William Ghosh

The analysis is of the following paragraph from V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1961)

But bigger than them all was the house, his house.

How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it: to have lived and died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

A House for Mr Biswas has been canonized, as Harish Trivedi says, ‘as one of the greatest postcolonial novels in English’. But it was first published in 1961, three years into the (ultimately frustrated) project of West Indian Federation, and a year before the formal independence of Trinidad, where it is set. So it would be more accurate to call it a cusp novel, written and published between two eras: when the colonial dispensation was clearly coming to an end, but before the independent state of Trinidad and Tobago had officially been born.

Ever since its publication, it has been read as a book about independence and autonomy. Mr Biswas is born into a family of ‘East Indian’ plantation labourers in rural, colonial Trinidad. The plot describes his search for a house of his own. The motif of the ‘house’ in the book stands for the sovereign ownership of space or territory: a topical subject for a Trinidadian author at this time. But it is also a metaphor for the novel itself. Henry James famously spoke of the ‘house of fiction’, whilst Iris Murdoch said ‘a novel is a house for free people to live in’. Naipaul extends and scrutinises this common literary metaphor. If Mr Biswas is looking for a sovereign, autonomous dwelling, the narrator is looking, also, for a suitable form of literary ‘housing’: for a form that can communicate the specificity of Mr Biswas’s experience.

The quoted passage, taken from the prologue, strikes a defiant, apparently triumphant note. In a proleptic flash-forward to Biswas’s eventual death from heart disease, Naipaul is listing the possessions he leaves behind. That Biswas should leave behind ‘the house, his house’, suggests that his quest in the novel will – like the best stories about up-by-the-bootstraps self-creation – be difficult but ultimately successful.

The body of the novel, however, qualifies this suggestion. Biswas does buy the house and is immensely proud of having done so. But his health, and his life, are used up in the quest; the house is overpriced, badly designed and dysfunctional; and at his death he leaves it heavily mortgaged to the bank, so there is a question as to whether he really ‘owned’ it. This casts a new light on this opening passage. Are the bold, exclamatory sentences (‘How terrible it would have been…’) protesting too much: making an overstated, defensive claim to justify Mr Biswas’s labour in the face of scepticism about the value of its fruits?

The second thing to note about the passage comes in the last line. The greatest indignity, it is stated, would be to die ‘unnecessary and unaccommodated’. But who states this? To whom do these words belong? Did Biswas fear being ‘unaccommodated’? Is Naipaul perhaps writing, as he is often supposed to be doing, from the perspective of Biswas’s son, Anand? Or is Naipaul here speaking in his own voice, making a bold, personal claim about the indignity of colonial existence? All three readings are permitted by the text, and they are not mutually exclusive. But the word ‘unaccommodated’ also belongs to Shakespeare’s King Lear – ‘unaccommodated man is no more but such a bare, forked animal as thou art’ he says when, stripped of his kingdom, he finds himself homeless on the heath. Throughout the novel Biswas’s homelessness, and the psychological turmoil this causes, shadow Lear’s homelessness and turmoil.

If Biswas dies in ambiguous possession of his house, Naipaul is only ever in ambiguous possession of the language with which he ‘houses’ or elegises him. ‘Unaccommodated’ is the tip of an iceberg of allusion and reference to the British literary canon through which Naipaul articulates the ambiguous sovereignty of the Caribbean novel in 1961. The major question that underlies Biswas, then, concerns how the postcolonial future is to be imagined, and where it is to be lived. What conceptual vocabularies were available, at the moment of decolonisation, to the statesperson or to the artist? In what ways did anti-colonial visions of national and cultural sovereignty surreptitiously carry over an understanding of ‘nationhood’ or ‘culture’ inherited from the colonial past? These were questions he would return to in The Enigma of Arrival, where he asks how the nature of his colonial education shaped his relationship with England, English culture, and the English landscape.

~

Works cited

Harish Trivedi. ‘Love, Marriage, and Realism.’ In Goebel and Schabio, eds. Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres. London: Routledge, 2014.

Cite this: Ghosh, William. “Close reading of A House for Mr Biswas.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2018, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 8 February 2026.

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Ed Dodson

In the post-war British context, the term ‘postcolonial’ has often been applied to Black and Asian writers. General surveys of post-war or contemporary British literature frequently use ‘postcolonial’ as a euphemism for ‘non-white’, and this becomes a way of lumping all such writers under one heading.

Andrzej Gasiorek, in Post-War British Fiction (1995), restricts his discussion of ‘colonialism’ to V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming, and of ‘post-colonialism’ to Salman Rushdie. Peter Childs, in Contemporary Novelists (2005), associates ‘Britain’s imperial past and post-colonial present’ with the familiar triad of ‘Rushdie, [Hanif] Kureishi, and [Zadie] Smith’. Nick Bentley, in Contemporary British Fiction (2008), connects ‘the multiethnic nature of contemporary Britain’ to these three, as well as Monica Ali, Courttia Newland, and Caryl Phillips. Brian Finney, in English Fiction Since 1984 (2006), places all of the non-white writers he discusses (Rushdie, Kureishi, and Kazuo Ishiguro) in a section entitled ‘National Cultures and Hybrid Narrative Modes’.

