The Indian Trilogy

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In his native Trinidad Naipaul had always somehow been of India without being Indian. After 12 years in London, and possibly in an attempt to regain some sense of his own roots, he decided to take a sabbatical year in India in 1962. This book is the fruit of that year. And this is Naipaul's next point. India is not a modern country because there is no sense of the passage of time, but rather passive acceptance of everything, and an escape into the land of imagination to compensate for what otherwise would be a reality too painful to bear (but again, this is also a feature of other third world countries such as that of Colombia, and a source of Magical Realism a la Garcia Marquez).

Individually, the stories are well-written. I've been interested in the issue of "foreign" Desi identity for a while. Years ago I asked a friend raised there, and his dad who never left, whether they considered Asians from colonial-era diaspora families (Trinidad, etc) "the same"? Father "Yes, of course" and son "No!" I've never heard Naipaul speak, assuming it was what is now called RP. This is where I admit that listening to Vance, I had to consciously remind myself that the author was not white. So, while probably inaccurate, it may have been better to have had the book read in an Indian accent? Also: Aitken, Gillon (2007) [2000]. "Introduction". In Gillon Aitken (ed.). Between Father and Son: Family Letters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. ISBN 978-0-307-42497-6 . Retrieved 19 September 2013. Jussawalla, Feroza F., ed. (1997). Conversations with V. S. Naipaul. Univ. Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-0-87805-945-4. I had more than changed flats: for the first time in my life I enjoyed solitude and freedom in a house. And just as, in the novel, I was able to let myself go, so in the solitude of the quiet, friendly house in Streatham Hill I could let myself go. ... The two years spent on this novel in Streatham Hill remain the most consuming, the most fulfilled, the happiest years of my life. They were my Eden." [58] Where there had been swamp at the foot of the Northern Range, with mud huts with earthen walls that showed the damp halfway up ... there was now the landscape of Holland... Sugarcane as a crop had ceased to be important. None of the Indian villages were like villages I had known. No narrow roads; no dark, overhanging trees; no huts; no earth yards with hibiscus hedges; no ceremonial lighting of lamps, no play of shadows on the wall; no cooking of food in half-walled verandas, no leaping firelight; no flowers along gutters or ditches where frogs croaked the night away." [2]A 1790 aquatint of High Street, Oxford, showing University College in the left foreground. A century and half later, V. S. Naipaul would spend four years at the college. Brahmin cows stagger around starving to death because they are holy. People starve to death or live off garbage because that is their Karma. Naipaul calls Ghandi one of the greatest failures of India. He brought in ideas of an egalitarian society and human rights that were never put into practice. The Indians did what they always did. They made Ghandi into a Holy Man to be revered and enshrined while ignoring his teaching. Form is worshiped even though it is devoid of substance. I could insert here my own observations as to how ideologues exist in every country. Worldwide people who cling to beliefs and social systems even when they have been proven not to work but that is a discussion for another time, I suppose. 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

This was my first introduction to Naipaul, and what an introduction it was. There are no holds barred right from the get-go ("Indians defecate everywhere"). There are plenty of astute analyses of the Indian way of life. For Naipaul, Indians are too fatalistic, they are irreedemably servile, the civilization as a whole seems to suffer from a crippling sense of complacency, and thus, Indians have no real sense of either history or beauty. Visaria & Visaria 1983, p.515,a: Quote: "A majority of the emigrants were from rural areas and from 'overcrowded agricultural districts' where 'crop failure could plunge sections of the village community into near-starvation'. In fact, there was a strong correlation between emigration and harvest conditions. Acute scarcity during 1873–5 in Bihar, Oudh and the North-Western Provinces provoked large-scale emigration through the port of Calcutta. The famine in south India during 1874–8 also resulted in heavy emigration." If you didn't know Naipaul was Indian (or even Trinidadian) you might mistake him for upper class British. He went to Oxford and lived in London and he peers down upon the natives he encounters in the former colonies. It's not always certain that the comical results are intentional. Knowing Naipaul from his other work, he is likely quite serious in his outlook. On way to Bombay he delivers scathing comments on Egypt, Arabia and Pakistan, setting an acerbic tone for things to come. What do you mean? You take the dictation. Write out these letters for me so I can send them out. They are urgent."

