This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
On 14 February 1989, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran issued a fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses for blasphemy and calling for the deaths of the publishers as well as the author.
Intellectuals around the world rallied to Rushdie’s defence, with the conspicuous exception of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul — V. S. Naipaul to his readers, or Vidia to his intimates. Naipaul told a reporter for the Bombay Sunday Observer: “I don’t know his books, but I’ve been aware of his statements. I found them usually left-wing and antiquated.” He described Khomeini’s fatwa as “an extreme form of literary criticism”.
Naipaul was hardly a defender of Islam. Indeed, it seems extraordinary that he received no death threats himself for Amongst the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981), a scathing exploration of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. But then, he always avoided the appearance of out-and-out blasphemy. He had learnt how much it cost.
His best-loved novel A House for Mr Biswas (1961) is a tribute to his father Seepersad. The hero, Mohun Biswas, is an irascible loudmouth whose life is a series of bathetic disappointments; yet he never loses a certain sense of dignity. Biswas is Seepersad Naipaul as reflected in a funhouse mirror: he too was born in Trinidad to a family of Hindu peasants, married into a powerful Brahmin landowning family and somehow managed to transform a job as a sign painter into a career as a journalist before dying at the age of 46. Vidia was frank about his father’s inability to mature fully as an artist in his milieu:
Writers need a source of strength other than that which they find in their own talent. Literary talent doesn’t exist by itself; it feeds on society and depends for its development on the nature of that society … The writer begins with his talent, but then discovers that it isn’t enough, that, in a society as deformed as ours, by the exercise of his talent he has set himself adrift.
Vidia described the three years he spent writing A House for Mr Biswas as the happiest period of his life. He managed to transform Seepersad’s experience into myth; never again would he create something this optimistic. Yet one wonders whether he would have depicted his father’s personal struggles in such a light-hearted manner had he been fully aware, whilst writing the novel, of what happened to Seepersad after he made some flippant remarks in a newspaper column.
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In 1970, the New York Times journalist Israel Shenker sent Vidia a clipping from the New York Herald Tribune dated 24 June 1933. The headline read: “REPORTER SACRIFICES GOAT TO MOLLIFY HINDU GODDESS: Writer Kowtows to Kali to Escape Black Magic Death”. According to the article, the “native writer” Seepersad Naipaul “yielded to the entreaty of friends and relations” and “offered a goat as sacrifice to appease the anger of the goddess”. His provocation was to ridicule Hindu farmers for sacrificing animals to Kali in order to “drive away the illness attacking their livestock” instead of following government regulations and having their cattle vaccinated.
Seepersad’s own accounts are at once fascinating and painful to read
Vidia was shocked. He had no idea that such a thing had ever taken place. At first he thought the Herald Tribune had been duped by one of his father’s impish pranks. But he asked his mother and found the story was true. Seepersad had been so humiliated by the ordeal that he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent four or five years depressed and unemployed before he finally managed to pull himself back together. Vidia was only a toddler when all this unfolded. His parents were too ashamed to talk about it. Had Shenker not sent Vidia that clipping, the story would have been buried for good.
In 1976, Vidia mentioned the goat sacrifice in his introduction to a collection of his father’s short stories but only described the incident at length in his “Prologue to an Autobiography”, which was first published in Vanity Fair in 1983, and can be found in the volume Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (1984).
Yet the sacrifice and its aftermath seem to cast a shadow over Vidia’s novels Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979), and it evidently coloured his views on religion for the rest of his life. Seepersad’s own accounts of what he endured are available in the collection Amazing Scenes: Selected Journalism 1928-1953, from Peepal Tree Press. They are at once fascinating and painful to read.
