With friends like these...

With friends like these…

It is disappointing to witness Nobel Laureate Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul resorting to film-star style hyperbole. Actors tend to unleash a glamour offensive whenever they feel neglected. Sir Vidia, possibly the grouchiest high-brow writer in the English language, prefers to attack, denigrate or let out an inky pall of gloom. Naipaul has been using this crafty stratagem for decades. His targets are varied, ranging from Mahatma Gandhi whom he called “shallow,” to himself: “I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading”.

Indeed, a favourite theme is his own sense of fractured identity necessitating periodic fulminations against aspects of the Caribbean, Britain and India - being Trinidad born, resident in Britain and ethnic Indian. In all of this, the thrust is why can’t all these black and brown people be more like the English? Of course, Naipaul wouldn’t be himself without contrariness. So when he moans, as he did in a recent interview with the Literary Review: “England has not appreciated or acknowledged the work I have done,” it’s just like Sir Vidia to ignore the honours showered on him. Naipaul was awarded the Booker in 1971, sheaves of the highest praise from the most eminent literary critics in the land, bushels of other lesser-known prizes, honorary doctorates from the Universities of Cambridge, London and Oxford, and of course, the knighthood, conferred on him in 1991.

Naipaul enjoys being outrageous - famously ringing the death knell for the novel as a literary construct - before writing yet another one presently. He likes attacking other authors, preferably famous, beloved and dead. Sample the latest broadside, delivered during the same interview. Sir Vidia ridiculed the writing talent of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Ernest Hemingway – all at one sitting! His sensational comments make good copy and excerpts from the interview were carried in newspapers and TV channels around the world.. His testiness is both quirky and amusing. There is no pulling of punches: Naipaul calls Jane Austen “vapid”, Dickens “repetitive”, Hardy “unbearable”, Hemingway too “busy being an American” and Henry James “the worst writer in the world”.

Sir Vidia doesn’t mind being a repeat offender. This latest volley is a sequel to a similar outburst from 2001. Then, he suddenly undertook to paint EM Forster as a homosexual preying on his fresh-faced students, calling him an “odious fraud.” This bout, also with the Literary Review, described James Joyce as “incomprehensible”.

To many, as Sir Vidia well knows, such posturing is entertaining. Naipaul is, after all, high literary dudgeon. Reading about him pronouncing in such cavalier fashion on other literary greats does afford a measure of sadistic pleasure.

While most of Naipaul’s allergies, always subject to revision at a later date, serve to add to his eccentric image, one of his habitual punching bags, his abiding pessimism about Moslems who practice: “the most uncompromising kind of imperialism,” did pay off most handsomely. That is provided you accept the thesis that the horrific terrorism engendered by Islamic fundamentalism, stopped the process of passing over Naipaul for the Nobel, finally securing it for him in 2001. His relentless criticism of Islamic people who, says Sir Vidia, contain “an element of neurosis and nihilism,” also does not get in the way between himself and his Pakistan-born second wife, Nadira. Fact is, everything one can say about Naipaul - the opposite is also true!

Other favourite punching bags include the dark-skinned peoples of Africa, India and the American Deep South. Naipaul wears eloquent spurs digging into the flanks of the post-colonial lands he analyses, but he is also a Quixotic champion of nuggets of good in all that he criticises. The trouble, such as it is, might be in the prism through which Sir Vidia views things. He is, like all of us, a product of his experience. But his experience is that of “a colonial brought up in English schools, on English ways and the pretended reasonableness of the English mind,” as the late great Literary Critic and Cultural Historian Alfred Kazin put it.

In the Indian context, Naipaul has gained popularity of late for his strong support for Hindutva. This has played well with the intelligentsia, relieved for the respite from all the dark books he has written on India - An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilisation (1977), and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). It was as if Naipaul was now satisfied that India was “modernising” after all.

The disturbing thing about the endorsement is that it comes from a pretty anachronistic cove. It is a patronising pat on the back from a right-wing dinosaur, an erudite Colonel Blimp, replete with cravat and broad-brimmed hat, a pucca “white” sahib - an over-blown caricature from a world that no longer exists.

(800 words)
By Gautam Mukherjee
Also published in The Pioneer, Sunday 9th April, 2006 www.dailypioneer.com