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Eating and Identity in Postcolonial Fiction pp 39–103Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

‘Our Little Bastard World’: Food, History, and Identity in the Novels of V.S. Naipaul

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the role of food and eating in V.S. Naipaul’s novels The Mystic Masseur, A House for Mr Biswas, and The Mimic Men, reading them in relation to the work of Sidney Mintz, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, Vijay Mishra, Roberto Schwarz, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Lizzie Collingham and the discussions of food, eating, and identity in Naipaul’s own non-fictional works The Middle Passage and An Area of Darkness. It also offers a brief overview of the history of Trinidad and of Naipaul’s career and discusses in relation to Naipaul’s writings Samuel Selvon’s novel A Brighter Sun and M.G. Vassanji’s novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. Key topics addressed include creolization, decolonization, and the relationship between literary forms and social conventions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Selwyn R. Cudjoe’s full-length study V.S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading records that by 1988 there were ‘at least nine books, thirteen doctoral dissertations, and ten Master’s theses […] devoted to Naipaul’s work’ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p.4. The first full-length study of Naipaul’s work appeared in 1972, Paul Theroux’s V.S. Naipaul: An Introduction to his Work (London: Heinemann, 1972), followed by Landeg White’s V.S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (London/Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975). Helen Hayward’s The Enigma of V.S. Naipaul (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) is a more recent attempt to engage with Naipaul’s work as a whole. Naipaul himself has also written extensively about his own childhood and background, most notably in his ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’, included in Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (London: Deutsch, 1984). ‘Two Worlds’, his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, discusses his childhood in relation to the history of Trinidad and was published in PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association) 117.3 (May 1992), 479–86. See also The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French (London: Picador, 2008).

  2. 2.

    V.S. Naipaul, ‘Images’, New Statesman, 24 September 1965, pp.452–3 (p.452).

  3. 3.

    Kobena Mercer, ‘Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics’, in Identity, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), pp.43–71 (p.43).

  4. 4.

    The account of Trinidad’s history I offer here is drawn largely from Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969 (London: Deutsch, 1970); C.L.R. James, The Making of the Caribbean Peoples (London: Bogle L’Ouverture Publications, 1968); F.R. Augier, S.C. Gordon, D.G. Hall, and M. Reckord, The Making of the West Indies (London: Longmans, 1960); Bridget Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad 1783–1962 (Kingston/Port of Spain/London: Heinemann, 1981), and ‘Social Organisation and Class, Racial and Cultural Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Trinidad’, in Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. Kevin Yelvington (London/Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp.33–55; Franklin W. Knight and Colin A Palmer, eds., The Modern Caribbean (Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); as well as Naipaul’s own The Loss of El Dorado: A History (London: Deutsch, 1969).

  5. 5.

    V.S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Colonial Societies, corrected edn (London: Picador, 2002), p.49. He cites Audier et al., as the source of these figures. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

  6. 6.

    Judith M. Brown, Global South Asians: Introducing the New Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p.32. See also Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).

  7. 7.

    Viranjini Munasinghe, Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p.x.

  8. 8.

    Munasinghe, p.xi.

  9. 9.

    Munasinghe, p.x.

  10. 10.

    Ato Quayson, Postcolonialism : Theory, Practice or Process? (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p.2. Quayson’s definition of ‘postcolonialism’ is particularly useful for its inclusiveness. The intellectual genealogy he lays out complements that of Neil Lazarus in ‘Introducing Postcolonial Studies’ and discusses how various sets of concerns, drawn from Marxism, the writing and criticism of Chinua Achebe, Wilson Harris, Kamau Brathwaite, and Wole Soyinka from the 1960s on, and the appearance of ‘Third World intellectuals in the Western Academy’ (pp.2, 3) have all informed postcolonialism . See also the chapters ‘Introducing Postcolonial Studies’ by Neil Lazarus and ‘The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies’ by Benita Parry in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.1–16, 66–80. Some more recent debates and discussions around the term postcolonial are addressed in Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp.10–4 and Robert J.C. Young in Empire, Colony, Postcolony (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), pp.149–77.

  11. 11.

    Ngugi wa Thiong’o uses this phrase as the title of Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: Currey, 1986).

  12. 12.

    George Lamming, ‘A Trinidad Experience ’, Time and Tide, 5 October 1961, p.1657. Born in 1927, Lamming is the author of novels including In the Castle of My Skin (1953) and Of Age and Innocence (1958) as well as works of criticism including The Pleasures of Exile (1960).

  13. 13.

