Analyse A House for Mr. Biswas as a diasporic allegory.
A key text that should help your reading of diasporic history is The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness by Paul Gilroy (Harvard University Press, 1993). Gilroy juxtaposes the metaphors of “root” and “route” in his study of diasporic literature. The “root” metaphor reconstructs memorially a pristine, pure, uncontaminated homeland to which the first generation immigrant dreamt of returning. In the novel one reads about Pundit Tulsi’s dream of returning to India, a dream that became meaningless after his death.
In Finding the Centre Naipaul talks about his grandfather who died on his way back to his native village near Gorakhpur. The “route” metaphor suggests the journey and the historical interactions between masters and indentured immigrants little better than slaves, which have forever “contaminated” the diasporic ethos and memory. Vijay Mishra in his “(B) ordering Naipaul : Indenture History and Diasporic Poetics” locates the “route” metaphor in two geograhical spaces : the ship and the plantation barracks. Of the first Mishra says:
