
He started off as a guy who wrote stories and essays. Then, he reinvented himself as a tractor. In his final years he became a hippopotamus.
for the same purpose for a wider audience, to make meaning and suggest ways of self-construction.
more particularly if you want to turn yourself into the Eiffel tower.
Indeed, this attribute of his oeuvre can be seen also as an act of self-assertion and self-preservation. The embedded katha is obvious if one follows Naipaul’s dictum that “part of the point of a novel [comes] from half rejecting the fiction, or looking through it to reality” (Reading & Writing 23).
One can read Harry Potter and recognize the reality that there is a lot wrong with contemporary Brtitish society.
To look through Naipaul’s writing is to find traces and sub-texts of Hinduism as the germ plasm around which the narratives grow.
I find 'sampratti' in Naipaul's Biswas. But few Hindu Professors of Literature know the term.
This essay explores some of his work to uncover the germ plasm and identify Naipaul’s position in the tradition and his synthesis of elements of the tradition with the requirements of literary discourse. Despite Naipaul’s youthful boast in An Area of Darkness that “I was without belief or interest in belief; I was incapable of worship” (41)
In other words, he couldn't go down the road of a Waugh or Greene or G.V Desani (or even Aubrey Menen).
, as he admits in later texts such as Finding a Centre and Reading and Writing, his involvement with Hindu tradition is undeniable.
He wasn't involved with it.
This statement in An Area of Darkness is in fact immediately preceded by the recognition of the need for belief and worship in times of adversity, and of the more specific need for them to be within the traditions of Hinduism.
I need a smart phone. This does not mean I am involved in the manufacture of smart phones.
When his friend, Ramon, dies, he notes: We were a tiny, special part of that featureless, unknown country, [India] meaningful to us, if we thought about it, only in that we were its remote descendants. I wished his body to be handled with reverence, and I wished it to be handled according to the old rites. This alone would spare him final nonentity.
Some people could get a Hindu priest to officiate at a crematorium in the Fifties. However, it was permissible to take the ashes back to India for immersion in a sacred river. At that time, all required rituals could be performed.
Even without a body, the 'shradd' can be performed. Still, we understand that Naipaul was mentioning a question which large scale immigration was making urgent.
Separated from the sub-continent by time and distance,
distance, not time.
the need for its religions and philosophy remains, if only as a bulwark against nonentity. This is compounded by the need to sanctify as Naipaul’s observations in The Enigma of Arrival demonstrate: “But at her death there was in her family a wish to give sanctity to the occasion, a wish for old rites, for things that were felt specifically to represent us and our past” (351).
Naipaul could not be present for his father's funeral. Thus 'sampratti' could not be completed. But a great book did come out of this trauma.
The presence of an Indian heritage and people’s need for it are the central pivot on which Naipaul’s speculations revolve and it is evident from his first published work, The Mystic Masseur, onwards, even when the signs of religious and philosophical speculations are coded to make them palatable or invisible to the primary international audience.
Dhan Gopal's 'Caste & outcaste' had sold very well in America in the early Twenties. You could crank up the exoticism & retain your market.
This encoding leads John Thieme to talk about allusions. He asserts that “the most significant body of allusions in the novel is to the various aspects of Hinduism” (43),
like what?
but he sees these allusions relating to Naipaul’s documentation of the acculturation of Indians in Trinidad. It can be argued, however, that The Mystic Masseur not only alludes to aspects of Hinduism to document acculturation, but it is also an embodiment of a Hindu concept of the human condition.
which is determined by karma and alleviated by dharma
It achieves this by performing a beautifully coordinated doubled triple movement.
Also, it performs kathak and ballet so beautifully that nobody notices.
The text is an act of social criticism
Democracy is bound to be a fucking disaster?
and it establishes an authorial perspective that becomes Naipaul’s hallmark. Naipaul constructs his protagonist in such a way that he can as easily be read within the European tradition of the picaroon hero,
he isn't a rogue.After a couple of false starts, he makes good. Is he a satire on the Kapildeo's family's main Hindu rival?
or the Caribbean tradition of Anansi,
of which nobody had heard back then.
as he can be read within Hindu traditions.
Or he can be read as a satire on Bhadase Sagan Maraj, a wrestler, who had made a lot of money during the war in the trucking business.
In the latter regard, the text can be seen as performing an act of religious worship. The coup d’état of the joining of these disparate elements is that one does not hear the grinding echoes of different cultures meeting because Naipaul’s aesthetics involves a blurring of the boundaries between the three categories.
Hindus were only about a quarter of the population. They didn't matter greatly.
Naipaul’s katha is, thus, exactly like the folk katha, which pulls together diverse discourses in a synthesizing action that is relatively smooth and soundless. This approach becomes progressively stronger as Naipaul continues to write.
