INTRODUCTION
1. Dwight Garner, “V. S. Naipaul, A Writer of Many Contradictions and Obvious Greatness,” New York Times, August 12, 2018.
4. Kandasamy, “V. S. Naipaul.” See also Pankaj Mishra and Nikil Saval, “The Painful Sum of Things: On V. S. Naipaul,” n+1 no. 33 (Winter 2019), https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-painful-sum-of-things/; Associated Press, “V. S. Naipaul, Nobel-Winning Author Who Drew Admiration and Revulsion, Dies at 85,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2018, http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-vs-naipaul-20180811-story.html.
5. In his final years, Naipaul occasionally struck a penitent note. In one of his last interviews, he asked his wife, Nadira, to be present while he was being interviewed because, as he explained to the interviewer, “she prevents me from saying wicked things.” Isaac Chotiner, “V. S. Naipaul on the Arab Spring, Authors He Loathes, and the Books He Will Never Write,” New Republic, December 7, 2012, https://newrepublic.com/article/110945/vs-naipaul-the-arab-spring-authors-he-loathes-and-the-books-he-will-never-write. When Naipaul’s authorized biographer Patrick French asked the Barbadian novelist George Lamming about Naipaul’s offensive public persona, Lamming said that Naipaul liked “playing ole mas, meaning he was masquerading or making trouble for his own entertainment, a Trinidadian trait.” Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul [hereafter Biography] (New York: Vintage, 2008), xi.
6. See, for instance, the title of the Irish Times review of Naipaul’s last nonfictional publication, The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010): “Is V. S. Naipaul a Racist or a Misanthrope?” See also Robert Harris, “The Masque of Africa,” Sunday Times (London), August 22, 2010.
7. Martin Puchner et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Vol. F, 4th ed., (New York: Norton, 2018).
8. “The Guardian View on V. S. Naipaul: A Complicated Man and a Complicated Legacy,” Guardian, August 12, 2018.
9. Amit Chaudhuri, “V. S. Naipaul’s Legacy Is Complex—but His Writing Must Be Celebrated,” Guardian, August 12, 2018.
10. Elleke Boehmer, “How V. S. Naipaul Reshaped the Literary Landscape,” Time, August 16, 2018.
12. “Naipaul Pulls Out of Turkey Event,” Financial Times, November 24, 2010.
14. Jennifer Rahim and Barbara Lalla, eds., Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2014).
15. Rhonda Cobham-Sander, “Consuming the Self: V. S. Naipaul, C. L. R. James, and A Way in the World,” in Lalla and Rahim, Created in the West Indies,51–78.
17. V. S. Naipaul, “Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture),” in Literary Occasions (New York: Vintage, 2003), 183.
18. “During the seventy years of indentured immigration [between 1848 and 1917], 144,000 Indians came to Trinidad…and only 33,000 returned to India. As a result, the Indian element in Trinidad’s population increased from 27,000 in 1871 to 70,000 in 1891 and its proportion of the colony’s total expanded from 22 to 32 per cent…. In the early 1900s the local-born outnumbered Indian immigrants. Thus for the native Indians, India would never be home.” In 1960, out of a population of one million, “Creoles accounted for 61 per cent. The breakdown by color groups was: whites 2 per cent, browns 16 per cent, and blacks 43 per cent. Indians made up 37 per cent of the total, among whom Hindus comprised 23 per cent, Muslims 6 per cent and Christians 8 per cent.” Colin Clarke, “Spatial Pattern and Social Interaction Among Creoles and Indians in Trinidad and Tobago,” in Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. Kevin A. Yelvington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 121.
19. V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South (New York: Viking, 1989), 161–62.
20. “Trinidad Returned Student Tells of Ordeal: Despised and Shunned,” Trinidad Guardian, April 23, 1933; “Hindu God of War Invoked for 1933 Elections Revolt Against Mr Teelucksingh,” Trinidad Guardian, November 23, 1932.
21. Seepersad Naipaul, The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories (London: Deutsch, 1976).
22. See, for instance, V. S. Naipaul, “The Worm in the Bud,” in A Writer’s People (New York: Vintage, 2007). A few years after Seepersad’s early death, Naipaul also wrote a letter to his wife, Patricia Hale, complaining bitterly that his father had been held back because of the racial prejudice of his British bosses (French, Biography, 183).
23. V. S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), 15.
24. Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972 (London: New Beacon, 1992), 11.
25. For a self-critical account of such complacency among Nigerian elites of the 1950s, see Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2013).
26. See, in particular, Edgar Mittelholzer, Corentyne Thunder (London: Secker and Warburg, 1941) and Sam Selvon, A Brighter Sun (London: Allan Wingate, 1952).
27. Naipaul recalled to his biographer, “I was an object of great curiosity to [black and mixed] people. I was very small, and they couldn’t have been nicer. There were few Indians, almost no Indians in the school. It was the first time I was coming out [of the countryside]…. I have to record how nice people were to me, as an unprotected little boy” (French, Biography, 32). In a 1965 interview with Derek Walcott, Naipaul asserted, “I am grateful to the Trinidad I knew as a boy for making me what I am [emphasis added].” But the adult Naipaul, who was addressing Walcott, was fearful of the “sinister” place Trinidad had become. “Manners,” a key indicator of the health of society, had deteriorated. Derek Walcott, “Interview with V. S. Naipaul,” in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), 7. Nearly thirty years after this interview with Walcott, Naipaul would again recall his childhood years in Port of Spain, recalling the wonders Port of Spain held for the country boy who had just moved there. See V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World [hereafter Way] (New York: Knopf, 1994), 13–15.
28. V. S. Naipaul, “BBC Caribbean Voices—An Island Is a World,” BBC Colonial Service, May 1, 1955, in Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon, ed. Susheila Nasta (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1988), 110–13.
29. French, Biography, 163. French was granted exclusive access to Naipaul’s private correspondence of the 1950s and 1960s. French’s invaluably extensive quotations from Naipaul’s letters of this period make clear how profoundly Naipaul was affected by the racialization of Trinidad’s politics. I have also benefited from Guyanese scholar Dolly Zulakha Hassan’s V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), which draws in part on her personal recollection of the period in question.
30. French, Biography, 167.
31. Naipaul, Way, 35. Naipaul hints at how his own racial feelings were stirred by the new political atmosphere: “Every black or African person from my past altered. And I felt a double distance from what I had known” (Naipaul, Way, 34).
32. Kirk Peter Meighoo, Politics in a ‘Half Made Society’: Trinidad and Tobago, 1925–2001 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2003), xxi.
33. C. L. R. James wrote in 1961, “What I feared and fear now more than ever is the blood of innocent people running down the streets…. Our political pandits are heading for this as confidently and as blindly as they smashed up the [West Indian] Federation.” Quoted in Ann Marie Bisessar and John Gaffar La Guerre, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana: Race and Politics in Two Plural Societies (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2013), 55.
34. “Inter-racial warfare [in Guyana] left a legacy of racial hatred that has permanently scarred the national psyche of the Guyanese population.” Percy Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination, and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 55. See also Martin Carter, “Time of Crisis” (1955) and “A Dark Foundation” (1955), in The University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Gemma Robinson (London: Bloodaxe Books, 2006), 195–200.
35. “It was only during the 1950s, however, that an appeal to racial sentiment became a central feature of mass political mobilization in Guyana and Trinidad” (Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival, 3). This would in part explain why Naipaul was shocked by the radically changed nature of his society, despite having been away only for a few years. The letters exchanged between Naipaul and his family between 1950 and 1953, for instance, give no indication of growing racial hostility.
36. For a contemporary overview of decolonizing Asia and Africa, see Rupert Emerson, “The Erosion of Democracy,” Journal of Asian Studies 20, no. 1 (November 1960): 1–8.
37. See, for instance, the Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012), on the 1965 mass killings of ethnic Chinese undertaken by Indonesian gangsters at the bidding of the newly independent state.
38. For a critical self-assessment, see Jussawalla, Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, 16.
39. V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre [hereafter Centre] (New York: Vintage, 1984), 68.
41. “The writer was told he would develop poisoning tomorrow, die on Sunday, and be buried on Monday unless he offered a goat sacrifice.” “Reporter Sacrifices Goat to Mollify Hindu Goddess: Writer Kowtows to Kali to Escape Black Magic Death,” Trinidad Guardian, June 23, 1933.
42. A 1933 newspaper article I found among Naipaul’s papers housed at the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library suggests that a related cause of the farmers’ extreme reaction was their harsh treatment by the colonial authorities. The article refers to the “unbelievable flogging (18 lashes of cat o’ nine and 5 years hard labor [inflicted on an Indian farmer] for escaping custody and receiving a pair of trousers.” The same article also mentions another peasant being subjected to similar punishments inherited from the period of slavery, including “cat [o’ nine lashes] for stealing a small amount of citrus” from the estate of his employer. G. C. Chag, Trinidad Guardian, May 27, 1933, Naipaul Archive 1:3.
