The title may create some semantic confusion as to what I am trying to write in this short piece about the great writer VS Naipaul, who died on 17 August at the age of 85. I am not making an attempt to critically evaluate any of his novels or travel writings, though they have thrilled me and opened up new realms of meanings, especially at a time when I was a seeker, a dream-laden youth and a student of literature written in English who wanted to be a writer in Nepali. These pursuits were not paradoxical; instead, they created an atmosphere for me to enter a world of literature that was little different from the regular text-based, genre-based reading of what was called ‘English literature’.

I found the period from the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies of the last century to be challenging, exciting and uncertain. A few colleagues and I were on the lookout for alternative trends and voices in what we knew as English literature. The canonical writings were represented in the volumes of Pelican History of English Literature, each devoted to a certain period. The world picture was English or American, to some extent. VS Naipaul was not represented in earlier editions.

English writing is changing

I was very surprised when the great British poet Stephen Spender, at a Cambridge Seminar in 1988 while answering my question, said that he did not believe Naipaul was an English writer. I remember, the topic was English language and its writers. I think, in the same year, I had published an essay in Madhuparka literary magazine about this experience. I was flabbergasted by this great poet’s observation. In the same seminar, another writer Jonathan Raban told me in conversations that Salman Rushdie was not a good writer. He thought that the kind of writing they were doing was not up to the mark. Incidentally, Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses had been just published, but had not found much publicity. I have always liked the writings of Jonathan Raban, his fiction and his works of literary criticism. I have used his criticism with my students earlier. But the point I am making here is different.

This memory is triggered by the death of VS Naipaul, author of 30 or so books.  He received a knighthood just the following year in 1989 and, of course, the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001. Reading Rushdie’s tribute to Naipaul, “We disagreed all our lives, about politics, about literature, and I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother, RIP Vidia”, I feel with some sense of surprise, how those times, those discourses and those attitudes have become a thing of the past in less than three decades. How fast English writing is changing makes us feel a force that was jointly created by English writers of different native origins, ancestry and backgrounds. VS Naipaul, to me, represented that very creative strength.  

The period when I began reading Naipaul’s novels and travelogues marked an opening for youths like me. However, for graduates of English literature like me, a canonical attitude continued to dominate the thinking about the ‘English’ writers. But I had already started independently pursuing my quest for alternative literature, and had discovered and read Naipaul’s books, as far as I remember, published by Penguin. Among the four, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), The Mimic Men (1968), In a Free State (1971), An Area of Darkness (1964) had shaken me the most. It was written by a native British writer of Indian origin and was a bewildering account of India—his forefathers’ native land. That account sounded as though it was breaking something that people in this area held as sacrosanct. The timing was interesting.

An Area of Darkness was well received by Indian readers whose response must have surprised western writers and editors of magazines. Apart from criticising Naipaul for his overarching generalisations, and his style of reading too much in ordinary images like a dozing farmer, endlessly driving the bulls pulling carts in the sun, poking their anuses with a stick, Indian readers in general did not call for a ban of the sale of Naipaul’s book. Indian readers kept calling Naipaul a great diasporic Indian writer. To coincide with this were the writings of American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg whose poems making fun of Indian goddesses, women and men were read by the same great readers.

VS Naipaul in his last book, India :A Million Mutinies Now (1990), a travelogue written after travelling in India, sees his past impressions quite differently. The suave, philosophic tone that I found in this book convinced me that Naipaul was writing about himself, his own past, and his own area of darkness.

The idea of a home

After reading the Western, especially British and American press coverage about Naipaul and his writings, I feel that they are very curiously divided about the power and strength of this writer. The dominant theme, as evoked by his famous novel A House for Mr Biswas, is home, a space and his state of being homeless. This theme resonates with Edward Said’s concept of ‘exile’, which he calls a “specular” position that is the source of moral strength in the world. Said confesses, he is deeply troubled by his great regard for Naipaul’s power of writing and his negative description of the same world of the so-called ‘other’ people.

My problem is, why did/does this spectre of homelessness and exilic condition haunt the great, brilliant, well-known and established writers of non-native origins? Is the psychology that treats the great Roma musician Manitas de Plata, whom The Economist once called “the world’s most famous flamenco player”  who held Picasso, Dali and Brigitte Bardot in awe by his performance, the same as it treats great writers with the so called exilic condition? Why does only home come in the depth of the argument? To add to the amorphous metaphor of home, the Nepali press is quoting Naipaul saying at his Nobel lecture that he had Nepali ancestry.

I still read Naipaul and others who have made reading literature and travelogues a liberating experience.