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A
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This episode is brought to you by the American Revolution on pbs. It began with voices carried on the wind, arguments in taverns, whispers at kitchen tables, the tramp of boots on muddy fields. From sparks kindled in America grew an upheaval that shook an empire, gave birth to a nation, and altered the course of history. Ken Burns landmark PBS series the American Revolution casts the familiar in a new light, illuminating stories left in shadow. The American Revolution is more than history. It's an exploration of the United States at its founding, its people, values, families and its place in the world. The choices of past and present are woven into the same fabric. As the United states nears its 250th year. These stories remind us that the revolution is not history pressed between pages, but a force still shaping the world today. The American Revolution premieres on Sunday, November 16th on PBS and the PBS app.
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B
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C
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A
Vidya Naipaul, born in rural poverty in colonial Trinidad in 1932, would rise from this unpromising setting to become one of the great writers of the 20th century. This achievement does not mean that all his writing was good or that his behaviour was exemplary, but rather that his cumulative accomplishment outstripped his contemporaries and altered the way in which writers and readers perceived the world. Using simple sentences, he would look at complex modern subjects. Extremism, global migration, political and religious identity, ethnic difference, the implosion of Africa, the resurgence of Asia and the remaking of the old European dispensation in the the aftermath of Empire. His achievement was an act of will in which every situation and relationship would be subordinated to his ambition. His public position as a novelist and chronicler was inflexible at a time of intellectual relativism. He stood for high civilization, individual rights and the rule of law.
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B
Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anandh.
- [04:14]
A
And me, William Deripool.
- [04:16]
B
And what you just heard, William, reading, is an extract from the opening of Patrick French's biography of Naipaul, the World Is what It Is, the authorised biography of VS Naipaul. Now, we said this on the podcast before, Patrick French was a very good friend of both of us and sadly is no longer with us. But we have another very distinguished biographer, an award winning biographer and a brilliant writer and speaker. Our friend Ben Moses, Pulitzer Prize winning no less. His Susan Sontag, if you just sort of Google it, hoovered up every accolade there is going. And you knew Naipaul very well. I mean, I interviewed him once, Ben, and I have to say I found the whole experience terrifying and appalling. I just really didn't enjoy it. I'm still quite scarred. I really hated it. How did you find it?
- [05:05]
C
Well, this is so funny. This is the usual story for so many people. I mean, he was kind of a legendary monster and for me he was nothing but, but lovely. I met him when I was really young. I was working in publishing right after I got out of school and I came to New York and he was published by my boss, Alfred A. Knopf. And he would come in and everybody, including very grand people like Sonny Mehta and the most important journalists and publishers in the city, would sort of run and hide under the table at his approach. And I was this kid and he was extremely kind to me. He was very nice to me when I started wanting to become a writer myself. Very encouraging. So I know all the stories. He certainly made bitchy comments to me sometimes, but overall I just, I don't have that story.
- [05:53]
A
I have exactly the same Ben. He was incredibly kind to me as a young writer.
- [05:57]
B
Just me, then.
- [05:58]
C
No, Anita, it's not just you.
- [06:00]
A
There's a whole world. But we were lucky. I knew him a little. I'd met him at a Christie's lunch at the auctioneers, and he knew all about miniatures. We chatted very, very intensely about this. I had no idea it was something that he liked. And he actually like specifically company school painting, which is something I was very, very interested in. So we sort of fell into each other's arms. And I had a book coming out the following month called from the Holy Mountain, and I invited him rather grandly to my book launch, not imagining that he would come at all. But not only did he come, he was the first person there and arrived before I did. And I arrived in the empty room of the Royal Society of Literature to find V S Naipaul and John Julius Norwich in a completely empty room, deep in conversation.
- [06:44]
B
Can I just say, I can't Im that Savidya enjoyed that so much, to be honest with you. I just don't think that would have been up his street. But look, I think what we're describing here, and it's probably a good start to this, is a complicated character. So, Ben, I mean, to understand a really complicated man who clearly we don't understand, and I don't understand as well as you two do, or in a different way, we should really know where he came from. Can you give us an idea of his origins?
- [07:09]
C
He comes from a background of no background. This is really important to understand. So he comes from Trinidad in the West Indies, which is the southernmost island in the West Indies. It's quite a large island by Caribbean standards, but it's a tiny little speck. He says it's the silliest island that ever dotted a sea. When he writes to his father in his 20s from Oxford. And the thing about Trinidad that makes it very different from other places and backgrounds that we've discussed or heard discussed on this podcast is that there's no indigenous population at all. It's been scraped is his word.
