10 highlights
-
Arif speculated that with less than a month having passed since the 9/11 terror attack, the Nobel committee had possibly been swayed by the Islamic world-bashing tone of Naipaul’s travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981).
-
Sandeep’s grouse had a nationalist tinge—a feeling of being hurt by how condescendingly Naipaul had portrayed India’s material deprivation and inhuman living conditions in his India trilogy: An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilisation (1976), and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).
-
To borrow an often used expression for him, Naipaul was a writer’s writer. Few have used the English language with the creative mastery and clarity that illuminate his prose.
-
In the broadest sense of the term, he was his own man. He never let his insights and observations of people and places become hostage to political correctness.
-
He wrote it as he saw it. That’s probably one of the reasons he was able to see signs of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism two decades before it became an international security menace.
-
Naipaul’s two other significant novels came in the 1970s—In a Free State (1971), which won him the Booker Prize, and A Bend in the River (1979), set in mid-twentieth century Africa.
-
Some could never reconcile with the ruthlessness of the outsider’s scrutiny to which Naipaul subjected his Indian experience in his three books on India.
-
If An Area of Darkness riled post-Independence patriots for his analysis of Indian poverty and ignorance, India: A Wounded Civilisation angered secularists, as Naipaul took a hard look at the loss of the country’s civilisational construct and cultural vandalism suffered during centuries of Muslim rule.
-
In an interview in the late 1990s, he said, “You say that India has a secular character, which is historically unsound. You say that Hindu militancy is dangerous. Dangerous or not, it is a necessary corrective to the history I have been talking about. It is a creative force, and it will prove to be so.”
-
An exceptional talent like him didn’t need the crutch of borrowed virtues. “The only lies for which we are punished are those we tell ourselves,” he once wrote in In a Free State.