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LITERATURE:V.S.NAIPAUL
A Prize For Sir Vidia
The new Nobel laureate in literature
is a civilisational man who travels in great style. And India for him
is an enduring idea of ancestry.
By S. Prasannarajan
The Swedish Academy has put it in an unNaipaulian
style. The highest prize in literature has been given to Sir Vidiadhar
Surajprasad Naipaul "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible
scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories".
Quite a mouthful for a writer who prefers elegant four-letter words to
consonant-heavy thicket. Though, quite natural for the Swedish Academy-with
infrequent exceptions (once in a while a Garcia Marquez or a Toni Morrison
or a Jose Saramago)-is known for garlanding superannuated national monuments
and dysfunctional dissidents, who require the support system of adjectives,
for the nouns themselves may not mean much to the world beyond Stockholm.
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| LONELY GRANDEUR:
The master chronicler's moment of glory is literature's finest as
well |
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Redeemingly, this time, adjectives and word size
of the citation apart, the Academy has chosen a writer who, in lonely
grandeur, continues to make sense of a world condemned by the passions
of history, a people let down by the conceits of civilisation, in scantly-clad
sentences that are patented items in the marketplace of imagination.
The honour, for so long an October anticipation,
coincides with Naipaul's return from traveller's notebook to novelist's
memory, that too after his famous discovery few years ago of fiction's
cadaver floating in the sewage system of 20th century art.
| The honour, for so long
an October anticipation, coincides with Naipaul's return from traveller's
notebook to novelist's memory. |
Half A Life, first featured in India Today with
exclusive excerpts and interview (September 3, 2001), is not only a comeback
announcement of a master storyteller but the memorial service of a man
who has no escape from the sorrows and soliloquies of badly torn societies.
In his first novel set in India, the title itself is a give away, at least
for hardcore Naipaul fans, in whose iconography, by the way, Sir Vidia
is the greatest living writer in English. Half A Life is a culminative
text from the finest chronicler of half-made societies. For, in Planet
Naipaul, perfection is there only in the narration, not in lives or the
stage on which they are lived.
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| THE LAUREATE
AND HIS LADY: Sir Vidia with wife Nadira |
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An exemplary life in this respect is Mohun Biswas
in Naipaul's breakthrough novel A House for Mr Biswas (1961). A failed
pundit, an accidental journalist, Biswas, one of fiction's enduring citizens,
is an idea personified with lots of ancestral input. The tragi-comic evolution
of Biswas, who is genetically modelled after Naipaul's own father, is
an essay in the existential grammar of the colonial citizen, with no oversized
angst, with no sentimental exhibitionism: "Ten weeks before he died,
Mr Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St James, Port of Spain,
was sacked. He had been ill for some time. In less than a year he had
spent more than nine weeks at the Colonial Hospital and convalesced at
home for even longer. When the doctor advised him to take a complete rest,
the Trinidad Sentinel had no choice. It gave Mr Biswas three months' notice
and continued, up to the time of his death, to supply him every morning
with a free copy of the paper."
Small incentives from the sociology of the colonised
heritage, the borders of which are extended in works like In a Free State
(1971), A Bend in the River (1979) and A Way in the World (1994). In his
unforgiving, remorseless pages emerge the mutated child of history, as
strikingly as in, say, A Bend in the River, a novel set in a Zaire-like
country where the protagonist Selim is on the run-from the violent eruptions
of an undead history, for it is not his world, and his claims on it mocked
by the power of the past: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing,
who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." And
this world is a Naipaulian obsession, this world replete with the faultlines
of conquest and fear, this irredeemable duskland, an enlarged Conradian
heart of darkness, whose new variation is the nameless African country
as portrayed in Half A Life.
| In an age of writers as
performers of conscience-keeping, he alone sees the vandalised national
soul, and he has the intellectual honesty to name the vandal. |
Sentimentalists are prone to call Naipaul a bitter
disillusionist with no heart. Wrong. Read his The Enigma of Arrival (1987),
perhaps his finest work, part history, part memory, part fiction, set
in the pastoral Wiltshire, part of the English West Country, and currently
the novelist's home. Naipaul, a novelist of constant arrivals and departures,
finds a "house" for himself here, amidst the ruins of the imperial
pride; really, an arrival of cathartic resonance for the exile from Trinidad.
