IN 1938, when Naipaul was six, his family moved from the more racially homogeneous Indian countryside to the Woodbrook neighborhood in Port of Spain. Over the next eight years, they occupied two rooms in a house they shared with other members of Naipaul’s mother’s large extended family. As people who had been accustomed to open spaces, Naipaul’s family were likely to have felt cramped and unsettled in their new home, particularly given the proximity of unfamiliar sounds, sights, and smells. Decades later, Naipaul recalled that a boisterous Indian man who lived in the yard next door slaughtered goats every Sunday morning, then “hung the red carcase up, selling pieces.”1 At night, the family was subjected to the “thunderous soundtrack” of the open-air American cinema at the end of the road, which competed with the prostitutes in nearby bars for the attention of dollar-rich American sailors stationed at the naval base.2
Naipaul’s family behaved unobtrusively and tried to escape notice in their new surroundings, but they were being observed by the residents of the street. Returning from school one day, Naipaul overheard a neighbor express shock at the number of people crammed into their small house. Talking about this experience many years later with his biographer, Naipaul recalled the shame he felt at the time. Life in their new urban surroundings, watching and being watched, felt alien to Naipaul and his family, and they maintained their “mental separateness” from the other residents.3 These early impressions indirectly informed many of the stories in his breakthrough book, Miguel Street, which he wrote in 1955. In this work, Naipaul discovered his comic voice. He also realized that he had stumbled upon his great subject: the fates of historically marginalized individuals in the colonial periphery.
Having said that, Naipaul’s earliest effort to write about his society was marked by a lack of knowledge of its history. In subsequent decades, a better-informed Naipaul returned to examine different aspects of Miguel Street in order to clarify his own relationship to some of the real people on whom his fictional characters had been based. These exercises would in turn enable Naipaul to see the potential of a writing in a manner that explicitly combined autobiography with fiction: “As diarists and letter-writers repeatedly prove,” he wrote in 1984, “any attempt at narrative can give value to an experience which might otherwise evaporate away. When I began to write about [Miguel Street] I began to sink into a tract of experience I hadn’t before contemplated as a writer.”4
Set during the Second World War and its aftermath, the stories of Miguel Street center on individuals whom Naipaul had observed as a child from the veranda of his home.5 The reader learns of the hopes and disappointments of these individuals—among them, a poet, a carpenter, a mechanic, a pyrotechnicist, a sweeper, a brothel owner, a working mother with many children, a street preacher, and a schoolchild.
The narrator of these stories is a fatherless working-class boy who lives on Miguel Street with his overworked and mostly absent mother. His failure to describe the context or the background of characters is somewhat disorienting for the reader at first, but this defect is compensated for by his vivid account of daily life, which includes humorous conversations that capture the cadence of the creolized English of the Trinidadian street. Through the young narrator’s observations, the reader senses that there exists an unchanging or monotonous quality to life in this society, and that it has constrained the individual development of the men and women who appear in the stories.
As if unconsciously making up for their circumstances, some characters invent fantastic stories about themselves. A few even find people who are willing to partake of their fantasy. This social trait forms the backdrop to the first story of the collection, “Bogart.” Hence, the boy-narrator reveals his social innocence when he indirectly confesses to being unable to understand why an unfriendly and taciturn man called Bogart is an object of such admiration on Miguel Street:
“What happening there, man?” [Bogart] would ask quietly, and then he would say nothing for ten or fifteen minutes. And somehow you felt you couldn’t really talk to Bogart, he looked so bored and superior. His eyes were small and sleepy. His face was fat and his hair was gleaming black. His arms were plump. Yet he was not a funny man. He did everything with a captivating languor. Even when he licked his thumb to deal out the cards there was grace in it.6
Like the narrator, the reader finds it hard to explain why Bogart’s sedentary habits, which include playing cards alone in his room all day, are imbued with a latent power and intelligence. It is only when Hat, the unofficial leader of the street, explains to the young narrator that Bogart’s morose listlessness and reclusive behavior are an expression of his worldly knowledge and experience, which he keeps to himself, that the reader begins to suspect that Bogart embodies the fantasy of someone who is able to leave and create a good life for himself elsewhere. Indeed, much of Bogart’s charisma derives from his supposed familiarity with places where existence is more varied and dynamic than Miguel Street, which is the only place that men like Hat can claim to know.
