Nobel prize-winning author V S Naipaul, known for his critical commentary on colonialism, idealism, religion and politics, has died at the age of 85, his family said early today.
Nobel prize-winning author VS Naipaul, known for his critical commentary on colonialism, idealism, religion and politics, has died at the age of 85, his family said on Sunday. To know more about his life, click here.
"He was a giant in all that he achieved and he died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour," his wife Lady Nadira Naipaul said in a statement.
Naipaul wrote more than 30 books of fiction and nonfiction. His first book was 'The Mystic Masseur'. His most celebrated novel, A House for Mr Biswas, was published in 1961.
His other works include the three stories in In a Free State (1971), Guerrillas (1975), A Bend in the River (1979), A Way in the World (1994), The Mimic Men (1967), The Enigma of Arrival (1987), Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998), Half a Life (2001), The Writer and the World (2002) and Literary Occasions (2003), The novel Magic Seeds (2004) - a sequel to Half a Life - and In The Masque of Africa (2010).
He is the recipient of numerous honours, including the Man Booker Prize in 1971 and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990.
Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.
In awarding him the prize, the Swedish Academy praised him "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories".
However, despite all these accolades, Naipaul has been criticised for his stance on women, people from the African continent, and Islam. His comments, usually controversial, evoked harsh reactions from critics.
Here are some of his most controversial statements
1. 'Women writers are unequal to me'
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Naipaul has been critical of women writers, terming them 'inferior' to him in prose. He even critiqued Jane Austen's work. “I couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world. I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me. And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he had said. - AFP
2. Shows signs of homophobia
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Naipaul was not a fan of writer EM Forster, who wrote the book 'Passage to India'. “Forster of course has his own purposes in India. He is a homosexual and he has his time in India… He just knew the court and a few middle-class Indians and a few garden boys whom he wished to seduce.” - AFP
3. Drawing the ire of Africans
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Naipaul was particularly hostile towards people from the African continent. When he spoke of people of Uganda, he said, "Africans need to be kicked, that’s the only thing they understand." He was also critical of Nigeria's Wole Soyinka winning a Nobel Prize in literature. In a letter to Paul Theroux, Naipaul said, "Has he written anything? The Nobel Committee is, as usual, pis**** on literature from a great height.” - AFP
4. A staunch critic of Islam
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Islam, Naipaul claimed, had both enslaved and attempted to wipe out other cultures."It has 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'.According to an article in the Guardian, Naipaul claimed what he called "this abolition of the self demanded by Muslims was worse than the similar colonial abolition of identity. It is much, much worse in fact... You cannot just say you came out of nothing." - Wikimedia Commons
5. 'India has no intellectual life'
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While speaking of India in an 1989 interview with India Today, Naipaul, while addressing the caste votebank said, "I don't think there is any harm in that (caste politics). Here, I am at one with Nirad Chaudhuri, who said that if you take away caste you'll pound us all into dust. People are not yet ready to be individuals in India. It will take several generations for that to happen. In an earlier interview, he had said, "The trouble with people like me writing about societies where there is no intellectual life is that if you write about it, people are angry… If they read the book, which in most cases they don’t, they want approval. Now India has improved, the books have been accepted… Forty years ago in India people were living in ritual. This is one of the things I have helped India with.” According to William Dalrymple, Naipaul had this to say about Ayodhya: "Ayodhya is a sort of passion to be encouraged. Passion leads to creativity among a section of the public" - ANI Twitter
