Seepersad Naipaul

Seepersad Naipaul
Seepersad Naipaul (1935)
Born	1906 Trinidad and Tobago
Died	1953 Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
Occupation	Journalist and author
Sprache	English and Hindustani
Nationality	Trinidadian and Tobagonian
Citizenship	British
Years active	1929–1953
Notable works	The Adventures of Gurudeva
Children	V. S. Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul
Relatives	Nadira Naipaul

Seepersad Naipaul (/ˈnaɪpɔːl, naɪˈpɔːl/; 1906–1953) was a Trinidadian writer. He was the father of V. S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul and married into the influential Indo-Trinidadian Capildeo family.

Early Life

Born to a poor Indian family in rural Trinidad, one generation away from indenture, Seepersad Naipaul largely educated himself. Sent to live with extended family, he would help rear goats and cows in the mornings, and then walk to school without shoes.

Naipaul only had an elementary school education but he taught himself to read and write, and wished to become a writer. His role models were O. Henry and William Somerset Maugham.

Career

Despite his limited formal education, Naipaul became the Central correspondent for the Trinidad Guardian, where he was the paper's first Indo-Trinidadian journalist. He was hired as part of an attempt to modernise the T&T Guardian, which was primarily read by the white urban elite at the time.

Naipaul's journalism was noted for his acute observations of Trinidadian society and his prose, which "boldly creolised reporting styles and showed his sons the possibilities of combining fiction and non-fiction". Prof Aaron Eastley, of Brigham Young University in Utah, describes Naipaul's as "a voice that was creative, often sensational, and certainly dramatic". Guardian sales reportedly rose during his employ.

Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales (1943)

Naipaul's first book, Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales, is a collection of linked comic short stories that was first published in Trinidad and Tobago in 1943. Like most Caribbean writers at the time, Naipaul had to self-publish. Only 1000 copies of the pamphlet were published and it became highly sought after.

The elder Naipaul wanted his son V. S. Naipaul (or "Vido", as he called him) to try to get his short story collection published in London, hoping any money it earned would help the family escape from poverty in Trinidad. After he had a heart attack, his daughter Kamla also wrote to Vidia, urging him to send an encouraging letter to their father and to demand he find a publisher for the book to save Seepersad's life. The book was not published in London until 23 years after the elder Naipaul's death.

In 1976, 23 years after the elder Naipaul's death, the collection was re-edited and republished as The Adventures of Gurudeva, and Other Stories (Andre Deutsch). V.S. Naipaul opted to omit some stories for this second edition, including a story in which his father satirised himself through a character called Gopi.

Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales has been called "a landmark in Indian diasporic fiction" by N. Jayaram and "a book of rare quality" by Patrick French.

Though out of print for several decades, Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales is due to be republished in 2025, as part of Peepal Tree Press' Caribbean Modern Classics series. The new edition will include new stories, originally broadcast on the BBC World Service's Caribbean Voices programme or published in Caribbean periodicals, as well as those stories removed from the 1976 second edition.

Between Father and Son: Family Letters (1999)

Letters from Seepersad Naipaul are featured in Between Father and Son: Family Letters (edited by Gillon Aitken), which collects correspondence between V. S. Naipaul and his family, dating from around the time Vidia won a scholarship to Oxford University until after the older Naipaul's death. The book was published in 1999, and extracted in The New Yorker.

Seepersad Naipaul, Amazing Scenes: Selected Journalism 1928-1953 (2024)

Edited by Aaron Eastley, Brinsley Samaroo, Kenneth Ramchand and Nivedita Misra, Seepersad Naipaul, Amazing Scenes: Selected Journalism 1928-1953 (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2024) covers 25 years of Naipaul's columns and articles in the T&T Guardian. Naipaul was initially charged with reporting on the lives of the East Indians on the island. The articles often reflect on topical issues of the day but are notable for their humour.

The incidents described in book often highlight the parallels between the elder Naipaul's career in journalism and V.S. Naipaul's character of Mohan Biswas in his novel A House for Mr Biswas. It also includes Naipaul's writings on the infamous "Kali cult" incident.

