Author’s Bio:
Fariza Mohammed is a teacher at A.S.J.A. Boys' College, San Fernando.
Since she started teaching at this school thirteen years ago, she has taught
forms 1 all the way through to 6. During this academic year however, she is teaching
forms 2, 4, 5, and 6 - English A (language), English B (literature) and
Communication Studies. She earned her BA, Dip Ed and MA at the University of
the West Indies St Augustine. Her MA thesis on which the present paper is
based, entitled Karma, Sectarianism and Gender Matters in Three
Trinidadian Novels, was supervised by Dr J Vijay Maharaj, and this paper which
extends the ideas in the thesis is co-authored by her.
Title of Paper: The Naipauls’ Karma
Abstract:
As Brinsley Samaroo argues in his essay, “The
Indian Connection:” “The Westindian East Indians will be neither Westindian nor
East Indian until they first of all come to terms with themselves.” One of the
ways this coming to terms is urgently needed is with regard to the myriad ways
cultural concepts slowly transmogrify. An examination of the concept of karma is
undertaken to demonstrate the point. Karma impacts upon every aspect of a
Hindu-Trinidadian’s life. It is only through the commission of good actions
that an individual can earn good karma and possibly attain liberation. Bad
karma constrains one to repeated lives on earth, and not always as a human
being. In this essay, the changing conceptualisations of karma in V. S.
Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, and
Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies will
be discussed.
The Naipauls’ Karma
Brinsley Samaroo argues in his essay, “The Indian
Connection:” “The Westindian East Indians will be neither Westindian nor East
Indian until they first of all come to terms with themselves.” Coming to terms
with oneself is a huge undertaking in all circumstances and under conditions of
diasporic dislocation, it is particularly so, since this involves not just the
loss of the tangible but also of the intangible and includes cultural concepts
and patterns of thought and behavior. An examination of one such concept, the
concept of karma, as represented in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, and Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies is
undertaken to demonstrate the point.
In order to delve into the philosophical concept of karma in the
selected novels, it is necessary to have a working understanding of the term[1].
As Gananath Obeyesekere reminds us
in Imagining
Karma, the concept is by no
means confined to Eastern cultures and is as readily apparent in the Buddhist
as it is in the Amerindian and Greek cultures. Sarah Shaw on the other hand
examines the concept in terms of two South Asian traditions, Buddhism and
Jainism, and explains:
…for Jains, karma was conceived of as a
material substance that adhered to the soul and weighed it down, obscuring its
natural omniscience and bliss and keeping it from attaining moksa. All actions
bound karma, even those that were involuntary, thus in theory there was no such
thing as ‘good karma’. For Buddhists, on the other hand, karma was not
physical, though it was still a law of the universe. The early Buddhists viewed
karma in psychological terms, declaring that it was thirst or craving that led
to bondage, and that the fruit of karma depended upon the motivation behind the
action. In time these two opposing positions came closer together, as Jains
accepted the idea of meritorious action leading to better rebirth, and began to
place emphasis on the role of the passions in binding karma. Both the common
heritage and the differing understandings of karma and the appropriate
religious life are visible in the narratives preserved by each tradition. In
particular, stories of multiple lives, which abound in the literature of both
Buddhism and Jainism, have much to reveal about attitudes towards the
mechanisms of rebirth and the pursuit of religious goals. (4)
Examination along more traditional lines have been undertaken by
traditional Orientalist scholars like Herman Wayne Tull. Tull sets his own work
apart from early work however by observing that in the “nineteenth and early
twentieth century Indologists tended to view … presentations of the karma
doctrine in the Upanisads” within what he identifies as a “tendency among these
scholars to disparage “priestcraft,” a perspective rooted in the philosophy of
the Enlightenment.” He claims that “this tendency led scholars to separate the
Brahmanas, ritual texts par excellence and the exclusive possession of the
Vedic sacerdotalists, from the Upanisads, discursive texts that seek to express
the nature of reality” (2-3). His explanation of karma is thus as a doctrine of
ritual action:
After discussing how the deceased enters
into the various planes of the cosmos, a process that replicates the
dismemberment of the primordial man, the famed Brahmanic sage Yajñavalkya is
asked: “What then becomes of this person?” Yajñavalkya then enunciates the
doctrine of action (karman): “Indeed one becomes good by good action, bad by
bad [action].” In the context of Vedic ritual thought good and bad apparently
refer to a valuation of action based on ritual exactitude; good being equated
with the correct performance of the rite, bad with the incorrect performance….
