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BOOKS

Sir Vidia's Shadow

Naipaul doesn't need the luxury of a biographer to unravel the writer's truth

By S. Prasannarajan

Sir Vidia is paying a price for the Prize. It's not the fault of the text, but the context. To be precise, it's all because of Osama bin Laden, Islam's troglodyte. The post-September 11 Nobel to Naipaul, concluded the secular neoliterates, is the Swedish Academy's way of joining America's war on Islamic terror. Naipaul, goes the socially correct, is a racist, an Anglicised brown who hates both browns and blacks; worse, he is anti-Islam. For the Guardian variety liberals, his civilisational Brahminism is a transparent camouflage for his irrational hatred. From this part of the world, the writer's ancestral home, the criticism is too ridiculous to be literary: Naipaul is a communalist, a nationalist bigot worthy of an RSS membership. Misreading Naipaul seems to have become bad sociology's first lesson in literature.

This is the Edward Said school of reading great literature, though, the only difference here is the readers are not as sophisticated as Said in their argument or appreciation. The Professor, for instance, has reduced writers like Albert Camus to inanimate footnotes to the culture studies of the imperium. Something similar is happening to Naipaul. To make him accessible to their social mind, Naipaul's detractors are isolating his text from his life. Lillian Feder, professor of English, classics and comparative literature at the City University of New York, though unleashes no such sociological malarkey. It's appreciation with classroom density, and it hopes to be a literary biography: "...the lifelong process of self-creation, an individual narrative of a search for truth that incorporates the historical and social framework in which it is enacted."

An honourable academic pursuit. But Naipaul is one writer who can do without a Boswell, for the Naipaul voyage is one of literature's most engaging acts in reinvention of the self. From The Mystic Masseur (1957) to Half a Life (2001), it has been a long passage of marginal men trapped in history, of dusklands in civilisation's backyard, of the exile's waystations. Naipaul, the loneliest of writers, and an elder statesman in the republic of the displaced, a fugitive from a half-made society, is not in search of truth. Truth is in writing itself-or in the state of being in the world. And in this world, only the English countryside of Wiltshire seems to have some order, the order of a hermitage, from where Sir Vidia-Saint Vidia in outlook-continues to deliver wisdom, much to the pleasure of those who appreciate refined imagination, and much to the indignation of those who haven't the mental refinement to know him.

And Naipaul on the world echoes Eliot: after such knowledge, what forgiveness. He means more than Islam.

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