45. Naipaul, Centre, 66–67.
46. See Naipaul, Centre, 66, 69. A court case in 1933 suggests that the family was engaged in strong-arm rural politics (Trinidad Guardian, February 16, 1933).
48. Signed articles in the Trinidad Guardian by Seepersad ceased to appear after October 5, 1933 (Patricia Hale, handwritten note, Naipaul Archive 1:3).
49. Bridget Brereton, “The Experience of Indentureship, 1845–1917,” in Calcutta to Caroni: The East Indians of Trinidad, ed. John Gaffar La Guerre (London: Longman, 1973), 32; Bridget Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 1870–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 182.
53. Naipaul was in fact referring to a topic that his father had written about (S[eepersad] Naipaul, “Repatriation to India Officially Discouraged. Chief Immigration Officer’s Views Life in the Motherland ‘Poignantly’ Difficult,” Trinidad Sunday Guardian, June 11, 1933, Naipaul Archive 1:3). Having realized that the destitute laborers would face even greater hardships in India—a published letter of October 10, 1933, speaks of Indian returnees in Calcutta “eating leaves of trees so as to preserve life”—the colonial authorities discouraged Indian repatriation. Seepersad agreed with this assessment, but his article records that “the destitutes argue: ‘We are beggars here and we can beg in India in the same way we beg in Trinidad. If we have to die better to die in our own country [India].’”
54. Naipaul, Centre, 54. My account also draws on the typewritten pages (titled “Autobiography”) in the Naipaul Archive 1:3, where this episode is recounted at length.
56. Naipaul, Centre, 58. See also V. S. Naipaul, foreword to The Adventures of Gurudeva, 8.
59. V. S. Naipaul, The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (London: Picador, 2010), 154, 156.
60. Naipaul, “Two Worlds,” 181.
61. Naipaul, “Two Worlds,” 190.
62. Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: Norton, 2008).
63. “China Is Struggling to Explain Xi Jinping Thought,” Economist, November 8, 2018; “India Invented Planes 7000 Years Ago,” Washington Post, January 4, 2015; “Indian Prime Minister Claims Genetic Science Existed in Ancient Times,” Guardian, October 28, 2014.
64. “More and more today, writers’ myths are about the writers themselves; the work has become less obtrusive.” V. S. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness” (1974), in The Return of Eva Peron and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1981), 244. Ironically, Naipaul’s often attention-seeking, deliberately incendiary utterances contributed a great deal to the Naipaul myth, distracting readers from what he actually wrote or predisposing them to reductive interpretations what he had written.
65. Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3.
66. Nixon, London Calling, 6.
67. The extreme rhetoric deployed by the intellectual right was typically aimed at defending Naipaul from academics: “Naipaul’s explicit celebration of Western civilization won him much hostility from the Left, especially from the rancid swamp of the entitled academic Left.” David Pryce-Jones, “V. S. Naipaul, 1932–2018,” New Criterion 37, no. 1 (September 2018): 3.
68. “Ishmael Reed interprets the vogue for Naipaul among American liberals and conservatives as symptomatic of a last-ditch effort to check the rising tide of multiculturalism” (Nixon, London Calling, 176).
69. Michael Gorra, “Postcolonial Studies,” in The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V. S. Naipaul (New Delhi: Buffalo, 2002), 113.
70. See Conor Cruise O’Brien, Edward Said, and John Lukacs, “The Post-Colonial Intellectual: A Discussion with Conor Cruise O’Brien, Edward Said, and John Lukacs,” Salmagundi 70–71 (Spring–Summer 1986): 65–81.
71. Fawzia Mustafa, V. S. Naipaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27.
72. Selwyn Cudjoe, V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 4. Other West Indian commentators have distanced themselves from such assertions: “There has been a certain touchiness about West Indian umbrage at Naipaul’s derogatory remarks on the region, a touchiness which may be a sign of the sense of insecurity inherited by the ex-colonised. By contrast, Naipaul’s sneering comments on contemporary English society or the Tony Blair government or Oxford University have raised no more than a ripple of amusement, perhaps a patronizing ripple, in the British.” Edward Baugh, “ ‘The History That Had Made Me’: The Making and Self-Making of V. S. Naipaul,” in Lalla and Rahim, Created in the West Indies, 5.
73. Edward W. Said, “Bitter Dispatches from the Third World,” reprinted in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). For a rare voice of dissent within postcolonial studies, see Sara Suleri, who noted the self-consciously ironic dimension of Naipaul’s writing that his detractors ignored. Sara Suleri, “Naipaul’s Arrival,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 1 (Fall 1988): 25–50, 26.
74. Nixon, London Calling, 6.
75. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival [hereafter Enigma] (New York: Viking, 1987), 146.
76. Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” trans. Edmund Leites and the author, in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992).
77. Selwyn Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago: A Study of Decolonization in a Multiracial Society (Vancouver: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 45.
80. “Butler was a preacher, and there was something in his passion or derangement that took the oilfield workers to a pitch of frenzy” (Naipaul, Way, 81). Butler “believed that God had appointed him to lead the people of the West Indies from the wilderness of colonialism” (Ryan, Race and Nationalism, 45). Aspects of Naipaul’s story echo Eric Williams’s account—including the gruesome killing of a black policeman by Butler’s followers. Eric Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (New York: Praeger, 1962), 234.
84. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.
85. Raymond Williams, “Culture Is Ordinary,” in Resources of Hope (London: Verso, 2016).
86. Williams, “Culture Is Ordinary,” 5.
87. “The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them—on what? It was fair to say that life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the Empire was undeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing system.” George Orwell, “England Your England” (1941), in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1964), 79.
91. Sidney Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 16.
92. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), 102–3.
93. See “Home Again” and “Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties.” The two stories appear in Naipaul, Way, 352–380, 70–106.
94. For “competing nationalisms,” see A. N. Porter and A. J. Stockwell, British Imperial Policy and Decolonization, 1938–64, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 50. For snapshots of the competing forms that nationalisms took in colonial territories with necessarily weak institutions, including Ghana, Malaya, Nigeria, and India, see Nicholas J. White, Decolonisation: The British Experience Since 1945 (London: Longman, 1999), 54–58. For an assessment of the consequences of such fractures, see D. A. Low, Eclipse of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 267; and Martin Lynn, ed., The British Empire in the 1950s: Retreat or Revival? (London: Palgrave, 2006), 126, 130, 146–47.
95. Naipaul, “The Worm in the Bud,” 9.
96. At least this was Naipaul’s belief: “The Negro leader [Eric Williams] is a dictator-like fellow (St. Cath’s man) and if he says he’s not racialist—his canvassers say it for him. The Negroes don’t want to discuss. You cannot say anything about their leader. Their bullies heckle and break up other speakers’ meetings and preserve order at their own. The police and civil service are all Negro. So one has no defence at all” (French, Biography, 171). For some context on Naipaul’s use of “black,” see C. L. R. James’s classic autobiographical work, Beyond a Boundary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 48–51.
97. For a wider consideration of the argument that “the Euro-African determinism of the plantation model forgets the East Indian Naipauls of this world,” see Rex Nettleford, “Creative Potential of Life,” Caribbean Perspectives, September 1, 1971, 118–19.
98. Eighteen seats of the twenty-four-seat Legislative Council were decided by these elections in the run-up to complete independence in 1962. Williams’s People’s National Movement (PNM) won thirteen seats.
99. French, Biography, 168.
100. See Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Societies in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 311–15; Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago, 475. Caryl Phillips has a sympathetic discussion of the encounter between Naipaul and Blair in “The Voyage In: Review of V. S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World,” New Republic, June 13, 1994, 43–44.
101. See, for instance, “For India’s Persecuted Muslim Minority, Caution Follows Hindu Party’s Election Victory,” New York Times, May 16, 2014; “Indonesia: A Nation’s Tolerance on Trial,” Financial Times, January 26, 2017; “International Criminal Court Drops Charges Against Kenya’s Ruto,” Financial Times, April 5, 2016; “Myanmar’s Military Accused of Genocide in Damning UN Report,” Guardian, August 27, 2018.
106. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
107. Naipaul, Enigma, 146–47.
108. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness.”
109. Naipaul, Enigma, 154.
110. French, Biography, 257.
111. Barack Obama obliquely acknowledged this point in an interview: “I think about [Naipaul’s] novels when I’m thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy.” Michiko Kakutani, “Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books,” New York Times, January 16, 2017.
1. MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT
1. V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre (New York: Vintage, 1984), 37.
2. See Shiva Naipaul, Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (London: Abacus, 1984), 3–46. See also the interesting interview conducted with Naipaul’s mother, Mrs. Droapatie Naipaul: Patricia Mohamed, “Structures of Experience: Gender, Ethnicity and Class in the Lives of Two East Indian Women,” in Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. Kevin A. Yelvington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 208–35.
4. V. S. Naipaul, “Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture),” in Literary Occasions (New York: Vintage, 2003), 192.