This interpretation of the karma doctrine differs from the doctrine’s apparent
meaning in later texts, which propose that an individual attains a specific
state in the afterlife, or is reborn, according to the moral quality of all
sorts of actions performed prior to death. (2)
At present, in South Asian as
well as all other contexts, karma is commonly used
interchangeably with the word ‘fate’ or ‘fatalism,’ to represent belief in
something other than present human action as responsible for the events that
occur during one’s life. It is frequently used that way by V. S. Naipaul. For
example, in A Bend in the River (1979), although distanced from India in time and space by his family’s
long location in Africa as part of ancient Afro-Asian continental exchanges, the
protagonist Salim says:
I could no longer submit to Fate. My wish
was not to be good, in the way of our tradition, but to make good. But how?
What did I have to offer? What talent, what skill, apart from the African trading
skills of our family? This anxiety began to eat away at me. And that was why,
when Nazruddin made his offer, of a shop and business in a far-off country that
was still in Africa, I clutched at it. (136-7)
For Salim, fate and family tradition are one
and the same and are set in opposition to the ability to find a place in the
world for himself. To choose the former is to choose a sense of being good that
can clash with grasping opportunities to ‘make good,’ meaning to participate in
amassing material acquisitions. He therefore rejects the former for the latter,
only to discover that he does so to his own eventual detriment, since diasporic
social perceptions make family traditions a lot like fate and as inescapable.
However, in Hinduism, the concept of ‘fate’ is not
to be taken lightly, as it is more than karma and pregnant with meaning.
According to David Knipe in his essay “Hindu Eschatology” the Sanskrit term for
‘fate’ is daivam:
The word [daivam] is derived from deva (god), suggesting a divine
source. Often it carries ambiguity in the sense of chance as well as necessity.
Melded with the concept karma, daivam therefore implies that karmaphala, the
fruits of past human action, are by no means the sole determinative of one’s
individual status. (185)
Despite Knipe’s fairly straightforward definition
of fate and karma and attempt to show how they intertwine, it remains a fairly
astronomical task to attach one definitive meaning to the term karma. This
difficulty in defining karma is clearly outlined by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty in
the introduction to Karma and Rebirth in
Classical Indian Traditions. She reminds us for example that:
Ambivalence
in the very earliest texts may account for a number of persistent paradoxes,
contradictions, and inconsistencies in the various karma theories – paradoxical
statements about whether karma can or cannot be overruled, contradictory
statements about the interaction of fate and human effort. (4)
Despite such caveats however, karma is largely
understood in terms of a cycle of life everlasting. It involves a process
whereby the actions committed in one’s past life are seen to influence the kind
of life an individual will enjoy in his/her subsequent re-birth. Thus, good actions
will bring punya, roughly speaking – merits or rewards, whilst negative actions
result in paap which has no adequate translation in English but is rendered in
some texts as sin and punishment.[2]
For practicing Hindus today, explanations such as V. Jayaram’s may thus suffice:
The
law of karma is a simple and straightforward concept according to which beings,
not just men, are rewarded or punished according to their own actions and
intentions. The law of karma makes it abundantly clear that the solution to our
liberation lies in our own hands and how we go about it is left to ourselves.[3]
Based on these explanations, in this study, karma
is distinguished from daivam or fate which represents the idea of
pre-determined inevitable destiny, the idea that events are out of the realm of
human control. These two notions are complex parts of the philosophical context
influencing how a Hindu perceives the world.
