The Shadow Bride (1988)1 is the eighth of nine novels published to date by Roy A. K. Heath (b. 1926). The author now lives and writes out of London, where he migrated in 1950. His novels speak directly of the unyielding landscape of his homeland, Guyana, and the social and cultural realities that inhere in its complex history of slavery, indentureship, colonialism and its aftermath. Heath’s novels range over the whole of the twentieth century in Guyana, registering in the writer’s peculiar way the impact of conquest and colonialism on the lives of ordinary people.His novelistic focus remains the urban condition, ground that has not been covered to any comparable extent by his contemporaries, the terrain that Martin Carter famously refers to as “my strangled city.” Heath’s novels, powered by what Michael Gilkes terms “urban angst”, anatomise a society mired in class schisms, poverty, power struggles and powerlessness, among other adverse social forces. Doc’s words in From the Heat of the Day (1979) could summarise Heath’s fiction:“Everybody’s making frantic efforts to get out of some deep pit. There’s always a tormentor trying to kick you back into the pit.” Heath’s first attempt to write prose fiction was in the 1960s. It came in the form of a massive novel whose burden was to portray the experiences of the Armstrongs, a coloured middle-class family living in the first half of the twentieth century, first in Agricola, a stagnant rural village on the East Bank of Demerara, and finally, moving up to the prestigious ward of Queenstown in Georgetown. However, Heath could not find a London publisher willing to take the risk of a lengthy William Collins, 1988; New York: Persea, 1996. Winner of the 1989 Guyana Prize for Literature. The other novels are: A Man Come Home (London: Longmans, 1974); The Murderer (London:Allison & Busby, 1978; NewYork: Persea, 1992); From the Heat of the Day (London: Allison & Busby, 1979; New York: Persea, 1993); One Generation (London: Allison & Busby, 1981); Genetha (London: Allison & Busby, 1981) [From the Heat of the Day, One Generation and Genetha were reissued as The Armstrong Trilogy, New York: Persea, 1994]; Kwaku (London: Allison & Busby,1982; New York: Persea, 1997); Orealla (London: Allison & Busby, 1984); The Ministry of Hope (London & New York: Marion Boyars, 1997).
Chiefly, the novelists Edgar Mittelholzer, Jan Carew and Wilson Harris work from an unknown writer. He was encouraged to write a shorter novel that was published as A Man Come Home in 1974. This was followed in 1978 by The Murderer. Both novels are set in a newly independent country recognisable as Guyana. Success inspired Heath to return to the long work he had laid aside. He divided it into three blocks before it was accepted and published as three separate novels: From the Heat of the Day (1979), One Generation (1981), and Genetha (1981); these paved the way for four more novels in which Heath continued his uncompromising examination of man and society. Each of Heath’s works stands by itself but their cumulative effect is an instructive and illuminating portrait of twentieth-century Guyana. To read the novels serially, in the order in which they were written, is to pursue an odyssey through a world of unrelieved post-colonial deprivation.

People of Indian origin generally owe their presence in the Caribbean to the indentureship system, initiated in 1838, ostensibly to counter a labour shortage in the a7ermath of emancipation. Indian immigrant workers were the last additions to the heterogenous societies of the British West Indies where a creolisation process was broadly at work among the polyglot elements. The entry of the Indian was precarious as, even though by the early twentieth century, Indians in Guyana constituted the largest racial and cultural block in the colony, integration was only a presumption. The social fabric is further complicated by the range of ethnicities found among Indians.
In The Shadow Bride we see relationships at work between a free Hindu woman from Kerala in South India (who is unlike her counterparts in the colony, for indentured women came largely from North India, a few from Madras); a Muslim Indian priest; a low caste Madras priest claiming to be a Brahmin Hindu; and several first generation Guyanese-born Indian characters including a medical doctor, his wife and a retinue of servants in the mansion. These are all unknowingly caught up in changes within the social structure of regulated Hindu life as transported from India.
As a Guyanese, Heath would be conscious of the presence of Indians in the society and one would expect that they would appear in his work, even though Kamau Brathwaite cautions: “Few non-Indians knew much about

Indians… although Indians make up more than one third of the population, their customs and ceremonies remain quaint and even exotic.” Whilst it may seem surprising that a non-Indian writer should tackle the reinterpretation of life among Indians in the colony, Heath had more than passing acquaintance with Indians. In his unfinished autobiography, Shadows Round the Moon, he records a leap in awareness. His particular connections with Indians opened a window to their world that enabled him to come to terms with Indian presence and the reality of a racially complex society that he explores in One Generation. It is not surprising therefore, that The Shadow Bride delivers a more in-depth treatment of Indian experience in the colony. It is Heath’s gi to those Indian Guyanese friends and acquaintances that helped shape his perceptions and sensibility. Through the eyes of a third-person omniscient narrator who frames the text within five parts and an Epilogue, an account of Indian female experience unfolds. The work opens with Dr. Bea Singh in retirement, “looking inwards and backwards” on his growth to adolescence and adulthood and contemplating what turns out to be a certain unresolved issue in his life. It is the 1980s and the reconstruction of the character’s past is achieved through his memories and reflections. The work can be read on one level as an account of Dr. Singh’s social evolution: his resolve to be a Guyanese and his desire to be a good man and to serve his people while remaining the Indian his mother would wish him to be.