6. V. S. Naipaul, Miguel Street [hereafter Miguel] (London: Deutsch, 1959), 9–10.
9. In an unpublished draft of Finding the Centre, Naipaul writes the following about his father’s first marriage. “I heard my father speak of it when I was a child—he made it a comic story: he said he escaped his wife by jumping out of a window, running away and never coming back—but I forgot it, and when I heard about it later, perhaps during a return to Trinidad, I was shocked.” Naipaul Archive 3:6.
11. See Naipaul, “Two Worlds,” 192. In this speech, Naipaul revised the unpersuasive claim he had made earlier in Centre: “Though [the simple opening sentences of Miguel Street] had left everything out—the setting, the historical time, the racial and social complexities of the people concerned—they had suggested it all; they had created the world of the street” (Naipaul, Centre, 19). Naipaul had also been ignorant of Bogart’s “true story” when he wrote Miguel Street (Naipaul, Centre, 41). He only began a serious study of the region’s history in 1966, while researching The Loss of El Dorado (Naipaul, Centre, 42).
13. Naipaul, Centre, 17, 27.
15. Naipaul, Centre, 37. Naipaul describes a classmate Ramon, a petty criminal who died in a car accident in London, as follows: “He was a Hindu and had been married according to Hindu rites. These rites must have meant as little to him as they did to me, and perhaps even less, for he had grown up as an individual, had never had the protection of a family like mine, and had at an early age been transferred to a civilization which remained as puzzling to him as this new transference to Chelsea.” V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (London: Deutsch, 1964), 38.
17. V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World (New York: Knopf, 1994), 113–14.
18. Naipaul, Way, 113–14.
19. Naipaul, “Two Worlds,” 187.
24. Naipaul, Miguel, 103.
29. Naipaul, Miguel, 116.
31. The term “pre-political” is taken from Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1959), 3.
32. Naipaul, Miguel, 168.
33. Naipaul, Miguel, 177.
34. Naipaul, Miguel, 165.
38. Naipaul, Centre, 45. One interesting detail we learn in Centre is that as a young boy Naipaul had called Bogart “by the Hindi word for a maternal uncle,” implying that Naipaul would have been encouraged to regard Bogart as a member of his own extended family, even though they were not part of the same kin group (Naipaul, Centre, 46). This was because “at the turn of the century Bogart’s father and [Naipaul’s] mother’s father had travelled out together from India as indentured immigrants. At some point during the long and frightening journey they had sworn a bond of brotherhood” that was to be honored by subsequent generations (Naipaul, Centre, 17).
39. V. S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), 37.
40. See, for instance, Gordon Haight’s detailed account of the books and magazines that George Eliot studied in her effort to reconstruct the religious and rural contexts of her first masterpiece, Adam Bede (1859), a novel set in the early years of the nineteenth century. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 249–50.
41. Naipaul, “Two Worlds,” 190.
42. Naipaul, “Two Worlds,” 190.
43. Naipaul, Reading and Writing, 36.
44. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited [hereafter Middle] (New York: Vintage, 1962), 213.
45. Naipaul, Middle, 213.
46. Naipaul, Middle, 213.
47. Naipaul, Middle, 214.
48. Naipaul, Miguel, 36; Naipaul, Middle, 214.
49. Naipaul, Reading and Writing, 30.
50. Naipaul, “Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way,” in A Writer’s People (New York: Knopf, 2008), 115.
1. V. S. Naipaul, The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) [hereafter Suffrage] (London: Penguin, 1969); V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (1961) [hereafter House] (New York: Vintage, 2001).
2. V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness [hereafter Area] (London: Deutsch, 1964), 31, 34–35.
3. For “plural society,” see the classic study by John S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).
4. V. S. Naipaul, Between Father and Son [hereafter Between] (New York: Random House, 1999), 122–23.
5. Naipaul, Between, 122.
6. The Guyanese critic Frank Birbalsingh makes this point in his review of the letters between Naipaul and his family, collected in Between Father and Son: Family Letters: “Not that such Indo-centric racism can ever be acceptable: it must be seen in the context of a colonial Caribbean society in which racist attitudes were common on all sides.” Frank Birbalsingh, “Father and Son,” in Guyana and the Caribbean: Reviews, Essays and Interviews (Chichester, UK: Dido, 2004), 204.
7. Naipaul, Between, 130.
8. Caryl Phillips, “The Enigma of Denial: Review of Between Father and Son: Family Letters,” New Republic, May 29, 2000.
9. “Between the brown-skinned middle class and black [Trinidadian] there is a continual rivalry, distrust and ill-feeling, which, skillfully played upon by the European peoples, poisons the life of the community.” C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London: Hutchinson, 1963), 50.
10. The early writings of the Martinique-born Frantz Fanon reveal a complicated relationship to blackness that suggests curious parallels with Naipaul. See Françoise Vergès, “Creole Skin, Black Mask: Fanon and Disavowal,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 578–95; David Macey, Frantz Fanon (New York: Verso, 1999).
12. Ralph Premdas, “Ethnic Conflict in Trinidad and Tobago: Domination and Reconciliation,” in Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. Kevin A. Yelvington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 136–39.
13. Others were more alert to the deteriorating situation. See Martin Carter, The University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Gemma Robinson (London: Bloodaxe, 2006)), 193–208.
14. French, Biography, 176.
15. French, Biography, 176. See also V. S. Naipaul, “The Regional Barrier,” Times Literary Supplement, August 15, 1958.
16. Naipaul, Suffrage, 208.
17. Naipaul, Suffrage, 13.
18. Naipaul, Suffrage, 19.
19. Naipaul, Suffrage,119.
20. Naipaul suggests that anti-Negro prejudice was a trait of both Hindu and Muslim communities: “ ‘What is Muslim?’ Chittaranjan asked [Baksh]…. ‘Muslim is everything and Muslim is nothing.’ He paused. ‘Even Negro is Muslim.’ That hurt Baksh…[who] shouted, ‘Good! Good! I glad! I glad Harbans ain’t want no Muslim vote. You say it yourself. Negro and Muslim is one.’” (Naipaul, Suffrage, 119).
21. Naipaul, Suffrage, 69.
22. Quoted in French, Biography 176–77. See also Ivar Oxaal, Black Intellectuals Come to Power (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1968), 190.
24. See Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 90–91, 103.
25. V. S. Naipaul, House, 22.
26. V. S. Naipaul, foreword to Seepersad Naipaul, The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories (London: Deutsch, 1976), 8. The opening chapter of House “cannibalizes” (Naipaul’s word) an important scene from Seepersad’s short story “They Called Him Mohun.” The tonal differences between the two scenes are instructive. For discussions of Seepersad Naipaul’s stories, see Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1975), 33–45; Helen Hayward, The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 18–20. White offers a sensitive account of Seepersad’s work as a reporter (White, V. S. Naipaul, 29–32).
27. Naipaul, House, 23. When his father dies and his mother is forced to leave for Pagotes to live with her sister, Biswas is not sent off to work only because he is too young. In contrast, his brothers, Pratap and Prasad, eight and eleven years old, are made into laborers on a sugar plantation (Naipaul, House, 39).
31. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin, 1962), 25.
32. Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” 10–12.
34. Erich Auerbach, “In the Hôtel de la Mole,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 463.
35. The underlying insight here is that the economic and bureaucratic expressions of “modernization” in the plantation society constrain the development of a “culture of modernity” in which institutions and norms that foster “the reflective treatment of traditions that have lost their quasinatural status” might be fostered. Misir’s rejection of traditional stories reflects this uneven development. Although he is empowered by the functional aspects of modernization, he lacks access to an adequate language to describe his condition. His stories are symptomatic of the condition he purports to critique. For an account of how modernization effects a peculiar “dissociation” from modernity, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 2.
37. I analyze this passage more fully in my essay “History and the Work of Literature in the Periphery,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 482–89.
38. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Maudemarie Clark (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1998).
40. In his pioneering study, Kenneth Ramchand attributes greater historical precocity to Biswas than the narrative will support when he claims that Biswas “recognizes the blinkered insulation of [the Tulsi] world and senses its imminent dissolution.” Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1970/2004), 160.
42. Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1923), in History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1967).
44. “This peasantry, transported to Trinidad, hadn’t been touched by the great Indian reform movements of the nineteenth century. Reform became an issue only with the arrival of reformist missionaries from India in the 1920s, at a time when in India itself religious reform was merging into political rebellion.” V. S. Naipaul, foreword to The Adventures of Gurudeva, 9.
46. Auerbach, “In the Hôtel de la Mole,” 458.
47. Naipaul, House, 139. Shama’s actions sustain Biswas. At such moments, he must “acknowledge both the urgency of his need to be free of the extended family system as well as the extent of his dependency upon it.” Fawzia Mustafa, V. S. Naipaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 68. The “profound seductions that provide the security which accompanies the familiar when posed as an alternative to the ‘new’” (Mustafa, V.S. Naipaul, 68) linger on in this way: they imbue Shama’s actions with energy and purpose despite resenting her exile from Hanuman House as a result of her husband’s poor judgment. Biswas has no such source of strength.
58. Naipaul, House, 556–57.
3. HISTORICAL IDENTITIES
1. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963).
2. V. S. Naipaul, “Cricket,” in The Overcrowded Barracoon [hereafter Barracoon] (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 21. The review was first published in Encounter, September 1963.
3. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1962), 77.
4. See Peter Calvocoressi, The World Since 1945 (London: Longmans, 1968), 351–55, 445–46.
6. Naipaul treats many of these themes in The Mimic Men (1967) and Guerrillas (1975), as well as in The Return of Eva Peron and Other Essays (1977). Similar insights can be found in Frantz Fanon, “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), 97–145.
7. See Bharati Mukherjee’s comments in Bharati Mukherjee and Robert Boyers, “A Conversation with V. S. Naipaul,” in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 75–92.
8. Mukherjee and Boyers, “A Conversation with V. S. Naipaul,” 83.
10. Patrick French (Naipaul’s biographer) and Diana Athill (his editor) both distance themselves from this passage, which shows Naipaul at his most overtly racist. Athill writes: “Vidia could not resist placing [the Negro] right at the start of the book and describing him in greater detail than anyone else in all its [The Middle Passage’s] 232 pages [italics in original].” Quoted in Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (New York: Vintage, 2008), 202.
11. Ralph Premdas, “Ethnic Conflict in Trinidad and Tobago: Domination and Reconciliation,” in Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. Kelvin A. Yelvington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 136–60. Premdas adds: “Because of the zero-sum structure of the contest conducted in a context where consensual values shared by all citizens…each ethnic bloc [i.e. Indian and Creole] views this event in semi-military terms in which the victor literally defeats and punishes the vanquished. Winners in a zero-sum competitive game take all the benefits of governments and may even re-define the rules of the game to perpetuate their power…. the 1961 general election in Trinidad was cast in total terms as Indian conquest by Creoles” (140–41).
12. Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 49.
14. It is as if, in a recalibration, all the potential violence in comic racial encounters in The Suffrage of Elvira have been brought to the fore. See V. S. Naipaul, The Suffrage of Elvira (London: Deutsch, 1958), 75–76, 119–120, 132. “Racial insults” are traded in all these scenes. On the traumatizing effects of racial politics in Naipaul’s life and work, see French, Biography, 211; Mukherjee and Boyers, “A Conversation with V. S. Naipaul,” 83–84; Bruce King, V. S. Naipaul (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 156.
16. Albert Gomes sought to position himself as a leader of the black working classes. See Selwyn Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago (St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1974), 94–96, 109, 128.
17. V. S. Naipaul, “The Worm in the Bud,” in A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (New York: Knopf, 2007), 8. See also Naipaul, Middle, 68.
19. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Viking, 1987), 153.
20. Naipaul, Middle, 33, 34.
22. Naipaul, “The Writer and India,” New York Review of Books, March 4, 1999, 486.
23. Naipaul, “The Writer in India,” 487.
24. V. S. Naipaul, “A Handful of Dust: Cheddi Jagan in Guyana,” in The Writer and the World, ed. Pankaj Mishra (New York: Knopf, 2002), 487.
25. Selwyn Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago, 140.
26. Naipaul, Middle, 80. Indian racial pride grew following India’s independence in 1947. But it sometimes expressed itself in contradictory ways. In 1946, “the first elections were held under universal adult suffrage in Trinidad. Then the bush lawyers and the village headmen came into their own, not only in the Indian areas but throughout the island. Then the loudspeaker van reminded people that they were of Aryan blood. Then, as was reported, the [Indian] politician, soon to be rewarded by great wealth, bared his pale chest and shouted, ‘I is a nigger, too!’ ” (Naipaul, Middle, 80–81).
28. Naipaul, Enigma, 154.
29. Naipaul, Enigma, 154.
30. V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (London: Deutsch, 1964), 32.
37. In 1966, Naipaul gifted a copy of An Area of Darkness to Jagdish Sondhi, a Kenyan-Indian businessman, inscribing it with the following words: “This, the book which I consider my best: a book written out of pain and concern; less about India than about people like yourselves and myself” (French, Biography, 253–54).
38. V. S. Naipaul, “A Second Visit” (1967), in Barracoon, 85, 93.
39. “In Trinidad caste had no meaning in our day-to-day life; the caste we played at was no more than an acknowledgment of latent qualities; the assurance it offered was such as might be offered by a palmist or a reader of handwriting. In India it implied a brutal division of labor; and at its center, as I had never realized, lay the degradation of the latrine-cleaner” (Naipaul, Area, 36).
40. Naipaul, Area, 82–83. Naipaul praises Gandhi for his “revolutionary assessment,” in which Indians were broken into the idea of democratic equality by being made to clean toilets. According to Naipaul, Gandhi saw this as a way to make equality into a psychologically ingrained reflex, rather than cheaply held rhetoric. “It is the system that has to be regenerated, the psychology of caste that has to be destroyed. So Gandhi comes again and again to the filth and excrement of India, the dignity of latrine-cleaning; the spirit of service; bread-labor” (Naipaul, Area, 85).
41. Naipaul, Area, 79; italics in original.
42. Naipaul, Area, 49, 78.
44. V. S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization [hereafter Wounded] (New York: Knopf, 1975), 227.
45. Naipaul, Wounded, 27.
47. Erich Auerbach, “In the Hôtel de la Mole,” 463.
50. Farrukh Dhondy, “V. S. Naipaul: The Man and His Mission,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 5, no 2 (Spring 2008): 181–200, 183. Patrick French remarks that “at a time when relativism was starting to be the accepted response to any post-colonial nation’s failings, the strength of Naipaul’s views [in An Area of Darkness] looked like a shocking return to the days of absolute, imperial judgments” (French, Biography, 231). Yet French goes on to say that this work would “influence the outlook of two generations of [post-colonial] Indian writers, particularly men: Amitav Ghosh, Farrukh Dhondy, Amit Chaudhuri, Tarun Tejpal, Amitava Kumar, Nirpal Dhaliwal have all written of its impact…. Pankaj Mishra said that he was left ‘shocked and bewildered’ when he read An Area of Darkness aged sixteen: ‘I didn’t know you could write like that about India. I think it was the first book I read in English that contained the world I lived in’ ” (French, Biography, 231).
51. Nissim Ezekiel, “Naipaul’s India and Mine,” Journal of South Asian Literature 11, no. 3/4 (1976): 193.
52. Twenty-seven years later, in India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), Naipaul acknowledges that although the approach he adopted may have been unavoidable, given his own understanding at the time of what it meant to be a writer, he rues the fact that he did not express a greater interest in the inner lives of the people he met on his first visit to India in 1962—a defect he seeks to rectify in Mutinies. V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now (New York: Viking, 1990), 511.
53. Naipaul, “A Second Visit,” 93. Drawing on the Brahminical culture depicted in the Kannada writer U. R. Anantha Murthy’s 1965 novel Samskara, Naipaul would speak of a “barbaric civilization, where the books, the laws, are buttressed by magic, and where a too elaborate social organization is unquickened by intellect or creativity or ideas of moral responsibility (except to the self in its climb to salvation)” (Naipaul, Wounded, 97). Naipaul’s call for a “revolution of the mind” resonates with some views of progressive Indian writers. See, most recently, Arundhati Roy, introduction to B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, ed. S. Anand (London: Verso, 2014), 17.
54. Interview with Charles Wheeler, in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1997).
4. FANTASY AND DERANGEMENT
1. “I long to find what is good and hopeful and really do hope that by the most brutal sort of analysis one is possibly opening up the situation to some sort of action; an action which is not based on self-deception.” Adrian Rowe-Evans, “V. S. Naipaul: Transition Interview,” in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1997), 30.
2. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1962), 68–69.
3. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Viking, 1987), 101. In a slightly bemused if complimentary review, the historian J. H. Elliott described The Loss of El Dorado as “neither exactly a novel nor exactly a history.” Confusions of genre aside, Elliott was not sure how to characterize Naipaul’s objective because it did not conform to a picture of a “self-conscious exploration of a national soul that one might expect of the ordinary expatriate author.” J. H. Elliott, “Triste Trinidad,” New York Review of Books, May 21, 1970. Another historian, Peter Marshall, praised Naipaul’s “subtlety” while expressing similar reservations about his methodology. But Naipaul’s effort to read historical texts to discern enduring patterns was recognizable to some Trinidadians, including the critic Kenneth Ramchand, who described it as “the most original historical work on Trinidad.” Kenneth Ramchand, “Loss of El Dorado,” Everybody’s 25, no. 8 (December 31, 2001): 26.
4. See, for instance, Naipaul’s discussion of “fantasy” in the 1960s black power movement in Trinidad and the Caribbean. V. S. Naipaul, “Power?” in The Overcrowded Barracoon [hereafter Barracoon] (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 267–75. This view is elaborated in interviews; see Jussawalla, Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, 30.
5. Echoing aspects of Nissim Ezekiel’s criticisms of An Area of Darkness, the Caribbean critic Edward Baugh also faulted Naipaul for his tone and for not sympathetically adopting the perspectives of ordinary Trinidadians in The Loss of El Dorado. Edward Baugh, “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History,” Small Axe 16, no. 2 (July 2012): 65.