While it cannot be pursued much further here it is
interesting to note that in Samuel Selvon’s A
Brighter Sun the philosophy of daivam is perhaps best summed up in the
phrase “what is to is, must is” (38). However Robert Jeremy Poynting in his
thesis, “Literature and Cultural Pluralism: East Indians in the Caribbean,”
talks about the forces against which Tiger rebels and surprisingly identifies
what this study considers as a representation of daivam to be ‘the creole
attitude’:
The
Indian way is to organize life along a predetermined route; practically, by
accepting the given means whereby a modest security can be achieved,
illusorily, by attempting to predict the outcome of any action, by consulting
the pundit, for instance. Having fixed notions about what ought to happen
inevitably sets up disappointments. Tiger, for instance, convinces himself that
their first child must be a boy. The creole attitude, frequently summed up by
Joe as ‘what is to is, must is’, becomes too often simply an excuse for
passivity and irresponsibility. (560)
Be that as it may, identifying the following as one of the most
important ways in which Samaroo’s concerns are obvious, this study is particularly
interested in the ways in which karma transmutes into fate, as much in the
sense of daivam as in the Western sense of fatalism in V S Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies.
One of the first occurrences in the novel A House for Mr. Biswas, and in terms of the post-indenture
chronology represented as well, is when Mr Biswas’s maternal grandfather, Bipti’s father, “futile with asthma, propped himself up on his string
bed and said, as he always did on unhappy occasions, ‘Fate. There is nothing we
can do about it’” (15). This sense of fate functions in A House for Mr. Biswas as
well as in Fireflies as metanarratives as defined by Mark Leffert.
According to Leffert, “Narratives
exist on two levels—as stories about life events and as stories about how the
world works. The latter, subjective personal metanarratives, exert enormous
control over the way people experience the world and live their lives.” (42) Daivam-fate
proves to be such a ‘subjective personal metanarrative.’
Moreover, as J. Vijay Maharaj argues in “A Mala in
Obeisance: Hinduism in Select Texts by V.S. Naipaul”:
[V. S. Naipaul’s] concern, as critics have
observed, is the individual’s ensnarement by aspects of Hindu philosophy,
particularly the idea of karma. However, contrary to the common critical claims
that Naipaul rejects karma, it can be shown that this is not so. He interrogates
the concept as “The Hindu killer, the Hindu calm, which tells us that we pay in
this life for what we have done in past lives,” but he also notes that it is an
injunction about “our duty to ourselves [and] our future lives.” Karma is a
mandate for acceptance of life’s events but it is not fatalism. It is also a
call to action since it is only through action taken now that one re-pays the
debts incurred in the past, ensures a quality life in the present and a better
life in the future. (127)
Initially, it is not karma in these terms, but fate-daivam
which makes its presence felt in V. S. Naipaul’s novel. His concern seems to be
that fate-daivam is often used as an excuse, an easy way out, a reason to
abdicate any kind of personal responsibility for one’s life. Mr. Biswas’ forefathers are depicted as
holding such strong beliefs in fate that it is used to virtually explain every
occurrence in their lives, almost to the point of absolving them from any
responsibility for anything. This is clearly the case with Mr. Biswas’
grandfather. Although: “No one paid him any attention” the narrator voices his
and the family’s acceptance that “Fate had brought him from India to the
sugar-estate, aged him quickly and left him to die in a crumbling mud hut in
the swamplands; yet he spoke of fate often and affectionately, as though,
merely by surviving, he had been particularly favoured” (15).
The tone implies that the act of merely surviving
is disdained by all and it provides a context for representations of characters
like Salim who will do anything in their power to do more than just survive. Naipaul
strongly condemns the kind of mentality exhibited by the grandfather. As
Maharaj observes:
Many
aspects of this brief scene negate the principle of action in the term karma
that the grandfather would have used. First of all, he is likely to be
suffering with asthma because of working on the plantations but he has never
taken a stand on this. Secondly, he is on a string bed that cannot add comfort
to his breathing. He has abdicated personal responsibility for his own health
and Naipaul suggests by the tone of the narrative that financial poverty is not
the only problem. There is a greater problem of poverty of mind and spirit.
