Remembering Sir Vidia

The late writer and journalist Khushwant Singh had delighted in being known as “not a nice man to know.”  But with due respect to Singh, that title rightly belonged to Nobel laureate, the enfante terrible and doyen of world literature, Vidiadhar Surajprasad, or as the world best knew him, Sir VS Naipaul.

Naipaul who passed away at 85, and is survived by his wife Lady Nadira Naipaul, remained a mystery to both his admirers and critics. Fellow Nobel laureate Sir Derek Walcott summed up the confusion when he hailed Naipaul as the “finest writer of the English sentence” but depicted him as a “rodent in old age.”

Not that such reactions bothered Sir Vidia, he thrived on them, and till the end continued to remain a sharply polarising figure.

However, to just focus on this “terrible” side of Naipaul and there is much to focus on – he called India a “slave society” and that “Africa had no future” – is to do him an injustice. Whatever else he was, Naipaul was a great artiste.

His work which travelled from his native West Indies to Africa, to India, to controversially exploring Islam in Among the Believers and Beyond Belief is a body of work that none of his peers – be it Salman Rushdie or any other author – could come close to at the time.

It is true that Rushdie invented a new style of writing genre altogether – magic realism – with Midnight’s Children but Naipaul went much further in asking the bigger questions. Themes surrounding colonisation, decolonisation, exile and the contradictions with identity and religion were areas that no one had gone into before and the recognition swiftly followed. The knighthood which came in 1989, and the Nobel Prize which followed in 2001 were just rewards for a man who had truly challenged the world into asking questions and exploring prickly areas of history that many would rather had never been opened. For this alone he deserves accolades, the mass worldwide news coverage and the plethora of Tweets, many of them from famous authors themselves recounting their encounter with the man.

But while the accolades are well deserving there are questions still worth pondering over here. It is not just the books or his life but the Naipaul persona and what it says about us that we must confront when we look back at him today. Many of us then chuckled away his rudeness and ignored his blatantly racist comments, as we believed that this was the price we had to pay for his art. As a result, Naipaul very soon realised that he could say or do pretty much what he liked, and the world would dance to his tune. This should make us think, how much of Naipaul’s art was weaved into his politically incorrect persona? Would we have paid as much attention to his work if he was not the controversial personality that he was?

The answer is no. There are many other Nobel Laureates for Literature but certainly none of them have gained the mass media attention that Naipaul has.  It is thus worthwhile to stop and consider if we are doing them a disservice. It is also worthwhile to consider if through aiding and abetting Naipaul’s rudeness were we sacrificing too much to the altar of his art? And has this had ramifications for future artistes? Again, this is probably so. In today’s social media world where instant reactions are demanded, many people who are artistes or otherwise are falling into the trap of binaries – left or right. This is something that we cannot afford. We need our artistes to be free, to shock convention, but we cannot as we did with Sir Vidia allow them to run free with controversial and meaningless comments. Sadly, that is exactly what is happening with many authors trying to recreate the “Naipaul persona” without trying to emulate his insight, or his passion to ask and answer the bigger questions.

This is a big worry going forward because today in an increasingly complex world, the world needs more Naipaul-like authors than before. The advent of Trumpism, ISIS, and the outbreak of racist protests across Europe, has raised questions of identity and religion in a way that is probably more urgent than they were in his time.  Sadly the literary world – both in fiction and non-fiction – has found itself wanting. In a time of global rift which many of us have never seen the likes of before, incisive art is needed more than ever. So far though, our authors have by and large failed the “Naipaul test” of asking probing questions and formulating inconvenient truths in an era which needs it more than ever. Can this change? One hopes so. Otherwise, we will have learnt nothing from Sir Vidia.