One day, Bogart disappears from his rented room, leaving everyone mystified but not entirely surprised. When he reappears just as suddenly months later, he tells the men who congregate in his room an incredible tale about having worked as a cattle rustler in Venezuela. Bogart claims that he saved enough money to open several “high-class” brothels in Brazil and Guyana. His glamorous life was finally broken up by “treacherous” policemen who had previously accepted his bribes.7 When one of the boys expresses skepticism about the story, Bogart takes offense and refuses to say another word, and Hat scolds the boy for his impertinence.
Although Bogart’s tale only confirms the men’s view of his heroism, the narrator notices that after his return Bogart is not the same person as before. No longer placid and indifferent, he is constantly angry and becomes a “feared man on the street.”8 Then one day, to everyone’s shock, the police appear and arrest Bogart, charging him with bigamy.9
Hat learns that Bogart had not been in Venezuela, as he claimed, but in nearby Caroni, where he had made a local girl pregnant. “In Caroni they don’t make joke about that sort of thing and Bogart had to get married to the girl,” he observes ruefully. Because Bogart was already married to a woman in Tunapuna, he inadvertently fell foul of the law prohibiting bigamy. To make up for the shock of these revelations, Hat declares to the others that Bogart had abandoned his wives in Tunapuna and Caroni for Port of Spain because he wanted “to be a man, among we men.”10 Just as Hat had reprimanded the young boy for raising awkward questions about Bogart’s Venezuela adventure, he now falls back on an idea of male fellowship to salvage Bogart’s reputation. However, given that Hat’s professed admiration for Bogart had been based on the latter’s experience of the wider world, which implied something grander than the parochial fellowship of the street, it is more likely that he what he really seeks to protect is a fantasy of individual agency he had projected onto Bogart.
On a different note, the reader finds it difficult to decide whether Bogart’s silences reflect a deep feeling or a kind of emotional blankness. Only at the end of the story does Naipaul suggest that Bogart’s restlessness and volatility are the result of unresolved questions about his past that he lacks words to describe, let alone analyze. The pathos of the short story “Bogart” lies, then, in its portrayal of an implied longing for a different kind of life, a desire all the more poignant because it is not elaborated by the young narrator, whose tone suggests that he too participates in the hopes that the street places in Bogart. In this sense, Bogart’s silences are echoed in the lacunae of the text itself.
In the stories of Miguel Street, Naipaul was learning his craft. He vividly describes the young narrator’s impressions of people and artfully conveys the pathos of Bogart’s desire for a life with broader horizons, but he was not yet able to elaborate upon how such feelings or actions might be informed by the past. This is why Bogart’s motivations, as much as his fantasies and his disappointments, remain elusive even at the end of the story. The stories in Miguel Street avoid any mention of the “racial and social complexities” of Trinidad for the simple reason that Naipaul did not know enough at this time to flesh out the backgrounds of men like Bogart.11
More than a decade later, with travel and research, Naipaul was able to shine a light on some of the wider contextual forces at work in this colonial society. The reader of Finding the Centre learns, for instance, that, like Bogart, Hat was based on Port of Spain Indian men who lived on Naipaul’s street:
Hat was our neighbor on the street. He wasn’t negro or mulatto. But we thought of him as half-way there. He was a Port of Spain Indian. The Port of Spain Indians—there were pockets of them—had no country roots, were individuals, hardly a community, and were separate from us for an additional reason: many of them were Madrassis, descendants of South Indians, not Hindi-speaking, and not people of caste. We didn’t see in them any of our own formalities or restrictions; and though we lived raggedly ourselves (and were far too numerous for the house), we thought of the other Indians in the street only as street people.12
Naipaul based the characters of Bogart and Hat on people he knew from his Trinidadian upbringing, descendants of indentured laborers from Punjab and South India respectively.13 Neither man had access to the languages and traditions of his ancestors. In the plantation society, Bogart had, in Naipaul’s peculiar formulation, become an individual “too soon.”14 Having “put as much distance as possible between himself and the people close to him,” Bogart found himself unsupported and adrift in society, lacking the coordinates that Naipaul deemed an essential component of material and intellectual development.15