- [07:45]
A
I mean, there was an indigenous population, but the British wiped it out together.
- [07:49]
C
With the Spanish and the French. And actually, so Trinidad is resettled in the early 19th century and it has a population of zero. And this is really different from any other place in the world except for these Caribbean islands. And what happens is it's transformed into a labor camp, basically. So they bring in a bunch of Africans. There's actually not much slavery there because slavery gets outlawed in the British Empire quite early on in Trinidadian history. So that's quite different from a place like Jamaica or any of the other Caribbean islands which were slave colonies.
- [08:20]
A
I didn't know that. It's later than the other ones. Is it?
- [08:23]
C
Much later.
- [08:24]
A
That's why they're all indentured.
- [08:25]
C
That's right. Well, the Africans do come from other Caribbean islands. It ends up being a half African, half Indian society, more or less. Of course there's other people around, but these people are kind of thrown together to work on these plantations. And the Naipaul family come from Uttar Pradesh, from the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh. In. It's his grandparents, Naipaul's grandparents. And they come because India is. Is falling apart also under the influence of the British Empire. And people are desperate to go somewhere and to get a job. And so people, Indians go all over the world. And this is the beginning of the great Indian diasporas in the West Indies, in Africa.
- [09:02]
A
This is a subject which we have not yet dealt with on this podcast, Indentured Labor. And it's something that deserves a little miniseries itself because so many of these communities, like Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius, very much.
- [09:15]
C
Formed by this in South Africa as well. But they don't actually come at this point to the imperial metropolis, which is to the uk. But anyway, they come there and they're thrown together. There's no real point to this colony because it's not a particularly rich colony. It's not a colony where the British invest much into it. They sort of leave it to themselves. And so Naipaul comes from this place. He's the grandson of these indentured laborers, but he's more importantly and seismically importantly for his life. He's the son of a semi journalist, of a man who has some education and some talent and is trying very hard to write, but he doesn't have even a language. And it's really important to understand Naipaul's relation to English and what this does for him. Because these people speak English because they've lost their own language, but they don't actually really know what English is. So he gives this great example about reading Wordsworth in school. And he says, reading about the daffodils, he said, we were sure that the daffodil was a lovely flower, but none of us had ever seen it.
- [10:20]
A
I remember a version of that. Funnily enough, I came to school in Yorkshire and being brought up in Scotland, I'd never really seen spring in the way that you get it in the south of England. All these poems that you're taught in England, about the spring coming, all the Shakespeare sonnets and everything. And it was really only when I got to Cambridge and I saw there's really a full spring with sort of cherry blossoms and all the things that everyone else thinks of spring. We just had daffodils and snowdrops and that was it. There was no cause for celebration at all.
- [10:48]
B
The Indian thing is really. I mean, it hasn't changed either. So I know that my mother, for example, when she was at convent school in India, learned and can still to this day recite the Charge of the Light Brigade. And Wordsworth's daffodils word for word, you know, meant nothing to her. But, yeah, she was taught it by rote.
- [11:06]
C
Well, this is how Naipaul learned at this colonial school in Trinidad. And it was very confusing over the course of his life. He writes and rewrites the story of coming into this language that refers to things, to cultures, to peoples, to class societies, because there's no classes, really in Trinidad. Everybody's kind of what we would probably say, lower middle class or pretty impoverished peasantry. India has receded because they're two generations out. They've lost their language. They're still Hindus or Muslims, but reflexively. And they feel this whole world around them, but they're very unable to grasp it.
- [11:44]
A
There's a lovely quote illustrating exactly your point, Ben, in an essay he wrote towards the end of his life. And he said, the idea came to my father in India with the English language. Somehow, in spite of the colonial discouragements of the place, an idea of the high civilization connected with the language came to my father, and he was given some knowledge of literary forms. Sensibility is not enough. If you're going to be a writer. You need to arrive at the forms that can contain or carry your sensibility. This was part of what was passed on to me at a very early age. All the poverty and badness of Trinidad, far away, with a population of half a million, I was given the ambition to write books, and specifically to write novels, which my father had presented to me as the highest form.
- [12:30]
C
And this is somebody who had not even really read many novels, his father, because very few books even arrive at Trinidad. It's not like growing up in the backwoods of Australia or of the United States or somewhere. It was really a place where there just wasn't much available, and the society that makes literature possible and that makes intellectual life possible just doesn't exist there. And so, in a great act of will, he manages to win one of the two scholarships that are available each year to come to the UK. And in 1957, he comes to Oxford and has this incredibly bleak time not knowing what he's doing. It's, of course, cold, you know, the weather. I guess it's warm if you're coming from Scotland, but it's certainly not if you're coming from. From Trinidad.
