Ira Mathur
www.irasroom.org
“‘This house,’ Mrs Tulsi said, ‘this house—he built it with his own hands.
Those walls aren’t concrete, you know. It looks like concrete to everybody. But everybody is wrong. Those walls are really made of clay bricks. And he made every brick himself. Right here.”
A House For Mr Biswas
—VS Naipaul
“The Lion House is crumbling in upon itself. Trees, bushes are pushing through the foundation. If you enter, it’s at your peril—a wall may crumble, and you could fall through the floor. It’s ownerless. All efforts to engage the owners to sell or donate the property to the State have failed.”
I could hear the anguish in the voice of Prof Ken Ramchand, former senator, academic, and notable critic of Caribbean fiction who wrote Naipaul’s Obituary for the UK Guardian in 2018.
Naipaul is widely recognised as the greatest writer of the past century, a UK Guardian editorial argued: “utterly reshaped the meaning of English Literature.” He wrote over 30 books, won the Booker Prize in 1971, was awarded the Trinity Cross (1989) knighted in 1990, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.
Lion House was VS Naipaul’s childhood home, (immortalised in A House For Mr Biswas) teeming with the brilliance of his uncles, where he watched his father, Seepersad Naipaul, a Guardian journalist, struggle like a trapped spider, a steely net cast by its patriarch.
That dense interior of his childhood transplanted from India was led by the patriarch Pundit Capildeo, Naipaul’s grandfather. Born in 1873, he sailed to Trinidad in 1894 from Calcutta with other indentured immigrants, where he soon turned from cane cutter to landowner and businessman.
In 1924 Pundit Capildeo began the construction of the Lion House, which he completed in 1926 naming it ANAND BHAVAN or the ‘Mansion of Bliss’, after which he left for India (on one of his frequent trips) where he died.
Father Anthony de Verteuil, in his book, ‘Eight East Indian Immigrants’ wrote: “Traditionally in Trinidad, East Indian immigrants invested their money in land or buildings. Capil was no exception. But the building he put up was far from the usual type and reflected his exceptionally strong Hindu ideology and unusual character.
… The prototype on which the edifice was designed as a city dwelling in the town of Gorakhpur, where his family had lived for generations, going back centuries. Lion House’s brutally stark pillars forming an arcade in front, plain walls, and flat roofs mirror the early Gupta style of the 5th century AD Capil constructed this creation with his own hands. It was his very own, and he may have envisaged it as his cultural gift to Trinidad from his ancient homeland.”
VS Naipaul, who clearly inherited his father’s asperity, would hate to be limited to being reduced as an “Indian” writer defined by race. In an interview I did with him long back, Naipaul, when I asked him his opinion on Indians in Trinidad, declared he didn’t know any. His supercilious remark was meant to drive home the point that literature is beyond race.
And that is the point. T&T lives with an extraordinary story of an exceptional family and a world heritage building within its grasp.
Now that Prof Ramchand says all efforts to find legitimate owners of Lion House have failed, he is calling on the State to make a thoroughly legal ‘compulsory purchase of the house, for a multi-partisan committee to contract a survey of the house to see how it could be saved and a fund which would pay the owner when they show up.’ Two years back, I bemoaned that a similarly historic home, the late Dr Eric Williams, on Mary Street in St Clair, had been sold to the Vatican. This shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.
Prof Ramchand, also the founder of the literary NGO Friends of Mr Biswas, facilitated the purchase of VS Naipaul’s second home at 26 Nepaul Street, St James, in 1996 as a heritage building in the nick of time, just before it was put up for sale.
“We have a terrible policy,” Prof Ramchand said, “We sell land to foreign embassies when we should lease it to them. Now Chinese and Americans, British own lands in our country forever.”
Love him or hate him, Trinidad was under the microscope of a writer with unsurpassed literary genius. The collapse of Lion House would be calamitous, demonstrating a state that cannot tolerate brilliance and conducts business with lethargy and a manageable mediocrity. We have already lost Dr Eric Williams’ home. We can’t lose this too.
Lion House, a façade with cracks, and moss for floors, under attack from an unforgiving earth, remains a magnificent, living, wounded creature until it collapses, betrayed by its callous inhabitants, lost to history.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023.
