V.S. NAIPAUL: A WAY IN THE WORLD
Icame upon my first Naipaul novel, A Bend in the River, as a seventeen-year-old in 1980s’ Dhaka, purely by chance while browsing the family bookshelf. I was fairly well read in Bengali literature for someone my age, but my acquaintance with world literature was still nascent. I’d encountered a few classics—Tolstoy and Maupassant, Maugham and Hemingway, but nothing more contemporary than that.
In this context, Naipaul’s opening words came at me like a brick through glass: “The world is what it is, men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” Here was a directness and immediacy that I didn’t know I could expect of literature.
Until then, literature to me was entirely about other people, far away. I wanted it to be about me, too. Rather, it seemed to be from another time or place—19th century European aristocracy or rural Bengali gentility—before it could ever be mine. The realities of a ragged new capital like Dhaka seemed too ordinary to merit literary treatment.
But in the smallness of Salim’s daily life and modest ambitions, in the sudden eruption of troubles, Naipaul rendered the unremarkable not only fit but urgent as a literary topic. Decades later, awash in a glut of post-colonial writing, it is hard to fully fathom today the astonishing power and newness of Naipaul’s early works.
Naipaul’s critics will claim that even as he opened up new vistas, he didn’t treat his subjects fairly. He was too harsh, too disdainful. He didn’t show them as they wished to be seen. He showed them as their colonial critics might. All this may be true to an extent, but it still misses the momentousness of what he accomplished: he recognised and established that even the “half-made” deserved literary attention.
Before Naipaul, the post-colonial writer was consigned to retelling folktales, narrating small-town shenanigans or scripting colonial nostalgia. Even today, there is a pressure on them to report on their specific sub-culture—either as a good native or as a good immigrant. Naipaul was the first to break free from such restrictions, forging ahead into new cultures. It matters less how much he got “right”; what matters is that he laid claim to the entire world as a subject—and he did so in a way, thanks to the impeccability of his style and the acuity of his observations, that his iterations of the world simply could not be ignored.
His entire career may be seen as a long process of laying claim—and thus coming to belong, somehow or somewhat. He worked his way from the outside in. After visits to Africa and Asia, in both fiction and nonfiction, he began inching closer towards a new home. There were false steps, such as Mr Stone and the Knights Companion. And then a step closer to London, with The Mimic Men. And finally, The Enigma of Arrival, a formal mystery with which he laid claim at last to his adoptive home, England. The outsider had come to tell the natives about the quality of their rains, the quaintness of their customs and the absurdity of finding himself amidst it all.
Naipaul was by all accounts not an easy man. I got to know him a little, as one of the hosts of the Dhaka Lit Fest, which he graced in 2016—his last public appearance. In my encounters with him, at the festival and a few times in London, he was always gentle and thoughtful. He cared little what people said about him; he wondered only how his writing might fare in time.
He was a boy from nowhere, who had made a way in the world with the power of his words alone. In the process, he built a magnificent edifice of letters, which will surely stand the test of time.