    V.S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur, int. Paul Edwards and Kenneth Ramchand (London: Heinemann, 1971). All subsequent page references are to this edition. Lamming’s comments would be less applicable to the short stories collected in Miguel Street (London: Penguin, 1971), which are set on an ethnically mixed street in Port of Spain, or Naipaul’s second novel The Suffrage of Elvira (London: Deutsch, 1958), which takes place during the 1950 general elections in an ethnically diverse district of Trinidad.

  14. 14.

    V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (London: Picador, 2002), p.30. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

  15. 15.

    Kamau Brathwaite , Contradictory Omens : Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Mona: Savacou, 1974), p.6. Brathwaite is developing the insights of his seminal earlier work The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

  16. 16.

    Sidney Mintz, Tasting Food , Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), pp.36–46 (pp.38, 40). Jeffrey M. Pilcher agrees with this hypothesis in ‘The Caribbean from 1492 to the Present’, in The Cambridge World History of Food, ed. Kenneth F Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), II 1278–88.

  17. 17.

    Verene A Shepherd and Glen L Richards, ‘Introduction’, in Questioning Creole: Creolization Discourses in Caribbean Culture, ed. Verene A Shepherd and Glen L Richards (Kingston/Oxford: Ian Randel/James Currey, 2002), pp.xi–xxvii (p.xxv).

  18. 18.

    As Selwyn Cudjoe glosses their responses, V.S. Naipaul, p.9.

  19. 19.

    See Wimal Dissanayake and Carmen Wickramagamage, Self and Colonial Desire: Travel Writings of V.S. Naipaul (New York/San Francisco: Peter Lang, 1993), p.vii. Rob Nixon indicts Naipaul on similar grounds in V.S. Naipaul: Postcolonial Mandarin (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Chris Searle’s ‘Naipaulacity’, Race and Class, 26.2 (Autumn 1984), 45–62. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London/New York: Verso, 1992), p.111.

  20. 20.

    Attempts to explore and theorize creolization in relation to the Caribbean’s communities of Indian origin can be found in Questioning Creole: Creolization Discourses in Caribbean Culture, ed. Verene A Shepherd and Glen L Richards, Selwyn Ryan’s The Jhandi and the Cross: The Clash of Cultures in Post-Creole Trinidad and Tobago (St Augustine: Institute of Social and Economic Studies, 1999) and Viranjini Munasinghe’s Callaloo or Tossed Salad?.

  21. 21.

    Brown, Global South Asians, p.63.

  22. 22.

    Vijay Mishra, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora : Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2007), p.91. The indentured labourer’s ‘weekly ration’, Mishra records, consisted of ‘rice, dhal, sugar, tea, dried fish, atta (flour), salt, oil, and half a pound (about 250 grams) of mutton at weekends’ (p.91).

  23. 23.

    Mishra, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, p.92. For these details Mishra credits G.M. Sammy, ‘Transitional Changes and Merging of the Eating Pattern of the Trinidad East Indian’, 3rd University of the West Indies Conference on East Indians in the Caribbean, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad, 28 August–5 September 1984.

  24. 24.

    Vijay Mishra, ‘The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora’, Textual Practice, 10.3 (Winter 1996), 421–447 (p.422).

  25. 25.

    Mishra , ‘The Diasporic Imaginary’, p.422. Mishra uses the term ‘diasporic imaginary’ to refer to ‘any enclave in a nation-state that defines itself, consciously, unconsciously or because of the political self-interest of a racialized nation-state, as a group that lives in displacement’ (p.423). For a complementary discussion and attempt to theorize ‘what is specific about contemporary diasporas’ see Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora : Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996), pp.15–6.

  26. 26.

    Mishra , The Literature of the Indian Diaspora , p.93. Mishra suggests that it is as a result of these associations that in Naipaul’s fiction food ‘is never something to be enjoyed or an occasion for celebration’ (p.93).

  27. 27.

    V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas, int. Ian Buruma (London: Penguin, 1992), p.409. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

  28. 28.

    See Mishra, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora , p.92, and Ramabai Espinet, ‘Representation and the Indo-Caribbean Woman in Trinidad and Tobago’, in Indenture and Exile: The Indo-Caribbean Experience, ed. Frank Birbalsingh (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 1989), pp.42–61.

  29. 29.

    Naipaul makes this point again, more explicitly, in his 1974 essay ‘Conrad’s Darkness and Mine’: ‘It came to me’, he writes, ‘that the great novelists wrote about highly organised societies. I had no such society; I couldn’t share the assumptions of the writers.’ V.S. Naipaul, ‘Conrad’s Darkness and Mine’, in Literary Occasions (London: Picador, 2011), pp.162–180 (p.168).

  30. 30.