In this sense, the stories of Miguel Street were written by an “innocent.”16 In A Way in the World (1994), Naipaul recalled that an early reviewer (modeled on the Trinidadian historian and radical C. L. R. James) had described the characters in early works like Miguel Street as “impoverished” people on whom “history had played a cruel trick.” Continuing to paraphrase this reviewer’s account, Naipaul adds, “My characters thought they were free men, in charge of their own destinies; they weren’t; the colonial setting mocked the delusions of the characters, their ambitions, their belief in perfectibility, their jealousies. The books, light as they were, were subversive, the article said, and remarkable for that reason.”17 Naipaul’s response to the review is a disarming “Yes, yes, it was like that,” implying that he had been too absorbed by the surface details to probe more deeply into the lives of the individuals or their social conditions. It took a perceptive (Marxist) critic to read “through” the comedy and lightness of these stories to grasp their “subversive” quality, which had not been apparent to Naipaul himself until it was pointed out in the review.18 Naipaul is grateful for the critic’s insights, but looking back, he also suggests that had he been as historically knowledgeable or as sophisticated as the reviewer at the time, he would not have been foolhardy enough to write Miguel Street. In this sense, Miguel Street marks the earliest stage of the process by which Naipaul himself began to work toward becoming “capable of self-assessment.”19
Returning to the stories, we see other evidence of Naipaul’s lack of social historical knowledge. The reader is told nothing of the backgrounds of the two black men, Popo and “B. Wordsworth,” whose artistic aspirations incline them to value actions and objects in capacious, rather than merely instrumental, ways. The reader does not learn how these working-class men might have developed these attributes, which are nevertheless described as unusual. Wordsworth attends to “everything as though he were doing it for the first time,” as though “he were doing some church rite.”20 Popo is the carpenter who conveys the value of purposiveness without purpose to the young narrator by announcing that he is “making the thing without a name.”21 Popo, who never drinks in the morning, shows the narrator how the glass of rum he holds every morning symbolizes the aesthetic delight that he takes in ordinary things: “Boy, in the morning, when the sun shining and it still cool, and you just get up, it make you feel good to know that you could go out and stand up in the sun and have some rum.”22 The narrator also thrills to the company of the stoical and humorous B. Wordsworth, who goes from door to door trying to sell his poetry despite being rebuffed. When asked whether the initial B. stands for Bill, Wordsworth says that it stands for “ ‘Black.’ Black Wordsworth. White Wordsworth was my brother. We share one heart. I can watch a small flower like the morning glory and cry.’ ”23
Despite the fact that Popo and B. Wordsworth do not find the means to develop their ideas and ultimately fail in different ways, they serve as role models who impart valuable lessons to the narrator. A few other characters who seek a more inclusive vision of society make an effort to improve the manners of the street kids. Titus Hoyt, the tireless evangelist of education and the most the public-spirited character in Miguel Street, regularly writes letters to the editor of the local newspaper, sets up a club for the street, and pays the bus fares for several boys to visit Fort George, where he delivers an impromptu lecture on the history of the island. When the narrator asks him if the French invaded Trinidad in 1803, Hoyt ignores the fact that Trinidad was a slave colony and, striking a Churchillian note, declares, “No, they didn’t attack. But we was ready, man. Ready for them.”24
A seeker of enlightenment, Hoyt is an optimist who aspires to knowledge and goes about trying to improve existing institutions. Despite his somewhat quixotic aims, he is recognized for his decency. By contrast, a character like Man-man, a street peddler who becomes mentally unbalanced and turns to religion after his dog dies, is a little frightening. Man-man had not always been a troubling a character. In the period when his dog was alive, he impressed the narrator as someone who took quiet pleasure in subverting norms under the cover of absolute conformity, in this case adopting the persona of a well-bred Englishman who does not speak grammatically correct English:
And Man-man, looking at me solemnly, said in a mocking way, “So you goes to school, eh?”
I said automatically, “Yes, I goes to school.” And I found that without intending it I had imitated Man-man’s correct and very English accent.25
When Man-man’s dog dies, however, he turns into a street preacher and gains a following by making political speeches with apocalyptic overtones. He claims to be in regular contact with God—“What he tell me about you people wasn’t nice to hear”—and warns of a total social breakdown. God vouchsafes Man-man a vision of “father eating son and mother eating daughter” if Trinidad wins political autonomy.26 Although everyone believes Man-man is mad, people also “weren’t sure that Man-man wasn’t really right.”27
One day, Man-man stuns everyone by announcing his plans to have himself publicly crucified and stoned. Whereas Titus Hoyt’s effort to create a shared identity through a study of the past is aimed at breaking down ethnic divisions, Man-man’s move reinforces religious identity by appealing exclusively to the emotions of Christians. In the racially mixed society, his outlandish behavior troubles non-Christians like Hat, who fear that the mimic crucifixion will inflame religious tensions. Man-man is arrested. Although he ends his life in a mental institution, there was a brief period when many people regarded him as a leader. Man-man’s early popularity suggests that his enthusiasm struck a chord with ordinary people, who, faced with poverty and hardship, found solace in his passionate appeals, even if his political objectives were never made clear.