Lots of gods and demons in Naipaul's books.
In The Overcrowded Barracoon,
Hanuman turns into a rocket-ship and flies up Uranus?
Naipaul refers to this act of blurring when he notes that, “[l]ike the medieval sculptor of the North interpreting the Old Testament stories in terms of the life he knew, I needed to be able to adapt” .
In other words, don't write about what Duke Algenon said to Lady Angela when she declared that there was a squirrel living in her vagina. Instead, write
'Dopti tell Ramgulam, “Yuh never go guess where that damn squirrel hide itself.”
Ramgulam say, “Same place as always, na?”
Dopti stand up there vex-amaze. “But how yuh know that? Yuh must be obeah man, bwoy!”
He adapts Hindu philosophy to the demands of the literary text and to the representation of the lives and circumstances of his characters.
He didn't know Hindu philosophy.
In The Mystic Masseur, he adapts the iconography of Ganesh, the God, to construct Ganesh, the protagonist.
Arya Samajis don't like Ganesh or Hanuman. They believe them to be Dravidian dieties.
The God, Ganesh, represents the human being in Hinduism.
No. It is Yama- god of death. He was the first judge & the first human to die. His vahana (vehicle) is man.
Ganesh is the first to be worshipped as the remover of obstacles.
Gan-esh in fact means lord/master/leader (esh) of created beings (gan).
No. He is the lord of the celestial hosts.
He is depicted as a mighty elephant,
he has the head of an elephant
the paramatman, who sits on a mouse, the jivatman.
This is true of the Ganesha Purana. But Naipaul's dad was Arya Samaji. Naipaul used the name 'Ganesh' because he thinks it is uncouth, rustic & probably Dravidian.
The image is meant to show that the individual is paramatman, the Creator, God, but in embodied form the person is severely limited in demonstrating god-like qualities because of corporeal confinement represented in the mouse.
I am demonstrating god-like qualities all the time. Sadly, people think I am flatulent.
Confinement of the spirit is the most immediately obvious element of the iconography that is unveiled in The Mystic Masseur. Ganesh, the protagonist, like his father, has a great deal of potential. Within the confines of the colonial condition, however, this potential is severely curtailed. Every area of their lives is filled with difficulties and Ganesh must play the role of Ganesh, the God, in many of his aspects, in order to assert himself and carve a place in the social structure of the Caribbean. He does this by displaying that aspect of Ganesh called Lambodar, he-of-enormous-appetite-for-all-things-of-this-world, symbolized by the great belly of the elephant. Like Lambodar, Ganesh consumes everything that comes his way, appropriating them, making them his own, using them to his own purposes. Ganesh is constructed in such a way as to show that he possesses the attribute of Ekadant, the single-minded, totally committed, and focused one. Ganesh intends to be successful, at what he does not know, but he expends undivided effort on the idea of success, of victory. The single-mindedness is Ekadantian.
He ends up as a puppet of the British calling himself G. Ramsay Muir. Similarly, at the end of the Ganesa Purnana, it is revealed that the deity changes his name to George Formby & moves to England to play the ukelele.
Apart from developing these overt similarities between God and the human being, with a light touch in a celebratory, comic tone, The Mystic Masseur also displays a perspective that the author embraces throughout his career. Thieme notes that: “Nowhere is there any suggestion that Ganesh could be other than he is” (43).
He would have changed his name to Genji San if the Japanese had conquered Trinidad.
The deeper philosophical ground of this statement lies in Hinduism’s refusal to label the things of this world as either good or evil.
It does so incessantly. Doing or being in contact with bad things engenders bad karma.
In Hinduism, unsullied good and evil are confined to the realm of the devtas and the asuras, for want of a better translation, the gods and the devils.
Even they are subject to karma. Seek for the Nirguna Brahman- beyond name & form.
In the realm of the human, there is no unadulterated good or evil. Naipaul is careful to demonstrate this in The Mystic Masseur and continues to demonstrate it in his thirty-three subsequent works.
Why bother? Why not focus on demonstating that it is necessary to breathe out after breathing in?
He generally insists that systems, institutions, and other social constructions impact on the individual so that s/he is unable to be other than s/he is.
She can top herself.
There is no book in which Naipaul can be said to blame the individual for what may be called his/her evil. In this regard, his attitude is Hindu.
Hindus are continually blaming me for stinking up the place by farting.
Apart from playfully representing God and man as akin,
Naipaul didn't believe in God. We may have a need for some such thing just as I have a need to believe I'm not the shittiest poet ever. But this doesn't mean the thing you need actually exists.
in an optimistic and convivial fashion that steers clear of judgement, the text can also be seen as performing an offhanded gesture of worship. Every child brought up in a Hindu environment learns that it is important to pray to Ganesh in the form of Vigneshwar, the remover of obstacles, before any enterprise is undertaken, for the removal of intellectual and other difficulties.