Such literary categorisations are often tied to authors’ biographies. This is true for gender and sexuality as much as for race. Most of the writers above, who are sometimes called ‘Black British’ writers, have their roots in British colonies, past and present. As a result, they are perceived to have a particular investment in ‘postcolonial’ questions of race and empire. This is a perception that is often, but by no means always, true.

Numerous contemporary writers and critics have complained about the ghettoisation of Black and Asian literature within Britain. In Bernardine Evaristo’s words, ‘If you are a black writer you are deemed to be writing about black subjects and that is generally perceived to be for a black audience’. According to Aminatta Forna:

I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer. We hyphenated writers complain about the privilege accorded to the white male writer, he who dominates the western canon and is the only one called simply ‘writer’.

There are a number of ways to tackle this question of naming. One is to expand the definition of ‘postcolonial’ beyond the confines of race: to read white writers as postcolonial, too. Several critics have argued that white writers from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (Irvine Welsh or Bernard MacLaverty, for instance) might also be considered postcolonial, or at least brought into postcolonial conversations. A parallel is suggested here between the ‘peripheries’ of the empire and the ‘peripheries’ of the UK, especially in the era of devolution.

An alternative and complementary solution would be, as Timothy Ogene argues, ‘to momentarily de-postcolonize’ the work of writers like Evaristo and Forna by discussing their writing outside of the frames of race and empire.

Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds brings together Black and Asian writers in and around the UK but without foregrounding their racial identities or imposing postcolonial themes on their work. At the same time, as the project title suggests, the term ‘postcolonial’ is not being discarded entirely.

The question we are left with is: what is the role of ‘postcolonial’ as a label today? It is, after all, fifty or so years after the major processes of decolonisation. Is postcolonialism still an effective tool for addressing contemporary writing in Britain produced by a range of writers from many different cultural backgrounds?

Cite this: Dodson, Ed. “The Postcolonial ‘Ghetto’?” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 8 February 2026.

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Biography

Writing

V. S. Naipaul in Dhaka, 2016, Faizul Latif Chowdhury (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

When, in the 1980s, Boris Ford was charged with compiling his influential history, The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, he chose titles which told the story in terms of a succession of literary titans. Volume One, ‘The Age of Chaucer’, was succeeded by volumes chronicling the ‘Ages’ of Shakespeare and so on. The final volume in the series was titled ‘From Orwell to Naipaul’.

It is a title which must have flattered Naipaul, who tried throughout his life both to insert himself in the ‘Great Tradition’ of English letters, and to assert his singular, special place within it. But it also shows the breadth and nature of Naipaul’s reputation through the 1970s, 80s and 90s. A pioneering non-white author, achieving fame across and beyond the world’s largest Anglophone markets, he also wrote with a ‘literary sophistication’ recognisable to British critics. Naipaul was heralded as a harbinger of the new ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘postcolonial’ literatures: an inheritor of the British tradition yet one who manifested its new, democratic global range.

Fittingly, inheritance became Naipaul’s subject. Within that ‘Great Tradition’ of English letters, no-one since Shakespeare had written so powerfully about fathers, or the anxieties of being a son. Naipaul’s own father, Seepersad, had emerged from an illiterate family of plantation labourers to become a journalist and one of the first Indian-Trinidadian writers to publish creative work in English. Seepersad’s ambition, his febrile kindness, and his psychological fragility is registered with subtlety and tenderness in A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, and other works, always from the perspective of a son driven to embarrassment and cruelty when he recognises himself in his father. Through the figure of Seepersad, Naipaul draws a link between genealogical and literary ‘filiation’. Both Naipaul’s early and his late books, Biswas and Enigma, describe the difficulties of breaking free from biological and literary ‘parents’.

Today, Naipaul’s work is deeply controversial, and it is easy to see why. His obsessive focus on fathers and sons leaves mothers and daughters out of the frame. With the exception of Shama and Savi in Biswas (modelled on his mother, and his beloved sister Kamla), women often exist in his books as ciphers, or objects of violence. Moreover, the model of literary filiation he describes now seems increasingly outdated. It would seem retrograde, to say the least, to describe modern Caribbean authors as anxious children of their British parents. Nonetheless, as Teju Cole notes, Naipaul’s influence on an ‘entire generation of post-colonial writers’ was vast, and its presence continues to be felt. His body of work is a remarkable document in the history of colonial encounter, tracing the psychological ambiguities and agonies of that passing moment in which the old British Empire was passing away and the postcolonial future – for Trinidad – appeared undecided, fraught and open.

—William Ghosh, 2018

Cite this: Ghosh, William. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2018, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 8 February 2026.

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