The Shadow Bride by Roy A. K. Heath

First published: 1988

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1930’s

Locale: British Guiana

Principal Characters:

• Betta Singh, a young medical doctor of East Indian descent
• Mrs. Singh, Betta’s wealthy widowed mother
• Meena Singh, the beautiful, sensual woman whom Betta marries
• Aji, an ancient female family retainer
• Mulvi Sahib, a Muslim religious teacher
• The Pujaree, a Hindu religious teacher
• Rani, an orphan adopted by Mrs. Singh
• Lahti, another orphan adopted by Mrs. Singh
• Sukrum, a vicious, scheming opportunist

The Novel

Like most of Roy Heath’s novels, The Shadow Bride deals with the disintegration of a single character. In this case that character is Mrs. Singh, a woman born in India but brought to British Guiana as a bride when still an adolescent. The novel’s title suggests that Mrs. Singh has left part of herself back in India and remains a “shadow” of herself throughout her life. She symbolizes the problems of all East Indian immigrants living in Guiana, and in a certain sense she symbolizes all first-generation immigrants everywhere, including Heath himself.

The protagonist of the novel is not Mrs. Singh but her son Betta, who has been studying medicine in England. Contrary to his mother’s wishes, he goes to work as a government official supervising the health of workers on a big colonial estate that is engaged in the business of growing sugar cane for export. The time is the 1930’s, and the country is still under British rule. Such estates played a major part in Guiana’s history because the British imported large numbers of indentured workers from India to do the backbreaking, poorly paid labor in the fields. The East Indians became the dominant racial group in Guiana, which is the reason Heath, himself of African descent, is writing about them.

The British overseers were as heartless in their treatment of the indentured workers as the slave owners in the Deep South of the United States were to their slaves before the Civil War. The biggest scourge in Guiana was malaria, which was transmitted by mosquitoes and not well understood at that time. Betta is appalled at the living and working conditions of the people he is called upon to treat, but he quickly runs afoul of the overseers when he tries to hospitalize men who are obviously too sick to work under the equatorial sun. An attempt is made on Betta’s life by thugs acting on orders from the estate’s top management. By this time, Betta is married and has a child; he quits his post because he does not want to endanger his family.

When Betta tries to move back into his mother’s house with his family, he finds that the gates have been padlocked to keep them out. His mother has fallen under the influence of a holy man of the traditional Hindu faith who, under the guise of teaching her to free herself from worldly attachments, is actually destroying her relationships with relatives and friends.

While Betta struggles to build a medical practice and support a growing family without his mother’s assistance, she becomes a helpless thrall to the Pujaree, who eventually becomes her husband and lord and master of her household. At last she realizes what has happened to her and manages to evict her hateful husband, only to fall into the hands of Sukrum, a loathsome household servant with no religious pretensions whatever. When Sukrum tries to assert his complete dominance by raping Mrs. Singh, she accepts the final humiliation of running back to her son and the daughter-in-law she has repeatedly scorned. She begins to lose her mind completely, and finally she frees her son and daughter-in-law of her demanding, disruptive presence by committing suicide.

The Characters

Roy Heath’s greatest strength as a fiction writer is in his characterization. He creates characters who seem to be real people. In The Shadow Bride, he tells his story from many different viewpoints, including those of Mrs. Singh, Betta, Betta’s wife Meena, Rani, Lahti, Sukrum, the Pujaree, and several others. He displays adroit craftsmanship in constructing scenes in which different characters are paired for purposes of contrast. Almost every character will interact at some point in the story with every other character, and the interactions are always appropriate to what is known of their personalities and motivations.

Heath writes good dialogue that suggests the intellectual, educational, and moral level of his characters; he never uses dialogue in a heavy-handed manner for the purpose of conveying plot information to readers. Like real people, Heath’s characters do not always say what they think and feel because they do not always know what they are thinking and feeling. Moreover, they often have reasons to conceal their true thoughts or feelings.

Heath shares one quality with the world’s greatest creative writers: He is able to project himself into all of his characters. Betta reflects that there is something in himself of all the people he has encountered over a period of about ten years. It should be noted that Heath himself has obvious points in common with both Mrs. Singh and Betta. Like Mrs. Singh, Heath is an expatriate who feels he has left an important part of himself behind in his native land. Like Betta, Heath is strongly motivated to find his true identity and be useful to society, but he is hopelessly perplexed by the enormity of humanity’s problems. Heath feels guilty about running away from the seemingly insurmountable troubles of Guiana in the same way that Betta feels guilty about abandoning the sick and dying workers. There are many such autobiographical projections in Heath’s major and minor characters.

