Gifted, Outspoken, Fearless

 

A mong contemporary English writers, few can match the stylistic skill or acerbic substance of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932-2018). Naipaul, who would have turned 86 on 17th August, died a few days earlier, on Saturday, 11th August. He left behind an enviable if controversial, literary legacy that few can aspire to equal let alone exceed. Also a reasonably well-recorded personal history that few would wish to emulate or admit to, peppered as it was with adultery, spousal and partner abuse, irascible temper tantrums, nasty feuds with friends, penny-pinching stinginess, counterbalanced in part by personal cleanliness, fastidious elegance, affable manners, occasional bouts of generosity of spirit, and fierce fidelity to truth.

 

Former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee with VS Naipaul in 2002  

 

Naipaul’s eventful life may be seen as falling into two uneven parts, thirty-five years of struggle, followed by fifty years of success. His early years are marked by desperate exertion and toil, not only to get through Oxford after flunking his B Litt but almost having to return to Trinidad after failing to survive in London as a writer. These years coloured his vision of both himself and the world.

 

He also believed in the value and, ultimately, justice of the modern, universal, scientific-material, rational Western civilisation, with its respect for letters. He considered himself a part of this universal Western civilisation, even if he did not fit into it fully, as his hauntingly ambiguous novel, The Enigma of Arrival, shows. This civilisation, in turn, showered him with its highest and most coveted honours. These included the Booker Prize awarded for In a Free State (1971), a knighthood conferred in 1990 by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature, and the 100th Nobel Prize for literature announced on October 11, 2001.

 

 

Naipaul was hated by many, but admired by more critics and readers than almost any other peer. He was routinely accused of racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, in addition to peddling stereotypes and half-truths about the “third world.” He travelled widely all over the world documented broken or half-formed societies and nations, offering his unsparing, politically incorrect, but brutally honest commentaries on both individuals and communities.

 

Many considered his account of Islam to be particularly invidious, if not odious. He famously declared, “There probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs,” and that Islam “had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it; you have to say “my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn”t matter”.” I believe, he was ultimately wrong; the threat to the world came not from the converted part of the Islamic world such as Iran, but from its very heartland, Arabia, where Al Qaeda was born, and its legionaries, the Taliban, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

 

 

His masterpiece was A House for Mr Biswas (1961), undoubtedly one of the greatest novels of the century. It is a modern epic of exile, loss, and partial recovery, the story not of near-comic protagonist’s struggle to be, quite literally, accommodated in a difficult, almost hostile, world, is a political and poetic allegory of the travails of the entire Indian diaspora of indenture and displacement. Almost a modern Ramayana, it places an anti-hero at its centre instead of the ideal Maryada-Purushottam Sri Rama. Biswas is also about the survival and spread of Indian civilisation, a theme that obsessed Naipaul as a part of his quest for his own identity. This book makes a very important contribution not just to the Naipaul oeuvre, but to our understanding of how a modern writer is made.

 

Naipaul, one might say, was obsessed with Bharat, which many thought he hated for its dirt, inefficiency, and self-deception, but loved with a passionate involvement and intensity. Among his contemporaries, he was among the first to speak openly about the destruction of Indian civilisation by Muslim invaders and conquerors, a theme he is touching on in An Area of Darkness (1964), and returned to again and again. In this remarkable book, he also touched on the problem of Kashmir, which had not yet reached an inflection point. He went back to the same hotel years later to revisit the situation. Towards the end of his life, he believed that Bharat had achieved a remarkable breakthrough in self-understanding, which would help us gradually regain our stature in the world. The turning point in his attitude was the concluding part of his trilogy, India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), in which he accurately documented, even predicted how crucial the IT revolution was to national progress.

 

 

My own defining Naipaul moment came unexpectedly. I was invited to meet him and Nadira, Lady Naipaul, along with a small group of writers and intellectuals in Delhi. The meeting, on 26 February 2004, was in the unlikeliest of venues, the BJP party headquarters on Ashok Road, at the fag end the NDA Government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. After a rather brief, not to mention disappointing address, preceded and followed by many flowery encomiums by political rather than literary luminaries, there were some sparking bon mots: “Do you justify the demolition of the Babri Masjid?” he was asked. “Yes, I did justify it… I have done it many times,” he returned, without batting an eyelid. “Is the BJP trying to appropriate you?” another asked rather predictably, if aggressively. “I don”t mind it,” Sir Vidia smiled wickedly. And I had almost given up on the possibility of a meaningful afternoon!

 

After the public meeting and interaction, Lady Naipaul announced that Sir Vidia would be willing to meet some of us. We lined up to pay our homage, getting a minute or two each. I had carried two of his books, A House for Mister Biswas (1961), his masterpiece, and a hardback of Among the Believers (1981), the first of his searching; some would say scathing, portrayals of Islam. After confessing how much I admired his writing, I fished the books out requesting him to autograph them.

 

Naipaul, a rather short man, drew himself to his full height of 5’5” or so, and announced rather haughtily, “I only sign new books and only hardbacks.” Neither of my copies qualified. I opened the somewhat battered Biswas and showed Lady Naipaul the certificate pasted on the flyleaf: “The MM Bhalla Prize awarded for securing the highest marks in First Year B.A. English (Hons.) 1978, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.” Lady Naipaul exclaimed, “Vidia, he’s carried this book all over the world for over a quarter of a century; how cute!” Naipaul’s face thawed in a remarkably warm smile, the ends of his narrowing eyes accentuating the creases and crows feet, “Oh well, in that case….” Whipping out his expensive fountain pain, he signed with a flourish.

 

I cannot end without going back to what Naipaul meant for “greater India,” our diaspora, particular the older displacement of labour and indenture, second in its trauma perhaps only to the “middle passage” of African slaves that Naipaul also wrote about. Vijay C Mishra, also the product of such a diaspora in Fiji, the opposite end of the earth from Naipaul’s Trinidad, has written moving about his sense of personal loss at the passing of the great

writer: “Dostoevsky once wrote,” says Mishra, “”We all come out of Gogol”s overcoat.” Inflecting it a little, “We, children of the indenture, all come out of Naipaul”s A House for Mr Biswas”. I mourn for Vidia, ‘he dead!””

Portions of this tribute were earlier published in The DailyO