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| Home > English Literature in India > Writers of English Literature in India > V.S. Naipaul
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| | V.S. Naipaul
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 V.S. Naipaul, according to one recent review, is a writer "endlessly showing an unclosable wound." From that metaphorical wound have flowed half a century of stories, comic, tragic, real and imagined. When the Nobel Prize Committee called Naipaul`s number last month, he was at his home in the English countryside. But alive in the committee`s mind were Naipaul`s depictions of his native Trinidad, his stories of a struggling Third World writer in the fickle First World.
His narratives are of America, Africa, India and the places in-between. And it`s that in-between, where identity is confusion, where Empire and its victims loom large, that Naipaul continues to explore and explain.
Of Indian descent, Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932 and has been living in Britain since 1950. The Swedish Academy in Stockholm honours the writer "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories".
The Oxford-educated Naipaul examined post-colonial society. His literary domain has extended far beyond the West Indian island of Trinidad, his first subject, and now encompasses India, Africa, America from south to north, the Islamic countries of Asia and, not least, England. "Naipaul is Conrad`s heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in his memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished," the Swedish Academy said. "In his masterpiece The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul visits the reality of England like an anthropologist studying some hitherto unexplored native tribe deep in the jungle. With apparently short-sighted and random observations he creates an unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture and the demise of European neighbourhoods."
Naipaul`s critical remarks and assessments of Muslim fundamentalism Paul Theroux, James Joyce`s Ulysses, and the homosexuality of E.M. Foster and John Maynard Keynes among other topics have been a source of controversy.
V.S. Naipaul most important works include A House for Mr Biswas (1961), A Bend in the River (1979), A Way in the World (1994) and An Area of Darkness (1964
The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul`s brilliant career, A House for Mr. Biswas" "is an unforgettable story inspired by Naipaul`s father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century`s finest novels.
In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous-and endless-struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark comedy of manners, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man`s quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.
In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony." The Committee also noted Naipaul`s affinity with the Polish-born British author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad: "Naipaul is Conrad`s heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished."
 His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies" (53). This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, a stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His supporters argue that he is actually an advocate for a more realistic development of the Third World, that he is motivated by a passionate desire for the improvement of the countries which he writes about, and that the assumptions of the likes of Said actually hold these emerging nations back. That said, Naipaul`s contempt for many aspects of liberal orthodoxy is uncompromising, yet he has exhibited an open-mindedness toward some Third World leaders and cultures that isn`t found in western writers. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World.
Writing in the New York Review of Books about Naipaul, Joan Didion said:
The actual world has for Naipaul a radiance that diminishes all ideas of it. The pink haze of the bauxite dust on the first page of Guerrillas tells us what we need to know about the history and social organization of the unnamed island on which the action takes place, tells us in one image who runs the island and for whose profit the island is run and at what cost to the life of the island this profit has historically been obtained, but all of this implicit information pales in the presence of the physical fact, the dust itself... The world Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual human endeavor... This world of Naipaul`s is in fact charged with what can only be described as a romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact...
In several of his books Naipaul has discussed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, eg nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul`s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a "creative passion", and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a "mortal wound." He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. William Dalrymple has argued that this is too simplistic, and that both Vijayanagar and the Mughal empire were hybrid civilisations, combining elements of both cultures.
In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul`s sometime protegι Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of the Nobel Laureate. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia`s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier.
In 1971, he became the first Person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State.
Awards
Booker Prize - 1971
Jerusalem Prize - 1983
Nobel Prize for Literature - 2001
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