V. S. Naipaul’s Journeys: From Periphery to Center

FEW MODERN writers have divided readers as fiercely as V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018). During his lifetime, Naipaul won numerous international awards, most notably the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Naipaul’s admirers point to the formidable scope of his nonfiction and draw attention to the fact that several of his novels have been hailed as masterpieces.¹ He has also been referred to as the “first modern global writer.”² By contrast, Naipaul’s detractors allege that his work reflects “the xenophobia and dehumanization that lay at the heart of colonialism,” and that his personal failings present an insurmountable obstacle to his canonization as a major author.³ These critics also accuse Naipaul of having exploited “the label of genius [to] get away with abusing women” and of being a bigot who profited from his talent for cynically composing “compulsively readable” stories about “vulnerable, broken people.”⁴

It did not help matters that Naipaul delighted in playing the troll, occasionally emerging from his home in the English countryside to feed the media with sound bites that seemed calculated to provoke outrage.5 By the time of his death, many in the media and at universities regarded Naipaul’s work as a platform for the reprehensible views with which he was personally associated.⁶ It is significant that Naipaul is the sole Nobel laureate of non-European origin whose work is excluded from the most recent edition of the widely used Norton Anthology of World Literature.⁷

An editorial in the Guardian identified the broader problem as follows: “V. S. Naipaul, who has died at 85, exemplified a very current preoccupation: whether an author’s personality can be separated from his or her reputation as an artist.”⁸ Some of Naipaul’s defenders accordingly maintained that his “comments about Islam, women and Africa were often unjustified and untrue—but that can be acknowledged alongside his gifts.”⁹ Seeking to establish a clear distinction between the unpleasant individual and the accomplished writer, they contended that Naipaul was a great stylist and an experimenter with forms, someone who “never ceased to engage in a fearless—if fraught—conversation about belonging, identity, and the colonial past.”¹⁰ The anticolonial Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o similarly praised Naipaul as “a writer’s writer” who was “ruthless in his satiric portrayal of the self-image of this mimic ruling elite, which always looked to the West for validation, but to its own people with disdain.”¹¹

Such divided judgments are further complicated by the different kinds of attention Naipaul commands in many parts of the world. Naipaul was the featured star attraction at international literature festivals held in Bali, Indonesia (at which he failed to appear), and Dhaka, Bangladesh, but withdrew from a writer’s conference in Turkey in 2010 after “a storm of protest in the country’s Islamist media.”¹² At the 2015 Jaipur Literature Festival in India, Naipaul drew the largest crowd in the history of the festival, “more than Oprah [Winfrey], more even than Amitabh [Bachchan],” according to an exultant tweet by the festival’s organizer.¹³ And, at a 2011 conference in Port of Spain, Trinidad, a group of distinguished Caribbean scholars devoted themselves to teasing out the complex ways in which Naipaul’s writings had been shaped by his West Indian background.¹⁴

At this conference, the Trinidadian critic Rhonda Cobham-Sander explored how Naipaul had drawn on personal aspects of his past in ways that illuminated broader tensions in the West Indies.15 A nuanced assessment of the relationship between Naipaul’s life and work can also be discerned in a statement made by the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh: “[Naipaul’s] views and opinions I almost always disagreed with: some because they were founded on truths that were too painful to acknowledge; some because they were misanthropic or objectionable; and some because they came uncomfortably close to being racist…. Yet he was writing of matters that no one else thought worth noticing; he had found words to excavate new dimensions of experience.” Ghosh added that an essay of Naipaul’s “has become so intimate a part of my experience that I cannot be certain where my memory ends and where Naipaul’s narrative begins.”¹⁶

For both Cobham-Sander and Ghosh, Naipaul’s writings shed an acute if discomfiting light on crucial aspects of their own formations. They imply, moreover, that the force of Naipaul’s literary excavations was linked to his defiance of approved ways of talking about postcolonial societies. In other words, Naipaul had affected them as deeply as he had because of, not despite, his tendency to give offense.

It would not have been possible for Naipaul to have elicited such complex responses from skeptical close readers like Cobham-Sander and Ghosh had he felt mere disdain for his Indian and Trinidadian background or, conversely, had he been exclusively motivated by a desire to win fame and fortune in the metropole. Naipaul’s writings, therefore, demand a nuanced approach. While it is important to recognize their problematic aspects, I do not think we ought to dismiss them for this reason. In part, this is because much of what is uniquely insightful about Naipaul’s work is connected to what is problematic about it. It is in this entangled manner that his writings undertake a self-implicating and socially illuminating reflection on global cultures and histories. As such, I do not rely solely on the binarisms of “ideology critique” (this is the approach adopted by Naipaul’s detractors) but supplement them with close readings that pay attention to the verbal texture—not least the irony and ambiguity—of Naipaul’s writings.

In order to respond fully to this texture, it is necessary to understand Naipaul’s personal background. Naipaul’s ancestors were peasants from North India who had been brought in the late nineteenth century to work as indentured laborers on the sugar plantations of Trinidad,

Naipaul’s Indian ancestors were latecomers to the colony and settled in areas that were relatively isolated from the rest of the population. Many Indians served out their five-year terms and then settled in the countryside.¹⁸ Naipaul’s father, Seepersad, was born to poor Indian peasants in Trinidad in 1906. Although he spoke no English in his early years and had little formal education, Seepersad’s luck improved when he married into a local family of conservative Hindu landowners called the Capildeos.

Remarkably, Seepersad developed a desire to become a writer. In 1930, he began working as a correspondent on rural Indian issues for the Trinidad Guardian newspaper. Indians were regarded as a backward and violent group by the wider society. “In the Indian countryside of my childhood in Trinidad,” Naipaul writes, “there were many murders and acts of violence, and these acts of violence gave the Trinidad Indians, already separated from the rest of the island by language, religion, and culture, a fearful reputation.”¹⁹ Seepersad reported on unsolved murders, family feuds, and vendettas, but as someone who had grown up in this world, he came to see his role as that of an interpreter of the ways of country Indians for an urban, middle-class audience. He also discussed rural and small-town politics and the discrimination faced by Trinidad Indian students in India, criticizing those who took a hopeful view of repatriation.²⁰

In his spare time, Seepersad composed short stories that evoked Indian village life in Trinidad during the first decades of the twentieth century.21 From the start, however, opportunities for his advancement as a writer were limited. Trinidad’s reading public was very small, and Seepersad lacked the wealth or social connections to take his writerly ambitions further. He died at the age of forty-three a disappointed man. Naipaul was twenty years old and in England at the time.

As a child, Naipaul came to identify with his father’s aspirations. He made Seepersad’s ambition to become a writer his own. Naipaul was aware of his father’s limitations as a writer, but he also came to believe that Seepersad’s talents had not been recognized because of his race and class.²² Naipaul’s entire adolescence was devoted, as he later recalled, to a “blind, driven kind of colonial studying,”²³ which was aimed at winning the yearly colonial government scholarship that would enable him to leave the island and pursue his ambitions abroad. Naipaul won the scholarship in 1949. A year later, he left Trinidad to begin his studies at the University of Oxford. In 1955, Naipaul moved to London and married Patricia Hale, a fellow undergraduate from Oxford who was for many years his most important reader.

During his first years in London, Naipaul was broke and desperate. He had attempted, without success, to write two novels. To his relief, Henry Swanzy, an Irishman who did a great deal to promote contemporary West Indian writing, offered him some freelance work at the BBC Caribbean Services program in London. Over a few weeks in 1955, working at a typewriter in the BBC freelancers’ room, Naipaul wrote a short story based on the street life in the mixed, working-class Woodbrook neighborhood of Port of Spain, Trinidad, to which his family had moved from the country in 1938. After several weeks of writing, Naipaul completed a set of short stories, which he titled Miguel Street. He subsequently wrote three novels, from 1956 to 1960, benefiting from the fact that after the war smaller London publishing houses were interested in “work by fresh, vigorous, new voices from far corners of the Commonwealth.”²⁴

Like other Caribbean writers of his generation, Naipaul got his start as a writer in London. However, several distinctive aspects of his work would soon become apparent. The first was his enduring productivity—averaging a book every two years for the next fifty years—and the second was his skepticism toward the rhetoric of anticolonial politicians. The impetus for both these features can be traced to Naipaul’s return to Trinidad in 1956. During this visit, Naipaul encountered a new kind of social unrest in his birthplace, which gave him an idea of the kind of writing he might do. It was also during this visit that Naipaul first got an inkling, which he would take many years to piece together, of the actual reason his father’s career as a newspaper reporter had come to a sudden end. In subsequent years, Naipaul’s efforts to grapple with both events, each one traumatic in a different way, obliquely informed the personal and political dimensions of his writing. They contributed to Naipaul’s efforts to narrate his origins as a new kind of global writer. Given their crucial importance to Naipaul’s self-conception, I will discuss them in some detail.

During Naipaul’s student years in England, the rhetoric of black and Indian politicians in Trinidad became increasingly racial in nature. The antagonism between the two main communities worsened in the years leading up to the country’s independence in 1962. Even though he was aware of this alarming trend, Naipaul seemed utterly shocked when he experienced it directly in 1956, upon his return to Port of Spain after being away for six years. The extent of Naipaul’s trauma can perhaps be explained by the fact that his attitude to Trinidad had, until this time, been as uncontroversial as it was unremarkable, reflecting the blasé attitudes of many educated colonials that they would seamlessly take over the smooth running of the government and economy from the departing colonial master.25

A few weeks before leaving England to visit Trinidad in 1956, Naipaul submitted the manuscript of Miguel Street to André Deutsch, a London publisher, who eventually published it. The stories in Miguel Street portray 1940s Port of Spain as a tolerant, easygoing, and politically somnolent society where the different races lived side by side in harmony. The spirit of these stories is very similar to that found in works by Naipaul’s predecessors, notably Samuel Selvon, Edgar Mittelholzer, C. L. R. James, and above all, Seepersad Naipaul.²⁶ The Trinidad of Miguel Street resembles the safe, racially and culturally mixed place Naipaul remembered from his childhood years.²⁷

There are other indications that Naipaul was feeling hopeful about the postcolonial future of Trinidad. In his review of his compatriot Sam Selvon’s novel An Island Is a World, which was broadcast on the BBC’s Caribbean Voices program several months before he left London to visit his birthplace, Naipaul emphasized Selvon’s treatment of the “important theme” of building up “national feeling” in a racially diverse country like Trinidad. He concluded his review with a resounding affirmation of the “relevance for many of us” of Selvon’s capacious vision of an inclusive Trinidadian identity.28 And upon reaching Trinidad in 1956, Naipaul sensed nothing troubling at first. In fact, shortly after he arrived, he wrote a letter (dated September 1956) to his wife, Patricia Hale, suggesting they consider moving to Trinidad because “the wealth of the place” made prospects for employment better there than in England.²⁹

However, Naipaul’s optimism did not last. Some weeks after his first letter, he wrote to Patricia again, this time to express outrage at the openly racist speeches he had heard from black politicians.³⁰ Many decades later, Naipaul recalled that “much of the hostile feeling released by the sacrament on [Woodford Square, Port of Spain] would have focused on the Indians, who made up the other half of the [Trinidad] population. The town had been important to me. Its discovery had been one of the pleasures of my childhood…. Now on this return I felt it had passed to other hands.”³¹

Racial violence, which had seemed inconceivable to him and his family only a few years earlier, now seemed likely to erupt at any moment. Racially charged confrontations and violent incidents on a small scale were taking place daily on familiar streets and in public spaces. Indians and blacks in Trinidad were on the brink of a race war.³² Similarly threatening encounters took place before the 1961 elections.³³ Then, between 1962 and 1965, there was an explosion of large-scale violence between Indians and blacks in neighboring Guyana.³⁴ With apparently little warning, ethnic division had made itself the defining characteristic of politics in this part of the postcolonial Caribbean.

Naipaul had a personal stake in the matter. He was a member of the largest ethnic minority in the country, and his private correspondence reveals his fears for the safety of his family. What had gone wrong? And what was it, Naipaul appears to have asked himself, about his education or sensibility that had blinded him to the tensions that had evidently been brewing between Indians and blacks?35 The racial hostilities of the 1950s forced Naipaul to admit that, despite being of the place, he really did not know much about it. Naipaul’s experience of racial violence in his birthplace had a profoundly transformative effect on his worldview.

