Lakshmi Persaud
Novelist who chronicled the lives of Indians in the Caribbean
LAKSHMI PERSAUD, who has died aged 86, was inspired by the success of her fellow Trinidadian Indian, the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, to become a writer, and was the author of five wellreceived novels, most of which engaged with the experience of the Indian diaspora, particularly women, in colonial and postcolonial Trinidad.
She was born Lakshmi Seeteram on September 20 1937 in the small village of Streatham Lodge (later Pasea Village), in rural Tunapuna, Trinidad, where her great-grandfather had arrived with other agricultural labourers, Hindus from Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, between 1890 and 1905. Her parents were in the retail business. They were, she recalled, “enlightened people” who saw the importance of education for girls as well as boys.
From St Augustine Girls’ High School and St Joseph’s Convent, Port of Spain, she left in 1957 to study geography at Queen’s University Belfast, staying on to take a PHD on “The Need for and the Possibilities of Agricultural Diversification in Barbados, West Indies”. She then took a postgraduate diploma in education at Reading University.
At Queen’s, she met Bishnodat Persaud, an economics student from Guyana, when he arrived late for a match for the university West Indian cricket team, of which he was the captain. Lakshmi, as secretary of the university’s West Indian Society, ticked him off, and Persaud would recall how, afterwards, he would cross the road to avoid her.
One day, however, she approached him, dropping her books on to the ground. When he picked them up, she invited him to coffee. They married in 1962 and had a daughter and two sons, one of whom is the television and radio psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud.
The family lived for several years in the West Indies, where Lakshmi taught at grammar schools in Guyana, Barbados and Trinidad, but they returned to Britain in 1974 when her husband was appointed Director of Economic Affairs at the Commonwealth Secretariat, and settled in Mill Hill, north London, after being recommended the schools in the area.
Lakshmi Persaud worked as a freelance journalist, contributing articles on socio-economic issues to newspapers and magazines, and recorded books for the Royal National Institute for the Blind. She turned to writing fiction in the 1980s after her children had grown up and left home.
She was 53 when her first novel, Butterfly in the Wind, was published in 1990. Drawing on her own childhood, she explored the psychological conflicts experienced by a Hindu girl in Trinidad attending a Catholic school. Sastra (1993) portrayed a young woman’s struggle to negotiate a course between the Hinduism of her Trinidadian Indian parents and her generation’s desire for freedom. Both books were bestsellers in the West Indies.
In For the Love of My Name (2000), Lakshmi Persaud moved away from her domestic territory to the fictional island of Maya, loosely based on her husband’s native Guyana and characterised by political repression and ethnic conflict. Raise the Lanterns High (2004) was about a wealthy Hindu girl living in Trinidad who is forced to marry a man she has witnessed raping another woman, a plot she used to explore the history of female oppression in India.
Her last novel, Daughters of Empire (2012), explored the experiences of two Trinidadian Indian sisters, one of whom stays in Trinidad with the family business, while the other migrates to England.
She was honoured with several literary awards in the West Indies, while in Britain, Warwick University established a Lakshmi Persaud Research Fellowship at its Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies.
Lakshmi Persaud’s husband, Professor Bishnodat Persaud, died in 2016. She is survived by their three children.