My first meeting with Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was in the mid-60s. He was in his early 30s, I just out of university. He was making his initial trip to India, which was turned into the book An Area of Darkness . Naipaul, who died at the age of 85 on August 11, had said he came to India largely out of curiosity, keen to have a look at the land of his forefathers. He was appalled by what he saw. The squalor and poverty repelled him.

Though he was several years my senior, he somehow took to me and we hit it off. Needless to say, I was flattered by his attention, as he had already made his mark as a writer. On his many subsequent visits to India, he invariably got in touch with me. I hosted parties for him in my Mumbai home, introducing him to my friends and providing him with contacts of people he could interview for the book he was working on at the time. We travelled together to Kolkata and Delhi. We went to Punjab when it was in the throes of terrorism, and even to the tiny hill station of Kasauli, where I had a family home.

Two more books on India followed — India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now . Unlike the first two scathing travelogues, A Million Mutinies Now was surprisingly mellow, even a little optimistic about India, though he would bristle if you pointed this out to him. He didn’t like to be categorised or be placed in any convenient slot. Though he did not say it, I think he felt he was a unique writer, one of a kind. And he was. His rootlessness — Indian by ethnicity, born in Trinidad and then transplanted to England — and his outsider’s view of the world, especially the developing world, gave him wonderfully penetrating insight, even if they were bleak and harsh. Add to that his immense scholarship and his mastery over the English language, and you had a writer of rare genius.

His writings resonated with me, as they must have with so many of his admirers. His spare prose, not a word out of place, was a delight. I devoured all that he wrote and became a huge fan. A House for Mr Biswas was a classic, but my favourite was In a Free State , which won the Booker Prize in 1971. The book was all about alienation, of three displaced people living in a foreign environment, echoing his own life. I interviewed him and wrote about him several times over the years.

However, my write-up after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 apparently upset him. I wrote that he had been on the shortlist for the coveted prize for several years but opposition to his candidature from prominent Muslim leaders had stalled his getting it. His two books on Islam — Among the Believers and Beyond Belief had agitated much of the Islamic world. He had called Pakistan “a criminal enterprise” and was persona non grata there.

Then came the 2001 strike on New York’s World Trade Centre. And suddenly the public mood changed. Naipaul’s unsparing take on Islam became more acceptable. Soon afterwards, he won the Nobel. I don’t think he liked my linking the two events. Coincidence? Of course, he richly deserved it, but as everyone knows, the Nobel Prize committee is not isolated from politics. And politics worked for him that time. After that write-up, I was dumped, as others have been, the best-known being the writer Paul Theroux. The last time I saw Naipaul was at the Thinkfest held in Goa in 2011. He was in a wheelchair and clearly not in good health. But he was quite affable, though the earlier warmth was gone.

Why did some of his writing evoke so much hostility? One reason was his bluntness. He refused to be politically correct. He continued to call Africans Negros. He simply wrote what he saw and intuitively felt. He was unflinching, uncompromising, and remained true to himself. He couldn’t care less if some people were offended. But at the core of his writing and what he said, there was always an element of truth. And the truth often hurts.

His observation, during a train journey in India, of people squatting near the railway tracks, lota in hand, baring their bottoms as they defecated, upset many Indians. Yet, it was true then, half a century ago, and it is true today, Swachh Bharat notwithstanding. He claimed Islam had a “calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history... you have to say, ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.” Many Muslims thought that was nonsensical; I feel there is some truth there. Was he a racist and an Islamophobe, as some critics claimed? He married a Muslim and calling Africans Negros is hardly racist. He once wrote, “If a writer does not generate hostility, he is dead.” Naipaul remained very much alive in that sense.

But he could sometimes be outrageously mischievous. He characterised Ayatollah Khomeini’s notorious fatwa on Salman Rushdie as “an extreme form of literary criticism” and commented that when an Indian woman puts a bindi on her forehead, she is saying, “I have nothing in my head”. Outrageous, of course, but could there be a kernel of truth in that?

I shall personally miss him greatly and the world of letters is that much poorer with his passing.

Rahul Singh is a former editor of the Reader’s Digest

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW