Victor Ramraj

A prominent aspect of the early and current Indo- Caribbean experience as de-
picted by Caribbean writers of East Indian extraction is the Indo-Carribeans'
sense of marginality in their adopted homes, be it the Caribbean itself or the
European and North American countries to which they migrated. In the Carib-
bean, they are late arrivers, whose deeply rooted culture kept them apart from
and prevented easy assimilation into the dominant British culture that was im-
posed on the colonies. Those who came to accept assimilation as an inevitable
course are depicted as perpetual travellers in a constant state of arriving. Many
Indo-Carribean assimilationists, like their black countrymen, migrated to Britain,
perceiving London to be their capital and their journey there as a sort of home-
coming, only to find, as Samuel Selvon and V. S. Naipaul relate, that they did
not actually belong there and found themselves on the periphery of the society.
In the 1960s, V. S. Naipaul, living in Britain, came to acknowledge that though
the English language was his, the tradition was not ( "Jasmine,"26), and later,
in the 1980s, he observed that he was striving to find a "centre" ( Finding the
Center) and to grasp the "enigma" of his perpetual state of arrival ( The Enigma
of Arrival). Those who migrated to Canada, as Sonny Ladoo and Neil Bissoon-
dath show, found themselves in a society in which the government's well-
intentioned multicultural policy advocates the concept of the cultural mosaic,
which unfortunately forces the Indo-Carribean and other immigrants to perceive
themselves as tiny individual tiles kept peripheral, if contiguous, to the prominent
central tile of the mosaic. None of the novelists portrays major characters who
are seriously contemplating a return to India; they create a few secondary char-
acters who feel alienated in the Caribbean and dream of India but hesitate to

-77-