    It is important to note that Naipaul is writing here about the still-colonial Trinidad of a particular historical moment at the turn of the 1960s. As Sara Suleri has commented, it is necessary to acknowledge the ‘extreme particularity’ of Naipaul’s ‘historical position’ when discussing his writings, to recognize that ‘Naipaul’s career represents a localized and singular moment in the multifariousness of postcolonial narrative ’ and that his writing lends ‘expression’ to a historically specific set of ‘linguistic and cultural crises’. Sara Suleri, ‘Naipaul’s Arrival’, in The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp.149–73 (pp.149, 150). Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, who suggests The Middle Passage is best understood as a work which deliberately intends through wilful ‘overstatement’ to ‘cut or provoke’, has similarly remarked upon ‘the obligation one feels, in writing about the Caribbean now, to show how deeply Naipaul’s provocation has been buried by history’. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Island People : The Caribbean and the World (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2017), p.11.

  31. 31.

    Among the things Naipaul laments about the perceived dissolution of the seemingly stable Indo-Trinidadian world of his childhood is the loss of a shared communal framework of social convention with which his fiction might work, in contrast to the early stories composed by his father, Seepersad Naipaul, which ‘are written from within a community and seem to be addressed to that community: a Hindu community essentially, which, because the writer sees it as a whole, he can at times make romantic and at other times satirize.’ See V.S. Naipaul, ‘Foreword to The Adventures of Gurudeva’, in Literary Occasions , pp.112–127 (p.120). ‘It is easier [for a reader] to enter any strong framework of social convention’, Naipaul remarks in The Middle Passage , ‘however alien’, than it is to engage with fiction which takes place in a setting where no such framework is seen by the author to pertain [64].

  32. 32.

    V.S. Naipaul, ‘London’, in V.S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (London: Deutsch, 1972), pp.9–16 (p.11).

  33. 33.

    Margaret Drabble, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature, revised fifth ed (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.696. Boyars , ‘V.S. Naipaul’, The American Scholar, 50 (Summer 1981), 359–67 (p.360). V.S. Naipaul, ‘London’, p.11. First published as ‘The Regional Barrier’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 August 1958, pp.20–46. ‘High Jinks in Trinidad’, anonymous review of A House for Mr Biswas , Times Literary Supplement, 29 September 1961, p.641. One of the fullest attempts to locate Naipaul’s writings in relation to different models of comic and satirical writing can be found in the chapter on ‘Naipaul’s Multidirectional Satire’ in John Clement Ball’s Satire and the Postcolonial Novel (London: Taylor and Francis, 2003), pp.41–4.

  34. 34.

    J.A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd edn (London: Penguin, 1992), p.170.

  35. 35.

    Cuddon, p.330.

  36. 36.

    We might note here in passing the extent to which the language of Naipaul’s non-fiction when he is writing about Trinidad—when, for example, he observes the ‘absurdity’ of an English restaurant on a Caribbean island serving bread and butter pudding or when he remarks in his 1965 essay ‘East Indian’ that ‘[t]o be an Indian from Trinidad is to be unlikely’ or suggests in The Middle Passage that ‘the Trinidadian’ is ‘a natural eccentric’ [77]—seems to invoke the spectre of the farcical, to hint an anxiety on Naipaul’s part that any attempt to write about such a society will inevitably begin to resemble farce.

  37. 37.

    Roberto Schwarz, ‘The Importing of the Novel to Brazil and its Contradictions in the Work of Alencar’, trans, John Gleeson, in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London: Verso, 1992), ed. John Gleeson, (pp.41–77), p.41.

  38. 38.

    Schwarz , p.42. Balzac appears among the list of novelists Naipaul mentions in his 1964 essay ‘Jasmine’ whose writings did not ‘work’ for him as a young reader, whose novels failed to survive the process of mental ‘adaptation’ and relocation to Trinidad to which all the books Naipaul read were necessarily subject. See V.S. Naipaul, ‘Jasmine’ in Literary Occasions , pp.45–52 (p.25).

  39. 39.

    Sara Suleri, ‘Naipaul’s Arrival’, p.149.

  40. 40.

    Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (London: Frank Cass and Co, 1968). All subsequent page references are to this edition. James Anthony Froude, The English in the West Indies or The Bow of Ulysses (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1888).

  41. 41.

    J.J. Thomas, Froudacity : West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained (1889), int. C.L.R. James (London/Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, 1969).

  42. 42.

