Everything about V S Naipaul totally explained
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Kt., TC (born
August 17,
1932 in
Chaguanas,
Trinidad and Tobago), better known as
V. S. Naipaul, is a
Trinidadian-born
British writer of
Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in
Wiltshire.
Naipaul was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature in
2001 and knighted by
Queen Elizabeth II in
1990.
He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors
Seepersad Naipaul,
Shiva Naipaul,
Neil Bissoondath, and
Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist.
Assessment of his work
In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a
Booker Prize for his book
In a Free State.
In awarding Naipaul the
Nobel Prize for Literature in
2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." The Committee added, "Naipaul is a modern
philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with
Lettres persanes and
Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony." The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the Polish author of
Heart of Darkness,
Joseph Conrad:
His
fiction and especially his
travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the
Third World.
Edward Said, for example, has argued that he "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting "colonial mythologies about
wogs and darkies". This perspective is most salient in
The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and
An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of
India.
His works have become required reading in many schools within the developing World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul's following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it's in the United States.
Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he's arguably "analysed" India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in
An Area of Darkness), and later with 'grudging affection' (as in
A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with 'ungrudging affection' (most manifestly in his view that the rise of
Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near
Gorakhpur in Eastern
Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as an indentured labourer. The mention of this is found in his work
An Area of Darkness.
Writing in the
York Review of Books
about Naipaul,
Joan Didion said:
In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he's been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, for example nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul's support for
Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the
Babri Mosque as a "creative passion", and the invasion of
Babur in the
16th century as a "mortal wound." He views
Vijayanagar, which fell in
1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in
Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in
Among the Believers.
In
1998 a controversial
memoir by Naipaul's sometime protégé
Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled
Sir Vidia's Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier.
In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of "Indian" and "African" and to concentrate on being "Trinidadian". He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he's come to some form of closure with Trinidad.
Personal life
Patrick French, a well-known writer on India and Tibet, has written a biography,
The World Is What It Is, of Naipaul. French was given free access to all of Naipaul's papers while he was writing the biography, and is the first person to read 24 volumes of diaries of Naipaul's first wife Patricia Hale. The diaries had been kept under lock and key at the University of Tulsa since Naipaul sold his archive for $620,000.
According to the biography, Naipaul married Patricia Hale in 1955, and started visiting brothels in London regularly three years after marriage. He would find the prostitutes' telephone numbers in local newspapers and visit them in the afternoon in secret while Patricia was at work as a school teacher.
Naipaul admitted in his biography that he frequently humiliated Patricia and even refused to give her a wedding ring. He often abandoned her to go travelling with a married Anglo-Argentine, Mrs. Gooding, whom he met in 1972. He would often tell Patricia how he was missing his mistress, Gooding, but that he needed her (Patricia) to help him with his books. He kept the mistress for almost 24 years before suddenly leaving her to marry a Pakistani journalist named Nadira Khannum Alvi.
Patricia learnt that her husband regularly saw prostitutes in London after he boasted about it in a magazine interview in 1994. She had just had a mastectomy and was in remission from cancer. Naipaul admitted that his mental cruelty for nearly four decades towards Patricia may have killed her: "I think that consumed her. I think she'd all the relapses and everything after that. She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way." "I was liberated. She (Patricia) was destroyed. It was inevitable."
A day after Patricia's funeral, Naipaul "welcomed into his home" Nadira Khannum Alvi, who was born in Kenya and married in Pakistan. She worked as a
journalist for the
Pakistani newspaper,
The Nation, for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in
1996, two months after Patricia had died. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir .
Bibliography
Fiction
Non-fiction
The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies - British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America (1962)
An Area of Darkness (1964)
The Loss of El Dorado - (1969)
The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (1972)
(1977)
A Congo Diary (1980)
The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad (1980)
(1981)
Finding the Centre (1984)
Reading & Writing: A Personal Account (2000)
A Turn in the South (1989)
(1990)
Homeless by Choice (1992, with R. Jhabvala and S. Rushdie)
Bombay (1994, with Raghubir Singh)
(1998)
Between Father and Son: Family Letters (1999, edited by Gillon Aitken)
- (2002)
Literary Occasions: Essays (2003, by Pankaj Mishra)
(2007)Further Information
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