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VS Naipaul was no victim His fellow post-colonial writers hated him

Who needed to be a victim when cigarettes were this cheap? (Photo by John Minihan/Evening Standard/Getty Images)

Who needed to be a victim when cigarettes were this cheap? (Photo by John Minihan/Evening Standard/Getty Images)


November 11, 2021   5 mins

V.S. Naipaul was a scathing critic of postcolonial societies and their offspring. In his fiction and travelogues, the Indo-Trinidadian author depicted the newly liberated nations of the Third World as something akin to a grim joke, ironising the chasm between their utopian aspirations and the sordid and often bloody realities that followed their independence.

This stance won him few friends among his fellow postcolonial writers. The Caribbean historian C.L.R. James spoke for many when he dismissed Naipaul as a colonial stooge who simply published “what the whites want to say, but dare not”. But while it may have been true that Naipaul provided comfort to Westerners licking their wounds over the end of European empire, he also offered something to those he critiqued: a challenge. Naipaul wrote about the pathologies of the downtrodden with an intimacy that could neither be faked nor ignored. Today, at a time when the American empire has entered its twilight, Europe is somnolent, and the long-marginalised are slowly attaining power commensurate with their numbers, Naipaul’s challenge feels worth reflecting upon.

“He had been fed by so many civilisations; so much had gone into making him what he was, but now, at what should have been the beginning of his intellectual life, he [had] cut himself off,” he wrote in his travelogue Among the Believers about a Leftist Iranian friend whose life he used to critique the culturally defensive trajectory of Iran after its revolution. The Iranians had wanted the amenities of modernity — fighter jets, medical technology, television. But the headlong cultural Westernisation of the Shah had unnerved them. Their passionate, unforeseen revolution had tried to turn back to the past while holding onto modernity’s material benefits, only to find that such a thing was impossible. The new regime they now lived with was ruthlessly modern in its style of oppression while still corrosive to the old values. In place of the Shah, they had not received the warm certainties of the past, but a gaping spiritual void.

It was these types of half-modernised peoples whose psychology Naipaul picked apart in his travel writings, from the Middle East to India, to Argentina. Even as he skewered the hypocrisy and brutality of empire, which he did with quiet effectiveness, Naipaul knew the pathologies of those on the other side. The child of an impoverished Caribbean society deeply shaped by the slave trade and colonialism, Naipaul, when he turned his sights onto his own people and those like them, knew how to press where it hurt.

Naipaul’s fiction, for which he won the Booker Prize fifty years ago this month, poked holes in the confidence of the newly liberated masses. In his 1979 novel, A Bend in the River, Naipaul depicted a fictional African country spiralling into the abyss after winning its freedom. At a time when cathartic violence was very popular on the postcolonial Left, he wasted no time pointing out where those furies would lead. “They’re going to kill all the masters and all the servants. When they’re finished nobody will know there was a place like this here. They’re going to kill and kill. They say it is the only way, to go back to the beginning before it’s too late.” These chilling words remind one of the apocalyptic visions of Isis. But they could describe any number of countries that have plunged into limitless violence after winning independence.

“Hate oppression; fear the oppressed,” Naipaul once wrote, pessimistically. Too often this has turned out to be wise advice. Naipaul painted with a broad brush. He got his share of things wrong. Later in his life, he even succumbed to the same fanaticism and hypocrisy for which he chastised others. Even so, his writings — about the squalor of India, the prideful stagnation of most Muslim countries, and the dangerous fantasies of the recently liberated across Africa and Latin America — could not be brushed off as simple ignorance. They had the sting of truth.

I started reading Naipaul a few years ago on the recommendation of friends. These recommendations typically came with a murmured warning that his politics were questionable, but that his books were worth it for the prose alone. I found that they were even better than that. Discovering Naipaul was like finding a curmudgeonly uncle who could point to one’s neuroses because he, too, had suffered from them.

Any reader who identifies with what used to be known as the ‘developing world’ will find in Naipaul’s writing a heavy dose of introspection. Naipaul’s first book about India, An Area of Darkness, was so pitiless about the country’s backwardness that its publication there was banned for several years after its initial release in 1964. His words seemed to open something up in people who were willing to listen. The Indian writer Pankaj Mishra said that the experience of discovering Naipaul as a young man left him “shocked and bewildered”. “I didn’t know that you could write a book like that about India,” he added. “I think it was the first book I read in English that contained the world I lived.”

Naipaul could be ungenerous to his subjects, most of whom were just emerging towards political independence after the long trauma of colonisation. But by shining a harsh spotlight on their failures, he also offered them a more comprehensive kind of freedom. Naipaul returned to those he wrote about moral responsibility for their own condition. This was the burden of independence, and accepting it, Naipaul suggested, was the only way that the formerly colonised would ever truly be liberated.

There’s a lesson in Naipaul’s life story as well. As the son of a lower middle-class Indo-Trinidadian family, he had one of the unlikeliest literary careers in history. At a time when the Western publishing world was considered the racial patrimony of those who controlled it, Naipaul triumphed so thoroughly that his personal background became immaterial. By the time Naipaul finished A House for Mr Biswas in 1961, he had established himself as perhaps the finest writer of the English language to be published in decades.

Naipaul achieved this in the face of an atmosphere that was not just unwelcoming but actively hostile. He did not retreat into a defensive cocoon but instead conquered the English literary world on his own terms. Like James Baldwin, whose writings on race dwarf most of what is published on the subject today in eloquence and coherence, Naipaul’s writings were put up against the Darwinian test of an unsympathetic audience. “I have got to show these people that I can beat them at their own language,” he wrote to his father in an anguished letter while at Oxford. And he did.

