Revision as of 21:23, 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

India: a contempt- hate relationship

VAIBHAV PURANDARE, In India, he was reviled by some, revered by others, August 13, 2018: The Times of India

Six months after the Babri Masjid demolition, The Times of India’s then editor Dileep Padgaonkar met V S Naipaul at the writer’s flat in London for an interview. Naipaul’s first two non-fiction books on his ancestral land, An Area of Darkness and A Wounded Civilization, had made Indians, regardless of political persuasion, angry and upset: the Left for his seeming lack of empathy and understanding for the poor and his bleak-eyed view even of India’s non-feudal past; the Gandhians because he was no respecter of their piety; the Nehruvian dreamers and Centrists because he could see no signs of progress, though he saw much corruption and in fact dismissed the country as being beyond redemption; and the Right because he acutely disliked the grip of religiosity and tradition on Indian society. By 1990, his views had changed, and in A Million Mutinies Now, he acknowledged that redemption, indeed, couldn’t be ruled out.

But his reply to a question about his reaction to the Babri’s razing showed just how deeply his thinking had changed. He’d reacted “not as badly as the others,” he said. The Mughal ruler Babar, in his view, “had contempt for the country he had conquered. And his building of that mosque was an act of contempt for the country…The construction of a mosque on a spot regarded as sacred by the conquered population was meant as an insult… an insult to an ancient idea, the idea of Ram.” In the kar sevaks who climbed atop Babri’s domes Naipaul saw “passion,” and in Hindu nationalism a “new, historical awakening” and hope for national regeneration.

As controversy erupted, the right-wing revised its opinion of this previously condescending Trinidadian Indian. Though some moderates and some Indian intellectuals — Arun Shourie for instance —had backed the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, Naipaul’s comment marked a key moment in the legitimising and mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism and, in fact, of militant Hindutva. Naipaul attracted much opprobrium of course, all the more as he accused Indian liberals of double standards, said Hindutva and Islamic fundamentalism couldn’t be equated and criticised Romila Thapar for her “Marxist” version of history; the scholar Rafiq Zakaria even described him as “a neo-proponent of Hindutva” in the tradition of R-S-S sarsanghchalaks. But Naipaul not only didn’t mind, he revelled in the row; he’d earlier always felt, unhappily, that reactions to him in India were tepid.

Though Naipaul made it clear later that history had to be finally “left behind” and that it had to be written by those with “independent minds,” the post-Babri label stuck. So much so that after Beyond Belief, the book on his travels to non-Arab Muslim countries, was out in 1998, the more passionate among Indian ‘liberals’ joined Zakaria in comparing him to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who’d originally expounded the theory of Hindutva, and M S Golwalkar, ex-R-S-S chief and Sangh Parivar icon. He was called “Fascist” and “anti-Islamic” for criticising the poet Muhammed Iqbal and writing, at the very beginning of the book, that Islam was “not simply a matter of conscience or private belief” but made “imperial demands” and altered a convert’s core identity, his worldview, his idea of history, his sacred language (to Arabic) and his holy places (to Arab lands). This theory underlying the text, as also his description of Pakistan as little better than “a criminal enterprise,” led to him being labelled a “Muslim baiter” in that country, and similar accusations were made from within India when he yet again spoke of the “passion” he felt had animated the kar sevaks in Ayodhya.

When the Swedish Academy chose him for the Nobel Prize after the 9/11 attacks, doubts were raised about whether the choice was political. But for a man described for decades as egotistical, rude, racist, misogynistic, pitiless and worse — not just by enemies but by one-time close friend like Paul Theroux, who felt Vidia’s grasp of Islam was “naïve” and “his ignorance of Arabic… kept him from understanding the Koran” — such doubts were water off a duck’s back. In the new millennium he returned to India on more than one occasion and re-stated his position on Islam and Hinduism, eliciting strong reactions from the likes of Girish Karnad. And on his death, many remarked on Twitter that the new, emerging India had failed to bestow any real honour on Naipaul. The pot, evidently, remained stirred.

Famous works

Some of famous works of V S Naipaul
From: August 13, 2018: The Times of India

See graphic:

Some of famous works of V S Naipaul

Controversies

NO STRANGER TO CONTROVERSY, August 13, 2018: The Times of India

Naipaul once famously said, “If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.” He lived by that dictum, never shying away from a fight and stirring up one furore after another with biting, hard-hitting words. A sample 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.”

(ON BEING ASKED IF ANY WOMAN WRITER WAS HIS LITERARY EQUAL)

Africa has no future... Africans need to be kicked, that’s the only thing they understand

It [Islam] 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’.”

The Taj is so wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people.

Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover.

Farrukh Dhondy’s tribute

FARRUKH DHONDY, ‘The world is what it is’; no one captured it better, 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.

Rahul Singh on Naipaul

RAHUL SINGH, A man always true to himself, August 13, 2018: The Times of India

I first met Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul in the mid-1960s, when he made his initial trip to India, resulting in his “An Area of Darkness.” He was still in his twenties. The book offended a lot of Indians for its rather unflattering portrayal of the land of his forefathers. His observation, during a train journey, of people squatting near the railway tracks, mug or lota of water in hand, baring their bottoms, while doing their morning business, upset many. The trouble is that it was true then – and is still true today, half a century later. Naipaul had this knack of uncovering uncomfortable truths in his writings. And it came essentially from him being an outsider. Only an outsider, with keen perception and profound insights, could reveal what Naipaul did.

His target was mainly Third World societies, which he disparagingly labelled as being “half-formed”. He became a lightning rod for criticism by those he hurt. But he did not care. He laughed at his critics. But even they grudgingly admired his exquisite prose and his mastery over the English language. He once revealed to me that after he had started working on a book, he only wrote 200 to 300 words a day, choosing every word with utmost care and reworking passage after passage. One of his editors confessed that she rarely changed anything in the manuscript he submitted to her, so carefully and precisely thought out was every word.

He led a complex private life. When he first came to India he was married to an English lady, Pat. On a subsequent visit he had acquired an Argentinian mistress, Margaret, who broke up her marriage for him. In return, he gifted her an apartment in Buenos Aires. He then met Nadira, a Pakistani Muslim, and dumped Margaret, who was devastated. In between, he admitted he frequented prostitutes.

His book on Islam, “Among the Believers” infuriated much of the Islamic world. Though he was on the short list of the Nobel Prize for several years, opposition to his candidature by prominent Muslim leaders apparently stalled his getting the award. But the terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Centre, changed the public mood, and soon afterwards, he got the coveted prize. The Hindutva brigade rejoiced when he lent support to the destruction of the Babri Masjid, calling it a “re-ordering of history”.

But it is difficult to put a label on Naipaul. Anti Islam? But he married a Muslim. He simply wrote what he saw. And if those insights hurt, too bad! As Shakespeare put it, “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night, the day. Thou canst not then be false to any man.” That was Vidia Naipaul, true to himself.