(127)
Mr. Biswas’ grandfather is one of those individuals
who uses fate as a means of explaining away unfavourable things that happen. It
is as though he feels people have no control over the pace or direction of
their own lives, instead they are wholly controlled by outside forces. Naipaul
takes issue with this since it makes people seem like puppets and provides them
with an easy way out. They are therefore excused from being accountable for the
state of their own lives and the consequences of their actions and behaviour on
others.
Bipti, Mr. Biswas’ mother, is perhaps the character
that best personifies the deep sense of fatalism that permeates characterization
in the novel and renders Mr Biswas’s meagre achievements in epic proportions,
viz:
Mr.
Biswas was forty-six, and had four children. He had no money. His wife Shama
had no money. On the house in Sikkim Street Mr. Biswas owed, and had been owing
for four years, three thousand dollars. The interest on this, at eight per
cent, came to twenty dollars a month; the ground rent was ten dollars. Two
children were at school. The two older children, on whom Mr. Biswas might have
depended, were both abroad on scholarships. It gave Mr. Biswas some
satisfaction that in the circumstances Shama did not run straight off to her
mother to beg for help. Ten years before that would have been her first
thought. Now she tried to comfort Mr. Biswas, and devised plans on her own. (1)
On the other hand, regardless of what happens in
her life: the miserliness of her husband, the death of her husband and the
eventual separation of her family, Bipti attributes it all to the universal
force of fate. In one of his early arguments with Bipti, Mr Biswas vents his
anger towards her largely because of her fatalistic thinking. He deliberately
says things that will strike at her very core, but ends up having little impact
on her because she sees even his protests as being part of her fate, so there is
nothing she can do about her situation in life, or her relationship with her
children. He becomes impatient. ‘You have never done a thing for me. You are a
pauper.’ He had meant to hurt her, but she was not hurt. ‘It is my fate. I have
no luck with my children. And with you Mohun, I have the least luck of all.
Everything Sitaram said about you was true.’ (65)
Naipaul’s Mr. Biswas is thus depicted as coming
from a Hindu-Trinidadian background in which a strong sense of fatalism is
evident and this is compounded by a similar ethos in the Creole environment
into which he is born. References begin with his birth. He is “six-fingered,
and born in the wrong way” (15). To make matters worse, his time of birth is
midnight, a time that is often associated with all things inauspicious. From
his very entry into the world, Mr. Biswas’ existence is fraught with such problems.
The midwife, without hesitation makes the prediction that Mr. Biswas will “eat
up his own mother and father” based on his breeched birth (15).
In fact, throughout the novel the struggle that Mr.
Biswas deals with continuously can be spoken of as one between free will and
pre-determination. He struggles against the predictions made by the midwife and
the pandit at the time of his birth. The pandit after consultation of his
astrological manual determines that Mr. Biswas will have an unlucky sneeze, is
doomed to become a spendthrift and a lecher, and needs to be kept away from
water in its natural form. Mr. Biswas’ attempts to escape this unfortunate
horoscope are intensified, but seem like less of a possibility after his father
dies, at the juncture of many of these predictions, in search of him. His only
weapon in this fight seems to be his name, “Mohun”, a name the milkmaids gave
to Lord Krishna, and the only positive feature of his birth. His Krishna-like
fight against fate is continuous.
The novel thereby refutes Bipti’s assertions. Aside
from his role in his father’s drowning, which can in itself be seen as a
self-fulfilling prophecy, Mr. Biswas’ life does not fulfil his horoscope as
given by Pandit Sitaram. At every step, he fights against fate and is
determined to be the agent in the events that happen to him during his
lifetime. One may posit that his relentless pursuit of a house of his own is in
fact motivated by his struggle against a seemingly inevitable destiny. Mr
Biswas’ motto is indeed “paddle your own canoe.” (107)
Despite Mr Biswas’ motto being the subject of much
laughter within the Tulsi household, it nevertheless provides him with a
certain level of independence in a house that is almost an institution designed
to promote a hierarchical community and community traditions ahead of
individual needs. Even though he achieves independence fitfully and often
fleetingly, he still manages to take a stand in order to achieve certain things
in life. Thus, as the author proudly asserts, he is able, unlike many, to avoid
dying as he had been born “unnecessary and unaccommodated” (14).
