All The Lives He Did Not Live

But even then, something about Naipaul’s statement felt dated to me. The sense of rejection in those lines and the embrace of the self as an island are possible via the kind of privilege that many, especially women, do not have. I wanted, instead, a literary form, and a world, that would positively encompass, in its syntax and methods, being from multiple places and identities, equally. Purity, as every woman knows and is constantly told, is a patriarchal myth.

So, Naipaul’s writing is lauded for its style: a stiff-upper-lip control of language and imagery; its exacting grammar is much discussed. In his early work, his outsider insights are expressed with humour meant to mediate his own rage and despair. But trapped by the binary of coloniser and colonial, he harks back to an elite Brahminism that underlines ancient Hindu superiority on one hand, and panders to the worst of Western conservative ideas of “dirty, smelly” peoples of the East, complacently at the mercy of entropy and decay on the other.

Naipaul with his daughter Maleeha. (Source: Express Archive)

Of course, dirt and despair are, and should be, the subject of literature: any healthy democratic society embraces, even encourages writers to see it steadily. But, as his first wife Pat warned him: “Your stories have humanity but not in the full sense. You stop too often with the tired and turgid mother, the insignificant clerk, the second-rate school teacher. You realise the futility, stupidity and misery. But that’s not all and you know it isn’t.” There is a syntactical violence in Naipaul’s prose. It is there in the mastery of the coloniser’s own accent. It is the voice of internalised self-disgust, the most pernicious legacy of colonialism on brown masculinity. Its tendency is to revenge itself on women, the poor, the “others” who threaten an island mentality of individualism, exceptionalism.

Much has been written about the damage Naipaul inflicted on the women in his life, including Pat. In his work, the same violence: women are locked behind the prison of his sentences, or are trapped by a gaze that never wants to admit female struggle or agency. Worse is meted out when religion is involved; his attitude towards the veil used as synecdoche for his enlightened righteousness. On a visit to Kashmir in the 1960s, he reports on, “women veiled […] women bred and breeding like battery hens”, and, after a conversation with a young Muslim man, comes to the conclusion that to him, “the abandonment of the veil was more to be feared and resisted than the theory of evolution.” Men decide: the veiled female body is the battleground for ultimate control.

An Area of Darkness is full of such enabling fictions: they give permission for further violence, perpetrated as unthinking influence on readers. The cover of a recent UK edition reads: VS Naipaul Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature An Area of Darkness His Discovery of India It illustrates his name and the authority of his literary endorsement, with the truth of darkness he “discovers” in India as an image of four veiled women against an infinite blue sky. The same attitudes and ideas that we can call out as “monstrous” in Naipaul’s work are deeply ingrained and continue to be reinscribed. Many readers will now, inevitably seek out Naipaul’s work for the first time. To properly deconstruct his powerful legacy and place it in a wider context, they could do worse than begin with his most recent works and read backwards. A wider social history will emerge that might make sense of our fraught times, in which questions of religious freedom, gender equality, class and caste are being debated across the world. And in which the UK’s Conservative former foreign secretary can make, (as he recently did), incendiary comments against women who wear the veil, then joke as he serves reporters cups of tea. While Naipaul’s person, life and work will continue to amplify questions about identity, representation, tokenism and value (not least in literary culture), it is clear that new forms must now find space in our writing, in our sentences and ideas: new voices must be heard. That’s quite a legacy indeed.