Not if you are Arya Samajis. Some of the greatest Hindus of modern times belong to that sect.
Naipaul would have grown up with this idea of Ganesh as Vigneshwar and as Vinayak, the guardian of the doorway and of movement from one area of life to another and this book with its point-by-point adaptation of the attributes of the god to the Hindu in the Caribbean can be seen as such an act of worship.
This author is too charitable. The truth is Naipaul feared that democracy would lead to anarchy. In 'Mystic' & 'Suffrage'- this is the predominating note. It did endear Naipaul to the British right-wing but he still had to struggle financially for many years.
It does not seem unrealistic or far-fetched to me, to think that in his difficulties with finding his voice, his material, and a publisher for his works, Naipaul would have gestured towards obeisance to the god, Ganesh, however obliquely. Whether one sees this as a “propitiatory technique” common to writers is irrelevant.8 It is no less “touching and attractive” than the “ancient drama” of ritual performances, “absurdly surviving in a Trinidad yard” (Naipaul, An Area 34).
One might say the same of the Christian mass celebrated in the Europe of the Dark Ages.
In the works that follow The Mystic Masseur, Naipaul also engages in iconographic adaptations. This is apparent, for example, in A House for Mr. Biswas, in the fictional name, Hanuman House, given to the house called Lion House as a symbol of resistance and courage in real life. Naipaul’s objective in this act of re-naming is to critique the traditional Hindu social structure that denies individuality and enterprise. Hanuman, the Hindu deity, is worshipped for the protection he bestows against illnesses, natural and other calamities, accidents and problems of all types.
But, Arya Samajis don't like him. Naipaul sided with his dad over his Mum's family.
Similar expectations are set up in the novel for the fictional house and the idea of community it represents. But the text demonstrates that in its new setting, the house cannot last and its protection cannot be extended beyond its shadow.
The Kapildeos continued to rise and rise.
Beyond this is a world where individual enterprise is of utmost importance and the house does not equip its denizens with the tools for survival and prosperity in that environment.
They make one or two bad investments. Nothing wrong with doing 'discovery'. You can't really speak of decline if people move away from the countryside to earn more in the city.
The community thus eventually disintegrates under the pressure of changes over which no one has control. In effect Naipaul seems to be making a Nietzschean statement by naming the house Hanuman: God is dead! Hanuman is dead! He cannot protect in these new surroundings!
Nobody actually gets poorer or loses status in the book. People do grow old and die. This is because of post-colonial performativity under conditions of neo-liberalism.
This is not an untoward act in Hinduism since the scriptural texts are replete with ideas about changing systems of worship and new and more efficacious manifestations of the paramatman. Within the context of a dead Hanuman,
Hanuman is immortal. Also he finds a herb to revive Lakshman.
Naipaul also appears to be making a Nietzschean declaration about the superman: the person who transcends the need for the herd, who can use the resources of his own spirit to survive.
In the denoument, Biswas gains super-powers after bathing in the red sunlight of planet Krytpon. He returns to Earth & sets up a universal religion whose Pope is a pussy cat.
This idea is dramatized in Mr. Biswas’ quest in which the idea of confinement of the human spirit re-emerges. Mr. Biswas is confined not just by Hanuman House but also by his own body.
unlike his wife who visits Uranus on the astral plane.
This is vividly depicted for example in one of many descriptions: “He didn’t feel a small man, but clothes which hung so despairingly from the nail on the mud wall were definitely the clothes of a small man” (Naipaul, A House 157).
He had clothes. Lucky bastard! I'll never forget the time I got an invite to the Garden Party at Bucking Palace and was turned away because I was bollock naked. I explained that I was a badly paid audit clerk & thus could not afford to buy clothes. They agreed to let me in provided I stuck a radish up my bum. Sadly, I couldn't afford to buy even a second hand radish.
Mr. Biswas must fight to maintain an idea of self, of his own value, of his own bigness despite the evidence of smallness with which he is confronted.
By whom? The guy was of average build. He wasn't a dwarf.
Maharaj mentions the doctrine of karma & the question of whether Hinduism is fatalistic. I think Biswas is shown as interpreting prarabdha karma in a manner compatible with both Arya Samaji & Stoci thinking (particularly that of Marcus Aurelius.) I suppose an AI could spin out a good enough essay on this topic within 5 seconds. My question is whether it could also fart while doing so? So long as the answer is 'no' Socioproctology will remain the monopoly of flatulent fools like me.
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