The Indian Trilogy

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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? Although it presents an unflattering portrait of his ancestral homeland, this may be the best of the three works. His approach to the genre seems to still be under development. The style differs from his later trips, which paint a vast panorama through extensive interviews. Instead this is a powerful series of personal narratives, culled from a year of travel. Naipaul is at the center of the story told in this book. There is a dark humor in his early voice, and a poetry that was later lost.

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. The first book of trilogy evoked strong sentiments in my youth and generated a lot of hatred for the author who was hellbent on telling me the obvious truth and reality of Indian life. Nobody has ever written so courageously and truthfully about India and his portrait of Indian psyche lays bare the banality and stupidity with which Indian mind has been riddled with since last millennium. But he was sympathetic of the reasons and correctly nailed down the deprivation of Indian thought on the Islamic invasion which terrorised Indian spirit. The first book of the trilogy was also a personal discovery for the author and its fascinating to walk with the author on his solo journey and to read first hand, his impressions of his native land, eccentricities of people he encountered and his bewilderment at the strange rituals and customs of the land that he was exploring. Naipaul was critical of Indian weather, Indian landscape, Indian arts, Indian science, Indian religion, almost everything that India had to offer but I beleive, not because these were deficient in any way but rather because he expected more or perhaps was expecting something different. India is a strange land and one either loves it or hate it and Naipaul ended up hating it in his first attempt to understand it. But I don’t blame him, India is so different and Naipaul who had till then only seen simple societies of Caribbean & Europe was not ready to fathom the intricacies of a complex social construct of an ancient land. It would take much more time for any outsider like Naipaul to understand the diversity and spirituality of India. It's not possible to understand India with western lenses that Naipaul kept on during his first sojourn to India and ended up labelling it, wrongly in my opinion, as an area of darkness. 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." Naipaul's fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. The novelist Robert Harris has called Naipaul's portrayal of Africa racist and "repulsive," reminiscent of Oswald Mosley's fascism. [129] Edward Said argued that Naipaul "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting what Said classified as "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies". [130] Said believed that Naipaul's worldview may be most salient in his book-length essay The Middle Passage (1962), composed following Naipaul's return to the Caribbean after 10 years of exile in England, and the work An Area of Darkness (1964).

Publication Order of Willie Chandran Books

Smyer, Richard (1992). Kelly, Richard; Hassan, Dolly Zulakha (eds.). "A New Look at V. S. Naipaul". Contemporary Literature. 33 (3): 573–581. doi: 10.2307/1208485. ISSN 0010-7484. JSTOR 1208485. 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.

In 2011, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A House for Mr Biswas, and ten years after Naipaul had won the Nobel Prize for literature, he dedicated the book to his late wife Patricia Anne Hale, who had died in 1996. Visaria & Visaria 1983, p.515,b: Quote: "Most of the emigrants probably left even their villages of origin for the first time in their lives, and they were not fully aware of the hardships involved in long voyages and in living abroad. Diseases — cholera, typhoid, dysentery — were often rampant in depots or temporary abodes for labourers at ports of embarkation and also on ships. Consequently, mortality among the recruits and emigrants was very high. The data on long voyages to British Guiana and the West Indies clearly show that mortality at sea was alarmingly high. Before 1870, on an average about 17 to 20 per cent of the labourers departing from Calcutta port died on the ships before reaching their destination." I came to London. It had become the centre of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. London was not the centre of my worldWith 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 I do not recall how I came to own An Area of Darkness by V.S. Naipaul. It's not a genre I normally read, but I did own it, and having it I decided to give it a try. It was worth it. And interesting. I have never traveled to India, although I did live in the Caribbean not far from Trinidad. My landlady and her family in Grenada were Indian and also from Trinidad. If I had not lived there I would not have known what a significant percentage of the population on the East Indian islands are descendants from India.

Left) Chaguanas is just inward of the Gulf of Paria coast. County Caroni and Naparima were fictionalised as County Naparoni in Naipaul's The Suffrage of Elvira. (Right) Indian women go shopping in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1945. As his journey progressed, for it was a journey on several levels, he became, if not more emotionally involved, at least interested. The next time he visits is when the green revolution has succeeded in the country and we have started the march to some self reliance, but make no mistake he does not sugarcoat anything, but sometimes goes overboard for criticising some ideas which he finds as repugnant.Sometimes he behaves like a whining Sahib: the trees were "disfigured by the Indian dust", or other complains that would seem irrelevant to an unassuming, seasoned Indian. At the ghats of Banaras near the pyres, "above occasional blazes... family groups smiled and chattered." Well, what else do you expect? The dead are dead. This book does not describe India as it is, but India as it looks, to him. He hits some notes and misses some, and that too is subjective. The hotel sequence in Kashmir is easily my favorite, especially the character of a caretaker named Aziz. It can work as a comic novella in itself.