Matters
Arising Trinidad Guardian March 25, 1987
By
Kenneth Ramchand
Seepersad Naipaul:
His Own Write
'The community in which he
had grown up was dissolving into the
vulgarity and directionlessness of the larger society'
vulgarity and directionlessness of the larger society'
It is fitting to remember the man who, as
Chaguanas correspondent of the Trinidad Guardian, brought drama to a dull job, and excitement to the passive countryside.
Seepersad Naipaul
(1906 - 1953) had been contributing articles on Indian topics to the Trinidad Guardian since 1929, but he
flourished as their man in Central, between 1932 and 1934 when he formed a
manic collaboration with the Editor, Gault MacGowan, an expatriate brought out to modernise the newspaper, and to
make it more competitive with the well-established Port-of-Spain Gazette.
Seepersad Naipaul's
articles included news of births,
deaths,accidents, quarrels, woundings, beatings, village feuds and
family vendettas. (Seepersad was not above using his position to report on
people who were troubling him, like his in-laws, for example.) There were also dramatised accounts of courtroom proceedings,road board meetings, public gatherings and election battles.
A character himself,
Seepersad was interested in odd or extraordinary characters: a woman 112 years old who had seen
slaves being lashed and shipped; a Hindu doing penance by the river; and a man they called Robinson Crusoe. This
Robinson set out from Chaguanas to discover an overland route to Tobago,
reminding those who mocked him (one imagines him as pained by the faithless as
is Leroy Clarke in our time) that people had laughed at Christopher Columbus
too.
Using pseudonyms like
"The Pundit", "Paul Nye", and "Paul Pyre" and
responding to MacGowan's appetite for the manic thrill,he elaborated a style that moved jauntily to the comic and themacabre; and he indulged in a sensationalist attitude which often
took liberties with the facts. It went, as they say, like a bomb. Guardian sales were
rising.
took liberties with the facts. It went, as they say, like a bomb. Guardian sales were
rising.
The high point was
reported in the New York Herald Tribune of June 24, 1933 in a story under
the following headlines: "REPORTER SACRIFICES GOAT TO MOLLIFY HINDU GODDESS: Writer kowtows to Kali to escape black magic death."
When a clipping of
this item was sent to V.S. Naipaul by an American journalist in 1970, the author explained it,
plausiblyenough, as "probably one of MacGowan's joke stories, with my father
trying to make himself his own news." In 1972, Vidia Naipaul checked the
back numbers of the Trinidad Guardian and found that it was not a joke. There
is some history to recount.
There was an outbreak
of paralytic rabies in the 1930’s, and
Hindu cow- minders
found it hard to pay nearly a whole day's wage for a vaccination to which, in any case, they had religious objections. Instead, they performed a goat sacrifice to the goddess Kali.
found it hard to pay nearly a whole day's wage for a vaccination to which, in any case, they had religious objections. Instead, they performed a goat sacrifice to the goddess Kali.
Young Seepersad
Naipaul had already begun to feel that the Indian community was stagnant and backward in some of
their practices. He was sympathetic to a reforming movement from India
called the Arya Samaj, and was encouraged into controversy with local die-hards
and ignorant conservatives by the thirsty MacGowan. It was as a reformer
outraged by "superstitious" practices that Seepersad Naipaul filed his
critical Guardian report.
Ten days later, he
received a threatening letter written in Hindi: He would be poisoned on a
Saturday, would die on a Sunday, and would be buried on the Monday unless he
appeased Kali by carrying out the very sacrifice he had so ridiculed. He had seven days in which to comply,
or else.
For the whole of the
next week, Seepersad Naipaul was
the news. He was given police
protection since, clearly Kali didn't write the letter. But he was not
going to yield to superstition.
His wife urged compromise for the sake of the children.
Friends begged him to relent. On the Saturday of the deadline,
Seepersad Naipaul who knew Chaguanas Indians, and who was just that little bit afraid of
Kali, perhaps, travelled to Curepe and sheepishly made the sacrifice.
Gault MacGowan sent a
top reporter to cover the event, and Seepersad provided his own insider's
commentary. The following day, by
some leak or miracle, The New York Herald Tribune carried the story.
MacGowan and Seepersad
seem to have egged each other on from the start of their relationship.
MacGowan was a character.
Soon, however, the Guardian could put up with his swash-buckling
methods no more.
Besides, he championed
causes that clashed with their business
interests too often. MacGowan appears to have been persuaded that there was a connection, as postulated by Dr. Pawan, between bats and paralytic rabies. This led to a number of flighty articles about 'mad bats' in
the place, and this was not the best thing for the tourist trade.
interests too often. MacGowan appears to have been persuaded that there was a connection, as postulated by Dr. Pawan, between bats and paralytic rabies. This led to a number of flighty articles about 'mad bats' in
the place, and this was not the best thing for the tourist trade.
The Port-of-Spain
Gazette took offence:"Scaremongering MacGowan libels Trinidad in two
continents."
The Port-of-Spain
Gazette was sued by MacGowan, and they had to pay. Then MacGowan sued the Chairman of his own newspaper,
reporting the proceedings in the Guardian. The suit was unsuccessful, and when his contract ended,
the
Guardian let him go. With MacGowan's departure in 1934, Seepersad's merry reign came to an end.
