Two Worlds

Proust has written with great penetration of thedifference between the writer as writer and the writer as a social being. Youwill find his thoughts in some of his essays in Against Sainte-Beuve, abook reconstituted from his early papers.

The nineteenth-century French critic Sainte-Beuve believedthat to understand a writer it was necessary to know as much as possible aboutthe exterior man, the details of his life. It is a beguiling method, using theman to illuminate the work. It might seem unassailable. But Proust is able veryconvincingly to pick it apart. "This method of Sainte-Beuve," Proustwrites, "ignores what a very slight degree of self-acquaintance teaches us:that a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in ourhabits, in our social life, in our vices. If we would try to understand thatparticular self, it is by searching our own bosoms, and trying to reconstruct itthere, that we may arrive at it."

Those words of Proust should be with us whenever we arereading the biography of a writer - or the biography of anyone who depends onwhat can be called inspiration. All the details of the life and the quirks andthe friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing willremain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there. Thebiography of a writer – or even the autobiography – will always have thisincompleteness.

Proust is a master of happy amplification, and I wouldlike to go back to Against Sainte-Beuve just for a little. "Infact," Proust writes, "it is the secretions of one's innermost self,written in solitude and for oneself alone that one gives to the public. What onebestows on private life - in conversation...or in those drawing-room essays thatare scarcely more than conversation in print – is the product of a quitesuperficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover byputting aside the world and the self that frequents the world."

When he wrote that, Proust had not yet found the subjectthat was to lead him to the happiness of his great literary labour. And you cantell from what I have quoted that he was a man trusting to his intuition andwaiting for luck. I have quoted these words before in other places. The reasonis that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted tointuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea howthings might turn out, where in my writing I might go next. I have trusted to myintuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an ideawhen I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have writtenonly after some years.

I said earlier that everything of value about me is in mybooks. I will go further now. I will say I am the sum of my books. Each book,intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, standson what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of myliterary career it could have been said that the last book contained all theothers.

It's been like this because of my background. Mybackground is at once exceedingly simple and exceedingly confused. I was born inTrinidad. It is a small island in the mouth of the great Orinoco river ofVenezuela. So Trinidad is not strictly of South America, and not strictly of theCaribbean. It was developed as a New World plantation colony, and when I wasborn in 1932 it had a population of about 400,000. Of this, about 150,000 wereIndians, Hindus and Muslims, nearly all of peasant origin, and nearly all fromthe Gangetic plain.

This was my very small community. The bulk of thismigration from India occurred after 1880. The deal was like this. Peopleindentured themselves for five years to serve on the estates. At the end of thistime they were given a small piece of land, perhaps five acres, or a passageback to India. In 1917, because of agitation by Gandhi and others, the indenturesystem was abolished. And perhaps because of this, or for some other reason, thepledge of land or repatriation was dishonoured for many of the later arrivals.These people were absolutely destitute. They slept in the streets of Port ofSpain, the capital. When I was a child I saw them. I suppose I didn't know theywere destitute – I suppose that idea came much later – and they made noimpression on me. This was part of the cruelty of the plantation colony.

I was born in a small country town called Chaguanas, twoor three miles inland from the Gulf of Paria. Chaguanas was a strange name, inspelling and pronunciation, and many of the Indian people – they were in themajority in the area – preferred to call it by the Indian caste name ofChauhan.

I was thirty-four when I found out about the name of mybirthplace. I was living in London, had been living in England for sixteenyears. I was writing my ninth book. This was a history of Trinidad, a humanhistory, trying to re-create people and their stories. I used to go to theBritish Museum to read the Spanish documents about the region. These documents -recovered from the Spanish archives - were copied out for the British governmentin the 1890s at the time of a nasty boundary dispute with Venezuela. Thedocuments begin in 1530 and end with the disappearance of the Spanish Empire.

I was reading about the foolish search for El Dorado, andthe murderous interloping of the English hero, Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1595 heraided Trinidad, killed all the Spaniards he could, and went up the Orinocolooking for El Dorado. He found nothing, but when he went back to England hesaid he had. He had a piece of gold and some sand to show. He said he had hackedthe gold out of a cliff on the bank of the Orinoco. The Royal Mint said that thesand he asked them to assay was worthless, and other people said that he hadbought the gold beforehand from North Africa. He then published a book to provehis point, and for four centuries people have believed that Raleigh had foundsomething. The magic of Raleigh's book, which is really quite difficult to read,lay in its very long title: The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and BeautifulEmpire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden city of Manoa (whichthe Spaniards call El Dorado) and the provinces of Emeria, Aromaia, Amapaia, andother countries, with their rivers adjoining. How real it sounds! And he hadhardly been on the main Orinoco.

