Backward Glance

In The Adventures of Gurudeva, Seepersad (an admirer of R.K. Narayan, an admiration not entirely shared by his son) created a lesser Malgudi. His hero lacks the charm of Narayan’s characters, but shares the sense of discomfort that accompanies the attempt to find one’s way in the world. Gurudeva is a stickfighter who sports wonderful sticks, but rarely fights; a wife-beater whose blows are the product of duty rather than malice; a confused defender of the variant of Hinduism transported across the oceans. He is not eloquent, but for the roughness of his portrayal, he asks to be heard.

In his foreword, occupying almost one-sixth of the book, written with an obvious, if critical, affection, Sir Vidia stresses that his father’s work is important, despite its obvious flaws, because it has a "way of looking". Only, his gaze is turned inwards, focused on a small segment of a community to the point of almost excluding the larger background of Trinidad.

For the son, his father’s failure to rise above this circumscribed vision was symptomatic of a larger failure: "The writer begins with his talent, finds confidence in his talent, but then discovers that in a society as deformed as ours, by the exercise of his talent he has set himself adrift."

But Seepersad’s fate has been shared by scores of writers from different literary backgrounds. More than "deformed societies", Seepersad’s style of writing—picturesque, unquestioning, quaint even in its own time—bears the insignia of nascent literature.

Young literatures encourage a tendency towards the imitative rather than the original, which is why Indian writing in English produced its Toru Dutts before its Rushdies. Dutt’s poetry, Seepersad’s prose: these still demand to be read, if only as a window into a different time and place.