- [13:19]
A
Yes. For me it was the end of the Ice Age.
- [13:21]
C
Rome and Naples. Yeah, yeah. But for him, he's absolutely struggling to find his way in the world and he has this vocation. And when he's at Oxford, his father dies having published a few stories which Naipault presents ever after as this incredible triumph of the will that he managed to publish a few short stories in local newspapers in Trinid. Why is that such a triumph? Why is that so incredibly impossible? It's because this society that he's coming from has not been described at all by literature. And so he's very aware of coming from a place where nothing has been given shape. And he believes that literature and language and the intellectual life that those things indicate are really the only things that allow people to give their experience any kind of form or any kind of understanding.
- [14:20]
B
This is an experience as shared by many who come over from India to study in England. The weather is bleak, the rooms are small, the sun is only up for a short amount of time, and the food, you know, they all talk about sort of being starved of all warmth inside and out. I wonder, though, I mean, with Naipaul in particular, who has this sense of, I don't know, maybe rootlessness in Trinidad because it isn't a country of deep roots. And then he's taken out of that soil and put into a place where his roots are even shallower.
- [14:49]
A
He calls himself doubly or trebly displaced.
- [14:52]
B
Does that sort of lend itself to sometimes the accusations or the praise of his writing, that it is often bleak and it is often cold, like a child splanted sapling from a place it doesn't belong?
- [15:03]
C
Well, I think that's true. I never find it bleak or cold at all. I find it extremely alive and absolutely fascinating. I think there's no question he's one of the greatest writers of the century, possibly the greatest in English. It's very hard to think of anyone who achieved what he achieved.
- [15:19]
B
God, no wonder he liked you. No wonder he bloody liked you.
- [15:22]
C
Well, you know, I loved him. I came from a background that is incredibly. It's so different to his that it's not even comparable. You know, I came from the imperial center, as it were. I came from the exact sort of society that he did not come from. And I am utterly intimidated by him to this day. I don't find myself worthy in a very profound way. He oppresses me in a way. What he achieved, and particularly achieved coming from this background of nothing, it's a titanic accomplishment, but I find it very alive. And I think the uprootedness and the deracinated nature of the people that he writes about and that he himself reflects what's so fascinating about him and what's so relevant about him is that that's same reality for millions, if not billions of people in the 20th century. So he comes to Paddington. He describes, I think in one of his last books, this boarding house he ends up in. It's a very down at the heels place.
- [16:20]
A
Paddington is literally the kind of first place you get off the train from Oxford. He sounds like he's literally come off the platform.
- [16:26]
C
I think he's actually coming from Trinidad. And he gets to London and he has to stay somewhere before he goes to Oxford. And he sees people from Malta, people from Egypt, people from India, people from China. And this is right after the war. You have to remember London was a completely different place to what it is now. London was a very poor city. It was a place that was totally bombed out still in the 50s. It was a place that wouldn't have looked like the shiny, aspirational London of today. But all these people's countries had been destroyed, the war had happened and they all wash up there. And he realizes later that he has this great subject. You know, he says until then, most of the world's cities, like most people in London, would have been British. You know, most people in Paris were French. Suddenly and within a space of just a few years, these cities fill up with millions and millions of people from absolutely everywhere.
- [17:20]
A
The implosion of empire, the implosion of.
- [17:23]
C
Empire, the emergence of these new metropolises that are quite different to what they would have been even 20 years before.
- [17:30]
A
And you say, Ben, when we've talked about it, you've talked about how he realised that he couldn't just go off and become a writer like Haussmann writing A Shropshire Lad, that he had to do something completely new. That there was no precedent for somebody from Trinidad writing a high art novel in English.
- [17:47]
C
There's absolutely no precedent at all. And he talks about reading some of these imperial travel writers that go to the West Indies. So I think even Waugh goes to Jamaica. And these, these kind of people descend from Cambridge or Oxford, and then they go sort of look at the picturesque natives and write these cute novels or descriptions. For someone like Naipaul, who's actually from those societies, that is a completely alien way of looking. He can't write about Trinidad the way that somebody from, you know, Shropshire writes about Trinidad. And so there's no precedence for him. And I thought, when I was younger, I used to think he's kind of putting us on a bit with this. I'm so original. Original. I'm the first person. But then, you know, the older I've. I've become, and the more I've read and traveled, the more I realized how unbelievably novel this was. I know a lot of Indians listen to this podcast. He's obsessed by Gandhi and by the image of Gandhi that comes out of the autobiography. And he writes about what Gandhi would have known coming out of Gujarat when he does and going to England, and what he would have read and what he would have known about the outside world. And it's basically nothing because this knowledge just wasn't available to people and it wasn't available to him. And he gets out of Oxford, where he's severely depressed, including because his father dies. And he remembers the street that he grew up in, Port of Spain, which he calls Miguel Street. It's a different name. And he writes this comic novel just about the neighbors and the people down the street, which is an absolute masterpiece. I really encourage people to read it because I think if you read it, you will get the taste of Naipaul in this comic vein.