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Seepersad was born in 1906, into an immigrant community with an unstable sense of itself. A schoolmaster in one of his self-published short stories describes it thus:
You people want to build a little India of your own in Trinidad. You are trying to dance a top in mud. It cannot be done. The difficulty lies in the fact that you are too much of a majority to assimilate, too much of a minority to dominate. On every hand you are pressed by Western influences. You cannot be entirely Oriental, nor entirely Occidental; you can no more be entirely Western than you can be entirely Eastern; neither a hundred per cent European nor a hundred per cent Indian. You will be distinctly West Indian.
Between 1845 and 1917, 144,000 Indians arrived in Trinidad as indentured labourers; Indians eventually made up a third of the island’s population. Almost all were Hindus. In those days, Trinidadian Indians had an unusually low rate of literacy, except amongst those who converted to Christianity under the auspices of the Canadian Presbyterian Mission. Most of them worked as clerks, shopkeepers or agricultural labourers. Seepersad’s short stories depict a culture in which Trinidadian Hindus encountered black, Portuguese, Chinese and mixed-race populations only in the local prison.
Seepersad always dreamed of becoming a writer. Although he left school at 14, he was a voracious reader of fiction, with a special love for the short stories of O. Henry and Somerset Maugham. Yet philosophy and theology attracted him even more than literature. He was particularly interested in Hindu intellectual traditions and found himself drawn to the Arya Samaj, a progressive, monotheistic Hindu reform movement. As with all provincial autodidacts, he was exasperated by the philistinism that surrounded him: why weren’t other Trinidadians obsessed with Mahatma Gandhi or Rabindranath Tagore or the riches of Indian thought and art?
In 1928, Seepersad began writing essays for the East Indian Weekly, voicing strong opinions on mixed marriages, “race dissolution” and the wearing of trousers and dresses, which he described as “one of the many symptoms of demoralisation amongst Westernised Indians”. He may have been one of them himself: he was fond of wearing bow ties, possibly in emulation of his mentor, Alexander Gault MacGowan (1894-1970), who came from London in May 1929 on a five-year contract to work as managing editor of the Trinidad Guardian.
MacGowan had travelled to India and was keen to take Seepersad under his wing, first as a freelance reporter, then as a columnist on Indian affairs. Finally, in 1932, Seepersad became the Guardian’s correspondent in Chaguanas, which was then a market town in the district where his in-laws, the Capildeos, were major landowners.
At first the Capildeos thought of Seepersad as a kind of family publicist. But he soon became politically inconvenient to them and began making enemies, the most powerful of which were the Capildeos themselves. On the night of 23 July 1932, he was ambushed late at night whilst cycling home from a political meeting. An assailant knocked him off his bicycle, gave him a black eye, uttered an obscure threat and ran off into the darkness. Seepersad must have known who was ultimately responsible. He decided to get revenge on his pious, devoutly orthodox mother-in-law who, according to Vidia, ruled over her extended family as “a totalitarian organisation”.
On 7th June 1933, the Trinidad Guardian published an inflammatory article with the headline “Superstition Hinders Anti-Rabies Campaign: ‘Fighting’ Disease by Goat Sacrifice: Indian Female Deity Thought Offended”. Seepersad accused “a certain section of Indians” of refusing to report rabies outbreaks to authorities. Instead, they employed “superstitious remedies”. “The outbreak of any extraordinary disease, especially smallpox and, recently, paralytic rabies, is interpreted by such Indians as an unmistakeable sign of the wrath of Kali, a female deity.” He followed this with an insolent description of the goat-sacrifice ritual meant to propitiate the goddess and ward off disease.
By coincidence, H. L. Thompson, the local sanitary inspector, fell ill on 6 June. The doctor initially thought it was malaria, until Thompson’s face and neck became swollen; he was admitted to hospital on 10 June and died the next day. There was no inquest, despite widespread suspicion of foul play: Thompson was unpopular in Chaguanas for his strict adherence to health regulations and insistence on expensive inoculations for cattle.
A few days after Thompson’s death, Seepersad received an anonymous letter warning him: “the same fate that attended Sanitary Inspector Thompson who encouraged you to offend the deity will also be yours”.
