The Mingling of People

"Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi," is the Latin phrase that remains on a monument in Salim's new town. The phrase comes from Virgil's Aeneid and means, "He approves of the mingling of the peoples and their bonds of union. This is also the former motto of Trinidad and Tobago, where V.S. Naipaul was born and raised. After reading Naipaul's Nobel Lecture, I began to understand more about the novel. Salim consistently describes a life without a past, a life lived in darkness, and of groups of people who live together and intertwine their fates. Naipaul, in his lecture titled "Two World," speaks about his blindness about his Indian heritage because history was just not passed along as the immigrants attempted to fit into the new society to give their families better opportunities.
In the novel, Naipaul speaks of people without histories; this is a theme we keep seeing in our Nobel Prize novels. In relating some of his heritage, Salim says, "if I say these things it is because I have got them from European boos. They formed no part of our knowledge or pride. Without Europeans, I feel, all our past would have been washed away." Naipaul's lecture illuminates the reality of this situation: while he was trying to learn about his town, Chaguanas, which was named after a tribe of 1,000 that just disappeared, he finds a one letter from Spain to Trinidad, asking about this tribe in 1652. This group of people, Naipaul says, just vanished because they failed to leave anything behind, and no one else had cared to document them, so all that remains is one letter in a British museum. The novel addresses the importance of preserving history, and explains the importance of who is doing the writing. While it's good that at least the Europeans have kept histories of Salim's ancestors, the Orientalist views that he is left with are damaging. He lives in a world created by the West, with a history that makes him and his people the Others.
While the mingling of people has its benefits in a cultural exchange and sharing of ideas, it is important that each group retains its roots and takes care to guard its dignity in history.