The “bootstrap” mantra of modern American conservatism is correctly criticised for serving as a defence of unjust economic or social arrangements, often by those who fail to live up to the high standards they prescribe for others. But there is also something to be said for persevering in the face of a world that never has been and never will be fair. “The world is what it is,” as Naipaul put it in the immortal opening lines of A Bend in the River, and those who begin at a disadvantage must strive to be their best selves regardless. This, at least, was the world that he inhabited. “You couldn’t be a victim in the 1950s,” Naipaul observed drily. “There wasn’t the market.”

If there was no market for victimhood in Naipaul’s time, even for a brown-skinned, lilting-accented son of Caribbean poverty, now it seems there is no market for anything else. These days I sometimes find myself involuntarily rolling my eyes at the mention of terms like “race” and “empire,” even though, objectively speaking, they remain important subjects. The deference that comes when these sacred terms are invoked feels too easy. No one has the courage to push back, to demand from the victims rigour and consistency. Without worthy adversaries to overcome, their writing devolves into cliché.

Like C.L.R. James and Edward Said, I likely would have been a political opponent of Naipaul had I lived in his time. But one does not need to endorse all of his views to recognise that he was a worthy critic of many who would conceive of themselves as members of an underclass — and that we, like everyone else, need such critics. I never met him. Yet reading his books decades after they were published, I’ve often had the feeling that that Naipaul was challenging me personally. His entire career was an argument against taking up the mantle of sainted victimhood.  To a reader of a particular background, he offers bitter medicine through self-reflection rather than the sugar rush of moral self-righteousness.

Fifty years after winning the Booker Prize and a few years after his own death, it turns out that this descendant of indentured labourers cast off by the British Empire still has something important to say.


Murtaza Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept who focuses on national security and foreign policy.

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Chris Wheatley
Chris Wheatley
2 years ago

Naipaul was on one wing of the modern-ish study of Postcolonialism. He was a good writer and was well travelled; he had his opinions. But that does not make him right.

I have been three times to India. On arrival I have been excited but on leaving the excitement had turned into depression. The number of people in the cities is overpowering. It is bound to lead to corruption because being corrupt is the only way to survive. No politician will be able to remove the corruption.

The people in India are friendly and welcoming. As a visitor you always feel safe. But you can’t be part of it. As a visitor there is only one solution – find a way of reducing the number of people so that the problem becomes manageable. This can be done by simply not increasing the number of people but then you get into arguments about Human Rights.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
2 years ago
Reply to  Chris Wheatley

Indian population can be reduced by the same way it has done in so many other countries.

Allow enterprise and prosperity to flourish.

India is already seeing benefits of this, despite the relentless demonisation of Modi. Their birthrate has reduced considerably.

Alka Hughes-Hallett
Alka Hughes-Hallett
2 years ago
Reply to  Chris Wheatley

To me it appears that overpopulation is incorrectly only ascribed to an increase in births? However the reduction of deaths seems to be the main cause. In India, those who survived births, life’s diseases and finally old age ailments and died at a ripe age, families had celebrations at their funeral. Now there is an expectation- to live up to and beyond 90, even in India. It’s not the births causing the problems , its deaths that have been outlawed.

Fear of Covid in the last 2 years is the case and point. Such western health protectionism has permeated to the developing nations. Like the virus itself, this western idea has infected the whole world. With grand plans of certain elites to vaccinate the whole world, no wonder the idea that death is unbearable whatever the ailment and is causing population to spiral.
It started a long ago with the advent and availability of modern medicine. It’s inevitable influence & unintended consequence is population boom beyond control.

When I listen to human rights , it makes me cringe . The most bizarre cases, I have heard of are mentally and or physically handicapped have the right to bear children without birth control with government aid. If these are the lessons for the rest of the world, what hope is there of controlling population ?

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 years ago
Reply to  Chris Wheatley

India followed disastrous socialist economic policies for decades, resulting in the oft derided ‘Hindu rate of growth’.

India needs freer markets, ‘radical reform’ in the realm of property rights. The slums in particular are indeed an outrage, provide legal title and proper public services, water and sanitation. That should not be beyond the capacity of a talented nation.

Last edited 2 years ago by Andrew Fisher
Ed Cameron
Ed Cameron
2 years ago

By the time I reached the Indonesian section of Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, Naipaul’s fixation on, to him, the ignorance, backwardness and uncivilised behaviour of the Muslims he met, including accounts of one man wiping snot on his own clothes, had me concerned about his true motives. These inclusions felt petty and vindictive. 
His later apparent flirtation with Hindu nationalism seemed to confirm this impression.  His thesis was persuasively expressed, his sincerity was less apparent. 

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
2 years ago
Reply to  Ed Cameron

And this is the point, sincerity is an irrelevance, as are motives, as is every aspect of personality. The only thing that matters is the work, does the work, the writing in this case, speak to you such that you find difficulty answering back? This applies even more starkly to the hard sciences than the humanities.
If you are one of those people who cannot separate the person from their creations, you are effectively creating a heaven, hell, and limbo for all discovery and all creation: the works of those you approve of to heaven, of those you don’t to hell, and all those where you know nothing of the creator, like that two-millennia old sculpture you saw in Rome the other day, why, they of course all go into limbo, judgement reserved.

Last edited 2 years ago by Prashant Kotak
Ed Cameron
Ed Cameron
2 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

Thank you. You use one of my favourite arguments – about separating the person from their work. As I say, the thesis was persuasive. But, for me, it was the words used, part of the creation itself, that lessened its appeal.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 years ago
Reply to  Ed Cameron

I suppose the Muslims are generally poorer and more ‘backward’ in those societies, notably India.

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago

Without a man of letters like VS Naipaul, a beacon of freedom, of freedom of expression, would be a lot less powerful.
I’ve read The Writer And His World. And I still have the book.