Who’s afraid of VS Naipaul?

Naipaul is an overrated and myopic writer, he observes but he does not understand

VS Naipaul’s latest book — by his own admission also probably his last — is pretentious and shallow. A Writer’s People: Ways Of Looking And Feeling is Naipaul’s 29th work.

Literary critics have always treated Naipaul gingerly, afraid of the Great Oracle’s withering contempt. It is time therefore to say this: Naipaul is an overrated and myopic writer. He observes but he does not understand.

I’ve read most of Naipaul’s books and have found them (with a few honourable exceptions like A House For Mr Biswas) lacking the depth and sharp insight that come naturally to truly great writers. Yet Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.

He is universally regarded as the world’s finest living writer. He lives in the Wiltshire countryside with his Pakistani wife, increasingly removed from the real world, immersed in his own angst and rancour. The anger within Naipaul — a rage that has corroded his books’ value and blunted the acuity of his mind — has deep roots.

Vidia Naipaul is the grandson of an indentured labourer from Gorakhpur. Over a century ago, the senior Naipaul, a Bhumihar Brahmin, was forced into indentured servitude by the British and shipped off to Trinidad.

There he encountered humiliation and hardship. His son — Naipaul’s father — tried to escape the social and cultural chains that bound him by becoming a small-time journalist and a (failed) writer. It was against this background of hopelessness and second-class citizenship in a barren British colony (Trinidad) in the 1940s that Naipaul’s early thinking was shaped.

To escape the sense of self-contempt that afflicts some men in such circumstances, Naipaul went up to Oxford in 1950 and transformed himself into a traditional Englishman in a London still reeling from the War and food rationing.

Naipaul needed post-colonial England as much as post-colonial England needed Naipaul. English literary agents quickly recognised Naipaul’s usefulness. Here was a young immigrant lad, good with words, full of opinionated rage against the newly decolonised world.

Naipaul was the brown finger on a white trigger. English writers were too guilt-ridden to write about an emerging India’s shortcomings in the late-1950s. Naipaul, with his carefully learnt English, brown skin and Western education was the perfect finger to press the trigger. The targets: India, Islam, developing cultures in general, Asian and West Indian writers, and Indian leaders.

The source of Naipaul’s anger was complex: he was furious that a weak, disunited India had allowed the British to conquer and occupy it. That occupation led directly to his grandfather being shipped to Trinidad as indentured labour.

Naipaul, the coloured Englishman, did not have the intellectual courage to condemn the real culprit —Britain — for its illegal occupation of India. How could he? He received his cheques in sterling, his whole intellectual infrastructure was English, he — grandson of an indentured servant —had been set up for life by the English literary establishment.

Naipaul could not bite the hand that fed him. But he could and did bite the hand (India) that had failed to protect his grandfather’s family from the British, from being taken away as a labourer to the West Indies. That contributed to Naipaul’s sense of eternal shame. Every one of his 29 books internalises that shame.

Of course, Naipaul does criticise the British in his books — but for the wrong things. He condemns contemporary Britain and its loss of values but not its criminal colonial past. Naipaul’s failure to identify the real victim (India) and the real culprit (Britain) of the 19th and 20th centuries is matched by his failure to understand in his latest book, A Writer’s People, recent Indian history, economics and politics.

It is an intellectual failure at one level and a moral failure at another — because Naipaul knows the truth but does not have the courage to tell it.

Email: minhazmerchant@business-leaders.com