Stories of material difficulty are everywhere in Miguel Street, and though the popular appeal of potentially demagogic leaders like Man-man cannot be underestimated, the narrator concentrates on how individual tenacity is the more typical response to privation. He recounts touching stories about frustrated women (including his own mother) who toil to make up for their unreliable and incompetent male partners. In Popo’s words, “Women and them like work. Man not made for work.”28
The narrator is exercised by the creativity such individuals display in adverse circumstances. Most notable is the overworked Laura, who startles the men on the street with her angry but evocative use of foul language. Her eloquent curses, like those of Shakespeare’s Caliban, draw attention to their form as much as their content. The people she curses do not take offense but pause in wonder at the poetry of her imprecations. The street learns, for instance, that in Laura’s lexicon, “stale bread” stands for (the equally poetic if more literal) “thin arse” man. She threatens one of her children with a beating so violent he will “fart fire.” Her colorful use of the English language also serves as a counterpoint to that of the exquisitely well-mannered and Panglossian Titus Hoyt.
Having many mouths to feed, Laura knows that there will be no relief from the drudgery of work. The seven fathers of her eight children abandon her, but instead of complaining, she trains her children to be self-sufficient in the hope that they will not repeat her mistakes. However, Laura’s hopes are dashed when her eldest daughter becomes pregnant. The narrator now hears in Laura’s wails a concession of defeat; she is a broken woman. “You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait,” is Hat’s quietly sympathetic comment on Laura’s fate.29 It speaks to the sense of solidarity in defeat that occasionally brings the street together.
For all the residents’ difficulties, the narrator declares that they see themselves as a community made up of complex individuals with distinct personalities: “A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say ‘Slum!’ because he could see no more. But we, who lived there, saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else.”30
Such awareness does nothing to alter the fact that bad influences are all around and the street boys have to work at keeping them at bay. The garbage collector Eddoes—euphemistically described as a “cart driver”—is admired by the narrator for his gentlemanly demeanor. Eddoes takes pride in his work and tells the boys that he often comes into professional contact with doctors and lawyers, who regard him as their friend. He claims wealthy people do not just give him valuable things; they take him into their confidence. A shared spirit binds the stories of Eddoes to those of Elias (the perennial exam-taker) and Titus Hoyt. Democratic sentiments—including equality, dignity, a sense of fellow feeling—are cultivated in a gradual way through good manners.
As the stories progress, however, Naipaul becomes more interested in using individual stories to explore how the spirit of democracy takes hold in uneven, sometimes self-destructive, ways in this “pre-political” context.31 In “Caution,” Bolo’s efforts to educate himself about world affairs have an unexpected and disturbing outcome because of his lack of formal education. When the reader meets him, Bolo is an advocate of self-improvement, like Titus Hoyt: “It have a lot of people who think they could kick people around. They think because we poor we don’t know anything. But I ain’t in that, you hear. Every day I sit down and read my papers regular regular.”32 At first Bolo believes that the newspapers expose the conspiracies of the rich and powerful. However, for reasons that remain unclear, over time he becomes convinced that the newspapers are themselves part of the global conspiracy that he alone knows about.
Bolo’s effort at self-improvement takes place in a context where public institutions remain undeveloped. As he grows increasingly discouraged, he turns away from his aspiration to understand world politics and alights upon a firm belief that everything is a racket that the powerful have set up for their selfish benefit. Bolo’s erstwhile desire for freedom and justice is suddenly overwhelmed by a fierce hostility toward the powerful, who he believes are in the business of tricking and exploiting poor men. In such circumstances, there is no meaningful difference between being informed and being duped.
Bolo holds to this position so completely that he refuses to believe that he has actually won a newspaper lottery:
I said, “But it really draw, Mr Bolo.”
He said, “How the hell you know it draw?”
I said, “I see it in the papers.”
At this Bolo got really angry and he seized me by the collar. He screamed, “How often I have to tell you, you little good-for-nothing son of a bitch, that you mustn’t believe all that you read in the papers?”33
Showing an awareness of state-led campaigns of Cold War disinformation, Bolo says of the Americans: “These people is master of propaganda.”34 He refuses to believe anything, least of all that the Second World War has ended. Only when the Americans dismantle their Port of Spain army camps in 1947 does Bolo reluctantly change his mind.
