Monday, March 12, 2007

Naipaul and India

An interesting if not wholly original essay by V.S. Naipaul (is this an excerpt?) in the Guardian. It is about his origins as a writer, his techniques, and the ways he had to adapt his writing to the world as he experienced it. One of the most engaging passages, and one of Naipaul's defining characteristics, is that he doesn't claim any great kinship with his marginalized homeland:

I was born in 1932 on the other side of the Atlantic in the British colony of Trinidad, an outcrop of Venezuela and South America. It was a small island, essentially agricultural when I was born (like Venezuela, it had oil, which was beginning to be developed). It had a racially mixed population of perhaps half a million, with my own immigrant Asian Indian community (finely divided by religion, education, money, caste background) of about 150,000.

I had no great love for the place, no love for its colonial smallness. I saw myself as a castaway from the world's old civilisations, and I wished to be part of that bigger world as soon as possible. An academic scholarship in 1950, when I was 18, enabled me to leave. I went to England to do a university course with the ambition afterwards of being a writer. I never in any real sense went back.

Nevertheless, Naipaul went back to the colonized world when he wrote now famous nonfiction about India, a process he recounts in the second half of the essay. Worth a read.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:03 PM

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