And then, as sometimes happens with confidence men,Raleigh was caught by his own fantasies. Twenty-one years later, old and ill, hewas let out of his London prison to go to Guiana and find the gold mines he saidhe had found. In this fraudulent venture his son died. The father, for the sakeof his reputation, for the sake of his lies, had sent his son to his death. Andthen Raleigh, full of grief, with nothing left to live for, went back to Londonto be executed.

The story should have ended there. But Spanish memorieswere long - no doubt because their imperial correspondence was so slow: it mighttake up to two years for a letter from Trinidad to be read in Spain. Eight yearsafterwards the Spaniards of Trinidad and Guiana were still settling their scoreswith the Gulf Indians. One day in the British Museum I read a letter from theKing of Spain to the governor of Trinidad. It was dated 12 October 1625.

"I asked you," the King wrote, "to give mesome information about a certain nation of Indians called Chaguanes, who you saynumber above one thousand, and are of such bad disposition that it was they wholed the English when they captured the town. Their crime hasn't been punishedbecause forces were not available for this purpose and because the Indiansacknowledge no master save their own will. You have decided to give them apunishment. Follow the rules I have given you; and let me know how you geton."

What the governor did I don't know. I could find nofurther reference to the Chaguanes in the documents in the Museum. Perhaps therewere other documents about the Chaguanes in the mountain of paper in the Spanisharchives in Seville which the British government scholars missed or didn't thinkimportant enough to copy out. What is true is that the little tribe of over athousand – who would have been living on both sides of the Gulf of Paria –disappeared so completely that no one in the town of Chaguanas or Chauhan knewanything about them. And the thought came to me in the Museum that I was thefirst person since 1625 to whom that letter of the king of Spain had a realmeaning. And that letter had been dug out of the archives only in 1896 or 1897.A disappearance, and then the silence of centuries.

We lived on the Chaguanes' land. Every day in term time -I was just beginning to go to school – I walked from my grandmother's house– past the two or three main-road stores, the Chinese parlour, the JubileeTheatre, and the high-smelling little Portuguese factory that made cheap bluesoap and cheap yellow soap in long bars that were put out to dry and harden inthe mornings – every day I walked past these eternal-seeming things – to theChaguanas Government School. Beyond the school was sugar-cane, estate land,going up to the Gulf of Paria. The people who had been dispossessed would havehad their own kind of agriculture, their own calendar, their own codes, theirown sacred sites. They would have understood the Orinoco-fed currents in theGulf of Paria. Now all their skills and everything else about them had beenobliterated.

The world is always in movement. People have everywhere atsome time been dispossessed. I suppose I was shocked by this discovery in 1967about my birthplace because I had never had any idea about it. But that was theway most of us lived in the agricultural colony, blindly. There was no plot bythe authorities to keep us in our darkness. I think it was more simply that theknowledge wasn't there. The kind of knowledge about the Chaguanes would not havebeen considered important, and it would not have been easy to recover. They werea small tribe, and they were aboriginal. Such people - on the mainland, in whatwas called B.G., British Guiana – were known to us, and were a kind of joke.People who were loud and ill-behaved were known, to all groups in Trinidad, Ithink, as warrahoons. I used to think it was a made-up word, made up tosuggest wildness. It was only when I began to travel in Venezuela, in myforties, that I understood that a word like that was the name of a rather largeaborginal tribe there.

There was a vague story when I was a child - and to me nowit is an unbearably affecting story – that at certain times aboriginal peoplecame across in canoes from the mainland, walked through the forest in the southof the island, and at a certain spot picked some kind of fruit or made some kindof offering, and then went back across the Gulf of Paria to the sodden estuaryof the Orinoco. The rite must have been of enormous importance to have survivedthe upheavals of four hundred years, and the extinction of the aborigines inTrinidad. Or perhaps – though Trinidad and Venezuela have a common flora –they had come only to pick a particular kind of fruit. I don't know. I can'tremember anyone inquiring. And now the memory is all lost; and that sacred site,if it existed, has become common ground.