Naipaul was by no means atypical in being shocked by the sudden turn of events. Millions of ethnic minorities across the decolonizing world of the 1950s and 1960s would experience similar feelings of disorientation and panic on the eve or in the aftermath of political independence.³⁶ Globally, ethnic tensions became a defining trait of the postcolonial condition. Minorities discovered, often too late and at tragic cost, that the postcolonial state or the majority community could become the agent of mass killing (a fact that remains the case today).³⁷

Like so many other elites of his generation, Naipaul had assumed that educated brown and black men would simply pick up and carry on the smooth running of affairs when the British administrators departed. He had no reason to suspect that the transfer of power might result in the disintegration of the social fabric of his birthplace.³⁸ The unrest of the late 1950s and 1960s alerted Naipaul to the fragility of postcolonial societies, and he began to attend to the ways that people who had been subjected and exploited might themselves turn into agents of violence and oppression.

This brings me to the second, and more intimate, element of Naipaul’s formation: his belated and gradual discovery, in the decade following his 1956 visit to Trinidad, of how his father had fallen foul of his own community some decades earlier. In different places, including Finding the Centre (1984) and The Enigma of Arrival (1987), Naipaul describes how his father’s story informed his own psychological makeup, his view of literary inheritance in the kind of society he was born into, and his deep yet ambivalent identification with the plight of marginalized groups.

Less than a year after Naipaul was born, his father began reporting on a case of Indian farmers in rural Trinidad who refused to have their goats inoculated against an epidemic of paralytic rabies that was threatening livestock across the island. The farmers were poor, and the shots were not cheap: “twenty-four cents a shot, at a time when a labourer earned thirty cents a day,” Naipaul writes.39 Many farmers refused to inoculate their livestock, hoping instead to ward off the terrible disease by offering a goat sacrifice to the goddess Kali.

On June 7, 1933, in an article in the Trinidad Guardian, Seepersad Naipaul dismissed this ritual, undertaken by the farmers as a “charm against the disease,” as “superstitious remedies.”⁴⁰ The article, which appeared with the headline “Superstition Hinders Anti-Rabies Campaign: ‘Fighting’ Disease by Goat Sacrifice [for] Female Deity Thought Offended,” got him into serious trouble with the rural Indians.

Shortly after the article was published, Seepersad received a death threat written in Hindi. It stated that he would die in a week unless he himself undertook the very sacrifice he had criticized.⁴¹ Evidently, such threats were not to be trifled with: one white official working in the area had recently been poisoned to death after trying to enforce the law.⁴² Seepersad was familiar with the rural area from which the threat had originated; he had reported on the numerous local feuds that resulted in many tit-for-tat killings that remained unsolved. Having to travel to these areas as part of his job, Seepersad was clearly “terrified of what he saw as a murder threat.”⁴³ Affecting bravado, he joked in print about the threat but went secretly to the Indian area and performed the ritual, hoping to placate his enemies.

Seepersad’s capitulation became widely known, however. The humiliation became too much for him, and his work suffered. He became “unbalanced,” then lost his job at the newspaper:

Seepersad bitterly suspected that someone in the “ruling circle” of his wife’s family of rural landowners had a hand in the threatening letter he had received. He had crossed the family by failing to report favorably on their candidate for a seat in the Legislative Council in the 1933 county election.⁴⁵ Pursuing this story of family intrigue would take us too far afield, but it is significant that Naipaul described his mother’s family as a “totalitarian organization.”⁴⁶ For a brief time, Seepersad had been sustained by “an idea of vocation”:

He wrote about Chaguanas [a town in Trinidad], but the daily exercise of an admired craft would, in his own mind, have raised him above the constrictions of Chaguanas: he would have grown to feel protected by the word, and the quality of his calling. Then the props went. And he had only Chaguanas and Trinidad.⁴⁷

Ironically and tragically, Seepersad’s life became undone by the very forces of the plantation society from which he had sought escape by becoming a writer. Having suffered a breakdown and been dismissed from his job, Seepersad once again became dependent upon his wealthy relatives. His life had come full circle.⁴⁸

Thus, whereas the events of the 1950s alerted Naipaul to the terrifying possibility of communal violence instigated by leaders of the racial majority, in subsequent decades he also became cognizant of the ways violence could be unfairly meted out by communities to one of their own. From these cases, Naipaul gained distinct but related insight into how victims of domination and exploitation—the black majority on the eve of Trinidad’s independence in the 1950s and the minority Indians on whom his father reported in the 1930s—could become perpetrators of violence. The first experience contributed to Naipaul’s becoming a critical observer of broader aspects of decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s; the second, and more personal, story influenced Naipaul’s views of the tension between individual rights and the demands of the community.

Seepersad Naipaul came from the class of poor peasants from India who formed the majority of indentured laborers on the island. Indians worked on sugar plantations in conditions “which had not significantly changed since slavery; one set of serfs merely replac[ing] another.”⁴⁹ During Seepersad’s childhood, many rural Indians regarded themselves as sojourners in Trinidad. They had taken on the ordeal of indenture in order to put aside enough money to purchase a small plot of land in their ancestral villages in India, where they eventually hoped to return. Thus, after they had fulfilled their contractual obligations, many wanted to be repatriated to India.

But repatriation turned out to be more complicated than it appeared. In 1931, a British-owned ship, the SS Ganges, had come to Trinidad with an agreement to take a thousand people back to India. In 1932, the year of Naipaul’s birth, news “that the Ganges was going to come again created frenzy in those who had been left behind the previous year. They saw this second coming of the Ganges as their last chance to go home, to be released from Trinidad.”50 Naipaul has written that many more wanted to go back to India than could be accommodated:

Seven weeks later the Ganges reached Calcutta. And there, to the terror of the passengers, the Ganges was stormed by hundreds of derelicts, previously repatriated, who wanted now to be taken back to the other place [Trinidad]. India for these people had been a dream of home, a dream of continuity after the illusion of Trinidad. All the India they had found was the area around the Calcutta docks.⁵¹

Another group of Indians, brought to Trinidad just before indenture was abolished, were subject to an ironic fate of a different kind. As a consequence of agitation by anticolonial leaders in India, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi, who successfully portrayed indenture as a humiliation for all Indians, the British authorities abruptly ended the practice in 1917. These actions had an adverse effect on those who had just arrived in Trinidad. When they completed their term of unfree labor, they found themselves in legal limbo. The new law rendered them ineligible for protection, and they did not receive the compensation they had been promised by the plantation owners or the colonial state. Regarding these latecomers, Naipaul notes:

The pledge of land or repatriation was dishonoured…. These people were absolutely destitute. They slept in the streets of Port of Spain, the capital…. In the colonial setting of Trinidad, where rights were limited, you could have done anything with these people; and they were tormented by the people of the town.⁵²

When he became an adult, Naipaul learned the stories of these people. He also discovered that, as a child, Seepersad had almost been taken to India in a Calcutta-bound ship like the SS Ganges. Seepersad’s father died in Trinidad in 1910, when he was four, and his mother’s relatives were too poor to support her and her four children. It was decided that they should make the journey to India, where it was hoped Seepersad’s mother would somehow find her way back to her family village.