6. V. S. Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado [hereafter Loss] (London: Deutsch, 1969), 4–5.
9. Naipaul adopts the variant spelling of Raleigh as Ralegh in his earlier writings.
11. Naipaul, Loss, 45–46.
12. Naipaul revisits the Raleigh story using a more intimate frame in A Way in the World (1990) by adopting Raleigh’s perspective on the death of his son. Lillian Feder suggestively explores the resonances in the depiction of Raleigh with other characters who appear in Loss, including Governor Hislop and Francisco Miranda. Lillian Feder, Naipaul’s Truth: The Making of a Writer (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 94–107.
14. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), introduction.
17. See the discussion of Robinson Crusoe in Watt, Rise of the Novel, chap. 1.
29. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–316. Naipaul anticipates Spivak’s discussion of how the nineteenth-century debate in British India over the abolition of the traditional Hindu practice of suttee (widow sacrifice) was so completely dominated by the competing claims of conservative Hindu patriarchs and the reforming British that it became impossible to retrieve the voice or values of the victimized widow.
30. Naipaul, Loss, xiv, 272, 354.
32. Naipaul, Loss, 350–51.
33. Naipaul, Loss, 351–52.
34. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, 157.
37. Naipaul, Loss, 189–94.
38. Naipaul, Loss, 365. In The Suffrage of Elvira, the Muslim Mrs. Baksh “blesses” her son with a lashing after a ritual involving the Bible is used to determine that he has lied to her about bringing a puppy into the house. Violent beatings of children feature prominently in A House for Mr Biswas and Miguel Street.
39. See Dolly Zulakha Hassan’s account of some of these criticisms and her defense of Naipaul in her book V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies (New York: Lang, 1989).
40. V. S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), 30.
41. Helen Hayward, The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 86.
42. V. S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (New York: Vintage, 1977), 79.
46. There are alternate ways of spelling Vijayanagar, including Vijaynagar and Vijayanagara.
50. Naipaul, Wounded, 90–91.
52. Naipaul, Wounded, 154.
54. Naipaul, Wounded, 161.
55. Naipaul, Wounded, 156.
56. Naipaul, Wounded, 155. Naipaul underscores the importance of cultivating secular and cosmopolitan ideals of humanistic study when he repeats his attack on Vinoba Bhave in India: A Million Mutinies Now: “As children [in colonial Trinidad] we were taught, for instance, what Goethe had said about Shakuntala, the Sanskrit play that Sir William Jones had translated in 1789. What luck that bit of knowledge should have come our way! Sanskrit was considered a sacred language; only priests and Brahmins could read the texts…and even in our own century pious people could get fierce about the sacredness of the language. Nearly 200 years after William Jones had translated the play, someone in independent India asked Vinoba Bhave, an imitation-Gandhi,…what he thought of Shakuntala. The idle fellow replied angrily, ‘I have never read the Shakuntala, and never shall. I do not learn the language of the gods to amuse myself with trifles.’” V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now (New York: Knopf, 1990), 398.
57. Ramlal Agarwal, “Review: India: A Wounded Civilization by V. S. Naipaul,” World Literature Today 52, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 343.
58. “[Given Naipaul’s] idea of a primordial Indian national identity that must be reclaimed from the obscurity of Muslim rule, Naipaul exhibits structural kinship with Hindu fundamentalism.” Pablo Mukherjee, “Doomed to Smallness: Violence, V. S. Naipaul, and the Global South,” Yearbook of English Studies 37, no. 1 (2007): 214.
60. Naipaul, Wounded, 5. Naipaul echoes the prevailing consensus among historians that Vijayanagar was lacking in dynamism and that its rulers were guided exclusively by a “dharmic ideology.” This view was challenged by historians in the decade following the publication of Wounded. See Burton Stein, The New Cambridge History of India: Vijayanagara (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67–71.
63. William Dalrymple, “Trapped in the Ruins,” Guardian, March 19, 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/mar/20/india.fiction. For a discussion of the “core beliefs” of Hindu nationalists, see Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New York: Harper, 2007), 637; for an account of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, see 576–580, 624–634. See also Christophe Jaffrelot, “Introduction: The Invention of an Ethnic Nationalism,” in Hindu Nationalism: A Reader, ed. Christophe Jaffrelot (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1–26.
64. Dalrymple, “Trapped in the Ruins.”
66. Dalrymple, “Trapped in the Ruins.”
67. In a 2001 interview with Patrick French, Naipaul stated that he had focused on the destruction of Vijayanagar as a literary device because it enabled him to draw attention to an urgent need for historical reflection. See Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (New York: Vintage, 2008), 367.
68. Dalrymple, “Trapped in the Ruins.” However, the decision by Hermann Kulke, an historian of early Vijayanagara, to reproduce an excerpt from the work of Robert Sewell—whom Dalrymple dismisses—raises questions about Dalrymple’s absolute judgment. Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India, 6th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 146–47. Kulke and Rothermund also appear to disagree with Dalrymple’s overall thesis when they describe “a deliberate policy of a religious and cultural revival in southern India after the impact of the Islamic invasion” (Kulke and Rothermund, A History of India, 143). Another historian of early India complicates the picture by referring to the “radically different [i.e., Hindu and Muslim] imperial ideologies coexist[ing] simultaneously” in Vijayanagara. Carla M. Sinopoli, “From the Lion Throne: Political and Social Dynamics of the Vijayanagara Empire,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 43, no. 3 (2000): 382.
69. I was unable to find evidence of hatred toward Islam in India in An Area of Darkness. Visiting Akbar’s fort of Hari Parbat in Kashmir, Naipaul writes, “The Mogul one could accept, and the Hindu. It was this English presence…which was hardest to accept” (Naipaul, Area, 103). Naipaul also pauses to admire an “exquisite extension” to Akbar’s fort. The Kashmiri Muslims in Area are sympathetically portrayed as being deeply absorbed by folk practices and shrine worship, with no indication of their being fanatics (Naipaul, Area, 132–33, 136–37). In contrast, Naipaul’s harshest words are directed at a group of Hindu pilgrims from Delhi: “They hawked loudly and spat with noisy repeated relish everywhere, but more especially on the water lilies, plants which had been introduced to Kashmir from England by the maharaja and were without the religious association of the lotus” (Naipaul, Area, 156–57).
70. Thomas R. Metcalf and Barbara D. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4–6.
71. Vasudha Dalmia and Munis D. Faruqui, Religious Interaction in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
72. The Muslim destruction of Vijayanagar was described as a “jihad” in some mainstream histories until around 1990. See, for instance, the account provided in Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 139.
73. See also Naipaul’s problematic statements about Muslim rule in India in a late essay, “The Writer and India,” in Reading and Writing, 48–49. Ian Buruma’s criticisms of Naipaul are pertinent. See Ian Buruma, “V. S. Naipaul, Poet of the Displaced,” New York Review of Books, August 13, 2018.
75. Farrukh Dhondy, “V. S. Naipaul: The Man and His Mission,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 5, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 181–200, 183.
76. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Master of Antipathies,” Indian Express, November 9, 2012.
77. Mehta, “Master of Antipathies.”
78. Mehta, “Master of Antipathies.”
79. Dhondy, “V. S. Naipaul,” 186.
81. Naipaul, Mutinies, 119.
82. V. S. Naipaul, “Michael X and the Black Power Killings of Trinidad,” in The Return of Eva Perón: with The Killings in Trinidad [hereafter Return] (London: Deutsch, 1980). Among the other nonfiction pieces reprinted in this collection are “A New King for the Congo” and “The Return of Eva Perón,” which explore the legacy of two populist leaders, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo and Juan Perón in Argentina.
85. “Raleigh, Miranda and Lebrun all correspond to the recurring type of the revolutionary maker of mischief, who then moves on, leaving others to face the consequences of his actions” (Hayward, The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul, 90). Naipaul returns to this figure in his later nonfiction, including Dipanjan, the brilliant physicist in Calcutta who joins the Naxalite movement (Mutinies, 316–324), and Shahbaz, the sensitive young Pakistani man who rejects his elite cosmopolitan past and travels to become a revolutionary in Baluchistan (Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, 274–89).
86. Naipaul, “Power?” in Barracoon, 269.
87. V. S. Naipaul, “A Second Visit,” in Barracoon, 104.
88. See Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959).
89. See Benedict Anderson’s discussion of mid-nineteenth-century Javanese court elites such as Ronggawarsita, who, unable to grasp this idea, referred to the arrival of the Dutch as heralding Kalyug, a Javanese word derived from the Sanskrit denoting “a time of darkness.” Benedict Anderson, “A Time of Darkness and a Time of Light” (1979), in The Specter of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998).
90. Naipaul, “A Second Visit,” 104.
91. Naipaul, “A Second Visit,” 104.
92. Shortly after An Area of Darkness was published, a writer at the Illustrated Weekly of India asserted that Naipaul “was speaking out of a real concern…. The severe strictures were valid, for it is time we, in this country, stirred ourselves from the moral complacency of assumed righteousness and looked into the mirror” (quoted in French, Biography, 232).
