The World is What it is — The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French; Picador; Price: Rs.595; 555 pp
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For an individual to be acknowledged as the “greatest living writer in the English language” by V.S. Prichett, arguably the greatest living literary critic in the English language, is a rare honour indeed. More so when the recipient of the encomium is a small brown man of Indian origin born in a tiny island (Trinidad) in the obscure West Indies.
Neither is that an exceptional opinion. Queen Elizabeth II awarded him a knighthood in 1990, and the jury of the Nobel Foundation conferred the Nobel Prize for literature upon him in 2001. These are just a few of the honours that have been heaped upon London-based writer and chronicler Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul. A descendant of indentured labourers shipped from rural Bihar in inhuman conditions to work the sugar plantations of the West Indies, during the span of half a century as a full-time writer, Naipaul has emerged as the most perceptive interpreter of the maladies of the post-colonial world.
Nor unlike most heavily honoured writers, is Naipaul unrewarded by the market. According to Patrick French, the author of this authorised but unsparing biography of this controversial writer, Naipaul owns several homes in Britain, and has a million pound bank deposit in the tax-free Channel islands, which makes him one of the richest writers in the world, certainly of non-fiction.
Born on August 17, 1932 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul (‘Vidia’) was the second child of Seepersad and Droapatie (charming mutations of ‘Sreeprasad’ and ‘Draupadi’) Naipaul. “In popular legend in 1930s Trinidad, Indians were depicted as poor, mean, rural, heathen, aggressive, ethnically exclusive and illiterate. This then was the rough world into which Vidyadhar (later re-spelt as Vidiadhar) Naipaul was born,” writes French.
Remarkably, although he had to “tend cows and goats before going off to school, barefoot”, by the time he was in his late teens, Seepersad had taught himself to read and write English, and even before Vidia’s birth had begun to work as a freelance reporter for the Trinidad Guardian — “an unusual job for an Indian to be doing” at the time. Although at best a moderately successful journalist and a failed novelist, Seepersad implanted the idea of a life of letters in his young son, nurturing him on Dickens, Shakespeare and Somerset Maugham in his growing years.
In 1950, Vidia Naipaul, a student of Trinidad’s top school, Queen’s Royal College where “government paid his fees and gave annual grant for the cost of books”, was awarded a scholarship to study at University College, Oxford. Intensely aware that he was cut out for greater things, getting out of the closed and intellectually arid environment of Trinidad was vitally important for young Vidia. Ascribing the scholarship which was initially denied to him, “as one of the lucky things in my life”, Naipaul is quoted by French as saying that had he not been able to escape from “these primitive societies in which the main talent is intrigue”, he would have “gone crazy”.
At Oxford — where he was totally unimpressed with the intellectual calibre of his fellow students — young Vidia found that his scholarship grant barely covered his modest expenses, and was obliged to work as a freelance journalist and later with the BBC’s Caribbean broadcast service to keep body and soul together. Nevertheless right from the start of his academic career at Oxford, Naipaul had resolved to become a writer, and within a year of enrollment had started work on his first novel (The Mystic Masseur).
At that time, on February 9, 1952 Vidia met Pat Hale, the somewhat plain daughter of a legal clerk in Birmingham, and a history undergrad at Oxford. Like most banana boat students brought up on over-glamourised projections of white women as beauties per se, young Naipaul was quick to fall in love. It was a relationship which resulted in marriage, much heartache and cruelty, and ended badly four decades later as recounted in detail in this penetrating biography.
Although Naipaul’s first two novels — Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr. Biswas — received good reviews, Naipaul burst upon the international literary scene as a new genre global writer-chronicler following his first visit to India, the land of his forefathers and the subsequent publication of An Area of Darkness (1964). This excoriating indictment of the new leaders of independent India, and in particular their indifference to modern sanitation, horrified the new post-independence Indian elite, but established Vidia’s intellectual reputation.
As he grew in confidence and stature, Naipaul’s unflinching eye focused upon autocracies and dictatorships in Africa (In a Free State, A Bend in the River); and on South America, notably Argentina (The Return of Eva Peron, The Sufferage of Elvira) and the Middle East (Among the Believers, Beyond Belief). Naipaul had morphed into a uniquely perceptive analyst of societies in transition, even as he grappled with the personal demons of an unsatisfactory love life, rejection of his work, and racial slights and insults which were freely dispensed in Britain as it became conscious of being “swamped” with immigrants from the former colonies.
Although personally a finicky, irritable, mean and demanding individual — and this aspect of Naipaul is unsparingly detailed by French — Naipaul also comes across as a humanitarian who feels the pain and deep frustration of ordinary people around the world whose great expectations of political freedom have been squashed by self-serving dictators and greedy elites. In particular in his two books on angry, militant Islam (Among the Believers and Beyond Belief), he has remorselessly exposed the anti-modernisation imperialism of autocratic rulers and the Muslim clergy of the Arab world, who are hell-bent upon forcing Muslims the world over to wipe out their native cultures and historical memories and replace them solely with the teachings of the holy book.
The formative influences which shaped the self-belief and deep insights of this unique, even if not great, writer are assiduously detailed in this engrossing biography. It paints the portrait of a man of many quirks and flaws who loved cruelly but who never lost sight of his central mission — to be a great writer with the integrity to courageously examine the new societies which came into being following the end of empire.
As to the intriguing title of this memoir, it is taken from the first sentence of one of Naipaul’s most acclaimed books, A Bend in the River: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing — and men who allow themselves to be nothing — have no place in it.”
This profound observation which is simultaneously an ideological and political testament, sums up the history of Sir Vidiadhar Naipaul, who emerged from wreckage of the post-colonial world to storm the literary ramparts of the mother country, which has been forced to acknowledge him as the greatest living exponent in its language. It’s an extraordinary story of the empire striking back, and winning.
Dilip Thakore