E-C-401: New Literature
Hitesh S. Vaghani
Roll no. - 19
SEM - IV
Paper no. – E-C-401
Year – 2011-12
Submitted to Dr.Dilip
Barad
Department of English,
Bhavnagar University.
Mr Biswas:-
Mohan Biswas is a person who is
subject to misfortune, as the ill omens present at his birth suggest. He is
marked, however, by his continual resilience and optimism. Despite his feeling
of being trapped by the Tulsis, he fights to maintain his independence and
romance. A sense of despair and disillusionment troubles him later in life, but
he fights against that too, and retains faith in the future both though his
children and though achieving the statue of a house owner. At Hanuman House the
conducts his campaign against the Tulsis with humour and inventiveness which
show his wit and sense of absurdity. He invents a catalogue of animal names for
the family, such as ‘the old hen’ for Mrs Tulsi, and mocks them for their
strong and exclusive family loyalties and mixed religious affinities. At times
his actions can seem petty and spiteful, and yet Naipaul succeeds in retaining
our respect and liking for him as a character. It is worth thinking about how
Naipaul achieves this difficult balance. Part of the answer is that Mr Biswas
is able to make fun of himself as well as of other people, and so avoids
becoming too superior and smug. He acts the role of clown or buffoon frequently
and even mocks his own appearance. In a scene at The Chase, he reflects how he
does not feel like a small man, and yet the clothes hanging up were
unmistakably those of ‘a small man, comic, make-believe clothes’. A sense of
insecurity also remains with him, so that he never feels periods of good
fortune can be permanent, or believes in them fully. The efforts to achieve the
ownership of his house, reflected in the very title of the novel, thus become a
need to establish a firm reality and independence of his own. The creativity
shown in his painting and writing reflects this need further, as does his
reading of fiction and philosophy. He needs to believe in the possibility of
romance, and much of his frustration in the novel stems from the feeling that
romance is always eluding him, especially after he become involved with the
Tulsis.
This
involvement reveals another major theme of the novel: that of the complex
relationship between freedom and commitment. Freedom is shown as something
which is desired, but feared at the same time, as it can cause feelings of
emptiness and of not belonging or being necessary to another person or to
society as a whole. These feelings are frequently at war in Mr Biswas, and this
conflict is shown in his changing attitudes to Hanuman House. Although he
quickly rebels against its attempt to destroy his individuality by making him
conform to the established rules and codes of behaviour, he also welcomes the
feeling of security and orderliness which it offers. Here he is no longer
simply a nonentity, but has a recognised role, even if it often seems a
negative one. He himself feels on occasion that his campaign is pointless and
degrading, and that his presence in the household is basically irrelevant since
if he left, the family rituals would continue as before.
It
is at this point, at the end of Part 1, that he recognises that rebellion to be
constructive must be accompanied by the positive act of constructing a better
alternative, and he leaves for the city with this intention. The process of
building a separate identity and accepting the results of one’s past actions
and involvements is shown to be a painful and difficult process. Ti involves
the shedding of fantasies and illusion we all possess, symbolised for Mr Biswas
in his ‘Escape’ stories which he eventually destroys, and accepting the reality
and commitments which have gradually accumulated almost without his being aware
of it. The novel is thus partly about growing up, and attaining maturity and a
sense of responsibility.
A
similar ambivalence is shown in Mr Biswas’s religious views. Although he claims
to rejects any traditional Hindu attitudes, such as the rigid caste system, he
enjoys his Brahmin status when at Tara’s and Ramchand’s homes, and possesses a
certain fastidiousness about foods and
smells- he refuses to stock salt beef and lard in his shop at That Chase, and
in moments so fear and stress he chants Hindu phrases. He also receives a
traditional Hindu cremation. Naipaul is showing us here the complex
relationship that exists between the forces that shape an individual and his
attempts to form his own personality and beliefs.
Mr
Biswas displays also a certain naivety or innocence in the judgements he forms
of other people. It seems that he can be easily misled by people who can take
advantage of his fears and ambitions. This deception happens with Moti and the
lawyer Seebaran at The Chase; with the carpenter, Maclean, at Green Vale; and
with the solicitor’s clerk. At Hanuman House also he is deceived into thinking
that he is marrying into a wealthy family and will receive a large dowry, but
this hope proves hollow. A further concept that Naipaul is illustrating in the
novel is the difference that can exist between appearance and reality, and this
contrast is often a source of humour. The walls of Hanuman House appear to be
concrete, but are in fact, as Mrs Tulsi proudly tells him, made of clay bricks.
This disparity is shown most clearly in the house in Sikkim Street which again
looks deceptively solid and deceives Mr Biswas, and then, comically, the Tutties.
Mr
Biswas himself is not all that he appears to be. As he says sadly to Shama:
‘That is the whole blasted trouble. I don’t look like anything at all.