Seepersad’s mother’s application for repatriation was approved by the colonial authority. On the appointed day, she took her children to the immigration depot on Nelson Island, Trinidad. But little Seepersad was fearful of the sea trip. He “hid in one of the latrines overhanging the sea, and he stayed there until his mother changed her mind.”⁵⁴ Seepersad’s mother resigned herself to staying in Trinidad. She became dependent on her relatives, who could not afford to keep the family together:

The family was scattered. The eldest child, a girl, worked in the house of a relative; she never learned to read or write. The elder boy went out to work on the sugar estates for eight cents a day. The younger boy [Seepersad, Naipaul’s father] was spared for school. He was sent to stay with his mother’s sister, who had married a man who owned a shop and was starting a bus company. The boy went to school by day and worked until late at night in the shop.⁵⁵

As Naipaul wrote years later, he only learned some of the key details of this story when he met his father’s dying sister in 1970 (almost a decade after A House for Mr Biswas, the novel based on Naipaul’s father’s life, was published). Naipaul learned to see something he already knew about his father in a new light—that Seepersad had been sent to a school so that he might follow in his father’s footsteps and become a pundit, a man learned in Hindu scripture and ritual. Quite by chance, then, Naipaul discovered how the idea of becoming a writer occurred to his father:

Naipaul’s own hope of becoming a writer “had been seeded in something less than half knowledge of my father’s early writing life.”⁵⁷ Naipaul’s genealogy made him a peripheral writer in more than one sense. His own ambitions were intertwined with the very hopes that he had, as a young child, cherished for his father. Naipaul’s enduring, if deeply fraught, interest in the global periphery was not a bloodless affair. From the start, it was connected to his efforts to make sense of how he had been shaped by his past.

The mature Naipaul would appropriate Seepersad’s story for himself. As with many things in his life, Naipaul worked it into an aesthetically complex story of inheritance. While one must be skeptical of Naipaul’s narrative when it veers toward self-mythologization, it is undeniable that his investment in his peripheral past was deep and complicated. To be sure, his writings reveal him to be working through this formative legacy in ways that are at times marred by the uneven historical development of which he was a product. Nevertheless, Naipaul’s critical observations about non-European societies, as well as those verbal statements in which he apparently repudiated his past, should be placed in the context of his serious writerly engagement with those worlds over the course of many years, not cast in the binary terms of celebration or rejection.

It would be a long time before Naipaul formed a full picture of Seepersad’s story.58 For years, the young Naipaul was consumed by a very different set of struggles, centered on establishing himself as a writer in London. Naipaul’s earliest publications, the first of which appeared in 1957, were fictional explorations of scenes from ordinary Trinidad Indian life. The tone and content of these works were comparable to those of other writers from British colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, who sympathetically described how non-European populations were successfully navigating the transition to modern forms of life. These stories were about marginalized peoples whose point of view had never been taken into account because the writers of colonial fiction had previously been European. Naipaul’s early works were well received by critics; he immediately gained a reputation as a comic writer with a superb eye and ear for the ways ordinary Trinidadians made sense of social and political change on the eve of decolonization.

By the early 1960s, however, ethnic and racial politics had begun to cast a shadow over the future of independent nations like Trinidad. Political leaders who had made the injustices of the colonial past the basis of demands for political independence now exploited racial sentiments and identity politics. In this context, Naipaul began studying his people with a more coldly critical eye. He came to insist on the importance of describing how the structure of colonial societies, with its material and intellectual underdevelopment, impedes the efforts of postcolonial peoples to understand the forces by which they have been shaped. Looking back on the story of Seepersad, as well as the beaten-down people with whom he interacted as a journalist, we can form an idea of how Naipaul was persuaded that people with limited backgrounds were poorly equipped to reflect on how their choices were influenced by the deranging forces of the past. Furthermore, we can imagine the complex and divided form of identification that resulted from this insight, not least because Naipaul’s father—and, to some extent, Naipaul himself—had emerged from such a group.

Naipaul’s explorations were prompted by a deeply personal or autobiographical impulse: a desire to understand how he and people with backgrounds like his had been for generations acted upon by wider forces they could neither describe nor analyze. His writing was motivated by a concern with the ways that such people (and he included himself in this group) might arrive at an unsentimental understanding of their formation, which he felt was a precondition of genuine historical agency.

Thus, writing became the means by which Naipaul sought to “work out a steady way of looking and acting” and to “make a whole of his life experience.”59 Naipaul went so far as to declare in his Nobel Lecture that “everything that is of value about me is in my books.”⁶⁰ Put simply, he made his life the object of his work, using it as a prism or point of departure from which to explore the historical and psychological connections with other postcolonial peoples. Naipaul’s obsession with excavating and elaborating different aspects of his own formation led him from stories of small-town lives in colonial Trinidad to travel and research in the Caribbean and India and, beyond that, to many parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Over six decades, Naipaul experimented with different genres and voices—whose moods were by turns warmly sympathetic, detached, enraged, contemptuous, bitter, melancholy, and contemplatively accepting—to describe the lives of peoples who had been shaped by the legacies of colonialism, slavery, indenture, and displacement. And Naipaul invariably regarded his past, his life, as deeply embedded with the themes he wrote about:

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 is what I meant when I said that my books stand one on the other, and that I am the sum of my books.⁶¹

In the early 1960s, when Naipaul began writing about the wider world, very little had been published on so-called peripheral societies, particularly by people with colonial backgrounds. Naipaul was among the first to write about his own society and to bring that perspective to bear on other colonized places with similar histories, offering others a way to perceive connections between diverse colonial spaces. At the same time, many of the themes that Naipaul was among the first to explore, from ethnic violence and civil war to the self-destructive impact of religious fundamentalism, have become central questions of the global twenty-first century.