    Lamming , The Pleasures of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960), p.225. In Naipaul’s defence, he had already made it clear, in a 1965 interview with Derek Walcott, that he did not consider his writing to be satirical at all: ‘I am not a satirist’, Naipaul claims, because ‘[s]atire comes out of a tremendous optimism’. ‘Satire is a type of anger’, he adds, whereas ‘Irony and comedy […] come out of a sense of acceptance’. Quoted in Ball, p.42.

  43. 43.

    Lamming , The Pleasures of Exile , p.225. All three writers were living in England at this time, Lamming and Selvon both having arrived in 1950. Born in 1924, Selvon’s best known novel is The Lonely Londoners 1956. On 12 March 1952, V.S. Naipaul’s father, Seepersad, wrote to him that ‘You know that Selvon is giving me some jitters. Can two persons be writing on the same themes and each be equally successful?’ (p.177). V.S. Naipaul, Letters between a Father and Son (London: Abacus, 2000), pp.177–8, 91–3.

  44. 44.

    Ahmad, In Theory, p.137.

  45. 45.

    Kedgeree ‘consists of rice garnished with onions, lentils and eggs. Fish was added by the British’ when they took up the dish in India. Larousse Gastronomique, general ed. Joël Robuchon (London: Hamlyn, 2001), p.646.

  46. 46.

    Champa Rao Mohan, Postcolonial Situation in the Novels of V.S. Naipaul (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2004), p.25.

  47. 47.

    Here The Mystic Masseur anticipates The Middle Passage , where Naipaul writes of ‘Indian weddings’ in Trinidad that: ‘There is little interest in the ritual; it is known only that at these weddings food is given to all comers’ [75].

  48. 48.

    See David Dabydeen, The Counting House (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2005).

  49. 49.

    Naipaul’s lack of interest in the cultural and social significances of food preparation (as opposed to food consumption) is also one of the ways in which his novels differ from those of the authors examined in subsequent chapters of this book, a point to which I shall return in my next chapter.

  50. 50.

    David Dabydeen, ‘West Indian Writers in Britain’, in Pak’s Britannica: Articles by and Interviews with David Dabydeen, ed. Lynne Macedo (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2011), (pp.86–105), p.88.

  51. 51.

    Dabydeen, ‘West Indian Writers in Britain’, p.88.

  52. 52.

    See Sharmila Sen, ‘Indian Spices Across the Black Waters’, in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies, ed. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), pp.185–99 (pp.194–5). See also Rajkumari Singh, ‘I am a Coolie’, Heritage, 2 (1973), 24–7.

  53. 53.

    V.S. Naipaul, ‘London’, p.11.

  54. 54.

    The similarity has been previously noted by John Thieme in ‘Rama in Exile: The Indian Writer Overseas’, included in The Eye of the Beholder: Indian Writing In English, ed. Maggie Butcher, (London: Commonwealth Institute, 1983), pp.65–74. Thieme suggests simply that Naipaul’s account is ‘one of a number of comic set-pieces [in the novel] which satirise Hindu rites’, while Selvon’s ‘account is […] more neutral’ (both 67). Arun Kumar Mohanty refers to Thieme’s article in his discussion of literary depictions of the Indo-Trinidadian community Between Two Worlds: A Study of the East Indian of Characters in V.S. Naipaul’s Fiction (New Delhi/Bhubaneswar: Prachi Prakashan, 1997), p.42.

  55. 55.

    Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, p.225.

  56. 56.

    Roydon Salick, ‘Introduction’, in A Brighter Sun, ed. Roydon Salick (New York: Longman, 1985), pp.i–xvii (p.iv).

  57. 57.

    Samuel Selvon, A Brighter Sun (New York: The Viking Press, 1953), pp.3, 4. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

  58. 58.

    Sam Selvon , ‘Three into One Can’t Go—East Indian, Trinidadian, Westindian’, in India in the Caribbean, ed. David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (Warwick: Hansib, 1987), pp.13–24 (p.15).

  59. 59.

    Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989), p.61.

  60. 60.

    Naipaul, ‘London’, p.9.

  61. 61.