- [19:27]
A
I absolutely love the early. The early Dipoles when I was in Trinidad and Tobago, and I actually went and stayed with his family. I went and stayed with his sister Kamala in Chiguanas. And those early novels, particularly, I thought the Suffrage of Elvira, which is not one of the ones that critics sort of Ray, but just very funny. Gorgeous book. Light, warm, affectionate, and just a wonderful, wonderful read. And very much a young man's novel.
- [19:53]
C
A young man's novel, but still so good that you just can't believe that he's so young when he does it. And these novels, I think, are absolutely perfect. They hold up after 60 or 70 years. 60 plus years, I guess, at this.
- [20:07]
A
Point, in terms of just sheer enjoyment. The most enjoyable books he ever wrote.
- [20:12]
C
Yeah, probably. And I think he starts off as a comic novelist, which is why people say that he's bleak. And I always push back against that because I don't think he is. I think he's hilarious. And I knew him personally, as I said, and he was a funny, funny man. He was mischievous. He was kind of obnoxious sometimes. He loved provoking people. He loved kind of trying to get a rise out of you. And he does all this in the prose as well, but I find it all of one piece. I think the thrill of reading Naipaul from the beginning to the end is that it's an evolution and the development of a truly great mind.
- [20:44]
B
Since you also, both of you knew him quite well when he, you know, you describe this coming to Paddington and sort of being this maelstrom of other people who've come from other parts of the world, did he seek kinship with those people or did he sort of categorize them almost sort of out of India caste system of who is worth knowing and who is not worth knowing?
- [21:01]
C
I think he did a bit. He had great social anxiety. He writes about that a lot as a young man especially. He doesn't feel that because of his education and the fact that he is someone who went to the finest school in his island and then, you know, became the best student and then goes to Oxford. He's what the French call declassees. You know, he's not of a class. He doesn't really identify with working class, what we would now call the Windrush generation, which is sort of happening about the same time. He's highly educated, but he also is very aware of racism against Indians, against any people of color in the uk. He pushes back against that quite a lot. And he finds it everywhere he goes.
- [21:48]
A
He even goes on television early on, speaking out against racism against immigrants, which is not something we associate with the later Naipaul at all.
- [21:57]
C
No, because he gets associated. He gets this reputation for being this ferocious racist. I mean, I think this is the most unfair thing of all. But he is somebody who doesn't have a place. Again, it's another form of deracination. It's another form of uprootedness.
- [22:10]
B
We're going to take a break, but I mean, just before we go to the break, you're sort of saying he has this reputation of being a racist. I think. I think we should tell listeners who aren't aware of maybe of Naples work and also reputation. What is it detractors would say about him when it comes to race? That's one of the sort of primary things that comes up in a search when you look Naipaul up.
- [22:29]
C
Yeah, I mean, this is something that, as with other things that happen on the Internet, it's something that I think got a life of its own even before the Internet. He writes critically about people he knows and with whom he identifies in a way. And at a time when this sort of critical writing was not acceptable because everyone was supposed to be excited about decolonization and this was a great thing and independence. This was going to lead to development and peace and prosperity. And of course it doesn't, you know, in the Caribbean. It doesn't in Africa, it doesn't in large parts of Asia. You know, a lot of the history of many post colonial countries is trying to find their way after colonization. And a lot of white imperial people really liked to write pretty condescending things that he thought were not fair.
- [23:22]
B
There's one sort of moment where he writes about, and you all know Ben, where this is from, but his character is coming down this stoop and it's surrounded by Caribbean people who are playing music and, you know, sort of dancing. And it's almost sort of snarling representation of them calling them hubshis, which was a word I had to go and look up. I had no idea what that was. And the whole thing just made me feel really ick, like ugh. And that person is not morally judged for feeling that way about these people.
