Short Stories, Novels, Literature, Poetry, Essays, Articles, Experiences, Interviews, Columns and more at TeluguPeople.com

THOUGHT PROVOKING ARTICLE ON MR. NAIPAUL FROM NET
- KS Kiran Kumar

Page: 1 of 1

Friends, I have recently come across the following write-up on Mr. Naipaul and thought of sharing with all. Although, I am not fully endorsing the argument put forward by the unknown writer, I must say, the contents of this write-up are really 'thought provoking'. QUOTE : WARNING : The following is a diatribe, and must be read only if you have lots of free time and a political bent of mind. Don't you think that Sir Vidiya gets entirely too much importance in India? Isn't it time that someone spoke up and told the fawning culture vultures of Delhi that this emperor is in fact without any clothes? Mr Vidiya Sagar Naipaul is descended from indentured labourers imported to British Guyana from northern Bihar. He is not Naipaul, but Mr Nepal, spelled in a fancy way. To properly understand Naipaul, one has to look at the history of the Indian labourers in the Caribbean. While the ones who went to British territories in the hope of economic betterment found their poverty and humiliation at British hands compounded further by the pain of displacement, the ones who went to Dutch Guyana, or modern day Suriname, found a much less racially hostile environment. The consequence is that today while the Surinamese Indians are much better adjusted people with benign feelings for Suriname as well as India, the Guyanese Indians exhibit extreme hostility and alienation. Mr. Naipaul is the prime example - the voice of alienation. The basic problem of Mr Naipaul and other people of his country, as well as those from Trinidad to a lesser extent, is that they are Biharis who learnt to wipe their asses instead of washing. This dichotomy unleashes a vicious distortion in the individual where Indianness comes into violent conflict with westernness, resulting in a constant sulk that is likely to explode in sudden fits of petty rage. Naipaul exhibits all these symptoms. He harbours contempt for his own Indian origins, because they keep him from being British, and harbours great resentment for the British, because they removed him from India. He also harbours hatred for the 'blacks' who share his country with him, and hatred for his country, which never delivered on the initial promise, and ended up becoming a prison. All this anger, rage, hatred and racial hypocrisy has been distilled over generations and fed to Caribbean Indians from an early age, until in Mr Naipaul it turned into poison. His writing is a desperate attempt to externalise some of this poison, and thus should not be paid too much attention. As for the Nobel, it should not be seen as some sign of approval for Mr Naipaul's rantings and ravings. The Nobel is a curious prize, in that it is usually 20 years too late. In Naipaul's case too, its for his early fiction, particularly for the novel 'A House for Mr Biswas'. To be fair, it is an excellent book, and is the definitive distillation of the Indian emigre experience in the Caribbean. After that though, Naipaul started writing travel books, and among the first ones he wrote was one about travelling to India. In the course of that book, Naipaul made the startling discovery that, horror of horrors - India was not perfect. In fact, it was dirty, dusty, corrupt and vast, with very few redeemable qualities. I have very little respect for people purporting to be travel writers who travel to far away lands and superimpose their own prejudices on alien cultures. Mr Naipaul, claiming to be a travel writer, makes no effort to understand the places he visits in their own socio-cultural milieu. Instead he views them through the prism of his proto-British sensibilities and gets very offended, about nearly everything. In short he is judgmental. Due to his rudeness, Naipaul was never taken very seriously as a person in Indian intellectual circles, until he got the Nobel. Even people who admired his novels admitted freely that as a commentator on different cultures, Naipaul was an embarrassment at best. On the other hand, Naipaul himself never made any claims on his PIO status - he remained a British intellectual. This state of affairs could have persisted till his passing, except recently a confluence of chance events conspired to thrust Naipaul into the limelight in India. Naipaul wrote a couple of books about travels in Muslim countries. The books, like much of Naipaul's work, were critical of local culture, and even more importantly, of Islam itself. Naipaul claims to have made the novel discovery that Islam demands a cultural submission from the converted people, prompting them to abandon their own indigenous culture, values and beliefs, and even history, and replaces these with the culture, values, beliefs and history of Arabia. Even a 10 year old knows that everyone in this world is a convert to some extent or the other. As a Hindu, I am conscious that modern day Hindus in India are converts to the Aryan religion from the tribal paganism that is still seen among the adivasis (however much Varsha Bhosle might protest otherwise) or from the religion of the Indus valley people. Christianity, which has spread globally through conversion, more often than not forced conversion, has done enormously greater damage to local cultures, beliefs and historical knowledge than Islam ever did. Christianity demands allegiance to the Vatican, and its holy sites are in Israel. The whole mythology of Christianity is based in Israel. So what’s so different about Islam that gets Mr Naipaul's goat? IMO, the progress of Islam outside Arabia has rarely been through conquest, and Islam was never used by corrupt nations to justify mass murder and colonisation like Christianity was. So Mr Naipaul's diatribe against Islam is obviously motivated. I did not understand why until I came to Florida and met various Caribbean Indian Hindus. I was surprised to find that anti-Muslim feelings among even these displaced individuals are as strong and fresh as they are among simple uneducated Hindus in cow belt India of today. 150 years away from the hatred and prejudice of India has done nothing to dim the fires of communal disharmony. It explains a lot of things about Naipaul, and I do not blame him for not being able to rise above the prejudices of his parents. However, I do object to conferring the Nobel on a bigot like him, not because the Nobel itself means anything, but because in simpler cultures the Nobel represents some sort of seal of approval by western intellectuals on the entire ovule of a man. The second chance event that elevated Naipaul was the ascension of the BJP in India. The BJP loves anyone who writes bad things about Muslims. If that writer also happens to have a Nobel, so much the better. Thus all of a sudden from an unwelcome outcast, Naipaul has become the cynosure of Indian eyes. These days you can not keep him away from India or away from the front pages of Indian newspapers who in their snobbery, place every stupid word he utters in bold type on the top. Today Mr Naipaul uttered another of his golden truths - in the Pravaasi Divas junket in New Delhi he proclaimed that Gandhi was a failure in South Africa. First of all, Mr Naipaul commenting on Gandhi is like a dog pissing at the sun. Secondly, Mr Naipaul, like most Guyanese and Trinidadian Indians, is vehemently anti-Partition and anti-Gandhi for his perceived pacifism. I have heard this from various highly educated Guyanese Indians here that India should never have agreed to partition - so what if there was threat of a civil war, the argument goes, a civil war is not such a bad thing. The US also had a civil war, after all. In light of such political wisdom one must bow one's head (to hide the look of amusement on one's face). Thirdly, the one thing the BJP loves even more than Muslim-bashing, is Gandhi-bashing, and for all his 'i'm above it all' attitude its hard to believe that Mr Naipaul is not aware of this. Finally, Mr Naipaul, who has never had anything charitable to say about modern India, or even to acknowledge Indian students who have tried to meet him in Britain, to comment on the Indian situation is beyond understanding. Lets stop paying attention to this man, and clearly understand why Mr Advani is so keen on courting him at every opportunity. UNQUOTE : Hope, you had a good reading. Your opinion is most welcome. Warm Regards KS Kiran Kumar

Syrette alfol oversprinkling. Chibouque whoopee demulsification crystallometry retentive porbeagle trireme stokehold bituminize nonvoid.

Read 2 Comment(s) posted so far on this Article!

Page: 1 of 1