93. Naipaul, Barracoon, 101.
94. V. S. Naipaul, A Congo Diary (Los Angeles: Sylvester and Orphanos, 1980), 14.
95. Naipaul, A Congo Diary, 15.
5. AMBIGUOUS FREEDOM
1. The fight was between the old princely state, ruled over by the king of Buganda, and the newly independent nation’s elected leaders, to whom it resisted submitting. “Constitution-mongering could never bridge the gulf between Buganda’s royalist separatism and the determination of other Ugandans that their own localities should, by emulating Buganda’s progress, forestall any new sub-imperialism.” John Lonsdale, “East Africa,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 542.
2. Quoted in Karl Maier, This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000), 59. Maier adds: “As cynical as his words might have sounded, Babangida spoke a truth that many Nigerian intellectuals have been loathe to admit: The general populace and sometimes even the most strident pro-democracy activists repeatedly applauded soldiers who overthrew governments they did not support. It happened in 1966 with the January Boys coup, in 1975 with the overthrow of Gowon’s military regime, and in 1983 with the ouster of Shagari’s elected administration. The pattern was to repeat itself in 1985 when Babangida himself came to power and again in 1993 when Abacha, the man reviled as Nigeria’s worst dictator, assumed control.”
3. John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and Forgotten Genocide (New York: Knopf, 2013).
4. “The People in Bengal Are Being Killed by Chinese and American Weapons,” in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1997), 15. See also Bass, The Blood Telegram, 67–68.
5. “Cyprian [Ekwensi] said they had sought me out so that, when I saw the name Biafra in a newspaper, I might think of them as people…. The blacks here [in the United States] (that is the correct word here) are very hostile to Biafra; they have got it slightly wrong, of course; they see Nigeria as the free black country and Biafra as the ‘strife.’…It was especially painful for me because 14 years ago I use to run into Cyprian a lot in the BBC; in those days he used to carry a novel in a briefcase and had no other problem than that of finding a title and a publisher.” V. S. Naipaul, Letter to Patricia Ann Hale, quoted in French, Biography, 276.
6. Jussawalla, Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, 36.
7. V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State (New York: Vintage, 1971), 1–2.
8. Bruce King, V. S. Naipaul (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 88.
9. V. S. Naipaul, “In a Free State” [hereafter “Free”], in In a Free State, 99. The king is based on the ruler of Buganda, referred to at the start of this chapter.
10. Naipaul, “Free,” 229.
11. Naipaul, “Free,” 104.
12. Naipaul, “Free,” 100.
13. Naipaul’s critical view was not untypical for writers of his generation. Chinua Achebe recalls a Nigerian elite “mov[ing] into homes in the former British quarters previously occupied by members of the European senior civil service. These homes often came with servants—chauffeurs, maids, cooks, gardeners, stewards—whom the British had organized meticulously to ‘ease their colonial sojourn.’ Now, following the departure of the Europeans, many domestic staff stayed in the same positions and were only too grateful to continue their designated salaried roles in post-independence Nigeria. Their masters were no longer European but their own brothers and sisters.” Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2003), 49.
14. Naipaul, “Free,” 100.
15. Naipaul, “Free,” 100.
16. “Naipaul is the “master of the difficult art of making you laugh and then feel shame at your laughter.” Nadine Gordimer, “Review: In a Free State,” New York Times Book Review, October, 17, 1971.
17. D. W. Harding, “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen,” Scrutiny, March 1940.
18. For Naipaul’s response to the rise of anti-immigrant feeling, see French, Biography, 276.
19. Naipaul, “Free,” 117.
20. Naipaul, “Free,” 109.
21. Naipaul, “Free,” 110.
22. “With both Bobby and Linda, there is no sense, as is the case in Naipaul’s earlier fiction, that a degree of self-understanding is a valuable tool in withstanding social and cultural contradictions.” Stuart Murray, “Naipaul in the 1970s: Authorial Preferences and the Symptomatic Reading of Place,” South Asian Review 26, no. 1 (2005): 65. This is true, but I would argue that the violent back-and-forth and the biting humor are a new form of reflection, shifting the burden of judgment away from characters and situating it in narrative rhythm and structure. The characters in all the stories of In a Free State (“One Out of Many” and “Tell Me Who to Kill,” along with the title story) serve primarily as filters through which broader forms of psychological and social complexity are explored, even if they are not themselves privy to insights or epiphanies.
23. Naipaul, “Free,” 163.
24. Naipaul, “Free,” 164.
25. Naipaul, “Free,” 123.
26. Naipaul, “Free,” 156.
27. Naipaul, “Free,” 100.
28. Naipaul, “Free,” 101.
29. Naipaul, “Free,” 144.
30. Naipaul, “Free,” 144.
31. Naipaul, “Free,” 145.
32. Naipaul, “Free,” 145.
33. Naipaul, “Free,” 184.
34. Naipaul, “Free,” 182.
35. Naipaul, “Free,” 235.
36. Naipaul, “Free,” 235. This point is emphasized: “They were entering the territory of the king’s people; and the highway here followed the ancient forest road. For centuries, using only the products of the forest, earth, reeds, the king’s people had built their roads as straight as this, over hills, across swamps” (Naipaul, “Free,” 228).
37. V. S. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” in Literary Occasions: Essays (New York: Vintage, 2003), 52.
6. TRUTH AND LIE
1. V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River [hereafter Bend] (New York: Vintage, 1979).
2. The main story of Bend is set in the Belgian Congo. Among the most traumatic events alluded to in the novel are the 1960 Congo army mutiny (Naipaul, Bend, 78) and tensions surrounding the European-instigated secession of the copper-rich region of Katanga at the time of Congo’s independence. The novel also records events from 1963, on the eve of Zanzibar’s independence, a British colony, shortly before the massacre of local Arabs. This massacre was the result of competing nationalisms, manifested in a power struggle between an old local “creolized” Arab political elite and black African nationalists (Naipaul, Bend, 29, 31). There are also fleeting references to civil unrest elsewhere, including the events leading to the 1971 coup in Uganda that brought Colonel Idi Amin to power (Naipaul, Bend, 114). These precise historical references make clear that the novel is set during the period 1960–1973.
7. Said defined “Orientalism as a Western style [of representation] for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 3. “The Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact. The principal product of this exteriority is of course representation” (Said, Orientalism, 21).
8. The same point is made in Edward Said, Orientalism, 6.
12. Salim’s strategy can be regarded as an example of the “highly sophisticated ironizing of imperial mythmaking” at work in Bend, rather than an apology for European imperialism. Sara Suleri, “Naipaul’s Arrival,” in The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 154. In this way, A Bend in the River revalues for the postcolonial age a central theme of Joseph Conrad’s classic novella Heart of Darkness (1899).
14. This received view of Salim is echoed by Ifemelu, the heroine of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah (New York: Anchor, 2014), 233–34. The phrase “ideological whiteness” is Sara Suleri’s. See Suleri, “Naipaul’s Arrival,” 154.
19. The Americans, fighting a war in Southeast Asia, have “used up more copper in the last two years than the world has in the last two centuries,” notes a minor character in a passing reference to the Vietnam War. Copper is an important source of revenue for the country: it is during the boom in copper prices, which takes place after the second rebellion, that many of the president’s prestigious projects, including the construction of the Domain, are undertaken (Naipaul, Bend, 93). When the copper boom ends and the restive forces emerge, the president is forced to take up populist measures to retain control of the country.
24. Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014).
25. This section of Bend recalls Frantz Fanon’s criticisms of the national bourgeoisie in his essay “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 97–145.
26. Naipaul, Bend, 128–29.
32. Although the Big Man is modeled on Mobutu Sese Seko, Naipaul deliberately downplays the stories of outrageous corruption that bedeviled Mobutu’s reign, as described in Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo (New York: Harper, 2002). Naipaul was aware of these stories—in A Congo Diary, he wrote, “Mobutu owns the Congo”—but the Big Man is not cast exclusively in this light. This suggests that Naipaul was attempting to capture a complex portrait of a postcolonial society confronted by the challenge of historical transition.
33. Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” in Aesthetics and Politics (New York: Verso, 2007), 22.
36. V. S. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness,” in The Return of Eva Perón with The Killings in Trinidad (New York: Vintage 1981), 233.
37. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” 169.
38. An importance transitional work is “The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,” Naipaul’s account of his visit to the Ivory Coast, which was published in Finding the Centre (1984). The final two chapters of this travelogue are marked by greater sympathy for an unfamiliar perspective than is apparent in the earlier chapters. As a consequence of his conversation with Georges Niangoran-Bouah, Naipaul revises his valuation of the tension he discerns between the “two worlds” of the society—between the (nighttime) world in which the spirits rule and the (daytime) world of “doing and development.” V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre (New York: Vintage, 1984), 137, 147.