    ‘Meetai’ is glossed by Roydon Salick as ‘sweetmeats’ (Salick, p.xvi)—although it may be worth noting that whereas the word meethai is used in contemporary Trinidad to refer to one specific kind of sweet, in India it is used to describe a wide range of different types of sweet and dessert. Indeed, this is a shift in signification which prompts the Indo-Trinidadian narrator of the Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian writer Shani Mootoo’s short story ‘Out on Main Street’ to reflect upon the cultural distance between herself—a ‘kitchen Indian’ who eats at home ‘some kind a Indian food every day’—and the owners of the Indian restaurants and sweet shops she and her partner visit on a trip in Port of Spain: ‘I used to think I was a Hindu par excellence’, she comments, ‘until I come up here and see real flesh and blood Indian from India’ (47). In fact, as it turns out, the owners of the shop she visits in the story, the ones confused by her request for meethai, are Indians from Fiji—and throughout Mootoo’s story the different ways in which the narrator and her partner identify themselves with and differentiate themselves from the other characters they encounter in the sweet shop and on Main Street prompt the reader to reflect both upon the multiple different kinds of group affiliation which any given Trinidadian citizen might claim—as part of an ethnic community, a religious one, a national one, along the lines of gender, or according to regional and local loyalties—and also the ways in which the boundaries of such imagined communities are drawn and by whom. Mootoo’s story is also a salutary reminder of the ways in which sexuality—the narrator and her partner are both female—might complicate such affiliations offer another form of group identification, in ways unhinted at in the work of either Selvon or Naipaul. See Shani Mootoo, ‘Out on Main Street’, in Out on Main Street (Vancouver: Press Gang, 1993), pp.45–57 (p.45).

  62. 62.

    A reading of the novel complementary to my own is offered by Sarah Lawson Welsh in ‘Caribbean Cravings: Literature and Food in the Anglophone Caribbean’, in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food, ed. Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien (New York: Routledge, 2018). Walsh also explores the gendering of domestic labour in the novel and in fiction by Indo-Caribbean women including Lakshmi Persaud’s novels Sastra (1993) and Butterfly in the Wind (2009) and Ramabai Espinet’s short story ‘Indian Cuisine’ (1994).

  63. 63.

    Gordon Rohlehr, ‘The Ironic Approach: The Novels of V.S. Naipaul’, in The Islands in Between: Essays on West Indian Literature, ed. and int. Louis James (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp.121–39 (p.124).

  64. 64.

    The mismatched and eccentric outfits of those diners who have refused to wear evening dress is reflected in Naipaul’s suggestion in The Middle Passage that since ‘there is no set way in Trinidad of doing anything’, the Trinidadian is: ‘a natural eccentric, if by eccentricity is meant the expression of one’s own personality, unhampered by fear of ridicule or the discipline of a class’ [71].

  65. 65.

    Paul Edwards and Kenneth Ramchand, ‘Introduction’, in V.S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur (London: Heinemann, 1971), p.viii–ix.

  66. 66.

    As Champa Rao Mohan notes, this is the last time Ganesh appears in ‘traditional clothes’ in the novel: ‘Soon after the dinner episode, Ganesh shifts to Port of Spain, where he stops wearing dhoti and turban altogether.’ Champa Rao Mohan, Postcolonial Situation in the Novels of V.S. Naipaul (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2006), p.32. Ganesh’s decision to attend the dinner at Government House in (his own idiosyncratic version of) traditional dress is of a piece with his announced intention to eat in the same way he would at home rather than accepting the superiority of European table manners. This sartorial shift thus reflects both Ganesh’s adaptation to more urbanized and less ethnically marked habits of dress and a new stage in his transformation from mystic to man of protest to colonial apologist. Ganesh’s wearing of a dhoti in this setting is also, we might suspect, an attempt to align or identify himself with Gandhi —and I shall be exploring Naipaul’s interest in the politics of diet in Gandhi’s own writings in this book’s conclusion.

  67. 67.

    Edwards and Ramchand, p.xi.

  68. 68.

    Arthur Calder-Marshall, Glory Dead (London: Michael Joseph, 1939), p.277. Naipaul discusses Calder-Marshall at length in A Way in the World (London: Heinemann, 1994) in the chapter ‘Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties’ (pp.69–103). The Legislative Council is discussed in Reinhard W Sander’s The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen-Thirties (New York/Westport, CT/London: Greenwood Press, 1988), p.20.

  69. 69.

    V.S. Naipaul, ‘Foreword’, in A House for Mr Biswas (London: Deutsch, 1984), p.3.

  70. 70.

    The word ‘Tulsi’ itself, the Hindi for ‘basil’, appears in the next in the context of the puja ceremony [51], highlighting the Tulsis’s much vaunted Brahmin status and traditionalism.

  71. 71.

    Homi Bhabha , ‘Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism’, in The Theory of Reading, ed. Frank Gloversmith (Sussex, NJ: Harvester/Barnes and Noble Books, 1984), pp.93–122 (pp.116–7).

  72. 72.

    Selwyn R. Cudjoe , ‘V.S. Naipaul and the Question of Identity’, in Voices From Under: Black Narrative in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. William Luis (Westport, CT/London: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp.89–99 (p.91).

  73. 73.

    Landeg White, V.S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction, pp.96–7.

  74. 74.

    White, pp.66, 65.

  75. 75.

    Homi Bhabha, ‘Representation and the Colonial Text’, p.117.

  76. 76.

    Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1830–1890 (London/New York: Longman, 1993), p.133. Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) was the author of Self-Help (1859) and The Lives of the Engineers (1867/1874), among many other texts.

  77. 77.

    Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1997), p.1.

  78. 78.

    Although we should not forget that it was his Brahmin caste which made Biswas a suitable Tulsi husband in the first place.

  79. 79.

    Richard B Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775, p.14.

  80. 80.

    Sidney Mintz notes that this was a relationship political independence did little to change. Of sugar he writes: ‘The product in question continued to flow to the metropolises, while the products obtained in exchange—food, clothing, machinery and nearly everything else—continued to flow to the “backward” areas.’ Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985), p.71. Naipaul directly engages with the effects this relationship has on the decolonizing state in The Mimic Men . On the history of canning and the enthusiastic reception of tinned food in the colonies of the British Empire, see Lizzie Collingham, The Hungry Empire , pp.176–7.

  81. 81.

    Critics including Viranjini Munasinghe and Steven Vertovec have critiqued attempts to give ‘functional explanations for the persistence of traditional forms’, such as the Hindu extended family in Trinidad. They argue that the family structure must be understood as what Munasinghe calls ‘a result of […] processes that took place within Trinidad’ rather than as ‘the passive retention of north Indian traditional forms’. Munasinghe, Callaloo or Tossed Salad , p.156. She cites The Middle Passage and A House for Mr Biswas in her discussion of the structuring of such families (pp.154–5). See also Steven Vertovec, Hindu Trinidad: Religion, Ethnicity and Socio-Economic Change (London: Macmillan, 1992).

  82. 82.

    Larousse Gastronomique, p.73.

  83. 83.

    White, V.S. Naipaul, p.96.

  84. 84.

    Matthew 25:35, The New English Bible (Swindon: Bible Society, 1988).

  85. 85.

    George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, p.39.

  86. 86.

    Reinhard W Sander, The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature, p.150.

  87. 87.

    Sander, p.9.

  88. 88.

    Sander further notes that ‘In 1947 the group published an anthology of the work of its members entitled Papa Bois, […] Seepersad Naipaul’s contribution […] was a short autobiographical piece’, ‘They Named Him Mohun’ (Sander, p.150). As has been widely noted, this story was ‘cannibalized’ by V.S. Naipaul, and provided the opening scene of A House for Mr Biswas. See V.S. Naipaul’s Foreword to Seepersad Naipaul’s The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories (London: Deutsch, 1976). V.S. Naipaul’s relationship to his father’s work is discussed in John Thieme’s The Web of Tradition (Hertford, England: Dangaroo Press/Hansib Publishing Limited, 1987), and in White’s V.S. Naipaul (pp.26–45 and 92–7).

  89. 89.

    Homi Bhabha, ‘Representation and the Colonial Text’, p.114.

  90. 90.

    We might contrast Naipaul here with the H.G. Wells of The History of Mr Polly , who is writing in what is often a self-consciously Dickensian manner about Late Victorian and Edwardian England but whose text registers no such strain between the somewhat anachronistic fictional mode adopted and the social setting depicted.

  91. 91.

    V.S. Naipaul, ‘Speaking of Writing’, Times, 2 January 1964, p.11 (p.11).

  92. 92.

    Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India , pp.150, 151. It may be worth noting that the eponymous third chapter of Suleri’s own memoir Meatless Days is structured as a sequence of memories of food, examining Suleri’s memories of the domestic arrangements and eating habits of her Lahore childhood, on discussions of ‘the eating habits of the motherland’ and their significance for expatriates, and the relationship between food and the body. Sara Suleri, Meatless Days (London: Collins, 1990), p.22. This chapter has been discussed at length both in Anita Mannur’s Culinary Fictions : Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture and in Parama Roy’s Alimentary Tracts : Appetites, Aversions and the Postcolonial, with Roy praising Meatless Days as a ‘matchless example of the text that illustrates the potential and the challenges of thinking colonialism and postcoloniality through and with alimentation’, while Mannur focuses on the ways in which Suleri’s ‘nostalgically rendered histories’, by marginalizing ‘cooks’ and ‘servants’ as narrative ‘nonactors’, fail to interrogate their own ‘class-based implications’. See Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts : Appetites, Aversions and the Postcolonial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp.162–4, 191–4 (p.193) and Anita Mannur, Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), pp.36–40, 48 (pp.40, 48). As a memoir rather than a novel, Meatless Days is unfortunately outside the scope of my discussion here.