Bolo’s paranoid reading of the colonial state and the Cold War context may well contain more than a grain of truth. However, because he lacks the ability to frame and interpret information correctly, his actions become self-destructive. Failing to learn how to correctly interpret the ways that truth is produced, lacking access to institutions and social practices that could rein in his febrile imagination, Bolo graduates into a conspiracy theorist. Despite his earlier promise as a critical thinker, Bolo shares the melancholy fate of the collection’s other characters, who are unable to realize their potential.
Naipaul’s fascination with the disoriented historical transition of a dislocated peasantry, symbolized above all by Bogart, gave him a point of entry into the life of the street. In his autobiographical Finding the Centre (1984), Naipaul describes how he tracked down the real Bogart many years after the publication of Miguel Street. On one level, this was an act of piety toward the actual person who had inspired Naipaul’s first successful literary character. More significantly, it revealed the type of character that interested Naipaul as he sought in later years to decipher the histories and cultures of diverse parts of the world, and how individuals in the colonial and postcolonial world negotiated the difficult passage from country to city and from premodern to modern conditions of life.
The real Bogart ultimately left Trinidad and moved to Venezuela, where Naipaul found him in 1977.35 Naipaul learned that Bogart was a shopkeeper in a run-down village on the island of Margarita, just north of the Venezuelan peninsula. When they met, the real Bogart appeared to Naipaul nearly as remote and impenetrable as his fictional counterpart in Miguel Street. What is most noteworthy about their encounter is not the insights that Naipaul gained into Bogart’s character so much as Naipaul’s belated realization that their shared background was the real basis of his fascination with Bogart. Even his apparently critical assessments of Bogart’s actions are therefore informed by a deeper filiation, as seen in the moment when both men reveal their ambivalent identification with traditional Trinidadian-Hindu practices. This acknowledgment of a shared background informs Naipaul’s view that the ritual chanting Bogart engaged in was an expression of a “nullity,” or subjective disorientation, because it had never been sustained by the deeper meaning that only a collectivity—even one as oppressive and “wretched” as Naipaul’s extended family in Port of Spain—could provide.36 Naipaul empathized with Bogart’s need for “the consolation of hallowed ways,” but he also believed that Bogart had paid a high price for escaping “too soon” from the tutelage provided by the clan or kin group.37 Like Bogart, Naipaul had sought to escape the stifling ways of the extended family but only ended up doing so after it had equipped him with certain reflexes or dispositions that would benefit him in later years.
Naipaul’s description of his encounter with Bogart in Centre is historically nuanced and informed by internal tensions. He suggests in this later work that when he wrote Miguel Street he had lacked the ability to adequately convey the character of the “real” Bogart. This was partly because the only literary tradition Naipaul knew at the time was that of the European novel. Naipaul’s turn to nonfiction to portray the “real” Bogart (in Centre) as a way of offering context and depth to the “fictional” Bogart (of Miguel) underscores the fact that the literary tradition Naipaul had studied, and upon which he sought to build his career as a writer, presupposed social norms and structures very unlike those associated with the “peasant dereliction” extant in parts of colonial Trinidad.38
European novels came buttressed with a wealth of historical and sociological knowledge that the European novelist took for granted:
The novel was an imported form [in Trinidad]. For the metropolitan writer it was only one aspect of self-knowledge. About it was a mass of other learning, other imaginative forms, other disciplines. For me, in the beginning, it was my all. Unlike the metropolitan writer I had no knowledge of a past…. And the plantation colony, as the humorous guide books said, was a place where almost nothing had happened. So the fiction one did, about one’s immediate circumstances, hung in a void, without a context, without the larger self-knowledge that was always implied in a metropolitan novel.39
Naipaul’s came to believe that his stories about his childhood environment lacked the “larger self-knowledge” that was taken for granted in European novels.40 In passages such as these, Naipaul intimated that as an author he shared the “limited social background” of his characters.41 To make up for this lack, Naipaul began traveling to different parts of the Caribbean in an effort to comprehend aspects of his own past, or as he put it, “to fill out my world picture.”42 Beyond the Caribbean, travel also became Naipaul’s way of forming a mental picture of the different societies in Asia and Africa to which he felt historically connected.
