‘Beta, leave India to Indians,’ the famed writer was once advised by his mother
new delhi — VS Naipaul, known for his timeless books and unsparing views, made his last public appearance in India in January 2015 at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), where he spoke at length and was even moved to tears at the overwhelming reception he got.
Recalling his maiden visit to India, the Nobel laureate had said in 2015: “I came to India first because of curiosity about my ancestral land. My publisher agreed to pay me an advance for anything I would write on India.”
But after writing two celebrated books on India, An Area of Darkness and A Wounded Civilization, his mother asked him to leave India. “The only Hindi word my mother carried from India was ‘beta’ and she said ‘Beta, leave India to the Indians’,” he quipped.
Naipaul took part in two sessions — A
House for Mr Biswas, which revolved around his masterpiece by the same name, and The
Writer and the World, in which he talked about his literary journey.
Naipaul was in conversation with Farrukh Dhondy, who asked him about his life in Trinidad, the journey as a writer, his memories of India and his writings about the country.
Dhondi asked him how come he was born in Trinidad despite his deep Indian roots. Naipaul said that it had nothing to do with him. “It had to do with my family and my parents,” he said, pointing out that there was a massive migration from India to the Caribbean islands during the middle of the 19th century and that he and his relatives “had to live with the result of that migration”.
When Dhondy proclaimed that the session would be like “a conversation between two old friends sitting with a glass of wine and looking at the sunset”, an emotional Naipaul retracted humbly: “I do not like talking about the sunset. It can be used against me to infer that I am in the sunset of my life. Unhappy metaphor.”
His wife, Lady Nadira, sat on a chair behind him, taking notes, holding the microphone when he became too tired to hold it and prompting the words when he forgot what he was saying or ran out of steam.
Naipaul also recalled the hardships during the initial days of writing.
“I was one of those people who desperately wanted to be a writer but had nothing to write about,” he said and advised young writers not be repetitive.
“Even Dickens went wrong when he began to repeat. An author should avoid doing that.” —