Naipaul was provocative all his life and attracted criticism from almost all angles. His country of origin, India, was not spared his honesty and ways with words… All these books are hard on India’s failure – the failure to move forward and place culture and religion in their place, while embracing modern ways of doing things.
In this age, no writer can be compared to Vidiadhar Suraj Prasad Naipaul (1932-2018) in terms of craft and contradictions. His writing career was remarkable, giving the world 16 works of non-fiction and 14 works of fiction. Each of his books stands out in so many ways – the narrative, the concreteness of the sentences, attention to details, thorough examination of the subject at hand and the visibility of imagery.
Of Indian decent, his life started in Trinidad and the rest of it began and ended in the world. Specifically, he became British but his works of inquiry and interest in the other parts of world made him perpetually lost. He spent some part of his life in Latin America. He spent a lot of time in Uganda; travelling across East Africa in 1966. His work took him to Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia. In the evening of his life he was in Nigeria, Ghana, Gabon Ivory Coast, Uganda (again) and South Africa. This African journey produced his last book The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Beliefs published in 2010. In 1979, his ‘African novel’ was published – creating the specimen for what is later referred to as his racist attitude to Africa. A Bend in the River, though a great work of imagination is seen as a severe criticism of Africa that espouses the sentiment that ‘Africa has no future.’
V.S. Naipaul visited Kano in the course of writing The Masque of Africa. The book, which examines patterns of African belief is as usual ‘Naipaulian’ in its piercing examination of connection and disconnection; how African’s are coping with Islam and Christianity side-by-side their traditional and cultural beliefs. Infact, Naipaul’s is more incisive in discovering those ironies in the lives of people – ironies that the people themselves hardly notice. His description of Kano is like those of many other places described in his books. After landing in Kano, he immediately notices the dust and dirt and says, “Beyond this is the town (Kano) proper: many goats eating garbage, plastic and paper. The goat is the perfect animal for this area, living on air until it is slaughtered. And the unfailing product of multiple marriages and many concubines. Garbage here, gathered up in little mounds. Innumerable okada motorcyclists doing the routes, picking up pillion passengers.” Before coming to Kano, Naipaul had formed his idea of the ancient city from geography and history books. But the reality he met on ground was far from the facts in books.
V.S. Naipaul lived and died without any belief. He repeatedly mentioned how strange the idea of religion appeared to him. Although brought up by parents with total commitment to Hindu rituals he always found himself at odds in the midst of it. In 1981 he attracted the rage of the muslim world with the book Among the Believers…
Naipaul was provocative all his life and attracted criticism from almost all angles. His country of origin, India, was not spared his honesty and ways with words. He kept going back to India in book after book: from An Area of Darkness, to India: Wounded Civilisation, and India: A Million Mutinies Now. All these books are hard on India’s failure – the failure to move forward and place culture and religion in their place, while embracing modern ways of doing things. In India: A Million Mutinies Now, Naipaul is critical of India’s red tape, corruption, ill-treatment of women and the poor. He notices and brings to the attention of the world how India works. To make something possible in India, as he points out, you have to know someone who knows someone who knows somebody.
No writer has been as successful as Naipaul in writing books of inquiry based on travels. His success in this area manifested in The Middle Passage (1962) which was based on travels to tiny Caribbean countries. Although the book examines the legacy of colonialism in these countries, it also points out the reasons why these places will never fully recover from what they are and what they have been through.
V.S. Naipaul lived and died without any belief. He repeatedly mentioned how strange the idea of religion appeared to him. Although brought up by parents with total commitment to Hindu rituals he always found himself at odds in the midst of it. In 1981 he attracted the rage of the muslim world with the book Among the Believers, which took him to Pakistan, Iran and Indonesia, where he examined how converted people coped with the new belief in Islam. He noticed with extraordinary attention to details all the clashes and gaps in the lives of a people who made the transition from other religions to Islam. He followed up with a sequel, Beyond Belief in 1998, going back to the same countries, and adding Malaysia to the list. These works are criticised and often described as Islamaphobic.
Beyond his many contradictions, V.S. Naipaul was the kind of writer who became an institution, charting his own path and standing out in the ranks of Conrad, Dickens and Hemingway. He constantly got reference to Conrad – a writer he respected.
Women were not left out of Naipaul’s whip. He once dismissed female writers as weak. In 2011, he said there is no woman writer who he considered as his equal. He went full cycle by adding that: “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.” Feminist were angered by his view that women have sentimentality and a “narrow view of the world.”
Beyond his many contradictions, V.S. Naipaul was the kind of writer who became an institution, charting his own path and standing out in the ranks of Conrad, Dickens and Hemingway. He constantly got reference to Conrad – a writer he respected.
The life and works of Naipaul are a lesson. He stuck firmly to his dream of becoming a writer. He became a great writer. He won all the prestigious literary awards – the Booker and the Nobel Prize. He left behind a body of works that pay attention to things and issues other writers cannot see. He wrote in the way and manner that every word matters. His sentences are always solid. His flow of narratives are distinctive, with a zero space for ambiguity. He said things as they are and confirmed that pleasing people is as good as losing oneself to nothing. He left this world with a hiatus, as vivid as the imageries he painted with words.
Isa Sanusi is a writer and literary critic based in Abuja, Nigeria.