Heath, like many other West Indians, emigrated to England. It is evident from his published writings that he feels alienated in that cold northern land with its predominantly white population; however, he also feels alienated in his native Guiana because, like the great American novelist Henry James, he has been an expatriate for so much of his life. In writing about Mrs. Singh’s chronic unhappiness, Heath is actually writing about himself. In one revealing passage, Betta muses that the book’s other characters “were all mirrors in which he had glimpsed something of himself, admirable or repugnant, according as he rejected or welcomed what he saw.”

Critical Context

Roy Heath has been given little attention in books about Caribbean writers. He moved away from his homeland and has lived in England since 1951, returning to Guiana only for occasional visits; thus, many books about Caribbean writers do not even mention his name in a footnote. He is considered by many critics to be a British writer rather than a Caribbean writer.

Those critics who have discussed Heath’s books invariably note that he is more concerned with the past than the future and with the individual than society. He is often called an “expatriate” author, and his harshest critics say that he does not truly understand the problems of his native land because he has been away from it for so long. He has been accused of lacking social conscience and national and racial identity.

Heath’s situation gives him a broader perspective than is available to writers who are immersed in a single familiar environment. He can be usefully compared to Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov, two great novelists who suffered by being cut off from their roots but whose suffering gave them a deeper understanding and tolerance than was exhibited by many of their stay-at-home contemporaries.

The Shadow Bride is generally considered to be Heath’s best novel. It is an important work that avoids giving easy answers to problems of race relations and personal alienation. Instead of offering salvation through politics or religion, the novel places the burden of existence upon each individual. Heath is too intelligent a writer to believe, or to attempt to convince his readers, that the enormous problems of his native land can be solved overnight by any quick fix. Through his protagonist, Betta Singh, he shows that the only hope for the future can be found in the patient, diligent, self-sacrificing dedication of many such intelligent individuals. He does not cast blame, even on the brutal colonial exploiters of the East Indian workers; he recognizes that human beings are complex mixtures of good and bad.

Bibliography

Boxill, Anthony. “Penetrating the Hinterland: Roy Heath’s Guyana Trilogy.” World Literature Written in English 29, no. 1 (1989): 103-110. A mainly favorable evaluation of Heath’s novels From the Heat of the Day (1979), One Generation (1981), and Genetha (1981). Boxill discusses Heath’s life and work, pointing out that Heath has never been especially interested in race relations, Guianese nationalism, the colonial heritage, or the search for a unique West Indian identity, all of which are characteristics of most Caribbean literature.

Dasenbrock, Reed Way. Review of The Shadow Bride. World Literature Today 63, no. 1 (Winter, 1989): 151-152. Gives a brief history of the settlement of Guiana and calls Heath’s novel “the epic of malaria” because this dreaded scourge of the tropics is central to The Shadow Bride. Compares the book to V. S. Naipaul’s classic Caribbean novel of “creolization,” A House for Mr. Biswas (1961).

Heath, Roy. Shadows Round the Moon: A Caribbean Childhood. London: William Collins Sons, 1990. The author relates the story of his early life in what was then British Guinea. His personal history is interwoven with many amusing anecdotes about his multiracial homeland under colonial rule.

Jaggi, Maya. “Promising Secrets.” The Times Literary Supplement, September 14, 1990, 979. A review of Shadows Round the Moon. Jaggi points out some of the autobiographical elements that found expression in fictional form in such works as The Shadow Bride.

McWatt, Mark A. “Roy A. K. Heath.” Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Daryl Cumber Dance. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. An informative discussion of Heath’s life and work, highlighting his ambiguous position as an expatriate.

Rosenberg, Leah Reade. Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Examination of the relationship between nationhood, national identity, and Caribbean literature. Crucial for understanding both Heath’s writing itself and the reasons for its habitual exclusion from the Caribbean canon.

Rubin, Merle. “A Marriage Tie That Binds.” The Christian Science Monitor, February 17, 1993, 15. A review of the American edition of Heath’s From the Heat of the Day, originally published in Britain in 1979. Focuses on the complexities of marital relationships and praises Heath for his refusal to provide simple solutions to his characters’ complex family problems, many of which are taken up again in The Shadow Bride.