  93. 93.

    Fredric Jameson, quoted in Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1 (January/February 2000), 54–69 (p.58). There are also, of course, clear parallels with the work of Roberto Schwarz here.

  94. 94.

    Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, p.58.

  95. 95.

    Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (London: Virago, 1993), p.24.

  96. 96.

    Frantz Fanon, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, The Wretched of the Earth , trans. Constance Farrington, int. Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Penguin, 1990), pp.119–65. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

  97. 97.

    Renu Juneja, Caribbean Transactions: West Indian Culture in Literature (London/Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996) p.13.

  98. 98.

    V.S. Naipaul, ‘Two Worlds’, p.485.

  99. 99.

    Daniel Miller, ‘Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink from Trinidad’, in The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating, eds. James L. Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp.54–69 (pp.57–8).

  100. 100.

    Witchbloom is a disease affecting cocoa. First discovered in Trinidad in May 1928, by 1932 it had affected 126,900 acres of cocoa. Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, p.209.

  101. 101.

    Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper, 1984), p.5.

  102. 102.

    Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p.2.

  103. 103.

    The horse sacrifice is described in The Rig Veda: An Anthology, ed. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (London: Penguin, 1981), 1.162, pp.89–93.

  104. 104.

    Suleri, p.149.

  105. 105.

    Robert K Morris, Paradoxes of Order: Some Perspectives on the Fiction of V.S. Naipaul (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975), p.60.

  106. 106.

    V.S. Naipaul, ‘London’, p.16.

  107. 107.

    M.M. Mahood and John Hearne have both seen ‘Garbage’ as mirroring Singh himself. M.M. Mahood, The Colonial Encounter (p.164). John Hearne, ‘The Snow Virgin: An Inquiry into V.S. Naipaul’s “The Mimic Men”’, Caribbean Quarterly, 23.2/3 (June–September 1977), 31–7 (p.36).

  108. 108.

    James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1992), p.233. Naipaul quotes A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Middle Passage, p.167.

  109. 109.

    V.S. Naipaul, quoted by Ian Hamilton in ‘Without a Place’, Times Literary Supplement, 30 August 1971, pp.897–8 (p.897).

  110. 110.

    Rob Nixon, London Calling, p.37.

  111. 111.

    Lizzie Collingham, The Hungry Empire, p.264.

  112. 112.

    Collingham, The Hungry Empire, pp.264, xv, xvi.

  113. 113.

    Collingham, The Hungry Empire, p.193.

  114. 114.

    This is also an issue Naipaul seeks neatly to sidestep in his novel Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963), which is set in England and structured around a series of dinner parties. In contrast to the novels that preceded and followed it (A House for Mr Biswas and The Mimic Men), Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, the only one of Naipaul’s novels in which all the characters are middle-class white English people, makes almost no mention of the food they are eating at all.

  115. 115.

    The Middle Passage, p.33. Tacitus, Agricola and Germany, trans. And int. A.R. Birley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.17.

  116. 116.

    Suleri, p.149.

  117. 117.

    Joyce, p.276.

  118. 118.

    Quoted in Dolly Zulakha Hassan, V.S. Naipaul and the West Indies (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), p.250. Discussed by John Clement Ball, Satire and the Postcolonial Novel, p.43.

  119. 119.

    John Clement Ball, Satire and the Postcolonial Novel, p.44.

  120. 120.

    V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (London: Penguin, 1980), p.120. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

  121. 121.

    More popular is the new ‘Bigburger’ franchise that opens in the town (p.104). The financial arrangements of both restaurants are explained to the narrator near the end of the novel (p.266).

  122. 122.

    V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State (London: Picador, 2002), pp.165–204. In a Free State describes itself as ‘a novel with two supporting narratives’, bookended with a prologue and epilogue apparently drawn from Naipaul’s own journals.

  123. 123.

    V.S. Naipaul, Guerrillas (London: Picador, 2002), p.95, 234. The use of this term to describe sexually active women is also used elsewhere in the novel (e.g. p.108).

  124. 124.

    V.S. Naipaul, Half a Life (London: Picador, 2001), p.73. Despite the two brief incidents referred to in the introduction, Half a Life makes no extended attempt towards the complex depiction of food that characterizes the novels examined in this chapter.

  125. 125.

