For what does a 'HOUSE' stand for? With reference to 'A House for Mr. Biswas'

  House

 A 'House' is a symbol of safety and dignity. one always aspires to have one's own home as a mark of social life and social stability. In his novel 'A House for Mr.Biswas' V.S.Naipaul depicts the aspiration of a immigrant Indian for his home which becomes the mark of finding his own self as well as social stability.


Search for Dwelling and Identity in ' A House for Mr.Biswas'by Naipaul

Naipaul's world is one of homeless nomadic migrants, making a middle passage from Africa or India to the West Indies, thence to England and back again, for, after three hundred years, there is no society and no system of values in which they can take root. Against this indistinct and dissolving background, the characters try to seize upon something to give permanence and to arrest the flux. 'A House for Mr.Biswas' is also written with the same backdrop of Mr.Biswas's desire for a house, root and his own identity.

'House'' in the novel stands as a symbol of stability, consistancy, root, relief etc. It is an Indian belief to have one's own home and one wants to die peacefully under its roof. In the novel, primarily, house symbolises material satisfaction and achievement through which Mr.Biswas strives totransform it into Home. Unlike four walls and a roof he wants to have peace, comfort and stability to find his identity, his self free from all the shakles. Meenakshi Mukherjee rightly observes,

"The novel is all about the unaccommodated man's repeated attempts to find a state location in a ramshackle and random world."

From the very outset of the novel Biswas was misfit, unlucky first at his own home and then in hanuman Hiuse at Trinidad. Throughout his life he has the only desire. Finally he gets his house after struggling a lot.

"As a boy he had moved from one house to another;... and now at the end he found himself in his own house, on his half- lot of land, his own portion of the earth."

Actually, Biswas' s striving and aspiration comes from the diasporic effect and lack of emotional environment at his own and others home. The same thing is depicted by Nissim Ezekiel in one of his poems, 

" Home is the place where we have to make our grace."

Whether a person be abroad or anywhere in the world the ultimate solace and peace is there at home. that is what Biswas craves for. In movies also starting from the tradition of the song 'Chitthi Ayi Hai'(Movie 'NAAM') up till I Love INDIA (the latest serial on SAB TV) the immigrants have tried to come back to their root in India. Naipaul has presented this novel with the same backdrop in post-colonial world.