What was past was past. I suppose that was the generalattitude. And we Indians, immigrants from India, had that attitude to theisland. We lived for the most part ritualised lives, and were not yet capable ofself-assessment, which is where learning begins. Half of us on this land of theChaguanes were pretending - perhaps not pretending, perhaps only feeling, neverformulating it as an idea - that we had brought a kind of India with us, whichwe could, as it were, unroll like a carpet on the flat land.

My grandmother's house in Chaguanas was in two parts. Thefront part, of bricks and plaster, was painted white. It was like a kind ofIndian house, with a grand balustraded terrace on the upper floor, and aprayer-room on the floor above that. It was ambitious in its decorative detail,with lotus capitals on pillars, and sculptures of Hindu deities, all done bypeople working only from a memory of things in India. In Trinidad it was anarchitectural oddity. At the back of this house, and joined to it by an upperbridge room, was a timber building in the French Caribbean style. The entrancegate was at the side, between the two houses. It was a tall gate of corrugatediron on a wooden frame. It made for a fierce kind of privacy.

So as a child I had this sense of two worlds, the worldoutside that tall corrugated-iron gate, and the world at home - or, at any rate,the world of my grandmother's house. It was a remnant of our caste sense, thething that excluded and shut out. In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were adisadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; itenabled us – for the time being, and only for the time being – to live inour own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India. Itmade for an extraordinary self-centredness. We looked inwards; we lived out ourdays; the world outside existed in a kind of darkness; we inquired aboutnothing.

There was a Muslim shop next door. The little loggia of mygrandmother's shop ended against his blank wall. The man's name was Mian. Thatwas all that we knew of him and his family. I suppose we must have seen him, butI have no mental picture of him now. We knew nothing of Muslims. This idea ofstrangeness, of the thing to be kept outside, extended even to other Hindus. Forexample, we ate rice in the middle of the day, and wheat in the evenings. Therewere some extraordinary people who reversed this natural order and ate rice inthe evenings. I thought of these people as strangers – you must imagine me atthis time as under seven, because when I was seven all this life of mygrandmother's house in Chaguanas came to an end for me. We moved to the capital,and then to the hills to the northwest.

But the habits of mind engendered by this shut-in andshutting-out life lingered for quite a while. If it were not for the shortstories my father wrote I would have known almost nothing about the general lifeof our Indian community. Those stories gave me more than knowledge. They gave mea kind of solidity. They gave me something to stand on in the world. I cannotimagine what my mental picture would have been without those stories.

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and weinquired about nothing. I was just old enough to have some idea of the Indianepics, the Ramayana in particular. The children who came five years or so afterme in our extended family didn't have this luck. No one taught us Hindi.Sometimes someone wrote out the alphabet for us to learn, and that was that; wewere expected to do the rest ourselves. So, as English penetrated, we began tolose our language. My grandmother's house was full of religion; there were manyceremonies and readings, some of which went on for days. But no one explained ortranslated for us who could no longer follow the language. So our ancestralfaith receded, became mysterious, not pertinent to our day-to-day life.

We made no inquiries about India or about the familiespeople had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished toknow, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I knowonly that some of them came from Nepal. Two years ago a kind Nepalese who likedmy name sent me a copy of some pages from an 1872 gazetteer-like British workabout India, Hindu Castes and Tribes as Represented in Benares; the pageslisted - among a multitude of names -those groups of Nepalese in the holy cityof Banaras who carried the name Naipal. That is all that I have.

Away from this world of my grandmother's house, where weate rice in the middle of the day and wheat in the evenings, there was the greatunknown - in this island of only 400,000 people. There were the African orAfrican-derived people who were the majority. They were policemen; they wereteachers. One of them was my very first teacher at the Chaguanas GovernmentSchool; I remembered her with adoration for years. There was the capital, wherevery soon we would all have to go for education and jobs, and where we wouldsettle permanently, among strangers. There were the white people, not all ofthem English; and the Portuguese and the Chinese, at one time also immigrantslike us. And, more mysterious than these, were the people we called Spanish, 'pagnols,mixed people of warm brown complexions who came from the Spanish time, beforethe island was detached from Venezuela and the Spanish Empire – a kind ofhistory absolutely beyond my child's comprehension.