Jeremy Poynting
We are very sad to hear of the recent death of Savitri (Savi) Naipaul Akal. Peepal Tree was privileged to publish her memoir The Naipauls of Nepaul Street (2018) and to meet her in Trinidad at the Bocas Litfest in 2018 when we launched her book. Then, we hugely enjoyed the pleasure of meeting her and her family at the after-launch party where we discovered how well champagne and roti go together. It was rewarding to meet all the kindly warmth, sharp insights and humour evident in the book, and find them in the person. Savi Naipaul Akal was one of those rare people who seemed completely secure in herself, without any kind of “front”, who had accumulated the wisdom from living a long life very fully and had remained youthful in spirit.
Her book is an important one because of the quality of its writing, the vividness of the memory it calls on, and the judiciousness of its insights and not least because it does justice to the role of women in the Naipaul family, too narrowly famed for the remarkable concentration of writing talent in her father, Seepersad, and her two brothers, Vidia and Shiva. Savi’s book offers a rich portrait of the centrality of her mother, Droapatie, in holding the family together and creating the environment in which so many members of the family were able to flourish. It’s a book with its own sense of shape and trajectory, and one that has an acute social and cultural vision of the changing shape of Indian Trinidadian life that at crucial points offers a subtly different perspective to those of her older and younger brothers’ visions of cultural implosion (from which there can be no recovery – just flight), in V.S.’s portrayal of the wider family’s life in A House for Mr Biswas and in Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies and The Chip-Chip Gatherers.
One of the crucial chapters in A House for Mr Biswas is “The Shorthills Adventure”, the episode when the Tulsi family move from Hanuman House to a country estate — and in their ignorance despoil its sophisticated Creole blending of natural elements in its agriculture and so precipitate the fictive family’s collapse. It’s a brilliantly written episode which portrays the utter failure of the elders of the Tulsi clan, trapped in a Brahminical Hinduism that still expects dutiful respect from their caste “inferiors”, to open their eyes to Trinidad or understand the reasons for their own inner collapse. Savi Naipaul Akal follows her father, Seepersad, in recognising that it was quite possible to hold on to a deep and self-sustaining sense of Indian heritage and to find a thriving place in Trinidadian society. Seepersad was the son of indentured immigrants from India, but he was very clear in both his journalism and his fiction that Indians in Trinidad had to become a new kind of people — both “oriental and occidental” and distinctively “West Indian” — and seize on the opportunities to remake themselves that Trinidad, though still a colonial country with a white-oriented racial hierarchy, offered people who were fleeing intense poverty and castism. His journalism displays an open interest in the culture of their Creole neighbours and Savi Naipaul Akal’s memoir follows precisely that kind of trajectory.
Savi's version of the Shorthills Episode (Petit Valley) is called “Heidi of the Tropics”, and she writes that the “estate of my childhood remains the most idyllic place in the world”. She agrees with her brother that “the Capildeo family, including ourselves, had not yet reached the level of sophistication to appreciate the Eden we were in”, but her account of childhood there opens out to an awareness of the Creole world on their doorstep – the creole villagers, cricket and an Easter of greasy pole festivities with ham at the top of it. For the young Savi Naipaul, through her father’s example and schooling, there’s an opening up into a world that includes war-time connections to the Atlantic world, an awareness of the power of whiteness in the colonial world, and the passionate excitement in the rising struggle for Indian independence and the colonial oppression vainly holding back its arrival.
Naturally, in the process of writing a family and personal memoir, The Naipauls of Nepaul Street has many interesting and judicious things to say about her famous brother, but it is as a portrait of the possibilities of making a life in Trinidad, and the transforming power of education, that Savi Naipaul Akal wrote a book of lasting value and a fine memorial for herself. In 2024 the South Asian rights to The Nepauls of Nepaul Street were acquired by Speaking Tiger Books - one of India's most acclaimed independent publishing companies.