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Gorra, Michael (2008). After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-30476-2 . Retrieved 19 September 2013. So, at the height of their power, the British gave the impression of a people at play, a people playing at being English, playing at being English of a certain class. The reality conceals the play; the play conceals the reality. Now Naipaul is getting into his stride, and his alter ego lashes out at what he considers are feeble, "stupefied" Indian attempts to adopt alien art forms: a b Smith, Harrison (11 August 2018). "V.S. Naipaul, Nobel winner who offered 'a topography of the void,' dies at 85". The Washington Post . Retrieved 12 August 2018. Greig, Geordie. "VS Naipaul: You might not like it, but this is Africa – exactly as I saw it". Evening Standard. Archived from the original on 27 August 2014 . Retrieved 14 June 2014. As his journey progressed, for it was a journey on several levels, he became, if not more emotionally involved, at least interested.

I will try to review all the three books in one write up, but it’s such an monumental task, because the varied experiences which Naipaul had when travelling through the length and breadth of the country are rich, and Naipaul manages to give us all these experiences in such rich language that you can identify with everything which he says to us.

Publication Order of India Trilogy Books

Greenberg, Robert M. (Summer 2000). "Anger and the Alchemy of Literary Method in V. S. Naipaul's Political Fiction: The Case of The Mimic Men". Twentieth Century Literature. 46 (2): 214–237. doi: 10.2307/441958. JSTOR 441958.

V. S Naipaul has always been a controversial figure. Whether it is for his rude behaviour towards fellow writers at conferences or his show of support for India's Hindutva ring, Bharatiya Janata Party or his admission in his autobiography that his callousness killed his wife, this Trinidadian author has always been some sort of an enfant terrible of English literature. For all his genius, he also remains a vilified figure in India and not without reason. The Area of Darkness, when it was published in 1964, created an uproar among Indians and was intensely criticised for its unkind, deriding and supercilious view of India. The clerk, realizing that if he gave such a letter to the secretary he would be humiliated, ran off and wrote out all the letters for the man. That is how things operated in India. French 2008, p.96: "Peter Bayley had been impressed with Vidia's confidence, ... Vidia, then, was able to adjust and compose himself in a social, formal setting." Naipaul, V.S. (2007) [2000]. Gillon Aitken (ed.). Between Father and Son: Family Letters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. ISBN 978-0-307-42497-6 . Retrieved 19 September 2013. French 2008, pp.32–33: "The idyll could not last. In 1940, Seepersad and Droapatie were told by Nanie that they would be moving to a new family commune at a place called Petite valley. ... In 1943, Seepersad could stand it no longer at Petit Valley and the Naipaul family moved in desperation to 17 Luis Street.With promotional help from Andre Deutsh, Naipaul's novels would soon receive critical acclaim. [56] The Mystic Masseur was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1958, and Miguel Street the Somerset Maugham Award in 1961, W. Somerset Maugham himself approving the first-ever selection of a non-European. [56] 1957–1960: A House for Mr Biswas [ edit ] Seepersad Naipaul, father of V. S. Naipaul, and the inspiration for the protagonist of the novel, Mr Biswas, with his Ford Prefect Naipaul was accused of misogyny, and of having committed acts of "chronic physical abuse" against his mistress of 25 years, Margaret Murray, who wrote in a letter to The New York Review of Books: "Vidia says I didn't mind the abuse. I certainly did mind." [131] As a side-note, he does not take too seriously the objection that the British plundered and looted the country. India's history, Naipaul notes, is precisely this history of being plundered and looted by invaders) This is the first book by Naipaul that has helped me understand why people disliked him so much. It's an insufferably arrogant account of a traveler through India who does not speak the language and has no meaningful understanding of its history. He goes purely by gut and what he produces is an astoundingly negative portrait. He depicts India as a grotesque dystopia, doomed by its fatalism to eternal misery. We can see in retrospect that this judgement was a bit hasty. Tripathi, Salil (9 February 2004). "Commentary - Remembering the Indian poet Nissim Ezekial". New Statesman.