The narrative structure would suggest Dr. Singh to be the main character but readers will detect another dominant presence in the work. Singh’s mother plays such a central part in the unfolding drama and her story is so compelling that the reader accepts Heath’s decision to call the novel The Shadow Bride. Thus, on another level, the work is convincingly about the experiences of an Indian woman: her dislodgment from India and her struggle to sever ties with the ancestral land; her dilemma of adjustment and accommodation in the heterogenous hodge-podge of early twentieth-century British Guiana; her struggle for identity and a place in patriarchal society and, above all, the struggle of a strong-minded woman to cope with “Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean,” Savacou 1974; reprinted 1985). her inner desires.
The Shadow Bride is perhaps the first regional work of fiction not only to grapple intensely with the psychological consequences of exile and dislocation, but also to do so from an essentially female perspective. Heath must be praised for bringing female experience to centre stage as he had done earlier in Genetha (1990). brought as a beautiful bride from the progressive state of Kerala, Mrs. Singh is astonished to discover that her wealthy Guyanese husband is a nobody and has no standing in his own country or community; he plays no part in his wife’s induction into that society nor in her process of adjustment and accommodation. Upon his sudden demise when her Guyanese born son, Bea, is four years old, she begins to assert her “violent opposition” against colonialism and its institutions: “She had not come to the country as an indentured labourer and had no intention of suffering either directly or vicariously the humiliations heaped on the children of estate workers,” and she refuses to permit her son to attend “one of those schools where white boys sit at the front and East Indians at the back.” Mrs. Singh is determined to distinguish herself ethnically as the orthodox Indian without the stamp and stain of indentureship, to keep her son cloistered within a self-referring Hindu culture and, not least, within her own possessive grasp. Even though Mrs. Singh is not an indentured woman, her relationships and clashes with indentured Indians (around whom the plot pivots) are, nonetheless, instructive and reveal much about how transplanted people negotiate and come to terms with their new space and its possibilities. Shunning her husband’s wish for her son to attend the prestigious Queen’s College, Mrs. Singh employs a private tutor, the reputable Mulvi Sahib, to groom him for the world and a profession in medicine (while forbidding Mulvi to impart Islamic teachings to Bea). The protagonist is oblivious to the notion that immersion into the education system is one way for Indians to overcome the indignities of indentureship. Mrs. Singh exhibits an early desire for power not only over her son but also over the helpers and hangers-on in her household:
Then, with a gesture of desperation, she went off to her room, reflecting as she went that as a girl she never defended herself, that as a wife she never raised her voice, that soon after her husband’s death she had her long hair cut, took to wearing trousers and discovered the tumult behind her expressionless face and a terrible desire to exercise power over Aji and her
husband’s hangers-on.
Even though Mrs. Singh cuts “her hair short and [takes] to wearing trousers like a man” so that her words and actions can carry weight in the patriarchal society, she remains a vulnerable, powerless creature, thrown into a state of emotional crisis when she and her maturing son clash over nationality and cultural issues.
Qualifying as a medical doctor in Ireland, Bea Singh returns to Guyana with certain idealisms about himself and his people. He disobeys his mother and sacrifices a successful private practice in Kitty to devote his service to the malaria stricken, working-class poor on a rural sugar estate, influenced, no doubt ironically, by the Mulvi Sahib’s life and humanistic philosophy, “Sacrifice is at the heart of human experience”.
During his three-year absence from Georgetown, he chooses his own bride in contravention of the ancestral practice of arranged marriages. It is an act that enrages his mother. Mrs. Singh’s isolation deepens in proportion to her jealous rage against her son’s wife.
Mrs. Singh is a nameless character, clinging to the title “Mrs. Singh” as a social mask that links her to her husband’s wealth and large mansion; she clings even more tenaciously to the cultural mask of “Dr. Singh’s mother,” having invested heavily in her son’s education so that her own status and vanity can be enhanced. In India, Dr. Singh’s mother would have derived identity through the high esteem attached to Hindu motherhood; as such, she would have gained authority and power through her veil and would have expected nothing short of complete submission from her son but, in the New World, the ground beneath her feet shines in the face of her son’s unexpected bid for individuality. She is left psychically insecure and stranded on an alien shore, without an identity of her own or the inner resources to struggle creatively towards self-realisation.