"Kali cult" incident

In one article, written in 1933, Naipaul describes a rabies epidemic infecting local animals and the superstitious owners who, rather than vaccinate their animals, sacrifice them to avoid "the wrath of Kali". Shortly after, he receives a threatening letter. The letter warns him of a deadly curse, which can only be undone if he sacrifices a goat to Kali Mai. He initially responds with humour, when he writes, "Briefly and explicitly, I say bunkum."

Despite this initial flippancy, Naipaul was eventually persuaded by his friends and family to perform the sacrifice of a goat in 1933. He was reportedly distressed that he had been forced to do something he didn't believe in and, according to his son V. S. Naipaul and others, this triggered a mental breakdown a few months later.

Death

On 2 February 1953, after their father had a heart attack, Kamla Naipaul wrote to her brother Vidia, who was still in Oxford. She demanded that, in order to save their father's life and the lives of their siblings, he send an encouraging letter to Seepersad urgently, and that he find a London publisher for The Adventures of Gurudeva, and Other Stories.

Seepersad Naipaul hoped the sale of his book would alleviate the family's poverty; they were living in a small shack at the time. In response, V. S. sent a letter discussing author Joyce Cary, who found success in his late 40s. Unfortunately, the elder Naipaul died of a heart attack later that year, aged just 46. The Adventures of Gurudeva was not republished until 1976.

Legacy

Though Naipaul died before seeing The Adventures of Gurudeva republished, his work is now highly regarded. At Oxford, V. S. Naipaul's mentor Peter Bayley argued that the book inspired Vidia's first four novels: "I found there The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira and of course quite a lot of Miguel Street and indeed anticipations of Mr Biswas." Writing in the T&T Guardian, Shereen Ali noted that the "older, more sympathetic Naipaul" also used many of the features lauded in the work of V. S. "a generation before his son did".

According to V. S. Naipaul, Seepersad's career as a writer showed his sons "an example of labour" which would influence their own careers. V. S. Naipaul wrote in his autobiography that "the ambition to be a writer was given me by my father" and that The Adventures of Gurudeva served as his own "private epic" until it was republished. Seepersad Naipaul's own career in journalism inspired the titular character from A House for Mr Biswas.

Reflecting on his childhood, V. S. Naipaul wrote, "There was a big ledger in which my father had pasted his early writings...This ledger became one of the books of my childhood. It was there, in the old-fashioned Guardian type and layout...that I got to love the idea of newspapers and the idea of print." His father would read books aloud at home, including Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, Jonathan Swift and Charles Kingsley.

Aaron Eastley has also argued that Seepersad Naipaul's writing influenced other local writers to express themselves. Naipaul's journalism spanned hundreds of articles over 25 years. Although some of his journalism wasn't written under his name, the characteristic language he used was enough to identify much of it through lexical stylometry.

Seepersad and Sons: Naipaulian Synergies

In 2009, Aaron Eastley of Brigham Young University, Utah met Kenneth Ramchand of the University of the West Indies (UWI) at St. Augustine, Trinidad. Eastley had been collecting Seepersad Naipaul's articles in the T&T Guardian, while Ramchand had been collecting his short stories. They decided to work together.

In 2015, based on their shared interest in the elder Naipaul, Eastley, Ramchand and others presented a three-day conference, Seepersad and Sons: Naipaulian Creative Synergies with the UWI Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies and the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago. This later developed into the anthology Seepersad and Sons: Naipaulian Synergies, published by Peepal Tree Press in 2019. Contributors to the anthology include Eastley, Ramchand, J. Vijay Maharaj, Nicholas Laughlin, Arnold Rampersad, Andre Bagoo, Sharon Millar, Keith Jardim, Raymond Ramcharitar, and others.

Bibliography

• Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales (1943, republished in 1976 as The Adventures of Gurudeva), reissue forthcoming by Peepal Tree Press, 2025 ISBN 978-1-84523-554-3
• Seepersad Naipaul, Amazing Scenes: Selected Journalism 1928-1953, edited by Aaron Eastley, Brinsley Samaroo, Kenneth Ramchand and Nivedita Misra (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2024) ISBN 978-1-84523-563-5