The numerous efforts made by Mr Biswas throughout
the novel to make a home for himself, whether it was at The Chase, Green Vale,
Shorthills, Port of Spain and eventually at Sikkim Street, were ways of taking
action to defy the fatalistic attitude he had been immersed in since childhood.
He is actually doing something, not simply having life pass him by, and
essentially the entire novel is reflective of this tension. This view is echoed
by John Thieme in “An Introduction to A
House for Mr. Biswas” albeit without a sufficiently nuanced understanding
of the complex concepts of fate and action in Hindu philosophy:
The novel can be read as an allegory which
explores a central issue for contemporary Hinduism, the opposition between
western-style [sic] action and the quietism encouraged by the doctrine of
karma. For Naipaul resignation to karma is the central Hindu failing, an
attitude of mind which precludes any form of social action. (157)
In A House
for Mr Biswas the Tulsi family is representative of the kind of Sanatanist
Hinduism against which Mr. Biswas rebels. His rebellion against the Tulsis
begins from his very entry into the Tulsi household and can be viewed as the
catalyst for his eventual possession of a home of his own. In fact, had he not
fought, undermined and rebelled against them at every opportunity, he may not
have been given access to the various properties at The Chase, Green Vale,
Shorthills and Port of Spain, which prepared him somewhat for the final
possession of the one at Sikkim Street.
The Tulsis, like most members of Mr Biswas’ natal
family are resigned to a fatalistic outlook on the world, having adopted it
from Mr. Tulsi himself: “What is for you is for you. What is not for you is not
for you.” (165). This attitude is one Mr. Biswas frequently encounters in
Shama, who adopted it from her family. Indeed, nothing enrages Mr. Biswas more
than when he encounters that fatalistic attitude as a particular encounter with
Shama shows: “What is for you is for you,’ he mocked. ‘So that is your
philosophy, eh?’” (517). As should be evident, this philosophy of the Tulsi
family bears a striking resemblance to “what is to is, must is” in Selvon’s A Brighter Sun.
Despite the numerous obstacles he encounters along
the journey of life, Mr. Biswas never really gives up on his desire to own his
own home, and this singular drive is represented as his saving grace. Although
life from the very beginning has been a struggle for him, this rebellious
Krishna-like spark keeps him going. Eventually, he is able to achieve a certain
level of success, “paddling his own canoe.” Although his success is brief, as
he dies not long after buying his home, it nevertheless provides him with a
great sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. His feelings of accomplishment
are represented in the comment with which the novel opens:
He
was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the
audacity of it: to walk in through his own front gate, to bar entry to whoever
he wished, to close his doors and windows every night, to hear no noises except
those of his family, to wander freely from room to room and about his yard. As
a boy he had moved from one house of strangers to another; and since his
marriage he felt he had lived nowhere but in the houses of the Tulsis, at
Hanuman House in Arwacas, in the decaying wooden house at Shorthills, in the
clumsy concrete house in Port of Spain. And now at the end he found himself in
his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That
he should have been responsible for this seemed to him, in these last months,
stupendous. (8)
Shiva Naipaul treats with karma similarly
in Fireflies a
novel about the Khojas that can be seen in fact as a sequel to A House for
Mr Biswas and in a similar relation to it as A House for Mr Biswas has
for their father’s short story “They Named Him Mohun”. This novel begins as fellow-novelist
Amit Chaudhuri notes in the Foreword to the 2012 Penguin edition with “an
episode … where the sisters and relations of the clan have gathered at the
Khojas’ house for a cattha, or an annual religious celebration”:
No Khoja
function was ever considered complete without a beating. Any infringement of
the rules (they could be invented on the spur of the moment) could be made the
occasion for one of these entertainments, and children who were rarely beaten
at home would suddenly find themselves liable. The choice of the victim was, in
the normal run of things, capricious. At such times the sisters became unpredictable
forces and, a beating once administered, its influence percolated through the
clan. Several more victims were hastily assembled, although none could surpass
the grandeur of that first beating.
