One of the “greatest” writers of the past century passed away with the same quietude that he lived, far from the madding crowd, but leaving behind a great literary legacy that India too can truly be proud of. Trinidad-born Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was of mixed identity. His parents were Indians but he is described as a British author. This, because he lived and worked for the most part in and around London, having arrived there from Trinidad in 1950 to study English Literature at Oxford. He retained his love for India, wrote extensively on India and on the Asian region and even shouldered the “blame” of being a proponent of Hindutva. But Naipaul was also sharply critical of religion and what he found wrong with this country too. He sure had a way with words.
From abject poverty, Naipaul rose from the ghetto to this great stature. His ancestors were among the “bonded labourers” the colonialists shipped from India to Trinidad to work there. He started writing and courting fame from the initial years in London as a student, and showed the courage to call a spade a spade. He called India even after its Independence as a “slave society”, provoked anger by teasing that the coloured dot that Indian women wore on their forehead meant indicated an empty head. He earned the wrath of the Blacks for creating an impression that he was the mouthpiece for Whites who suppressed and
repressed them. He was uncomfortable with religion, per se, and wrote about Islamic radicalism much before it surfaced openly. This showed his connect with the ground realities with a finger on the
pulse of society. Yet, he laughingly saw the 1989 Islamic fatwa against author Salman Rushdie as nothing more than an “extreme form of literary criticism.” Rushdie, on his part, saw in Naipaul’s writing shades of Hindu fundamentalism.
Naipaul’s own life and times are vividly reflected in his writings, starting with his first novel The Mystic Masseur, a humourous story on the life of depravity in the Trinidad ghettos; ‘The House of Mr Biswas,’
a commentary on colonial societies in which his father is the central character; and, ‘A Bend in the River,’ seen as a defence of colonial rule in Africa, from the eyes of an Indian Muslim settler. Having written over 30 fiction and non-fiction works, including travelogues he was the worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 and a fitting tribute to his outstanding contributions as a litterateur of renown. His demise at 85 leaves a deep void in English Literature.