Social Marginality, Cultural Hybridity and Politics of Identity: Reading Naipaul’s The Mimic Men and The Mystic Masseur
Dr. Manisha Sarkar

Abstract
V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men and The Mystic Masseur scrutinize the multiple socio-cultural predicaments of the marginalized, the once colonized West Indian subjects groping for distinctive identities of their own. The New World Caribbean society was created by a system of indentured labour which resulted in the migration of agricultural labourers from India and China to produce sugarcane in the West Indian plantations. Situated in this creolized society, the East Indians in Trinidad impelled by the ‘girmitya’ impulse recreate the mythologized Hindu world through mindless replication of communal rituals. Their cultural hybridity further seduced them to mimic western cultural paradigms. My paper proposes to examine how their uncouth strategies of self-definition ironically aggravate their alienation trapped in a maze of identity politics and also how they acquire an awareness of their syncretistic existence.

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