The Nobel Prize-winning British author of Indian descent, V.S. Naipaul (85), passed away on Sunday. A controversial figure in his country of origin, and in the Carribean, where he was brought up, Naipaul was nothing short of a force of nature. His dark, sardonic prose captured the whole spectrum of the immigrant experience—the doubts, the self-loathing, and the rootlessness—in a way that transcended, in all its ugliness, the sanitised uptown Bostonian angst of the Jhumpa Lahiri variety. His prose was luminous, and the bluntness of his observations, piercing. But his later works, especially the travelogues from India (The Wounded Civilisation), and explorations of the Islamic society (Among the Believers), often nursed and pruned the cruel condescension of a white colonial master, narrated in the garb of a brown man.
Naipaul was born in Trinidad, the grandson of indentured Indian labourers. "When I was born in 1932, it had a population of about 400,000. Of this, about 150,000 were Indians, Hindus and Muslims, nearly all of peasant origin, and nearly all from the Gangetic plain," he said in his Nobel lecture. It was within that cesspool of inter-community tensions, rising liberation movements in the backdrop of receding colonial powers, that Naipaul first embarked on his career as a writer. His experiences growing up would be crystallised in the dry humour of his very first works, like The Mystic Masseur, which he had written in 1957, after an English course in the Oxford University, and a subsequent stint in the BBC World Service. His earlier works merit an independent study in themselves. But, the crowning achievement that catapulted him to fame was A House for Mr Biswas, a deliciously intricate tale of a man modelled after Naipaul's father, a wanna-be writer struggling to find a place in a strange part of the world that he wittingly finds himself marooned in. His later personal life was marred with controversies—his public dissing of Indian counterparts Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and countless others, his admissions to physical indiscretions while his first wife Patricia Naipaul was battling cancer, allegations of domestic harassment, reported support for BJP and Babri Masjid demolition, among many others.
In a 1989 interview with The Washington Post, Naipaul narrates an incident where his father Seepersad, a journalist with the Trinidad Guardian, received threats after a report on Hindu farmers refusing to vaccinate their cattle. A warning note made its appearance: Naipaul had to perform the same ceremony he criticised—sacrificing a goat—or he would face death. He had to acquiesce."My father was entering the world of civilisation, writing bravely. When the crunch came, he couldn't be protected," Naipaul said in the interview. "He had to recant and he never recovered." His was a lifelong tussle with his roots, his identity and very existence; the cold disappointment of finally encountering his motherland is clearly visible in his many travelogues. His writings betray a sense of bitterness—of wide-eyed dreams of a glorious heritage falling woefully short—disillusionment at a culture, that he believed to be his own, struggling to overcome the dual whammies of sustained colonisation and partition. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he would thank Britain, his adopted homeland, but not the Carribean.
"The narrow, broken lanes with green slime in the gutters, the choked back-to-back mud houses, the jumble of filth and food and animals and people, the baby in the dust, swollen-bellied, black with flies, but wearing its good-luck amulet. I had seen the physique of the people of Andhra, which had suggested the possibility of an evolution downwards, wasted body to wasted body," he wrote in one. "It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad," he sneers in his seminal An Area of Darkness. The pain of his un-belonging is sometimes illustrated with blinding clarity: India, for me, is a difficult country. It isn't my home, and cannot be my home; and yet, I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far". Similar diatribes he would have reserved for his host country in the Carribean, and the continent of Africa (A Bend in The River), sometimes prompting accusations of racism, or being a brown man's Uncle Tom, kowtowing and catering to the exotic, imperious white man's gaze into the third world. His works gained critical acclaim in the West, and nods of appreciation in the form of a Booker Prize for In a Free State, which best characterises his penchant for inexplicable cruelty, mixed in with razor sharp observations.
Nobel Prize winning Carribean poet Derek Walcott, strangely Naipaul's foremost nemesis and most strident critic, speaks about the mythical wonderment of the Carribean's Ramleela enactments in his Nobel lecture: "Felicity is a village in Trinidad on the edge of the Caroni plain, the wide central plain that still grows sugar and to which indentured cane cutters were brought after emancipation, so the small population of Felicity is East Indian, and on the afternoon that I visited it with friends from America, all the faces along its road were Indian, which, as I hope to show, was a moving, beautiful thing, because this Saturday afternoon Ramleela, the epic dramatization of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, was going to be performed, and the costumed actors from the village were assembling on a field strung with different-coloured flags, like a new gas station, and beautiful Indian boys in red and black were aiming arrows haphazardly into the afternoon light. Low blue mountains on the horizon, bright grass, clouds that would gather colour before the light went. Felicity! What a gentle Anglo-Saxon name for an epical memory.
Under an open shed on the edge of the field, there were two huge armatures of bamboo that looked like immense cages. They were parts of the body of a god, his calves or thighs, which, fitted and reared, would make a gigantic effigy. This effigy would be burnt as a conclusion to the epic. The cane structures flashed a predictable parallel: Shelley's sonnet on the fallen statue of Ozymandias and his empire, that colossal wreck in its empty desert."
Would Naipaul have been one of the wide-eyed boys, listening to the poetic struggles and victories of a deity who once lived half a world away, yet inextricably linked to his life and his identity? If there is one literary comparison that can be made with Naipaul's journey, it is Joseph Conrad and his epic Heart of Darkness—two post colonial writers, both accused of racism. Charles Marlowe's [a white man and the protagonist in Heart of Darkness] searing, colonialistic, patronising gaze into the "savage tribes of Africa" discomfited critics the same way Naipaul's frighteningly tactless inferences elicited massive outrage in his country of origin. One of the most searing critiques of Naipaul's work comes from post-colonial academic Edward Said: "Naipaul's account of the Islamic, Latin American, African, Indian and Caribbean worlds totally ignores a massive infusion of critical scholarship about those regions in favor of the tritest, cheapest and the easiest of colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies, myths that even Lord Cromer and Forster's Turtons and Burtons would have been embarrassed to trade in outside their private clubs. He is a third worlder denouncing his own people, not because they are victims of imperialism, but because they seem to have an innate flaw, which is that they are not whites."
His former protege-turned-critic Paul Theroux described Naipaul the best when he wrote that he was a "mushy soul afflicted with a cruel streak". Derek Walcott, in verse, echoed the then popular sentiment: "The mongoose [a derogatory term for the writer of Indian descent] takes its orders from the [British] Raj". Academics have called him one of the most influential and consequential post-colonial writers, whose prose had no contemporay equals. Sadly, however, the real Sir Vidia never stood up.