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sub-Categoy
[ VS Naipaul ]
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[http://braveheart-blog.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_archive.html
Naipaul: Man of No Land
Thursday, October 27, 2005
As I had a mild discussion tonight, I felt the need to post something about VS Naipaul.
His Indian connection is often blown out of proportion by him and the Indian media both, only to force me to remind them that such men belong to no nation, no land. Einstein and Shakespeare grew so huge that they belonged to the world. And Naipaul, spitting on every land he put his footsetps upon, belongs to none.
A writer is not just a wordsmith, he does not merely discuss and recreate images covered with dust; he also has to take responsibilities, he also needs to share the stage with everyone else, performing the same chores as others. Just because he can play with words and his tongue, he does not have any right to put himself above everyone else.
Unfortunately, a bastard like Naipaul, a man of no land, shoots like a loose cannon.
Big words and an odd political stand, the power to create magic with words and the propaganda of writing for the people of the third world may earn the adulation of the Swedish Academy, but cannot earn the respect of humankind. No wonder Naipaul remains a snob in literary and political circles all alike. Edward Said has argued that, "He allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution, promoting colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies"
Husain Naqvi has written this lovely piece discussing the character of Naipaul.
To understand a poor man and his history, you need to bend down and sit with him for a while. But the Naipauls are too big to do that. So they move on, making opinions and writing books. They give statements about history looking through their tourist glasses and stand arrogantly by them.
To try and locate an objective evaluation of history in his voice, is like jumping hard so you could take off. As the famous quote goes, 'The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see'. Hence, in the latter half, he saw and he wrote what he needed to, not for others but for himself, yet only to impose himself upon others. Here is a brief study of the bigot VS Naipaul, spectacularly performed by Naqvi sahab
Naipaul is brilliant. Indeed, he is one of the finest writers the 20th century has produced. His book covers are often embellished with the following blandishment: “For sheer abundance of talent there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V.S. Naipaul.” We agree. His early comedies - Suffrage of Elvira, Miguel Street - are perceptive, compassionate, even Narayanesque, evoking, reifying a distant, eccentric island - a world populated by real, colorful characters.
The culmination of the early period of his career is in A House for Biswas, which, according to James Wood, issued the most enduring literary character in post-WWII fiction. Subsequently, his superb, dark, Conradian novels that include Mimic Men, Guerillas, and A Bend in the River depict seismic shifts in the short history of the “Third World” like few others before him.
But Naipaul’s prose is not the issue. It’s his politics and persona. In a way, Naipaul has not published a book worth the page it’s printed on since 1979, since A Bend in the River, when he almost exclusively pursued “travel writing,” an ill-defined genre, neither fiction nor autobiography, neither journalism not sociology.
In a review of Among the Believers, for instance, Fouad Ajami avers, “…one gets the distinct feeling of superficiality in this book. Of the holy city of Qom, Naipaul writes: ‘Qom’s life remained hidden.’ It is probably fair to say that much of the territory he covered remained hidden to him. The places he went to confused and eluded him, denied him entry. He was in a hurry; he wanted to see ‘Islam in action.’ But the people he wanted to comprehend were ambiguous and guarded, and under no obligation to reveal themselves to a traveler. Inside the large international hotels, visitors came to talk with him, but his questions frequently seem rigged and their answers canned.”
As Naipaul once said, “We read to find out what we already know.”
In fact, over the years Naipaul has fancied and fashioned himself into what can be best described as a “post-national,” a native so progressive that he can scrutinize himself, his society, and context without prejudice. It seems that Naipaul believes that he has progressed, evolved, by stepping on to an airplane. It’s as if he is awed by order: light-switches that function; taps that pour water; well-stocked grocery stores that carry eight varieties of jam; and clean streets that lead to well-lit avenues and those to broad highways. He’s become civilized by moving from here to there, by severing ties with his past, and consequently, he can claim citizenship of the world.
Yet he is a bigot. Of the bindi that adorns the forehead of married Indian women, Naipaul once said, “The dot means: My head is empty.”
Naipaul vitriol for Africa and Africans is spectacular. “This place is full of buggers”; “Do you hear those bitches and their bongos?” Mel Gussow notes, “About the influx of Jamaicans into England, he suggested in an article that one way to decrease immigration would be to increase the importation of bananas. His much quoted line was: ‘a Banana a day will keep the Jamaican away.’” Naipaul has managed to package condescension as objectivity.
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s pathology intrigues us endlessly. Both post-national and bigot, his persona remains entirely parochial. In Sir Vidia’s Shadow, his one time friend Paul Theroux comments,
“…[Naipaul] behaved like an upper-caste Indian. And Vidia often assumed the insufferable do-you-know-who-I-am posturing of a particular kind of Indian bureaucrat, which is always a sign of inferiority.
It had taken me a long time to understand that Vidia was not in any sense English, not even Anglicized, but Indian to the core - caste conscious, race conscious, a food fanatic, precious in his fears from worrying about the body being ‘tainted.’ Because he was an Indian from the West Indies - defensive, feeling his culture was under siege - his attitudes approached the level of self-parody.”
Recently, old man Naipaul has come full circle, officially reclaiming his heritage by associating himself with the BJP, the Hindu chauvinist party in Indian politics. None other than Rushdie castigated him for being a “cheerleader for the [BJP].” He added, “When Naipaul writes articles that the BJP can use as recruiting material, it's a problem.”
Naipaul is, in a way, a bastard, spawned of disparate narratives, a byproduct of the postcolonial world. He’s uncomfortable here and there, in his native Trinidad and his adopted country, Great Britain: “Indian by descent, Trinidadian by birth, a Briton by citizenship…He has lived in all three societies, and…has bitter feelings about them all: India is unwashed, Trinidad is unlearned, England is intellectually and culturally bankrupt.”
The complete article can be read here. I don't think BJP is a really Hindu Chauvinist Party, nor do I believe Naipaul is an Indian just because he believes in caste and race. (But that's besides the point actually!) A snob, he surely is. Nothing more, nothing less. Such people belong to no land. I wish he could be denied that bit of land which every man needs one day. But then, Naipauls are not be taken that seriously, their snobbery desrrves only to be ignored. Let them sulk and spit around and dig their own graves.]
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