7. PRODUCTIVE DEFORMATION
1. V. S. Naipaul, “Prologue to an Autobiography,” in Finding the Centre (New York: Vintage, 1984); “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” in Return of Eva Perón: with The Killings in Trinidad (New York: Vintage, 1974), 221–45.
3. Naipaul, Centre, 21–22.
5. Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (New York: Vintage, 2008), xiii. In his review of A Bend in the River, the critic Irving Howe described how the “astringent” Naipaul “since 1961” had deliberately made himself into “hardly even a ‘likable’ writer, for he no longer performs and barely troubles to please.” Concluding his review on a note of emotional exhaustion, Howe respectfully expressed his concern that Naipaul was inflicting on readers more reality than they could bear. “Perhaps we ought to be grateful that in his austere and brilliant way he holds fast to the bitterness before his eyes.” Irving Howe, “A Dark Vision,” New York Times, May 13, 1979. Howe’s remark makes one wonder if Naipaul began losing readers because he had, with the 1979 publication of his masterpiece Bend, become too “astringent” for his own good. Long after he moved on from this “dark vision,” Naipaul never managed to completely shed the reputation he had gained in the 1970s.
8. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Viking, 1987), 5.
10. Naipaul, Enigma, 6 (emphasis added).
12. Naipaul, Enigma, 5 (emphasis added).
13. Naipaul, Enigma, 7 (emphasis added).
14. Naipaul alludes to Proust when he speaks of “two ways to the cottage” (Naipaul, Enigma, 8) and the different possibilities symbolized by each path, as well Naipaul’s discovery that they are connected. See also Charles Michener, “The Dark Visions of V. S. Naipaul,” in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), 65.
16. Naipaul, Enigma, 191.
18. Naipaul, Enigma, 187, 193.
19. For a discussion of the manner in which Naipaul connects movements of laborers past and present, see Peter Hughes, V. S Naipaul (London: Routledge, 2014), 95–96.
20. Naipaul, Enigma, 251. Gillian Dooley notes that “although Naipaul does his best to dispense with the mechanics of plot in Enigma, by blurring time and thus causing uncertainty in the logic of cause and effect that is basic to plotting, but he cannot avoid the emergence of plots from his narrative, the story of Brenda and Les, for example, becomes a small plot in the reader’s mind.” Gillian Dooley, V. S. Naipaul: Man and Writer (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 137. Brenda’s background does indeed come into view in a more conventionally novelistic, and sentimental, manner than does that of Jack or, indeed, Naipaul’s landlord.
21. Here Naipaul deploys the realist style to great effect, obliquely recalling the hapless Biswas’s effort in colonial Trinidad to assert himself before powerful forces. Jack has planted a hedge to act as a barrier against the encroaching activity of large industrial farms that have appeared in the valley: “I noticed [Jack’s] hedge first of all. It was well clipped, tight in the middle, but ragged in places at ground level. I felt, from the clipping, that the gardener would have liked that hedge to be tight all over, to be as complete as a wall of brick or timber or some kind of man-fashioned material” (Naipaul, Enigma, 16–17).
24. See the interesting discussion in Shirley Chew, “(Post)colonial Translations in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival,” World Literature Written in English 37, no. 1/2 (1998): 118–34, 130–31.
25. Naipaul, Enigma, 203.
26. Naipaul, Enigma, 222.
27. Naipaul, Enigma, 224.
28. Naipaul, Enigma, 224.
29. Naipaul, Enigma, 225.
30. Naipaul, Enigma, 225.
31. Naipaul, Enigma, 225.
32. Naipaul, Enigma, 226.
33. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chap. 26.
34. Naipaul, Enigma, 225 (emphasis added).
35. Naipaul, Enigma, 169.
36. Naipaul, Enigma, 225.
39. In a review of Enigma, Derek Walcott criticizes Naipaul for romanticizing the English countryside at the expense of his birthplace, Trinidad. As I have argued, this assessment misses much of the ambivalent descriptions in Enigma. Walcott’s view has been echoed by other hasty readers, including Pascale Casanova. Equating realist form with political reaction, Casanova declares, “Naipaul’s deliberate quest for Englishness—rewarded in the end by a knighthood—naturally disinclined him to innovate with regard to literary form or style.” Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 212. See also Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 164–89.
40. Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 167.
41. “Virtually without notice, in the dreams and nightmares of the so-called ‘double revolution’, Europe plunges into modernity, but without possessing a culture of modernity. If youth, therefore, achieves its symbolic centrality, and the ‘great narrative’ of the Bildungsroman comes into being, this is because Europe has to attach a meaning not so much to youth, as to modernity.” Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 2000), 5.
42. Gregory Castle, Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 3.
43. I am alluding here to dependency theory. Nonetheless, the distinction between the forms of cultural consciousness and self-reflection in the core and the periphery should not be turned into an ontological divide (not least at a time when the line between core and periphery has been complicated by the ascendancy of non-European powers); it serves rather as a heuristic that enables us to delineate this peripheral writer’s concerns.
44. Naipaul, Enigma, 146.
45. I am drawing on Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” trans. Edmund Leites and the author, in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992).
46. Naipaul, Enigma, 143.
47. Naipaul, Enigma, 143.
48. Naipaul, Enigma, 131.
49. Naipaul, Enigma, 131.
50. Naipaul, Enigma, 146.
51. Naipaul, Enigma, 147.
52. Naipaul writes, “My travel was not like that [of Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, or Evelyn Waugh]. 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 semiderelict 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. It was to be taken out of oneself and one’s immediate circumstances—the material of fiction—and to have a new vision of what one had been born into, and to have an intimation of a sequence of historical events going far back.” V. S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), 30.
53. Naipaul, Enigma, 169–70.
54. Returning to Trinidad in 1961, Naipaul finds an island “full of racial tensions and close to revolution.” He reveals his fears as an ethnic minority, claiming that the “rawness of nerves among black people had become like communal festering” (Naipaul, Enigma, 159).
55. Naipaul, Enigma, 126.
56. Naipaul, Enigma, 141.
57. Naipaul, Enigma, 178.
58. Naipaul, Enigma, 147.
59. Naipaul, Enigma, 124.
60. Naipaul, Enigma, 159. Naipaul contrasts these movements for “separateness” to the refusal of a black man in 1950 to be berthed in the same cabin as Naipaul as a way of expressing his solidarity with the ideals of the latter group of black men (159). It might be said, however, that the contrast Naipaul sets up is unhistorical.
61. Naipaul, Enigma, 159.
62. Naipaul, Enigma, 159.
63. Naipaul, Enigma, 124.
64. Naipaul, Enigma, 124.
65. Naipaul, Enigma, 124.
66. Naipaul, Enigma, 125.
67. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Brent Hayes Edwards (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8.
68. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles L. Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 91.
69. Quoted in David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2000), 165.
70. Naipaul, Enigma, 159.
71. Naipaul, Enigma, 159.
72. Naipaul, Enigma, 161.
73. Naipaul, Enigma, 161.
74. Naipaul, Enigma, 162.
75. Naipaul, Enigma, 173.
76. Naipaul, Enigma, 173.
77. Naipaul, Enigma, 114.
78. Naipaul, Enigma, 112. Note the deceptively lighthearted account of this episode in the eighteen-year-old Naipaul’s letter home, September 15, 1950, in which he affects indifference as to how his actions will be perceived. “I dumped the roti (wrapped in paper) in the waste basket and ate the chicken and a banana and drank ice-cold water. What the maid said on the following day when she emptied the basket, I don’t know, nor do I particularly care to.” V. S. Naipaul, Between Father and Son (New York: Random House, 1999), 13. The teenage Naipaul nervously displaces this stereotype of himself—his self-directed prejudice—onto the lowly hotel maid who occupies this position in the scene.
79. Naipaul, Enigma, 244.
80. Naipaul, Enigma, 245.
81. Naipaul, Enigma, 244–45.
82. Naipaul, Enigma, 244.
8. LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND
1. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Viking, 1987), 353.
3. V. S. Naipaul, “Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture),” in Literary Occasions: Essays (New York: Vintage, 2003), 194.
4. V. S. Naipaul, “The Long Way Round,” Guardian, March 10, 2007.
5. V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now [hereafter Mutinies] (New York: Viking, 1990), 202.
6. Akeel Bilgrami, “Cry, the Beloved Subcontinent: Naipaul Fiddles While India Burns,” New Republic, June 10, 1991, 30.
7. Heteroglossia means “literally a ‘mixture of tongues,’ [a term the literary theorist Mikhail] Bakhtin invoked to account for the social diversity of speech types that he discovered in the novel.” Lynn Pearce, “Bakhtin and the Dialogic Principle,” in Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Patricia Waugh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 229.