From the fracturing of central authority in South Sudan to the suffering of ethnic minorities like the Rohingya in Myanmar, Naipaul’s writings shed light on the human and historical dimensions of postcolonial instability that continue in our day. Unlike foreign news correspondents and commentators, Naipaul focused not on postcolonial politics but on intimate and historicized accounts of the aspirations and destinies of ordinary individuals affected by social upheaval. His writings illuminate our understanding of the complex origins and consequences of modernity in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

The twenty-first century has been described as the dawn of a “post-American” age, with once colonized or semicolonial territories styling themselves as regional or global superpowers-in-waiting. In this new setting, historical transitions will look very different than they did in the era of decolonization.62 Nevertheless, the need for historical reflection and awareness remains as acute as ever, particularly if the rise of new powers is to avoid the replication of old injustices, on the one hand, and old fantasies, on the other. Naipaul’s insights have a valuable, if cautionary, role to play in this phase of global history, not least because of the urgency with which they foreground the euphoria or triumphalism with which many false postcolonial dawns were greeted. Today, Naipaul’s writings are perhaps most valuable in their tacit illustration of why it is premature to celebrate technological or economic progress as it unfolds in contexts where critical reflection and historical understanding remain impoverished.⁶³

This book is not focused on convincing readers that Naipaul’s insights were either absolutely right or utterly wrong. I steer clear of the tendency of admirers and detractors alike to be captured by what might be called the Naipaul myth.64 Naipaul’s “gift for provoking extreme admiration or equally pronounced indignation” is one reason he was, at the time of his death in 2018, defined in the eyes of the public almost exclusively by this myth.⁶⁵

Readings of Naipaul have accordingly been shaped by a desire to uphold or destroy what is assumed to be a “Naipaulian” vision of global realities. In the case of his detractors, the power of the Naipaul myth reveals itself in the widespread focus on “exposing” Naipaul’s underlying motivations. Reflecting a position that has become entrenched within academic postcolonial studies, for instance, Rob Nixon declared that the prizes and acclaim that Naipaul won in Europe and America were the reward for his cynical eagerness to denigrate non-European peoples.⁶⁶

Nixon’s book, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (1992) is reflective of the extreme ways Naipaul’s work came to be appropriated by opposing factions of the “culture wars” that raged in the last decades of the twentieth century.⁶⁷ Progressive academics like Nixon sought to overthrow established “Eurocentric” valuations in the academy. In this polarized setting, Naipaul’s evolving body of writing was characterized by some of his scholarly detractors as racist or as expressing nostalgia for European colonialism. It was implied, by Nixon among others, that Naipaul’s work was only admired by racist Westerners, whereas it was universally reviled in the non-West.⁶⁸

One critic offers a snapshot of the manner in which Naipaul’s writings came to be interpreted by journalists and academics in purely ideological terms:

Naipaul had long been controversial…for his unwillingness to blame the failures of Third World independence on colonial history alone. Then Irving Howe canonized him in a [1979] review of A Bend in the River at just the moment when Commonwealth literature began to think of itself as postcolonial, and at that point the rumblings of backlash became a roar. There must be something wrong with a writer who got so much approval from “Establishment” sources.⁶⁹

In these arguments, consideration was rarely given to the fact that Naipaul had been writing about non-Western societies for some thirty-odd years and had begun doing so to make sense of his own peripheral formation, not to uphold a Platonic idea of Western civilization or, conversely, to attack multiculturalism. Naipaul the man, rather than his writings, came to be the object of critical judgment among his critics. One declared that Naipaul’s works “lend themselves to an indictment.”71 Another critic asserted that a “reading of Naipaul’s texts is, by definition, a political act.”⁷² No less an authority than Edward Said pronounced Naipaul “a witness for the western prosecution.”⁷³ In contrast to previous decades, then, by the early twenty-first century the overwhelming consensus in English departments of Anglo-American universities was that Naipaul ought to be judged for his “programmatically negative representation of formerly colonized peoples.”⁷⁴

The fact that Naipaul is no longer alive today makes the task of writing about him feel different, if not necessarily easier. Freed from the endless distractions he posed while he was alive, scholars and critics are able to concentrate on the significance of Naipaul the writer, not Naipaul the man. Naipaul the man has now been consigned to that ever-expanding gallery of dead authors, from Rousseau to Marx, from Brecht to Larkin, whose individual shortcomings are destined, with the passage of time, to find their proper, rather than determining, place in assessments of their work. Critics and literary historians can finally begin the task of forming a more complete picture of Naipaul’s development as a writer without having to worry about another round of his sensationalizing or self-sabotaging utterances.

These circumstances provide us with an opportunity to bring new perspectives to the study of Naipaul’s art and thought, not least by attending to the complex ways his writing evolved and changed direction over the course of a long career. For these reasons, it is also time to look beyond the “programmatic” Naipaul conjured by postcolonialist evaluations, in order to examine how a reading of his works may offer fresh insights into the social and cultural challenges of the twenty-first century.

I situate Naipaul’s writings in the context of his beginnings as a writer who was born in and shaped by his experiences in the colonial periphery, not against the backdrop of the late-twentieth-century ideological debates that raged within the metropolitan academy. I concentrate on the way Naipaul’s obsession with his past and his meager cultural and intellectual resources formed the basis of a complex and historically dense artistic project. To this end, I have chosen to discuss those writings that best reveal Naipaul’s extraordinary scope as a writer and his evolution as a thinker, and to demonstrate how these features are embedded within a sustained reflection on his multifaceted past.

My aim in this book is to take French’s deeply researched insights into Naipaul’s life in a new direction. I focus on those aspects of Naipaul’s biography that shed light on the network of obsessions that came to dominate his writing over the course of sixty years. Throughout the book, I examine the different ways Naipaul’s manner of mining his own life story and history enables the reader to see, often in surprising ways, the connections between the writer’s subjectivity and that of peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. I also demonstrate how Naipaul’s narrative voices typically eschew outward displays of sympathy for the oppressed, preferring instead an entangled perspective from which his observations and reflections are derived. In my view, the continued appeal of Naipaul’s work to readers across the world lies in the way he modeled a style of peripheral reflection that people from quite different histories could recognize or identify with and, consequently, draw upon to reflect upon their own pasts.