In Chaudhuri’s reading of the episode, he
foregrounds Shiva Naipaul’s representation of fate in words that are immensely
appropriate for the purposes of this essay. He is thus quoted at length.
Chauduri remarks:
This mixture of
random justice and predestination gives to Naipaul's fiction – in lieu of
straightforward linearity – a tantalising, slightly alarming, circular
musicality, a kind of pass-the-parcel sequence of shifting the weight from one
person, one centre, to another. Naipaul's themes are fate, dissolution, bad
luck; but he is also concerned with, beyond the story, the music – that is, a
span of time, constituting a narrative or a life, comprising pauses in which
the sword falls repeatedly, and in which nothing much is achieved. As a result,
the matter of fate and destiny is something he deals with in a way that’s
unique, and which bears no resemblance to the plotted narratives of others who’ve
had similar concerns…
The point could not have been expressed
better. Whereas V. S. Naipaul diegetically explains the functioning of
fate-daivam in the characters’ lives, Shiva Naipaul expresses the its
permeation through his characters’ consciousness via the very form of his work.
Chaudhuri remarks to this effect that “Scene after scene, episode after episode
in this terrible pass-the-parcel game, Shiva Naipaul reveals himself to be less
an adherent of character and story than a devotee of an exquisite, if deeply
odd, formal beauty.” The beauty recreates the beauty Seepersad Naipaul strove
for in order to represent Hinduism in his short story as Maharaj asserts in ‘A
Caribbean Katha.’
It can be concluded therefore that, as represented
in these novels, in the Hindu-Trinidadian context, the philosophy of karma is
action based and exists in tension with the concept of fate which is
represented in Sanskrit by a different term, daivam, which is a belief in and
fear of predetermination and destiny. In the selected literature, the two
authors present the philosophy of karma at work in the lives of their
characters. In their presentations of the Hindu-Trinidadian community various
perceptions of the term karma emerge. It is noteworthy however that the protagonists
see karma as being the result of human activity and do not resign themselves as
victims of fate. Instead they are determined to take charge of how their lives
ultimately turn out.
Karma in the Naipaul brothers’ work can thus be seen as capable of
performing a similar function to other texts in the South Asian tradition. Theirs may not be stories like those in the Jātak kattha vanyanā,
which according to Shaw comprises “a multitude of stories preserved by early
South Asian traditions that discuss karma and rebirth, giving specific examples
of past-life memory” (i). Nonetheless one may borrow Satya P. Mohanty’s words, in “Alternative Modernities and
Medieval Indian Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana for example, in
order to assert that in these works:
The poetic—in particular,
metaphorical—connections among the various actors consolidate the philosophical
redefinition of identity in terms of action rather than social ascription, or
karma rather than dharma. The individual self is extricated from entanglements
of caste and social station as the self of the doer and the devotee. …[They] may
well represent a major stage in the articulation of a subjectivity that is
disembedded from caste and class, and available in principle to all human
agents, not limited to gods and goddesses. (15)
In fact, in the two novels examined
here:
Karma and inherited social roles (the
traditional meaning of dharma) are here wrenched apart; what emerges as an
alternative to ascribed identity is the thinking, questioning, critical
self—something close to the modern ideal of the individual whose value does not
depend on social status but rather on what she or he chooses to do, on
intentional action. (Mohanty ‘Alternative’ 18)
The Naipaulian literary production thus
performs a great service to the Hindu-Trinidadian community.
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[1] The understanding of karma that applies to this essay was
developed via study of a number of texts listed in the bibliography including
many not directly referenced such as Appleton (2011), Bronkhorst
(2000) and (2011), Das (1999) and (2007), Doniger O’Flaherty (many but see in
particular (1980), Dube (2006), Goldman (1985), Gombrich (1975), Granoff
(2010), Keyes (1997), Krishan (1992), Reichenbach (1990) and Solomon (2003).
[3] V. Jayaram. Hinudism: Beliefs and Practices. Web.
Accessed November 28, 2014. http://www.hinduwebsite.com
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