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The ‘Intuitive’ Writer

When a writer of international acclaim with genealogical roots in India, as his place of origin, departs the world forever,…

The ‘Intuitive’ Writer

When a writer of international acclaim with genealogical roots in India, as his place of origin, departs the world forever, as engaged readers we review, re-read and re-assess his contribution to the immortal literary world.

VS Naipaul, born in Trinidad in 1932, was the grandson of an Indian indentured labourer. Naipaul’s father was a writer who instilled the passion for reading and writing in his son, and writing became the career of VS Naipaul. He moved from the Caribbean region to Britain, eventually became a British citizen, was knighted in 1990 and in 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Needless to add, Naipaul wrote in the English language. In his Nobel acceptance speech, which is a brilliant self-analysis, Naipaul usually regarded as a rather moody writer of intractable temper, controversial, sometimes contemptuous of others and incorrigibly self-opinionated, however exuded a remarkable mellow sobriety as he stated, “When I became a writer those areas of darkness around me as a child became my subjects. The land; the aborigines; the New World; the colony; the history; India; the Muslim world, to which I also felt myself related; Africa; and then England, where I was doing my writing. That was what I meant when I said that my books stand one on the other, and that I am the sum of my books. That was what I meant when I said that my background, the source and prompting of my work, was at once exceedingly simple and exceedingly complicated.”

On 18 November 2004 I was present at the crowded Oxford Bookstore, Park Street where Naipaul spoke about his literary journey and rued the way in which literary subjects all over the world had deviated towards the speculative, the fantastic and towards augmented reality as well as towards narratives that described the trials of the disabled and marginalised. At that time I was the chairperson of the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

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Naipaul’s novel Magic Seeds had been entered for the competition by his publisher. I received more than a hundred books vying for the Commonwealth Writers Prize that year. The jury panel did not select Naipaul’s book for the award.

In fact, in the early 1990s when the postgraduate Department of English of Calcutta University, introduced an optional course on Indian English literature, the first time in its history, Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas was included in the syllabus. Expectedly, it was withdrawn with haste and embarrassment. Naipaul was not an Indian writer, he was not an Indian diasporic writer, and he was a British citizen. The slip actually proved that Naipaul was not regarded as an “alien” writer in India; though India was not his home address, Indian readers read him with curiosity and admiration, as if he was one of their own.

Interestingly, the novel Magic Seeds among its exploration of India through the protagonist Willie included an intriguing section on Gandhi in his early youth; it described how Gandhi felt completely out of sorts in the sophisticated urban environment of the city of London. Naipaul then referred to Gandhi’s autobiography and added, “He wrote his autobiography in the 1920s. A remarkable book. Very simple, very fast, very honest. A book without boasting. A book so true that every young Indian or old Indian can see himself in its pages. There’s no other book like it in India. It would be a modern Indian epic if people read it. But people don’t…” (Magic Seeds 17)

Naipaul’s own understanding of India was like that of a Western intellectual interested in the exotic and curatorial essentialisms that defined India leading to a magisterial overview, as Amartya Sen had defined so incisively. In his Nobel speech Naipaul’s reminiscences clearly underscored Naipaul as an Orientalist, a cultural traveller, and unequivocally an engaged visitor, a tourist and an Outsider – “I had to go to the documents in the British Museum and elsewhere, to get the true feel of the history of the colony. I had to travel to India because there was no one to tell me what the India my grandparents had come from was like. There was the writing of Nehru and Gandhi; and strangely it was Gandhi, with his South African experience, who gave me more, but not enough… The few Indian writers who had come up at that time were middle-class people, town-dwellers; they didn’t know the India we had come from.”

Among his many novels and non-fictional narratives, the three which are referred to time and again as Naipaul’s representation of India, often assessed as acerbic, erratic, erroneous and eccentric are An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now. The last mentioned has some personal associations. The book records Naipaul’s visit to The Birla College of Science and Education, Kolkata later renamed AJC Bose College. Naipaul had visited the college in order to meet the erstwhile Naxalite activist Dipanjan Roychoudhury, who taught Physics in that college. Naipaul observed, “It was a real, working college, but physically it was in a state of decay, Calcutta decay.” (299) It is this college of “drop outs”… “ defeated soldiers” (300) that I had joined on the recommendation of the West Bengal College Service Commission, in the early years of my professional career as a teacher.

In his speech Naipaul referred to his travels and his role as a cultural critic, “Both fiction and the travel-book form have given me my way of looking; and you will understand why for me all literary forms are equally valuable. It came to me, for instance, when I set out to write my third book about India – twenty-six years after the first – that what was most important about a travel book were the people the writer travelled among. The people had to define themselves. A simple enough idea, but it required a new kind of book; it called for a new way of travelling”.

In fact, Naipaul quite categorically stated that he was an eclectic writer, not an ideologue. He stated, “I said I was an intuitive writer. That was so, and that remains so now, when I am nearly at the end. I never had a plan. I followed no system. I worked intuitively. My aim every time was do a book, to create something that would be easy and interesting to read. At every stage I could only work within my knowledge and sensibility and talent and world-view. Those things developed book by book. And I had to do the books I did because there were no books about those subjects to give me what I wanted. I had to clear up my world, elucidate it, for myself.”

In fact, Paul Theroux in his book VS Naipaul had concluded with the remark that “no country can claim him” as he seemed to be congenitally a cultural migrant, a writer who believed in intuitive powers, “I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. I think that probably lies with my ancestry.”

Naipaul’s nomadic stance, his simplicity in his self-definition , his projecting himself as a cosmopolitan wanderer, aware of the history of imperialism, does not put him into the same league as Kipling and Nirad C Chaudhuri, nor can Naipaul be equated with his Caribbean contemporary, the poet Derek Walcott who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1992. In fact the two crossed swords several times and Walcott’s searing sarcastic poem “Mongoose” about Naipaul has been described by critics as “gladiatorial excess”. Naipaul’s own words about his writing can be used as the most appropriate summing up, almost robbing the literary critic of the triumph of penning a holistic concluding paragraph, “I am near the end of my work now. I am glad to have done what I have done, glad creatively to have pushed myself as far as I could go. Because of the intuitive way in which I have written, and also because of the baffling nature of my material, every book has come as a blessing. Every book has amazed me; up to the moment of writing, I never knew it was there. But the greatest miracle for me was getting started. I feel – and the anxiety is still vivid to me — that I might easily have failed before I began.”

 

A Tribute to V S Naipaul

(17 August 1932- 11 August 2018)

 

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