While Dr. Singh meets his mother’s fury with “the gentle firmness he had adopted from abroad, driven by the impulse seven years of independence had kindled in him” she, on the other hand, “wanted to howl with impatience at her impotence in the face of events she could not control”. Subjugated to a “mother country” and the purity of its values, it is impossible for her to jettison the collectivity of her Keralan culture, particularly where no viable alternative order is on the horizon in a post-colonial society that offers no myths from which the psyche can take strength.
Whether or not Heath fully understood the shi7 occurring in Hinduism in the New World, he managed to capture the degradation among some of its adherents as conveyed by C. F. Andrews in Impressions of British Guiana, 1930: An Emissary’s Assessment. Both works traverse the same historical period. In the face of proselytisers in the colonies, the upper caste immigrants moved to relax the caste system, embracing many more Hindus as Brahmins to prevent them from going over to Christianity, thus enabling illiterate self-promoters (such as Pujaree) to pose as spirituals and assume and exceed religious and moral authority. An African character in The Shadow Bride is invested with sufficient awareness of the plural society to detect that Indians had been in limbo since their historic crossing: “They had lost caste since their journey across the water, a constant complaint of those who claimed to be Brahmins, and the dismantling of the caste system that delighted many had left others bewildered and confused.”
The shift from spiritualism to materialism manifests itself most clearly in Pujaree, whose undue influence over a vulnerable Hindu woman complicates the crisis between mother and son, a clash that could otherwise have been taken as nothing more than a generational gap between immigrants and their Guianese-born offspring with aspirations of their own. Pujaree belongs to a band of people who exploited Hinduism in the New World, practising a perverted version of it. Mrs. Singh’s living arrangements with Pujaree, cohabiting under the guise of their being spiritual partners, would have been untenable in India, but this development only emphasises the altering conditions of womanhood in the new dispensation of migration.
The choice between the trickery of Pujaree and the moral authority of Mulvi places certain pressures on Mrs. Singh that contribute to the acceleration of fragmentation and self-division. In retrospect, Dr. Singh’s feelings of guilt spring from the thought that somehow he allowed his mother to fall prey to such a degenerate character and, by the end of the work, Dr. Singh feels responsible for the tragic state of affairs, “jolted into the realisation that his mother’s death was his doing, but he could not have acted otherwise.” His sympathy for his mother
remains intact: He reflected on his shame, on the chaos of his former home…even though he came to reflect sympathetically on her willfulness and desolate condition: His animosity at his mother’s earlier behaviour passed away at the discovery of her loneliness…he examined his discovery from every angle, astonished that he had missed what lay before his eyes. She was an exile from marriage and her country, and the last link with both had been severed at Aji’s death, leaving her stranded on the shore of an unrelenting loneliness. Mulvi had known Pujaree as a “wayfarer priest … wandering the suburbs of Georgetown with his brass lotah and a cloth thrown over his shoulder… a disreputable opportunist who gave East Indians a bad name”; but he refrains from offering opinions to Mrs. Singh in her void of desolate loneliness and her increasingly temperamental moods. The way is left free for Pujaree to seize the opportunity to reinvent himself. Ensconced in Mrs. Singh’s mansion, he asserts himself as man of the house, exploits her in every sense and widens the rift between mother and son. Heath offers a graphic portrait of the predator that also illuminates the erosion of mainstream Hinduism and its traditional mores and values in an alien land: For the first time he had been roused to exercise his full rights as her spouse and protector. Standing at the head of the stairs he listened and was surprised at the spirited way she had carried out his orders.
The Pujaree had been quietly working towards this end for years. All his actions had been regulated by his ambition… Hardly had he taken in the fact of living by her side, in the house that had dazzled him for so many years than he found himself in a position of being able to make of it whatever he chose. He was familiar with every piece of furniture in the drawing room… If life was change then he would change everything around him beyond recognition.
As we shall see, there are, in addition, certain characteristics noticed in Mrs. Singh that are not historically or culturally predetermined. A deeply divided character, Mrs. Singh enters the most challenging stage of her existence after Be8a’s abandonment of her, for even though “Kerala never ceased haunting her” and “[I] Bea let her down, she would go back to India, to the place of longboats”, the dilemma is that return is impossible, “she could not return, for she had given birth here.”
Mrs. Singh’s isolation that begins with her son’s rejection deepens in the hands of the Madrasi Pujaree who had “gained a foothold in her house”. Her negative energy is released at the moment when she discards the medallion of Ganesha, the all knowing God of Hindu tradition, and replaces Laxshmi (the goddess of compassion, generosity, love, and fertility) with that of Durga of the Kali Mai sect (fierce warrior of war and destruction), at the Pujaree’s command: “a fire burned intensely in her and she transformed into an opposite quantity”. This departure from mainstream Hinduism throws Mrs. Singh into deeper psychic confusion than that already presented by her condition of shipwreck.