He quoted this in a tongue-in-cheek article with the headline: “Guardian Reporter Threatened with Death! Unless He Makes a Goat Sacrifice: Alleged Vilifying of a Hindu Goddess: Gruesome Letter”. The piece defiantly ended: “I say bunkum. Frankly I don’t believe in Kalis, deities or ju-jus, and so, I won’t sacrifice a goat. Meanwhile, I anticipate the biggest thrill I have ever experienced, thanks to Kali.”
This is the kind of loudmouthed bravado that got Mr Biswas into trouble in Vidia’s novel. But Seepersad was only warming up. He bragged in his column of 20 June about how well he was sleeping, even though his wife was pleading with him to make the sacrifice.
Yet although he seemed proud to have been offered police protection, his anxiety was beginning to show. In his column the next day he noted: “Everywhere I go I meet people who look on me as one sadly doomed. They all try to persuade me to make the goat sacrifice. ‘You must want to die’, they tell me, when I laugh at their advice.” But he was weakening. On 23 June, his column bore the headline: “Mr Naipaul to Make Sacrifice: A Goat to Die for Kali Today.” His explanation was that of a defeated man:
I am a modern Hindu. I profess the religion of Reformed Hinduism. Reformed Hinduism is not polytheistic. Whereas in the so-called old Hinduism there are no less than 3,000,000 deities, my religion believes in only one God. Out of reverence to this old Hinduism I now feel I was wrong in belittling Kali as ju-ju. Out of this same reverence, which in my youthful impatience I had neglected to show, I will make the sacrifice to Kali and at least make amends for any hurt I have done to the feelings of polytheistic Hindus. Whether after the sacrifice I shall abandon my present faith and be converted to the other is a matter no man can decide until divine guidance is sent to him.
The day after the sacrifice, Seepersad’s colleague Sidney Rodin (1911-1954) published an eyewitness account of the ritual:
Mr Naipaul, in white, with a chain of hibiscus flowers about his neck, squatted on a brilliant orange-coloured Indian rug facing the altar. At intervals he bent forward throwing cloves upon the tiny coal fires that gave off a sweet-odoured smoke. Then he would rise, place fire in a brass plate and pass it over the heads of the onlookers standing beyond the flowers. The fire was passed over the goat and over the image of the goddess …
Rodin describes the beheading of the goat in some detail. His disgust is palpable. As for Seepersad: he wrote in a bitter “Confession of Faith” on 24 June:
As I sat before that sacrificial ceremony, the realisation forced itself on me that today Hinduism is a conglomeration of everything under heaven and earth … Yesterday’s affair — and I am sorry to say it — has taught me that there is no standard of truth by which to test the virtue of popular Hinduism. It condemns nothing. It can give small moral guidance …
He dismissed the doctrine of karma, and the very idea of polytheistic Hinduism, and reasserted his belief in “a single God” rather than “a thousand Kalis”, vowing never to make another sacrifice again: “I know my faith now.” A few months later, MacGowan left Trinidad to take up a job in New York. Seepersad wanted to join him but lost his nerve. Soon afterwards, he also lost his mind: according to his wife, “He looked in the mirror one day and couldn’t see himself. And he began to scream.”
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In his published writings, Vidia took care never to insult others’ religious beliefs. Not overtly, anyway. He knew that if he ever crossed a line with non-Christians, no white liberal would ever be willing to save him. If only Seepersad had realised this truth earlier in life, he too might have avoided “an extreme form of literary criticism”. On the other hand, he emerged from his apparent chastisement at the hands of Kali without lingering resentment. Later this year, Peepal Tree Press will reissue his volume of short stories, Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales, which was first published in 1943. They are self-evidently the work of a devout (if unorthodox) Hindu.
Seepersad seems never to have lost his faith, despite his dramatic spiritual crisis. Is this the result of profound self-deception — or unexpected inner strength?