Though, for most exiles, who constitute an exclusive club in the fiction
of the past one hundred years, homecoming is a never-ending rite of memory,
for Naipaul, it is not a case of home-is-elsewhere. Rather, it is an inaccessible
idea of the displaced. The Enigma of Arrival, which even the Swedish Academy
says is his masterpiece, is an invention, a poignant one, made possible
by the limits of exile.
In varying degrees, this enigma of arrival is
evident in almost every waystation of the traveller. Particularly India,
which is very special for the son of Seepersad Naipaul, a journalist and
a failed short storywriter with an Indian Brahmin origin. "India
is an ancestral fascination, you cannot get away from it," he told
India Today on the eve of the publication of Half A Life. His three full-fledged
India books-An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilisation
(1977) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)-homage as well as protest,
disenchantment as well as enchantment, memory as well as denial, disillusion
as well as dirge. In An Area of Darkness, it is a journey from memory
to reality: "To me as a child the India that had produced so many
of the persons and things around me was featureless, and I thought of
the time when the transference was made as a period of darkness, darkness
which also extended to the land, as darkness surrounds a hut at evening,
though for a little way around the hut there is still light. That light
was the area of my experience, in time and place. And even now ... something
of darkness remains, in those attitudes, those ways of thinking and seeing,
which are no longer mine." This from the grandson of a man who had
recreated an eastern Uttar Pradesh village in central Trinidad.
In A Wounded Civilisation, despite the pervasive
Gandhian illusion, he sees the possibilities of intellectual awakening,
of inquiry. In A Million Mutinies, he is less angry and more compassionate
while passing through the little revolutions born out of the big one-Independence.
India for him is an enduring intimacy. "India was the great hurt.
It was a subject country. It was also the place from whose very great
poverty our grandfathers had to run away." For the grandchild, India
is the eternity of return.
For the shy Naipaul with the stutter of an upper-class
Englishman, India was an idea that fascinated and perplexed him. He was
a child of the Empire, a product of its institutions-Oxford, the BBC and
bohemian London-and a celebration of a time when triumph in the lottery
of life was to be born an Englishman. He grew to imbibe the best the Empire
had to offer. Particularly a love for India. He was a "native"
but he was very, very English. There was no contradiction. Not even in
his endorsement of Hindu nationalism.
| In Planet
Naipaul, perfection is there only in narration, not in the lives or
the stage on which they are lived.. |
Today, Sir Vidia returns as the civilisational
man, with patriarchal gravitas, much to the discomfort of the left-liberals
for whom nation is a bad idea. In an age of writers as street performers
of conscience-keeping, he alone seems to see the vandalised national soul,
and he has the honesty to name the vandal-Islam, what with his recent
remarks during a book reading in London: "Islam has had a calamitous
effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your
past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my
ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter' ... The story of
Pakistan is a terror story." This is not the rage of a fanatic, this
is the testament of the civilisational man. And nothing unusual from the
author of Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions
Among the Converted Peoples (1998), where Islam is not a religion but
an imperium, at war with the unifying ideas of globalisation: "Islam
is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim
is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief.
It makes imperial demands. A convert's world view alters. His holy places
are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history
alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a
part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that
is his." Bin Ladenists have something to ponder here.
This is not self-righteousness camouflaged in
civilisational elitism. It is the vision of a journeyman who is constantly
swayed by the idea of rootlessness, to some extent like the travels of
Willie Chandran in Half A Life, though, Naipaul, unlike his fictional
character, has not been "watching without seeing and hearing without
listening". Here is a writer who writes what he has seen, what he
has listened, and his translation of the world he has inherited and the
world he has lost is a text with few parallels in fiction or travel writing.
It is like clarity, precision and Naipaul.
"It takes a lot of work. The computer would
tell you that the average length of a word in my writing is four letters.
I like to use small words, because they compel you, force you, to clarify,
to be precise," he told India Today. As if the multisyllable passage,
as long as the distance between Trinidad and the rest of the globe, of
man, permanently reinventing his story, badly needs the structural intervention
of the wise man from Wiltshire, who at 69, is still time travelling.
And the Swedish Academy, at long last, has said,
what a show. Sir Vidia's moment of glory is literature's finest moment
as well.
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