The Brazilian Marxist critic Roberto Schwarz has insightfully described how historical circumstances impose constraints on the formal choices made by writers from “underdeveloped” countries. But Schwarz also remarks that artists do not passively “register” these constraints. They give shape to the social processes (or the “preformed material”) that define them: “In shaping it, in turn, the writer superimposes form upon form, and the depth, force and complexity of the artistic results will depend upon the success of this operation, of this relation to the preformed material in which the energies of history lie.”⁷⁶

Naipaul’s later work gains complexity and significance by virtue of his refusal to shape what Roberto Schwarz calls “preformed material” into fiction (a move more typical of other creative writers). He seeks instead to discover this material’s effects on the writer and the man, something that “fiction by itself” would not have allowed him to do. Naipaul made his life story, and the insights he gained from his interactions with interlocutors, the frame through which form and meaning could be given to the myriad and disorienting events that had influenced his psychic and social formation.

“Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties” relates to the 1937 oil field strike that some historians have described as the beginnings of popular politics in Trinidad.77 The story’s central figure is Foster Morris, a fictional left-wing English journalist famous for having written an optimistic account of the class politics surrounding the strike. The fictional Foster Morris was based on an actual man Naipaul had met, Arthur Calder Marshall, a friend and contemporary of Graham Greene and author of Glory Dead (1939), a well-reviewed work of travel writing that included a sympathetic account of the workers involved in the 1937 strike.

Morris had also made a name for himself in the West Indies with his sympathetic depiction of the strike’s leader, Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler, which prompts Naipaul, in the fictionalized “Passenger,” to seek Morris out in the 1950s with the aim of hearing his personal impressions of Butler. An immigrant worker in Trinidad from the smaller and poorer British colony of Grenada, Butler was the most important radical black leader of the 1930s and a precursor of major political figures such as Eric Williams:

It was well-intentioned, but it was wrong…. That idea of background—and what it contained: order and values and the possibility of striving: perfectibility—made sense only when people were more truly responsible for themselves. We weren’t responsible in that way. Much had been taken out of our hands. We didn’t have backgrounds. We didn’t have a past…. If you could look down at us from the sky you would see us living in our little houses between the sea and the bush; and that was a kind of truth about us, who had been transported to that place. We were just there, floating.⁷⁹

Despite his apparent misgivings, Morris wrote as if the conditions for a real political transformation were in place. He effectively elided the distinction between backward and advanced capitalist contexts. When Naipaul meets him, Morris explains that he had chosen to falsify what he truly thought of Butler for political reasons: “You couldn’t go away and write that Butler was a crazy black preacher. That was what the oilfields people [i.e., the bosses] were saying.”⁸¹

Naipaul acknowledges that the colonial and business elites had deliberately recruited Grenadian rather than local Trinidadian laborers because, as an “isolated labor force in the oilfields,” they could be more easily exploited.82 These were also the years of the Great Depression. Before the Grenadian workers went on strike in 1937, Naipaul adds, their lives would have been especially hard.⁸³ Nonetheless, from Naipaul’s standpoint Morris would have done West Indians a greater service had he pointed out that this anticolonial rebellion was being led by individuals who lacked the vocabulary, concepts, and historical understanding to lay claim to a new principle of authority. Had he done so, Morris would have equipped the colonized with the tools to assess their situation, even if this would have come at the expense of straightforwardly affirming the obvious justice of their cause.

Naipaul’s response to Morris also provides insight into how his efforts to superimpose literary form on the material conditions by which he had been shaped differ from academic approaches to postcolonial literature. Academic approaches often assume that one must “subversively scrutinize the colonial relationship” and affirm the claims of oppressed peoples.⁸⁴ Insofar as Naipaul regards the colonized as agents in their own right, whose stories should be central rather than peripheral to portrayals of the colonial history, his approach is aligned with that of postcolonialist scholars. However, Naipaul crucially insists that literary writing not repress or falsify the circumstances in which many struggles from below were undertaken, even if they appear to compromise the moral justification of such struggles.

The academic reflex of affirming peripheral resistance to a hegemonic “center” can be traced to a classic essay by the British cultural critic Raymond Williams titled “Culture Is Ordinary” (1958).⁸⁵ Williams argues that despite being born into a working-class family, he was not intimidated by the prospect of studying at the University of Cambridge when he gained admission as a scholarship boy in the 1930s. Williams counterintuitively declares that his experience at Cambridge convinced him that his Welsh working-class culture and identity actually gave him an advantage over his upper-class peers, who took their superficial knowledge of cultural matters to be a sign of their cultivation.

What the crowd of well-heeled undergraduates Williams encountered at Cambridge failed to realize, he argues, was that the essence of cultural strength lies in ordinary ideas, feelings, and values that disadvantaged peoples across the world have organically absorbed from their immediate surroundings. “I was not cast down by old buildings,” Williams writes revealingly, “for I had come from a country with twenty centuries of history written visibly into the earth.”86 Williams claims a ground and an orientation from an “earth” whose organic nature takes precedence over the artifice of mere “buildings.” He sought to redefine culture as a whole way of life, encompassing institutions, everyday practices, norms, and dispositions that derived their moral compass from the at once unyielding, autonomous, and self-sustaining order of working-class identity.

The character Foster Morris is clearly drawn from the same generation of British intellectuals whose formative influences lay in the 1930s, a decade in which economic depression had given rise to deep skepticism about the fairness of market societies and to an even greater awareness of the exploitation of British colonies around the world.⁸⁷ A believer in the same egalitarian ways of thinking that underpinned Williams’s celebration of his working-class background, Morris dutifully sought, in Naipaul’s view, to project an equivalent “social depth and solidity” onto Trinidadian society when he visited it in 1937. Naipaul claims that in his desire to “applaud” the local population, Morris “failed to understand the nature of their deprivation…. He saw us as versions of English people and simplified us”:⁸⁸

[Morris] couldn’t understand, for instance, that although Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler was a kind of messiah, though in the high moments of the strike educated people like lawyers attributed to him almost miraculous powers, and felt that where he led no harm could come, these very people felt at the same time, in their bones, that he was a crazed and uneducated African preacher, a Grenadian, a small-islander, an eater of ground provisions boiled in a pitch-oil tin.⁸⁹

According to Naipaul, such sentiments hinted at the fractures within Caribbean society as a whole. Racial and ethnic differences appeared to play at least as important a role as an awareness of class distinctions. As a child, Naipaul had heard his aunt repeating “stories about the poverty and ignorance of the Grenadians” and their disgusting habit of eating “ground provisions [which] were tubers—yams, eddoes, cassava, sweet potatoes” cooked, it was commonly alleged, in tins that Trinidadians often used to store kerosene. The Grenadians were looked down upon by people in Trinidad for being “too poor to buy proper enamel or black-iron Birmingham-made pots, like the rest of us.”⁹⁰

This “us” (like the earlier “us”) appears to encompass a multiracial Trinidad, even if the object of focus in this instance is an Indian woman who lived in the same house as Naipaul. Even for poor Trinidadians at the time, the pitch-oil (or kerosene) tins symbolized the degradation of the Grenadian worker. By revealing an aspect of the social prejudices instilled in him through the behavior of a close family member, Naipaul offers a portrait of the fractures within the plantation society that shaped his experience.

