Revision as of 20:58, 10 September 2018

A life in literature

FARRUKH DHONDY, ‘The world is what it is’; no one captured it better, August 13, 2018: The Times of India

VS Naipaul: a timeline
From: FARRUKH DHONDY, ‘The world is what it is’; no one captured it better, August 13, 2018: The Times of India

VS Naipaul- famous quotes- I
From: August 13, 2018: The Times of India

VS Naipaul- famous quotes- II
From: August 13, 2018: The Times of India

His Quest Was To Turn The Imagined Into The Seen

Perhaps all those who contribute to the world divide it. I am sure Galileo was not very popular with medieval theologians who insisted on believing that the earth was the centre of the universe. Darwin wasn’t the darling of those who thought God created all creatures in those six days. Mahatma Gandhiji was reviled by Churchill for demanding decolonisation and setting the world on a new political course.

So it was, I think, with Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul. No one needs to be reminded that people from all over the world reviled and attacked him. Girish Karnad did, in a famous episode which I am compelled to rehearse later. Then fellow Nobel prize winner Derek Walcott who called him ‘VS Nightfall’ and said he was a racist.

And then there are thousands of people whose nationalism overcomes the evidence of their senses – those who deny that Indians defecate and urinate openly in the streets, those who object to it being pointed out to an African potentate that black magic cannot make you have two bodies which are simultaneously present in France and at a dinner table in Ghana; those who couldn’t see that Haiti was a degraded civilisation with more poverty, murders and corruption per square mile than in Hades…. And, dare one say it: those who denied or covered up the fact that the Muslim and then Mughal conquests and governance of India often perpetrated brutality and even partial genocide through the compulsions of war or the contempt generated by the diktat of religion.

Girish with the best of motives, in a famous speech at a Mumbai literature festival characterised Vidia as an Islamophobe. He provided a packed audience with his contentions and the evidence for his prosecution. It may have convinced some, but knowing Vidia I knew it was far from the truth. Vidia wasn’t antagonistic to any theological formation. He may have found certain practices of, say, Christians, symbolically worshipping an instrument of capital punishment distasteful. It would, if the messiah were condemned to death today, be like using the electric chair as a symbol of salvation. Vidia never, in writing or verbally, attacked any theology. As far as I could tell, he had a respect for Hindu ritual but wouldn’t engage with its tenets.

He wasn’t anti-Islamic or anti-Muslim. He married a Pakistani Muslim and though I’ve not seen Nadira, Lady Naipaul, saying her prayers or going to the mosque, she certainly objects to any blasphemous references to the Prophet. Vidia has formally adopted her two Muslim children and is grandfather to their offspring. What Vidia has written about, vehemently and with condemnation, is what he believes was a distortion of history by the Nehru-Gandhi version of it , which had the noble political purpose of glossing over Muslim atrocities and genocide of sections of Hindu society in the interests of religious harmony in India. Vidia’s inclination to tell the truth, to draw back the carpet under which this history has been swept is, understandably interpreted as divisive.

And so to Derek Walcott’s contention, backed by very many, that Vidia’s critical insights in his writing amount to racism. In his book A Writer’s People, Vidia writes about coming upon Walcott’s early poems and being fascinated by the fact they existed. As Vidia progresses and confronts the world of writing he sees and provides insights into the limitations imposed on writers by the worlds they come from or the ones they embrace. It leads him to analyse the scope and limitations of West Indian writers whose work he characterises, sometimes negatively. Walcott was obviously not pleased.

In the same book Vidia does not hesitate to apply the similarly if broader strictures to British writers and to his sometime friend Anthony Powell. The book is in no sense colour-conscious and in itself provides no evidence for calling him a racist.

Perhaps those that do base their arguments, if they can be called arguments, on his books about Africa, the Caribbean and, equally importantly, the Islamic world of Iran, Pakistan and other non-Arab nations which have adopted the faith.

Vidia’s distinction and uniqueness as a writer is to address the countries and continents he explores and describes through the lives and discourse of people he encounters in the first half century after the collapse of colonialism.

The writing takes many forms, none of them copies of anything that has gone before. Throughout his conversations with me, for formal published interviews or relaxed guppshupp (he would have hated the description) between friends, he would extol the fresh and the underivative.

He once read me a passage from Pickwick Papers and said nobody had looked at that small segment of the world in that way. He thought it was wonderful. He then picked up A Tale of Two Cities and read a paragraph or two of description from it, remarking that it was inexact, cliched and derived from Dickens’ earlier books. I pointed out that Tale was the only book written at a historical distance from Dickens’ own life. Vidia said it was not seen but imagined.