Guardian let him go. With MacGowan's departure in 1934, Seepersad's merry reign came to an end.
Not long afterwards he
became ill. Vidia Naipaul reports
his mother as saying: "He
looked in the mirror one day and couldn't
see himself. And he began to scream."
see himself. And he began to scream."
Seepersad returned to
the Guardian later and worked as a journalist up to his death in 1953. He was
the first person of Indian origin to be a major writer in a ‘mainstream’ or
‘national’ paper so-called. His journalism records the changes taking place in
the Indian community; the errors and confusions into which it was falling in its ignorance about itself and its past,
and its inability or unwillingness to propel or project itself into
the
future.
future.
Seepersad Naipaul was
disturbed by what was happening to the Indian community, and disturbed about his place in it or in the world. The community in which he was born in
1906 was embedded in a Mother India whose rituals and mores it thought it
was reproducing in a diverse Trinidad environment which excluded them
or which they tried to ignore.
During his lifetime,
hard knowledge of Indian religion and philosophy and even of the language had
begun to fade. At this stage, however, many preferred "to grow up as ignorant Hindus than as intelligent Christians."
Later, the younger
ones would embrace modernity and become scornful of Indian ways. To many,
you could only become a Trinidadian if you denied any and all connection
with India.
Ten years after the
Kali episode, Seepersad published, at his own expense, a collection of stories called Gurudeva and OtherIndian Tales, and it is in these stories that the nostalgic
side of his attitude to his community receives emphasis.
The Port-of-Spain he
was writing out of was a new world without ritual, custom or ceremony.
The community in which
he had grown up was dissolving into the
vulgarity and directionlessness of the larger society.
"There are no
more elders," intones Walcott's Saddhu in the poem, "Is only old
people." With time roaring in
his ears, Seepersad Naipaul was finding, like Walcott's Saddhu, that there was nothing to turn to anymore.
So in Gurudeva and
Other Indian Tales, he created again the older community, celebrating it
not because its rituals and
ceremonies were alive but because they subscribed to the idea of ritual and
ceremony. The pancahyat
settled family disputes; the winding negotiations for an arranged wedding often
turn out to be the same as the path of true love. And in the story "They named him Mohun," a
story which he read to a gathering of the literati in Port-of-Spain, the first Naipaul shows the community celebrating the birth of a child.
Through its
participation in an ennobling ceremony, it is able to rise above anger of vindictiveness.
A welcome is eventually extended to the cruel and stingy father who turns up to claim his right according to
tradition (even though he had expelled thepregnant woman and her young
children) : "Is it written in the ancient books," he asks, "that at a
jubilationon the birth of a son the whole village should be invited, exceptthe father? Is it
written..."
But the short story
writer had not lost the powers of observation of the journalist. He writes flatly enough
about poverty, dispiritedness, and a weary acceptance of Fate in a story called "In the Village, " which was written after
the publicationof Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales.
In the continuation of
the Gurudeva epic into the post-war period, Seepersad's ironies leave us with no safe ground on which to stand. He satirises caste
feeling, uses Schoolmaster Sohun as a mouthpiece against fanaticism
("You people want to build a little Indian of your own in Trinidad"), and as a voice announcing a dilemma ("You cannot be entirely Oriental, nor entirelyOccidental"). Yet he turns satire against Sohun, too, as a mimic man who has "turned Christian for his own roti," and who has divorce himself ("you people") from other Indians.
Gurudeva, on the other
hand, has taken it upon himself to be a pundit, and to give up English.
Seeing flaws in every position, Seepersad Naipaul cannot help observing that "whereas his
(Gurudeva’s) bad English would be glaringly patent to many, his bad Hindi would be patent to none."
To this teacher comes
a spectacular pupil, Daisy Seetolal, Presbyterian and pretty, with high-heeled
shoes, plucked eyebrows and painted lips. This shockingly
modern girl ("good looks and dutty tricks") despised the local fellows in the day of the American soldiers at Carlsen Field.
Now suffering hard times like her city sisters, Jean and Dinah, she
stoops to the village swains.
Poor dreaming Guru
falls in love, and is bold enough to take his case to the panchyat who agree that he can have a second wife since his first wife is childless.But they insist that "the woman
forthwith gives up Angrezi ways."
They must be nuts,
according to the American-trained Daisy.
"Me?
Turn Hindu? Ha! Man, don't make me laugh. Me wear ghungri, and ohrani and chappals and long hair? Me
give up rouge and lipstick?"
The author’s sympathy
for the woman under the patriarchy makes us admire the courage and independence
of Daisy, her repudiation of the patriarchy as takes the first bus to Port-of-Spain and the unknown, leaving Guru to his games with the panchayat, to the barren
Ratni and to his souring dreams of another life.
Seepersad Naipaul
could turn a serious subject into a joke for MacGowan because it was easier to
do this than to look too deep and too long into the void. But he was too
much Naipaul to be able to fool himself either about his own dilemma or about the dereliction of his community. For a frightened man, he was brave. His
journalism and his short stories remain anaccurate and despairing representation of a community in crisis.
If in the end he was
confused by the confusion he saw and held up for posterity to see but he made it possible for his sons to
understand and pursue into wider and deeper regions the losses their father first started to bear.
In choosing to be a writer in Trinidad in the 1930s, he opened up to both his sons the possibility of writing as a reason for living.
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