Naipaul’s emphasis on this derangement resonates with the anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s caution against underestimating the “difficulties that the battered social systems and frail economies of those former colonial societies impose upon their children when they seek education, fame, and fortune—no matter how hard they work.”91 More than Mintz, Naipaul was interested in how this social fabric might itself shape the ways people come to see their possibilities. Fostering a critical awareness of this reality came to define Naipaul’s aims as a writer, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s.

In the final phase of his career (1981–2010), by contrast, Naipaul sought to soften and reevaluate the harsh realities exposed by the writing he did in the previous two decades. The stories of A Way in the World (1994) belong to the later phase of his career. In this work, Naipaul describes the individual dislocations and social rifts of peripheral societies, but he also expresses a great interest in imagining the forms that reconciliation between antagonists might take. “Home Again,” the volume’s final story, offers a counterpoint to “Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties” (the story featuring Foster Morris) in this regard.

Like “Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties,” “Home Again” presents a fictionalized account of Naipaul’s encounter after many decades with a Trinidadian black man he had worked for in his younger days. Naipaul’s story explores how individuals from divided societies can try to enter into the perspectives of others, even if they find it impossible to completely overcome inherited misgivings and prejudices. Having described in many of his previous books how deeply racial hostility runs in the postcolonial society, Naipaul takes a modest step toward a “reconciliation of differences” in which the claims of nonidentity, rather than affirmations of identity or solidarity, prevail.⁹²

Set in 1966,⁹³ “Home Again” centers on Naipaul’s meeting with a fellow Trinidadian called Blair in Kampala, Uganda. Blair, a black man, was a civil servant in Trinidad’s Government House for whom Naipaul had worked for a few months in 1949, just prior to leaving Trinidad for Oxford. Blair was widely regarded as a rising star in the bureaucracy, and the teenage Naipaul viewed him as a charismatic man and a kind boss. However, that early association, which belonged to a happy time for Naipaul and Blair, both of whom seemed on the threshold of bigger things, was tinged with mutual suspicion when the two crossed paths again.

It was during the 1950s—after Naipaul left Trinidad—that Blair had become known as an Afro-Trinidadian nationalist politician with strong anti-Indian views.94 It is helpful to consider Naipaul’s description of how Trinidad’s first prime minister, Eric Williams, became a national leader:

In 1956, six years after I had left the island, there arose a proper black leader, [Eric] Williams, a small black man with dark glasses and a hearing aid, stylish (a necessary quality) with these simple props, and soon overwhelmingly popular. He talked a lot about slavery (as though people had forgotten). By that simple means he made all island politics racial.⁹⁵

Naipaul implies that in a context where color-consciousness prevailed among all the nonwhite groups who had suffered in different ways, the color of Eric Williams’s skin was as important as his invocation of slavery—both of which exist as “racial” signals directed exclusively at black people.⁹⁶ In the mixed society of white, Asian, and black, Williams’s rhetoric of victimhood excluded non-African groups.⁹⁷ The political leaders of the Indian community were also behaving like racial leaders in the guise of national ones. When Eric Williams swept to victory in the tense election of 1956,⁹⁸ Naipaul’s own ugly racial feelings manifested themselves in a letter he wrote to Patricia:

I am not staying here much longer. If the election results were different, there might have been some point. But with the present government of noble niggers, all sorts of racialist laws might be passed; and life for minority communities could become tricky. Indians are talking of leaving; so are the Chinese. Because of its very smallness and unimportance in the world, the grossest injustices can be perpetrated here without people in England getting to know.⁹⁹

Naipaul channels, through his racist language, wider sentiments and attitudes that are at work in fractured colonial contexts. His approach obliquely offers insights into forces that continue to threaten the social fabric of postcolonial societies today.¹⁰¹ Naipaul’s misgivings about meeting Blair only grow when he learns that Blair is in Uganda to study how much money is being smuggled out of the newly independent country. When Ugandan politicians spoke of “economic parasites” who were smuggling their profits abroad, it was an open secret that the Indian ethnic minority was being targeted. Naipaul felt that Blair’s work intensified the resentment poor black people felt toward the Ugandan Indian community: “The hate [for the Indians] was in the newspapers, in the parliament, in the compound, in the university. It was open; it was licensed; it brought about no retaliation. Expatriates dealt in it to show their own commitment to the country. Some political people saw it as part of the business of building socialism, and gave it a doctrinal gloss.”¹⁰²

Naipaul constellates the racial context in Uganda in 1966 to Trinidad’s election violence in 1956:

I hadn’t met Blair since 1950, and I didn’t want to meet him now. I didn’t like the politics he had gone into [in Trinidad after independence]. The almost religious exaltation of the early days of the black movement had given way very quickly to the simplest kind of racial politics. In Trinidad that meant anti-Indian politics and constant anti-Indian agitation; it was how the vote of the African majority was to be secured. Though I was no longer living in Trinidad, I was affected. I found when I met people I had known there, even people I had gone to school with, that the racial question couldn’t be ignored. There was a self-consciousness on both sides, a new falsity. And I found, with every visit I made to Trinidad, that I was more and more cut off from the past.¹⁰³

Ultimately, however, what makes it possible for Naipaul and Blair to arrive at an understanding is their similar class background. In Naipaul’s description of the challenges that the decades-older Blair must have faced in order to make his way in the world, the frustrated efforts of Naipaul’s own father, Seepersad, are brought to mind:

[Blair’s] education hadn’t been as straightforward as mine. He came from a poor family in a far-off country area and he had made a late start. That late start had put him at a disadvantage in the educational system. He had to go to rough elementary schools and then to “private” high schools run by people with the barest qualifications. He would always have been too old for the better schools, and he would never have had the clear vision of a way ahead that had been given to me at an early stage: elementary school, exhibition to a secondary school, scholarship to a university abroad. He would have always had to feel his way. And when, after all of this, he had entered the government service, just before the war, his prospects were still limited; the senior posts were reserved for English people.¹⁰⁵

And when the two men do meet, the nervous hostility Naipaul feels quickly disappears when a contemplative Blair disarms Naipaul by telling a story about being surprised by his own unexpected display of prejudice toward a Japanese person in a Manhattan train station. Naipaul interprets this as Blair’s offer of an olive branch. Blair has anticipated, perhaps even mirrored, Naipaul’s anxiety about how their meeting would turn out.

