Foreword

Summary

The idea for this book is an old one. I first read V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas in the third year of my undergraduate course at Delhi University in India. I did not particularly enjoy the book then. Later, when I came to Trinidad and read it again, I found in it a reflection of my interest in Indian writing in English. The book laid emphasis on documenting the everyday lives of Indo-Trinidadians in a joint family set-up. Its use of English and the familiarity of the subject matter helped me re-discover a deep-rooted Indian culture within Trinidad.

I am a recent migrant from India to Trinidad, a non-resident Indian (NRI), who shares strong ties with my motherland through internet access and social media platforms. As such, I am part of a huge NRI population overseas, but Trinidad is not a typical sought-after destination. A majority of the NRI population resides in the Middle East, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. My distance from these ‘diasporic metropolitan centres’ provides me with a unique standpoint from where I can negotiate postcolonial and postmodern discourse away from the typified Indian diaspora critic working in the US or UK academy. However, this book is neither ostensibly about me nor my diasporic point of view.

The book references an older diaspora that came to Trinidad over 178 years ago. That diaspora is no longer a diaspora but a strong community that is deeply enmeshed in the political, economic, social and cultural life of Trinidad. Stories abound about how the Indians were tricked into coming so far from home to Trinidad, or ‘Chini-dad’ as they called it. Vijay Mishra qualifies the differences between the older and the newer diaspora as between those who could not return and for whom India became a land in their imagination, distant and pure, and those who frequently return to the homeland, replenishing their connections to an actual India. My book, in a way, seeks new ways of bridging the gaps between the older and the newer diaspora.

I contend that reading Naipaul in Trinidad has made a difference because location, in spite of recent scholarship on globalisation, has to be lived to be felt.