Literary Musings: Naipaul, The History of the Vanquished and the Search for Identity

“Most of us know the parents and grandparents we come from. But that would only be a fragment of the truth. We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes, we can be strangers to ourselves”.

I have just started reading the V.S. Naipaul book “A Way In The World”, my first Naipaul book in a few years. As a reader, it is a pleasure to be back. Nobody writes quite like “Sir Vidia” Naipaul, though many try. Like quite a few of Naipaul’s books, this one too is concerned with ordinary people caught in a no-man’s land as far as their identities are concerned. Like Naipaul (who was born of parents of Indian origin in Trinidad in the West Indies, and who then left for England in his teens), the characters of many of his books face a similar identity crisis. Are they Indians, are they West Indians, are they English, or are they all of the above? These various identities all manifest themselves in Naipaul’s finely etched characters, often with tragic consequences. Naipaul has spent a lifetime exploring the search for individual and collective identity.

And in all of Naipaul’s books, there is always a suggestion of huge underlying tragedies lying just below the surface. In his book “A Turn In the South” published in 1989 for example, which dealt with his travels in the American Deep South, it is the enduring legacy of slavery and the way it continues to affect Southerners of all races a hundred and thirty years after it was abolished. In “Beyond Belief” (published in the 1990s), it was about how Pakistan had failed to reinvent itself after Partition from India in 1947. A five thousand year old common history and culture was forgotten (and indeed reviled) overnight, leading to tragic consequences and for want of a better word, an amputated state with people who were suddenly told that their ancient heritage was irrelevant and worth abandoning.

In Naipaul’s view, these nations and peoples have never recovered, and have lost their own identities in the bargain. They are “wounded civilizations”. When Naipaul was deservedly (and belatedly) awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Nobel Prize Committee said “Naipaul is (Joseph) Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished”.

Of course, no writer I have read is able to write about such weighty topics and express these existential dilemmas as well as Naipaul. He has the ability to say so much with so few words. His writing style is economical, even sparse. Yet no one quite captures the essence of a person or place quite like Naipaul. A few writers, such as Paul Theroux (“Sir Vidia’s shadow”) have tried over the years. Theroux has his own compelling writing style, and it is evident that he is strongly influenced by Naipaul. However, Theroux’s sensibilities remain American and his perception and judgment of his environment is primarily from an American standpoint. Theroux also does not possess the historical perspective of the past that Naipaul does.

Naipaul is different. In his travel books, Naipaul is the eternal traveller, the observer, the perpetual outsider. He is a stranger to his surroundings and is yet intimately aware of them – an unusual combination. His knowledge of the past and local histories of the places he visits is astonishing. Being the perpetual outsider has its advantages as far as his writing goes. Also, his intelligence and perception of the reality he finds himself in (wherever he goes) is most acute. Combine this with his formidable writing skills, and you have an irresistible combination, a unique view of the world. While his writing is weighty and thought-provoking, it never comes across as self-important or presumptuous, maudlin or sentimental. There is no hyperbole or exaggeration, just a keen sense of the past and present and an eye for detail that is unsurpassed.

Naipaul’s skill and ability in describing a foreign place and its people runs in the family. His younger brother Shiva Naipaul was also a brilliant writer who wrote about travel and the search for identity in a very good book titled “Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth”. Read it if you get the opportunity. You will not regret it. Shiva died in tragic circumstances in 1985 at the age of only forty. After his death the British newspaper the Spectator established the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for "the writer best able to describe a visit to a foreign place or people...of a culture evidently alien to the writer". There are those who feel that Shiva would have surpassed his older brother as a writer had he lived.

But let me get back to V.S. Naipaul. His writing in many cases is prophetic – his 1989 book on India “A Million Mutinies Now” examines how India is almost always on the verge of imploding, beset as it is by caste, religious and linguistic tensions that are in some cases, thousands of years old. Happily, this particular prophecy about India has still not come to pass, though the recent riots in Mumbai bear evidence of what Naipaul writes about.

Of course, Naipaul swore never to return to India after his first visit there in the early 1960s, which led to the book “An Area of Darkness”. As a person of Indian descent, Naipaul was disillusioned with India and felt that India and its peoples had been traumatized by centuries of invasion and colonial rule. He thought of India as spiritually exhausted, an isolationist state clinging to the empty symbols and rituals of an ancient past whose spirit was dead. He swore never to return. But return he did, many times.

His subsequent books on India have turned out to be progressively more optimistic. He has admitted that in India, somehow the ancient past co-exists (sometimes uneasily) with the present. In no other country in the world has this happened. The “history of the vanquished” has still not been written as far as India is concerned. India is the only country in the world where the “pagan” past is still alive and well.

In his books, Naipaul often explores the idea of what can best be termed as ‘racial” or “genetic” memory. Possibly some ancient genetic memory was stirred in Naipaul on his initial visit to India. So though he was troubled and distressed by much that he saw in India and there was not much about his sensibilities that was Indian, could it be that some long-dormant genetic memory of the emerald-green fields and sugarcane plantations of his ancestors in Eastern Uttar Pradesh drew him back again and again to the land of his forefathers? Did Naipaul, the eternal outsider, finally get a glimpse of home? It is possible.

His ancestors moved halfway across the world in the late nineteenth century to escape the crushing poverty of the North Indian plains and to find a better life. It is possible that Naipaul came back a century later to the land his ancestors left and found home in the bargain. For a man who is an outsider wherever he is and whose world view was, is and remains bleak, it must have come as quite a surprise.

So if I wake up one morning from a vivid dream of sitting by the side of the Ganges River in Bengal, with the fog rolling up the river and the sky full of rain, with the smell of wet earth and vegetation and with fishing boats outlined in the hazy distance, if I wake up with the distinct feeling of intimately knowing a place I have never been to, I will remember V.S. Naipaul and his supposition of genetic inheritance and memory. Because home may be a place you have never ever been to before.