Shopkeeper, lawyer, doctor, labourer, and overseer- I don’t look like any of
them.’ As one of the Tulsi sons-in –law and as a journalist he can achieve a
kind of status, but has always to return to his ‘crowded, shabby room’. During
his job as investigator of Deserving Destitute, he reflects that the conditions
he is living in are as bad as the people about whom he is writing. This element
of vulnerability and luck of certainty help to make Mr Biswas into a human and
sympathetic person, as well as a kind of Everyman with whom we can identify.
This also explains his words to his son during his breakdown at Green Vale when
Anand asks him in a bewildered way ‘Who are you?’ Mr Biswas replies: ‘I am just
somebody. Nobody at all. I am just a man you know.’ Thus he resents, as we all
do, the attempts of other people to categorise him and so reduce his
individuality. He even alters his daughter’s birth certificate where he is
described by Seth as a labourer, and signs himself ‘proprietor’.
His
attempts at self-definition, then, constitute the main body of the novel. By
finally owning his own house away from the Tulsis, who are described at the end
of the prologue as ‘that large, disintegrating and indiffent family’, he has
succeeded in laying claim to his portion of the earth and escaped the fate of
having ‘lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.’
Mrs Tulsi:-
Mrs Tulsi is the centre of the Tulsi
family around which the other characters revolve. She is the widow of Pundit
Tulsi, a respected figure both in his native India and in Trinidad, and the
whole family again prestige from his reputation. Mrs Tulsi maintains a
matriarchal tyranny over the household and its various members. It is
significant that in Hanuman House, the usual Hindu tradition by which daughters
go to live with their husbands and become almost servants of their mother-in
law is reversed, in that the husbands stay in that the husbands stay in the
daughters’ household and become subservient to their mother-in law, Mrs Tulsi.
This is part of the humiliation which Mr Biswas feels so strongly and tries to
reject. The manipulation which Mrs Tulsi directs towards those around her is
clearly concealed under an appearance of martyrdom and suffering. If someone
steps out of line, she faints and retires to the Rose Room where she is
endlessly massaged by the faithful Sushila and other daughters, and remains
there until the offending son-in-law, who encounters silence and hostility on
all sides, is forced to capitulate and apologise to her.
Mr
Biswas is on many occasions subject to the whims and emotional blackmail of the
‘old fox’. She is able to control her moods according to the occasion, to
become maudlin and sentimental to disarm her opponent. This is shown when she
tries to win Mr Biswas back to family allegiance after the birth of Savi, whom
he wishes to name Lakshmi. She makes a number of simple statements which strike
Mr Biswas as possessing a ‘puzzling profundity’, and he finds himself listening
against his will and being ‘trapped’ by her mood. She is proud of her authority
and her ‘old-fashionedness’, and the floggings she has administered to her
command of English. When Mr Biswas offends against the Tulsi demand for the
suppression of individuality by buying the large doll’s house for Savi, Mrs
Tulsi declares that she is poor and gives to all but cannot ‘compete with Santa
Claus’ and she asks Shama to give her notice before moving to ‘her mansion’.
Like her brother-in –law Seth, who rules with her, she is capable of surprising
crudity in her language as when she tells Mr Biswas to ‘go to hell’ during
their final quarrel.
The
novel shows the decline of the Tulsi family which is caused by internal wrangles
and the disruptive effects of a different culture. Mrs Tulsi is anxious for her
sons to succeed and sends them to a Roman Catholic collage, thus compromising
her Hindu beliefs- as Mr Biswas is quick to point out with his image of her as
‘the orthodox Roman Catholic Hindu’ who has salmon only on Good Friday. Mrs
Tulsi moves to Port of Spain when she feels that the ‘younger god’ Owad should
be looked after during his schooling following his brother’s marriage. It is at
this point that the power structure in Hanuman House begins to be threatened,
since Seth, though he can maintain control, fails to impose harmony. The family
feud with Seth furthers the declaim of the household, and when Owad is sent abroad to study to become a doctor,
Mrs Tulsi appears to lose interest in the family and ceases to direct it until
she is revived by the move to short hills. Here again, however, her interest
soon languishes, though she issues some directives about food and possible
economies. We are told that, after the death of Mrs Tulsi’s sister, Padma, the
‘virtue’ of the family dissolves, and Mrs Tulsi assumes more and more the role
of an invalid. She is still able to exert control over her daughters, and on
her move to the city from short hills, succeeds in making their lives a misery
as she develops her command ‘of invective and obscenity’. She is revived by the
return of Owad, and exerts herself to please him while her health improves
‘spectacularly’ under his treatment, thus betraying, thus betraying her obvious
hypochondria. After Owad is alienated by the quarrel with Anand and his
increasing association with his own friends and Dorothy’s cousin, she tries in
vain to win him back by talking about his boyhood and Pundit Tulsi and her own
sufferings; but it is now too late. She is a character for whom the reader
feels little sympathy, but she is a source of much humour and satire in the
novel, as well as showing the decline of traditions through her failure to
maintain them. We also see, though her involvement with Roman Catholicism, the
dilution of Hindu culture and religious ritual.