    There is no mention of food, for example, in Suleri’s elegantly nuanced reading of A Bend in the River in The Rhetoric of English India, pp.154–7. It is also worth noting that in all three of the novels discussed here the central characters are outsiders to the community or society which is being depicted. Nowhere in A Bend in the River , for example, do we hear what the ‘river Africans’ of the region think about their food or any hint of what it might signify for them—all we are given is an urban onlooker’s revolted reaction to it. In both Guerrillas and In a Free State , it is striking the extent to which the central protagonists eat communally only with other expats and Europeans. To sum up the difference between these texts and those discussed in the rest of this chapter: if in The Mystic Masseur, A House for Mr Biswas , and The Mimic Men meals were used (however unsuccessfully) to imagine forms of social and communal solidarity, in Guerrillas , In a Free State , and A Bend in the River , food features almost exclusively as a means of dividing people, of imagining and expressing difference.

  126. 126.

    Munasinghe , pp.154–5. Daniel Miller, ‘Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink from Trinidad’, pp.57–8. Selwyn Ryan, The Jhandi and the Cross, pp.16, 154. Kathleen M Balutansky and Marie-Agnés Sourieau, ‘Introduction’, in Caribbean Creolisation: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature and Identity, ed. Kathleen M Balutansky and Marie-Agnés Sourieau (Gainesville, FL/Barbados: University Press of Florida/Press University of the West Indies, 1998), pp.1–11 (p.6).

  127. 127.

    Homi K Bhabha , ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in The Location of Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), pp.85–92 (all p.86).

  128. 128.

    Bhabha, p.89.

  129. 129.

    Moyez G Vassanji was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1950 and was raised in Tanzania. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, before settling in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of seven novels, of which The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is the fifth.

  130. 130.

    M.G. Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2004). All subsequent pages references are to this edition. Similarly Vassanji’s Uhuru Street (1991), a collection of short stories set on a single street in Dar es Salaam, models itself structurally on Naipaul’s Miguel Street , a collection of short stories set on a single street in Port of Spain.

  131. 131.

    Focusing on his earlier novels No New Land (1991) and to a lesser extent The Gunny Sack (1989), Dan Ojwang’s ‘“Eat Pig and Become a Beast”: Food Drink and Diaspora in East African Indian Writing’ offers a more detailed account than is here possible of the specific cultural, literary, and political contexts of the depiction of food in Vassanji’s fiction. See Dan Ojwang, ‘“Eat Pig and Become a Beast”: Food Drink and Diaspora in East African Indian Writing’, Research in African Literatures, 42.3 (Fall 2011), 68–87.

  132. 132.

    Similarly we might consider the advantages and limitations of reading these texts together as part of what Vijay Mishra has called ‘the literature of the Indian diaspora ’. Like Ralph Singh, like Naipaul himself, Vikram Lall is the third-generation descendant of indentured Indian labourers—and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall like The Mimic Men carefully presents itself as the product of a further displacement (to London or to Canada). As Avtar Brah reminds us, ‘It is axiomatic that each empirical diaspora must be analysed in its historical specificity’—see Cartographies of Diaspora : Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996), p.183—but we might also consider the ways in which such texts read in conjunction demand more nuanced models and understandings of such concepts as ‘home’ and ‘diaspora’ and anticipate recent critical discussions around the concepts of ‘transnationalism’ and ‘double diaspora’. See, for example, the essays collected in Diversities in the Indian Diaspora, ed. N. Jayaram (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities, ed. Kim Knott and Sean McLoughlin (London: Zed Books, 2010) and Vassanji’s novel No New Land, which follows a group of East African Indian emigrants as they adapt to life in Toronto.

  133. 133.

    It is striking, for example, that Vassanji’s novel works consistently to complicate the tendency of Naipaul’s novels to simplify identity categories and to present originary identities as less complex than diasporic ones. With their emphasis on divisions—of area of origin, of religious affiliation—The In-Between World of Vikram Lall reminds us that (in Avtar Brah’s words) ‘the homelands of diasporas’ themselves include ‘racial enclaves’ and ‘unassimilable minorities and other discrepant communities, and are not pure unified spaces in the first place’ (Brah, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora , p.5). Furthermore a recurring interest of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is relationships which cross racial, ethnic, religious, and caste boundaries—a subject almost entirely absent from the novels by V.S. Naipaul on which this chapter has focused—and in individuals who have crossed or unsettle the boundaries between communities, such as Sakina Molabux, a Masai woman who has married into a prominent family of Punjabi origin and who now wears ‘a shalwar-kameez and dupatta’, speaks Punjabi ‘fluently’ and cooks ‘formidable kheer, karhi, and dahi-wada’ (40).

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    Paul Vlitos

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Vlitos, P. (2018). ‘Our Little Bastard World’: Food, History, and Identity in the Novels of V.S. Naipaul. In: Eating and Identity in Postcolonial Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96442-3_2

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