V.S. Naipaul, a great expatriate writer, has championed, has championed the issues of dislocation, fragmentation, rootlessness and consequent loss of identity in diasporic literature. An expatriate writer is one who voluntarily moves to reside abroad but at the same time maintaining his national identity, with a view to return to his native land. Thus, an expatriate is more privileged than a refugee. Naipaul's expatriate sensibility accounts for his "willed homelessness" with the least possibility to return to Trinidad. His expatriate sensibility is greatly affected by his marginalized existence. Naipaul is wholly alienated and hence, a citizen of nowhere and every where. Exile has been the basic urge behind all his creative writing. The Mystic
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It tells the opposite tale of the process, not a recovery, but a loss-of how Ganesh Ramsumair, a Brahmin of Indian origin, becomes G. Ramsay Muir-a mimic man" (114). In her critical analysis of Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur, Madhurima Srivastava has drawn attention to the fact that, "The acute conflict between the Oriental and Occidental hemisphere is indubitably a momentous dimension of diasporic sensibility which figures prominently in The Mystic Masseur throughout" (169). When the novel opens, Ganesh Ramsumair is a struggling masseur, "at a time when masseurs were ten a penny in Trinidad." (11) Naipaul then proceeds to recount the life of the protagonist to us, from boyhood to manhood. Ganesh Ramsumair is the son of an Indian immigrant to Trinidad, who seems to be blessed by fortune. He is a representative of the first generation of the Indians in Trinidad to have come under the influence of Western education. The first generation Indians, as a matter of fact, confronted a severe identity crisis. They were exposed to a totally different value system in school, whereas their socializing system had been in their own traditional culture. The need for good education brings Ganesh into contact with the Creole world of the Port of Spain. Ganesh's father Mr. Ramsumair, takes pains, to send Ganesh to Queen's Royal College for admission, "He had Ganesh dressed in a Khaki suit and a Khaki toupee and may people said, the boy looked like a little sahib"
It tells the opposite tale of the process, not a recovery, but a loss-of how Ganesh Ramsumair, a Brahmin of Indian origin, becomes G. Ramsay Muir-a mimic man" (114). In her critical analysis of Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur, Madhurima Srivastava has drawn attention to the fact that, "The acute conflict between the Oriental and Occidental hemisphere is indubitably a momentous dimension of diasporic sensibility which figures prominently in The Mystic Masseur throughout" (169). When the novel opens, Ganesh Ramsumair is a struggling masseur, "at a time when masseurs were ten a penny in Trinidad." (11) Naipaul then proceeds to recount the life of the protagonist to us, from boyhood to manhood. Ganesh Ramsumair is the son of an Indian immigrant to Trinidad, who seems to be blessed by fortune. He is a representative of the first generation of the Indians in Trinidad to have come under the influence of Western education. The first generation Indians, as a matter of fact, confronted a severe identity crisis. They were exposed to a totally different value system in school, whereas their socializing system had been in their own traditional culture. The need for good education brings Ganesh into contact with the Creole world of the Port of Spain. Ganesh's father Mr. Ramsumair, takes pains, to send Ganesh to Queen's Royal College for admission, "He had Ganesh dressed in a Khaki suit and a Khaki toupee and may people said, the boy looked like a little sahib"