Early diaspora in Naipaul’s writing

As I discussed in the last week’s column, V.S. Naipual’s literary career is important on many counts in understanding the growth and development of diasporic literature and the overarching influence it exerted particularly on the lives of diasporic writers who are emerging from many parts of the globe.

For these writers, carving out a niche to write about them and the changing dynamics of diasporic life is indeed a herculean tasks on many fronts. Diasporic writings, among other things, express profound loss of roots, loss of motherland and the continuous attempts to find themselves, the new cultural codes prevalent in societies where these writers have willingly or unwillingly settled in.

V. S Naipaul’s writings recode pangs of diasporic existence in Trinidad. For example, V. S. Naipaul has noted in his Area of Darkness (1964) how the indentured Indian managed to ‘recreate an Eastern Uttar Pradesh village in Trinidad’ as if in the vastness of India.

When Sir V. S. Naipaul delivered his Nobel Lecture in Börssalen at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, 7 December 2001, he gave some useful insights into how his diasporic up bringing influenced his writings:

“To give you this idea of my background, I have had to call on knowledge and ideas that came to me much later, principally from my writing. As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are. But for the French child, say, that knowledge is waiting. That knowledge will be all around them. It will come indirectly from the conversation of their elders. It will be in the newspapers and on the radio. And at school the work of generations of scholars, scaled down for school texts, will provide some idea of France and the French.

"In Trinidad, bright boy though I was, I was surrounded by areas of darkness. School elucidated nothing for me. I was crammed with facts and formulas. Everything had to be learned by heart; everything was abstract for me. Again, I do not believe there was a plan or plot to make our courses like that. What we were getting was standard school learning. In another setting it would have made sense. And at least some of the failing would have lain in me.

With my limited social background it was hard for me imaginatively to enter into other societies or societies that were far away. I loved the idea of books, but I found it hard to read them. I got on best with things like Andersen and Aesop, timeless, placeless, not excluding. And when at last in the sixth form, the highest form in the college, I got to like some of our literature texts - Moliere, Cyrano de Bergerac - I suppose it was because they had the quality of the fairytale.

"When I became a writer those areas of darkness around me as a child became my subjects. The land; the aborigines; the New World; the colony; the history; India; the Muslim world, to which I also felt myself related; Africa; and then England, where I was doing my writing. That was what I meant when I said that my books stand one on the other, and that I am the sum of my books. That was what I meant when I said that my background, the source and prompting of my work, was at once exceedingly simple and exceedingly complicated.

You will have seen how simple it was in the country town of Chaguanas. And I think you will understand how complicated it was for me as a writer. Especially in the beginning, when the literary models I had – the models given me by what I can only call my false learning – dealt with entirely different societies. But perhaps you might feel that the material was so rich it would have been no trouble at all to get started and to go on. What I have said about the background, however, comes from the knowledge I acquired with my writing. ..

"I said I was an intuitive writer. That was so, and that remains so now, when I am nearly at the end. I never had a plan. I followed no system. I worked intuitively. My aim every time was do a book, to create something that would be easy and interesting to read. At every stage I could only work within my knowledge and sensibility and talent and world-view. Those things developed book by book.”

Although the new diaspora may not feel the perennial influence of colonialism around them in their adapted lands due to the advancement of communication and travel and the formation of communities such as Sri Lankan community in Australia, Canada, the UK and in the USA, pervasive racism, majoritarian exclusive practices at places or work are some of the inescapable realities of diasporic life.

In a Free State is one of the best novels by Naipaul in which he grotesquely describes the diasporic existence. In fact, the novel is all about people living away from home. It is one of the instances where paradoxes of success and failure come in hand in hand in life in diaspora.

“I AM NOW an American citizen and live in Washington, capital of the world. Many people, both here and India, will feel that I have done well. But, I was so happy in Bombay. I was respected. I had a certain position. I worked for an important man. The highest in the land came to our bachelor chambers and enjoyed my food and showed compliments on me….”

Though the book recounts the rather comic account of an Indian in Washington, what is obvious is that Naipaul portrays a kind of delusion between the perception of a ‘free state’ on the part of the immigrant’s relations and friend in motherland the realities that the newly immigrants themselves face in the diaspora.