Throughout Naipaul’s career, travel and historical research complemented his efforts to expand his understanding of his past through the writing of fiction. Fiction “by itself” would not have taken him to this this “larger comprehension.”43 It was travel that gave Naipaul an insight into the distinct fates of low-caste Indians who ended up in different parts of the Caribbean. In The Middle Passage, an account of Naipaul’s 1961 visit to several countries in the West Indies, we sense the aura of the fictional cart-driver Eddoes of Miguel Street hovering over the actual South Indian street-sweepers Naipaul observed in neighboring French Martinique. It was only when he visited Martinique that Naipaul realized that the confident and self-possessed Eddoes he had invented was grounded in Port of Spain’s peculiar history. From his close observation of low-caste South Indians in French Martinique, he was able to draw recursive insight into the fictional character he had created in a state of relative ignorance. In this way, Naipaul’s discovery of facts that were not available in books would enrich the next phase of his creative development:
I had never known there were Indians in Martinique beyond the usual businessmen from Trinidad. I had never known that in the French islands, as in the British, indentured Indian immigrants and some Chinese had replaced slave labour after emancipation, and that seventy thousand or more Indians had come to Martinique. Unlike the Indians in British Guiana, Trinidad and Surinam, they came from South India, many from the French Indian colonies. They did not flourish. As one Martiniquan said to me, with disgust and pride, “They died like flies.” Some of the survivors emigrated to Trinidad and settled in west Port-of-Spain. Only four or five thousand remained in Martinique, laborers on the sugar estates of the north, sweepers in the city, and they made no mark on the society; no Indian even opened a shop. It might be that their numbers were too small.44
Naipaul infers that Indian sweepers did better in Trinidad than in Martinique because the Indians in Trinidad were internally diverse and numerous enough to “re-create an India in miniature, with the basic Hindu-Muslim antagonism, Shia and Sunni divisions among the Muslims and a complex if rapidly disintegrating caste system among the Hindus.”45 In colonial Port of Spain, these social structures were simultaneously reproduced but also hybridized in flexible ways that gave a degree of political and economic mobility to low-caste South Indians like Eddoes.
Such prospects were, in Naipaul’s view, unavailable to the Indian community in French Martinique. Naipaul argues that “it might be that unlike these [Trinidad] Indians, the Martinique Indians came from a single depressed Hindu caste”:46
There is the remarkable fact that just as in India the sweepers’ settlement is separated, perhaps by a river, from the town, so in Fort de France [Martinique] the Indian sweepers are separated from the rest of the town by a canal. It is also to be noted that among those who emigrated to Port-of-Spain there was a tradition, now lost, of road-sweeping; and they have proved the most assimilable of Trinidad Indians. It is easy to see how such people, without the traditions, aptitudes and drive of other castes, would be helpless; or how any small, alien impoverished group would remain submerged in Martinique, where society was as rigidly organized as Indian society but where standards were incomprehensible and beyond attainment.47
Although the fictional Eddoes of Miguel Street is descended from the same “low Hindu caste” as the actual South Indian sweepers Naipaul observed six years later in Martinique, the latter—unlike Eddoes, who is portrayed as a glamorous and politically assertive figure by the impressionable child narrator of Miguel Street—were helpless “without the traditions, aptitudes and drives of the other castes.”48
Naipaul’s interest in the subtle similarities and differences between disadvantaged groups in different places arose from an exploration of places and groups both familiar and new to him. He developed this approach to peripheral spaces over the course of the next six decades in ways that arose from the interanimating insights of his fiction and nonfictional writing. In Miguel Street, we see Naipaul beginning to discover his material and taking his first, mostly intuitive, steps toward forming a connected picture of the complex, multifaceted colonial situation by which he had been shaped. In his early works, he grappled with subjects that kept him close to his social origins.
As I show in the next chapter, Naipaul did so through closely observed accounts of the uneven ways small-town and rural Indians had been inducted into modernity. This phase of early self-education culminated in the journeys Naipaul took in 1961 in order to write The Middle Passage:
I was a colonial traveling in New World plantation colonies which were like the one I had grown up in. To look, as a visitor, at other semi-derelict communities in despoiled land, in the great romantic setting of the New World, was to see, as from a distance, what one’s own community might have looked like…to have an intimation of a sequence of events going far back.49
In the years after writing Miguel Street, Naipaul was at pains to evoke a sense of people descended from these “unprotected” members of a globally displaced peasantry. He felt it necessary to learn the “art of self-assessment” and to form a picture of the world.50 This was, in his view, the first and most important task for the writer from the periphery. It also forms the starting point from which I elaborate the development of Naipaul’s art and thought.