Opinion: VS Naipaul's journey to find his roots

'If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead', wrote Naipaul famously about the many controversies he got embroiled in. He was unsparing in his critique of the post-colonial world, and his writings reflected the irony and the rootlessness, which the colonised societies suffered after the European conquest.

Born in Trinidad in 1932, VS Naipaul had humble beginnings. But he won a scholarship to study at Oxford. His first novel was 'The Mystic Masseur', published in 1957, which was a runaway success. His initial writings focused on the Caribbean, with comedy as its principle theme.

But soon he ventured into travel writing, making trips across South America, Africa and Asia. He wrote extensively on the nature of rootlessness, and the conflicts between the colonisers and the colonised. In his analysis, he was unsparing of both. For his fans around the world, his writing sparkled with clarity. Touching upon issues which defined the post-colonial world. He shed no tears for the oppressed, nor did he offer any solutions to the chaos exploding in the nations and societies he was critical about.

Naipaul wrote three books on India. His travels in the land of his ancestors was as much a discovery of his own past as itworked as research material for his book - 'An Area of Darkness' written in 1964, which was promptly banned. It was described as too pessimistic, an unfair portrayal, which reeked of European arrogance. It was denounced as a description, which looked at India through the spectacles of a 'Brown Sahib'. Naipaul's other two books on India were no less controversial. In his description of India as 'A Wounded Civilisation', Naipaul glazes over much of India's historical achievements, and presents to the readers a picture of a nation which has been plundered and laid waste beyond redemption. But despite their faults, Naipaul's books on India remain eminently readable.

About the Caribbean, Naipaul writes: "The history of the islands can never be told satisfactorily. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation and nothing was created in The West Indies."

It is this dry humour, blended with a certain lack of emotion, which sets apart Naipaul's writing.

It is also hard to miss the patronising tone and the arrogance in Naipaul's writing. In his travel books, Naipaul examines the fallacies of a society with the disapproving gloom of a European. A glimpse of a prejudiced mind is seen in his 'Among the Believers - AnIslamic Journey', where Naipaul narrates his experience of travelling through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. The narrative is set in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Flipping through the pages of 'Among the believers', one is struck to the extent to which a brilliant writer can be handicapped by his prejudices against a religion he may not like. It is purple prose, no doubt, but the arguments sound more emotional than based on logic.

Perhaps nothing captures the contradictions and dilemmas tearing up this genius, who always searched for his roots more pithily than what he wrote in his book: The Return of Eva Peron - "It came to me that the great novelists wrote about highly organised societies. I had no such society; I couldn't share the assumptions of the writers; I didn't see my world reflected in theirs. My colonial world was more mixed and secondhand, and more restricted'.

Naipaul won every literary prize there was to be won. He clinched the Man Booker prize in 1971, and the Nobel for literature in 2001. His fans loved him, and the many controversies he stumbled into, only kept him in the media glare, and enlarged his aura. But away from his literary genius, VS Naipaul lived with an acute sense of bitterness. Torn away from his roots, he was a man thrust into the chaos of the post-colonial world, wanting to be European, without being able to see the merits of his own ancestral culture.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)