The following surreal scene with her terrorised daughter-in-law heightens the psychological realism of a work that depicts the chaos of a disintegrating mind on the brink of madness: All of a sudden the dogs reappeared at the entrance of the door. Meena, gripping the arms of her chair, closed her eyes and waited. And just as suddenly as the animals had appeared, so their gasping filled the room and Meena, unable to restrain herself any longer, uttered a piercing shriek which resounded throughout the house, accompanied by the bellowing of the dogs… She then remembered that her mother-in-law had replaced her shrine to Lakshmi, goddess of prosperity, by one to Durga, the destroyer. And just thinking of the name struck terror in her heart.
At the heart of Mrs. Singh’s dilemma is a fixation with her son whose “shadow bride” she secretly perceives herself as, and so the work can be read as a reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex. This is suggested through a dream Be8a has that convinces him of her emotional manipulation, masking as maternal love, that “could not fail to bring in its train the most terrible consequences”:
Then, one night after she had petteed and fondled him while putting him to bed, he dreamt of her with staring eyes and a long tongue which hung over her lower lip.
And soon afterwards, among the numerous old calendars she kept in her camphor-wood chest, he discovered a picture of Durga in her terrible aspect, the devourer of children. The picture was red and baleful. And what remained of the experience, what lingered until his childhood was overtaken by his youth, was the ascendance of red over blue. Now he felt pity for his mother, realising that her power was illusory, that he no longer cared to explain in detail why he was obliged to leave as soon as he could, before he was overcome by a complacence which . . . in him would be a kind of death. Shocked into recognition of this duality in his mother “transformed
into an unrecognisable entity”, a version of the destructive Kali goddess Durga, Dr. Singh resolves to flee the grasp of her indomitable will and the prison-like mansion with its camphor-wood chairs and chests, its irrelevant internal laws, early in his medical career. In spite of his maturity and education, Dr. Singh’s understanding of his mother’s character is as imperfect as when he was a child; it is even suggested that his career was strangulated as “he could take pleasure neither in his mother’s helplessness, nor in the fulfillment of his own ambition to found
a hospital of his own.”
For crossing his mother’s will, Dr. Singh comes to experience the seething cauldron of her mind; she feels “the affront of her son’s abandonment deeply enough to seek revenge on someone closely related to him” and conspires with Pujaree to do evil: “In exchange for her undertaking to convert the lower storey of her house into a temple, he agreed to harm Bea’s infant son as punishment to Bea.” In the first chapter of the novel we meet Dr. Singh’s son, made invalid as a result of this evil act.
Heath’s preoccupation with the dark side of the human mind comes through clearly in all of his novels, nowhere more so than in his rendition of the dramatic psychological change in Mrs. Singh, convinced as she is that “she had arrived at the point where the road forked, where good and evil separated. And she had no doubt it was Bea’s conduct that obliged her to take the
one leading to the destruction of herself at the moment when she was about to embark on the other”. The urgency of her needs and the intensity of her rebelliousness guarantee her greatness as a literary creation. Unlike other Indian women in the colony who are bound by the rigid rules and regulations of the plantation system, however repressive they may be, Mrs. Singh is unanchored and invested with an ironic freedom. The ill?fated relationships she cultivates in her bid for power over others threaten her fragile mental condition, rendering her the most alienated creature that ever crossed the so?called “blackwaters”.
And yet Mrs. Singh’s fragmentation is not all of her own doing. This character allows us to reflect on Western theories about rational man through the irrationality and illogicality evidenced in human behaviour: When, ashamed of the absurdity of the charge she had laid at Rani’s door, Mrs. Singh broke off in the middle of her tirade, she stood near the two young women, astonished by her conduct, by the realisation, after all these years that her husband was really dead… She listened by the silence created around her by her dictatorial voice and was ashamed that Rani’s irresponsible smile had vanished and that Lathi seemed cowed by her outburst
The Shadow Bride is also instructive for Mrs. Singh’s perverse relationship with other members of her household, including her harbouring of a rootless vagrant, Sukrum, to bring calculated ruin to one of her protégés, Lathi. Sukrum is, in turn, responsible for the final degradation of this tragic woman. In view of her irrational and psychopathic tendencies, even Pujaree ultimately comes to fear Mrs. Singh as “a woman whose character he could never fathom”. By choosing a first generation Indian who arrives in the New World with her cultural certainty intact, the writer is able to trace the process of adjustment and accommodation into Creole society from its initial stages. Through the schizophrenic response of the Indian to her dislodgment from the ancestral land, the work comments on the sea change that Hinduism undergoes in the New World. Mrs. Singh fails tragically in her poignant struggle to secure an identity in the New World; she cannot even understand her place in the unformed sociocultural reality of early twentieth?century British Guiana.
By Roy Heath
Introduction
By Ameena Gafoor