While Naipaul appreciates Blair’s roundabout, elaborate way of reaching out by signaling his own fallibility, he is aware that both of them cannot help seeing themselves and each other in the terms assigned by a deeply divided society. Each has been differently “interpellated” or inserted into a historical script that determines the frame in which individual choices are made.¹⁰⁶ Naipaul is all the more appreciative of Blair’s self-deprecating remarks, which strike him as a ritual offering extended by the historical victor in recognition of the resentment that a representative of the defeated race must feel.

New layers of emotion and structure, all drawn from a storehouse of Trinidadian memories, are revealed in this highly nuanced narrative. Naipaul could not have been so moved by Blair’s generous gesture were he not, in some measure, still emotionally connected to his community of East Indians as well as a broader sense of a Trinidadian identity. Prejudice here is depicted not as something to be stamped out but as a material reality to be worked through. Both men tacitly own their racial views as grounded in historical realities and therefore not easily overthrown. This ugly aspect of the postcolonial condition is realistically explored, not repressed or merely denounced, by Naipaul perhaps because in his view it opens a path toward genuine reconciliation—literature representing in this instance a form of writing in which troubling emotions and ideas may be staged and explored in a frank but nuanced manner.

Naipaul’s traumatic experience of racial tension in Trinidad in 1956 and his belated discovery of his father’s humiliation and decline serve as the points of departure of my understanding of his work. These events provide an orientation to the story that follows. I am not offering a psychologizing interpretation in which Naipaul’s controversial works are blamed on his childhood experiences. My interest is in the fact that these events influenced Naipaul’s deliberate decision in his adult life to reorient his writings toward an exploration of the disparate entities that contributed to his formation. He writes, in The Enigma of Arrival, of the moment in which he turned away from a focus on himself to the light that his own past shed on his understanding of the world: “I defined myself and saw that my subject was not my sensibility, my inward development, but the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in.”107

As noted earlier, the first phase of Naipaul’s career, 1957–1961, can be described as a period of apprenticeship, during which Naipaul discovered a set of simple themes and genres to describe Trinidad as it entered its transition from a colonial plural society into a majoritarian democracy.

The years 1962–1980 see Naipaul adopting a tone of cold detachment; his vision darkens. His assessment of “half-made societies doomed to remain half-made,” taken from his 1974 essay on Joseph Conrad, belongs squarely to this period.108 His fiction and nonfiction range across different social and historical settings for the first time in his career, establishing Naipaul’s claim to be the preeminent global writer of the postcolonial era:

So, from the starting point of Trinidad, my knowledge and self-knowledge grew. The street in Port of Spain where I had spent part of my childhood; a reconstruction of my “Indian” family life in Trinidad; a journey to Caribbean and South American colonies; a later journey to the special ancestral land of India. My curiosity spread in all directions. Every exploration, every book, added to my knowledge, qualified my earlier idea of myself and the world.¹⁰⁹

In the most intimate ways, Naipaul was shaped by the world he sought to describe. The works of the middle phase were distinguished by their acute observations and harsh judgments—these are the outstanding traits of works from the travelogue An Area of Darkness (1964) to his novel A Bend in the River (1979). By the end of the 1970s, however, Naipaul had exhausted this vein of writing, which typically privileged an observer desperately committed to comprehending the world, to “making a pattern” of his experiences in an objective manner.

The third, and last, phase of Naipaul’s career is distinguished by a marked softening of tone and a willingness to incorporate more diverse voices and perspectives. If the preceding period was marked by a grim acceptance that the “world is what it is” (the opening line of A Bend in the River), in this phase, Naipaul is more interested in exploring how different individuals make “a way in the world” (the book title of a sequence of narratives published in 1994). Between 1981 and 2010, Naipaul also experimented with mixed forms. He sought to blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, autobiography, and history, in ways that enabled him to integrate and reconcile the diverse experiences of his own youth and middle age and to bring these into dialogue with other, often opposing voices.

Naipaul began to write in ways that engaged with points of view that contradicted his own. He also moved toward an attempt to compare his formation with that of people from other places. The characters he describes in this late phase, particularly in nonfictional works such as India: A Million Mutinies Now and Beyond Belief, are much more vivid than any in his earlier writings. In his fictional writings of this period, Naipaul develops an interest in how other individuals had been shaped by the dislocations of the past and how they engaged with and sought to reactivate aspects of their formation. He teases out similarities between himself and these other individuals in the most unexpected (and subtly comic) ways.

In the chapters that follow, I examine how each book Naipaul wrote furthered the development of his art and thought. His writings had a visceral impact on non-Western readers. Michael Manley, the Jamaican intellectual who would become prime minister, wrote a letter to Naipaul after reading The Mimic Men (1967): “The handling of the theme of disorder set off echoes of a recognition even as it sounded warning bells.” Manley’s mother, the sculptor Edna Manley, also wrote to Naipaul: “I am very impressed. I have lived through some of what you write about.”110 For Western readers, Naipaul’s writings illuminated the perpetuation of an unjust world order for which they bore substantial responsibility.¹¹¹ Whether or not readers agree with his conclusions, this book seeks to demonstrate that Naipaul’s account of the global condition was grounded in his own formation in the colonial periphery. Through his writings, he sought to connect his mixed and fractured past to that of other postcolonial peoples. Given the reflective and analytical character of Naipaul’s writing, one of its most valuable aspects is its ability to equip readers with a vocabulary through which they may learn to describe their condition with the aim of effecting change.