8. Naipaul, Mutinies, 41.
9. Naipaul, Mutinies, 41.
10. Naipaul, Mutinies, 41.
11. Naipaul, Mutinies, 95.
12. Naipaul, Mutinies, 115.
13. Naipaul, Mutinies, 118.
14. Naipaul, Mutinies, 180.
15. Naipaul, Mutinies, 158.
16. Naipaul, Mutinies, 9.
17. Naipaul, Mutinies, 5–6.
18. Naipaul, Mutinies, 6.
19. Naipaul, Mutinies, 6.
20. Naipaul, Mutinies, 143.
21. Naipaul, Mutinies, 41. “The old Hindu Sanskrit learning—which a late 18th century scholar-administrator like Sir William Jones had seen as archaic and profound as the Greek, and had sought, in a kind of romantic, living archaeology, to dig up from secretive, caste-bound brahmins in the North—that old learning had, 200 years later, in the most roundabout way, seeded the new” (152).
22. V. S. Naipaul, “Christianity Didn’t Damage India Like Islam,” Outlook India, March 4, 1999.
23. Naipaul, Mutinies, 15.
24. Naipaul, Mutinies, 15.
25. Naipaul, Mutinies, 23.
26. Naipaul, Mutinies, 60.
27. Naipaul, Mutinies, 45.
28. Naipaul, Mutinies, 45.
29. Naipaul, Mutinies, 17.
30. Naipaul, Mutinies, 17, 20.
31. Naipaul, Mutinies, 25.
32. Naipaul, Mutinies, 25.
33. Naipaul, Mutinies, 17.
34. Naipaul, Mutinies, 119.
35. Naipaul, Mutinies, 115–16.
36. Naipaul, Mutinies, 118.
37. Naipaul, Mutinies, 118.
38. Naipaul, Mutinies, 31.
39. Bilgrami, “Cry, the Beloved Subcontinent,” 31.
40. Naipaul, Mutinies, 395.
41. Naipaul, Mutinies, 58.
42. Naipaul, Mutinies, 59.
43. Naipaul, Mutinies, 59.
44. Naipaul, Mutinies, 420.
45. Naipaul, Mutinies, 6.
46. Naipaul, Mutinies, 423.
47. Naipaul, Mutinies, 193.
48. Naipaul, Mutinies, 187.
49. Naipaul’s analysis of the British partly echoes that of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London: Macmillan, 1951), 415–21. However, Naipaul does not share Chaudhuri’s pessimistic assessment about the “barbarous” tendencies Chaudhuri thought likely to overwhelm postcolonial Indian democracy.
50. Naipaul, Mutinies, 395.
51. Naipaul, Mutinies, 395.
52. Naipaul, Mutinies, 395.
53. Naipaul, Mutinies, 395.
54. Naipaul, Mutinies, 395.
55. Naipaul, Mutinies, 398.
56. Naipaul, Mutinies, 399.
57. Naipaul, Mutinies, 403.
58. Naipaul, Mutinies, 445.
59. Naipaul, Mutinies, 495.
60. Naipaul, Mutinies, 508–509.
61. Naipaul, Mutinies, 516.
62. Naipaul, Mutinies, 516.
63. Naipaul, Mutinies, 517.
64. Naipaul, Mutinies, 517.
65. Naipaul, Mutinies, 518.
66. Naipaul, Mutinies, 518.
67. Naipaul, Mutinies, 518.
9. CONVERSATIONS WITH THE FAITHFUL
1. V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey [hereafter Believers] (London: Deutsch, 1981); Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples [hereafter Beyond] (New York: Vintage, 1998).
2. Naipaul, Believers, 274.
3. Naipaul, Believers, 274.
4. Naipaul, Believers, 275.
5. Naipaul, Believers, 228.
6. V. S. Naipaul, “Reading and Writing,” in Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), 11–13.
7. V. S. Naipaul, “London,” Times Literary Supplement, August 15 1958. Growing up in Chaguanas, Trinidad, Naipaul says, knowledge about his past “wasn’t there.” V. S. Naipaul, “Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture),” in Literary Occasions: Essays (New York: Vintage, 2003), 186.
8. Naipaul, Believers, 274.
9. “In the city we were in a kind of limbo. There were few Indians there, and no one like us on the street. Though everything was very close, and houses were open to every kind of noise, and no one could really be private in his yard, we continued to live in our old enclosed way, mentally separate from the more colonial, more racially mixed life around us” (Naipaul, “Reading and Writing,” 14).
10. Naipaul, Believers, 252.
11. Edward W. Said, “Among the Believers,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 113.
12. Naipaul, Believers, 241. Shafi told Naipaul earlier that in his village near Kota Baru, Malaysia, “intellectual pursuits were nothing.” Very few young people went out of the village for higher education., and those who did were expected to take up religious education (224).
14. See the thoughtful assessments by Hanif Kureishi, “Travelling to Find Out,” London Review of Books, August 30, 2018; and Anjum Altaf, “Hanif Kureishi, Naipaul and Pakistan,” Express Tribune, October 19, 2018.
15. Naipaul, Believers, 134–35.
16. Naipaul, Believers, 135.
17. Naipaul, Believers, 161.
18. Naipaul, Believers, 157.
19. Ian Buruma, “In the Empire of Islam,” New York Review of Books, July 16, 1998.
20. Naipaul, Beyond, 323, 326.
21. Naipaul, Believers, 326.
23. Naipaul, Beyond, 157.
25. Naipaul, Beyond, 343.
28. Naipaul, Believers, 241; Beyond, 48.
32. Naipaul, Believers, 284–85.
39. Naipaul, Beyond, xii–xiii.
40. Naipaul, Beyond, xii, 129.
41. Toward the end of Beyond Belief, a Malay CEO named Nasar purports to explain the mystery of Shafi’s disappearance by telling Naipaul that Shafi had failed as a businessman and consequently began to speak in utopian terms about Islam. He had isolated himself from his more successful fellow activists like Nasar, who had gone on to become directors of big corporations. Nasar adds: “In those days we talked about Islam theoretically. [Today, in the 1990s,] we are talking about Islam as a way of life in practice. Now I confront the real world…That is the test. The test for a Muslim is when they are confronted with reality and a choice to make. Until then they are always right. Utopian” (Naipaul, Beyond 367–68). For a historical discussion of the Malaysian state’s co-optation of elite Islamist students as business leaders in the years leading up to the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, see Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, trans. Anthony F. Roberts (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 88–95.
10. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
2. V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre (New York: Vintage, 1984), 87.
4. V. S. Naipaul, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (New York: Vintage, 1998), xi.
5. V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (London: Deutsch, 1981), 163.
6. Naipaul, Believers, 163.
7. Naipaul, Believers, 167.
8. But see the connections briefly alluded to in the foreword to The Loss of El Dorado (London: Deutsch, 1969).
9. Naipaul, Beyond, xiii.
10. V. S. Naipaul, The Masque of Africa [hereafter Masque] (New York: Knopf, 2010), 95.
12. Naipaul, Masque, 117.
13. Naipaul, Masque, 117.
15. This is how Naipaul characterized Narayan’s evocation of small-town southern India in his novels: “Even the independence movement, in the heated 1930s and 1940s, was far away, and the British presence was marked mainly by the names of buildings and places. This was an India that appeared to mock the vainglorious and went on its own way.” V. S. Naipaul, “The Writer in India,” in Reading and Writing, 52.
16. U. R. Ananthamurthy, Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man, trans. A. K. Ramanujan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
17. Rhonda Cobham-Sander, I and I: Epitaphs for the Self in the Works of V. S. Naipaul, Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2016), 23. See also James Wood, “Half a Life,” New Republic, November 5, 2001.
18. V. S. Naipaul, Half a Life [hereafter Half] (New York: Knopf, 2001), 28.
20. As Michael Gorra has noted, there are echoes of the father-son relationship in A House for Mr Biswas. Michael Gorra, “Postcolonial Studies,” New York Times Book Review, October 28, 2001.
22. V. S. Naipaul, A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (New York: Knopf, 2007), 52 (emphasis added).
24. Bridget Brereton, “Naipaul’s Sense of History,” in Created in the West Indies, ed. Jennifer Rahim and Barbara Lalla (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2010), 211.
25. Brereton, “Naipaul’s Sense of History,” 208.
27. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980), 14.
29. Naipaul, Half, 74–75.
31. Naipaul, Half, 155. See James Wood’s observation that Willie frees himself from the cruel hierarchies of caste in India only to “reinsert himself into a world of frozen race and class distinctions” in Mozambique. James Wood, “Half a Life,” New Republic, 34.
33. Alok Rai, “Not Much Magic,” Hindu, October 24, 2004. Rai, however, misses the ironic tone of the novel when he criticizes its “hunger for [a] transcendence [that] takes the form of a certain mysticism of violence.” It is difficult to see how Naipaul could “espouse a rhetoric of voluntarist transcendence” when all the revolutionaries in the novel are depicted as moral and physical grotesques.
34. V. S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds [hereafter Magic] (New York: Knopf, 2004), 120.
42. [Jean Rhys] is really the pioneer. She came over here at the turn of the century. She was from the West Indies, very high principles as a writer. She wouldn’t falsify her experiences…. [But] she’ll never feed a culture or alter sensibility, and I think if you’re a writer these are the things you want to do.” BBC Radio 3 interview, January, 29, 1973, 20:45–21:25. (Naipaul Archive, University of Tulsa, 3:6)