Ethnicity, Identity and Conflict as Portrayed in the Writings of V. S. Naipaul

Carole Davies further identifies this urge in her book Black Women, Writing and Identity: ―[m]igration creates the desire for home, which in turn produces the rewriting of home. Home can only have meaning once one experiences a level of displacement from it‖ (1994, p. 113). Here the fictional trope of ‗exile‘ is fused to a quintessentially modern notion of transcendental homelessness. For the Caribbean subject this much needed profound consciousness becomes an assertion of one‘s syncretistic identity, no longer governed by the politics of belonging and not-belonging. Notes 1The‗Girmitya‘ ideology may be comprehended as a form of home-building and place-making. Home-building is the building of a feeling of being at home based on four ‗affective building blocks‘: ‗security, familiarity, community and a sense of possibility. Similarly, ‗place-making‘ involves three strategies of naming, rituals and institutions so that the ‗mythologized world‘ of the girmitya appears in the form of fossilized memories of the old places. 2 The East Indian community of Trinidad is characterized by a close family structure and a sharp hierarchical division compounded by the absence of social mobility. However, the dissolution of feudalism also saw the gradual dissolution of these relations. The indentured Indian who was so long ―…structurally Indian rather than West Indian‖ (Klass, 1961, p. 3) began to be influenced by individualism, competitiveness, social mobility and an intensification of wage labour that capitalism nurtured. In a 2004 interview given to Patrick French, Selby Wooding, who was at the Queen‘s Royal College a few years senior to Naipaul, also articulated the same opinion that the few lucky students from the tropics were expected to behave like English schoolboys as a pre-requisite of being socially integrated. He therefore endorses that ―one …[has] to wear the mask of the master in order to advance‖ (2008, p. 42). 3 An exact parallel of this brutal slaughter has been recorded by Patrick French in his biography of Naipaul. The manner in which Naipaul‘s father was cajoled by his family members to escape social ostracism by sacrificing a goat is equally weird. Seepersad‘s unbiased journalistic account of the ‗superstitious practices‘ of rural Indians in Trinidad ―…who interpreted outbreaks of smallpox and rabies as an unmistakable sign of the wrath of Kali‖ (French, 2008, p. 20) and purchased a goat to propitiate the deity sound almost sacrilegious. The barbaric attitude of the religious fanatics to punish him for vilifying such long established beliefs soon manifests itself as French recounts: ―[u]nder intense pressure from his wife and her extended family, he agreed to execute a goat. The rationalist, the reformer, the Arya Samajist,…the modern man, the scorner of ju-ju, succumbed to a Hindu tradition linked to sacrifice that even in India was associated with the more extreme Tantric practitioners‖ (2008, p. 22). Materalist Reading. Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press. 1988. 2. Fawzia, Mustafa (1995). V.S Naipaul. New York. : Cambridge University Press, 1995 3. Edward Said (1994). Culture and imperialism, London: Vintage, 1994, p.8) 4. Feder, Lillian (2001). Naipaul‘s Truth: The making of a writer. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001 5. George Lamming (1998). ―Introduction‖ (1983)to In the Castle of my Skin(1970),introduced in Bruce King,ed., New National and Postcolonial Literature-An Introduction, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 111. 6. Huntigton, Samuel (1996). The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking Of World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. 7. Naipaul V.S. India: A Million Mutinies Now. London: Heinemann, 1990. 8. Landeg, White (1975). V.S. Naipaul. London: Manmillan Press, 1975 9. Mohan, Champa Rao (2004). Postcolonial Situation in the Novels of V.S Naipaul New Delhi, 2004. 10. Ngugi Wa Thiango (1995). ―The Language of African Literature,‖ in Bill Achcroft et al., eds., The Postcolonial Studies Reader, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 220. 11. Nixon, Rob (1992). London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992. 12. Rohler, Gordon (1968). The Ironic Approach: The Novels of VS Naipaul,‘ The Islands in Between. London: Oxford University Press, 1968 13. Rushdie Salman (1991). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 London: Granata Books, 1991. 14. Staples, Brent (1994). ―Con Men and Conquerors, ‗a Review of A Way in the World,‘ New York Times Book Review, 1994.

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