Masculinity under Imperial Stress – Mr Biswas and V S Naipaul

Abstract

In Mr Biswas, Naipaul creates his most destitute of protagonists. Born into a community of Indian labourers on a sugar estate, in a remote village of Trinidad, Mr Biswas grows to face a life without prospects. Cut off as much from the distant homeland of his ancestors in India, as from the African society around them, the circumstances of Mr Biswas and his people are a direct outcome of colonisation, and Indians in Trinidad are among the twice colonised. Claiming to be of Brahamincal origin yet uneducated, caught in poverty and demeaning labour, East Indians living in West Indies, the circumstances Mr Biswas finds himself in are dire. His efforts to break out of this world to which he is politically and socially confined eventually crystallise into the one desire – to have a house of his own. The ownership of a house for Biswas is fundamental to establishing his identity as a man within the colonial context. This paper examines the impact of colonisation in the construction of masculinity in Mr Biswas, and insofar there are biographical parallels, and in Naipaul himself.