- [23:48]
A
It's the Indian equivalent of the N word. Humpshee Patrick has a very, very nice pass, which I just got here about Naipaul's tendency to caricature himself in public outside his books. You know, his books were very serious, but he liked to stir things up. He said, or was said to have said, that Africa had no future, that Islam was a calamity, that France was fraudulent and interviewers were monkeys. If Zadie Smith of White Teeth fame, optimistic and presentable, was a white liberal's dream, Vs. Naipaul was the nightmare.
- [24:19]
C
Well, I love this speaks to my own sense of not liking these white liberal pieties, which were the same ones I grew up with. It's very important to understand as well that he grew up in a non white society where there were basically zero white people. And he often says that, you know, in the West Indians we threw around racial terms at each other all the time. You know, blacks did to Indians and Indians, the Hindus did to Muslims. And this was sort of how this society talked to each other. And of course he realized later that that was a great way to get a terrible reputation. So I'm not not here to defend that. I'm just saying that he didn't like white liberals. He thought they didn't understand the part of the world that he came from and the parts of the world that he spent so much of his life seeing. He didn't like their extreme respect for it, but also he didn't like the music that they were making.
- [25:07]
A
Anita, to your point, he called Rastafarianism a disease.
- [25:11]
C
Well, yeah, he thought it was loud. He was a writer, and I'm a writer too, and I don't love noise. And I sympathize with him with this kind of loudness of a lot of places.
- [25:21]
B
But it's not just loudness that he's talking about. I mean, that particular scene that I'm thinking of, it is racially loaded because it's the kind of sound of the unevolved again, I wish I could remember what it was exactly, but I do remember drawing away from it going, bloody hell.
- [25:36]
C
I'm not here to defend everything he says, but I think that he definitely does this about his own communities, his people that he identifies with as well as other people. And I think it's part of his being uprooted, also of just not really identifying with the same things.
- [25:53]
B
Let's take a break and join us after the break where, I mean, we've sort of talked a little bit about some of his early work. Let's get into the meat of what makes Naipaul the legend that he is.
- [26:08]
A
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C
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A
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C
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A
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C
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- [28:18]
A
Welcome back. So we've talked a little about Naipaul in his early novels. These wonderful comic lights, affectionate looks at his Caribbean background. But we're going to look now at some of his nonfiction. And it was the Caribbean that he wrote his first nonfiction book about, which very much set the tone for what was going to come. Tell us, Ben, about the Middle Passage, which was commissioned by the government of Trinidad and Tobago, greatly regretted by them ever since, because it gave a deeply unflattering portrait of the islands he was meant to be writing up.
- [28:53]
C
Well, I think this comes back to what we're saying about some of the accusations of racism stuff. I think that when people expect to be flattered, they're looking to the wrong writer. You know, a lot of these people want to write a book. Oh, isn't it beautiful? And something that'll promote tourism or something. This is why governments and states often commission writers to come to sort of blow smoke up their ass. Naipaul doesn't do it. He comes in 1961, so he's just a few years out of Oxford. And he comes because he wants to see the rest of the Caribbean, which he hasn't really seen. So he goes to, I think it's Jamaica, British Guiana, Suriname, Trinidad. And I think he goes to St. KITTS or maybe St. Lucia, I can't remember. I don't think it's a bleak view. Again, I push back on it. This book is incredibly good to me because the extent of the observation, the things that he sees, every sentence feels so rich to me. It's a very, very complex portrait written from inside these societies by a great writer, which I don't think in any of these cases has existed before coming from within the society. And so, of course, the Trinidadians are disappointed by it. But at the same time, if you talk to West Indians now, I mean, he's still, as in India, he's still a writer that Any West Indian writer has read and read extensively. It's really the first time that they have a writer of this stature coming from within the society. And he finds these places uprooted, as we're saying. He finds them not necessarily very promising because what do they have? They have a few hundred thousand people, they have a collapsed plantation economy. The imperial steward has departed. They have the option of what he calls at some point, the new slavery of tourism. So you can try to bring in a bunch of cruise ships, but it's very unsure, like, what are these places going to do with themselves? How are they going to fully join now they're independent states or they're becoming independent states, what is that going to look like and how does it look? And this is his real emphasis throughout everything he writes about the global south, of the developing world. How are they going to develop the intellectuals that they need to bring themselves fully into the modern age?
- [31:04]
A
He continues in this vein with a second book in 1969, the loss of El Dorado. What's striking about this book is that rather than attacking the post colonial decay and corruption, as he had done in the Middle Passage, this one he is astonished by the brutality of British rule in the Caribbean, describing an empire of plantations and Negroes. The whip, the branding iron, the knife for cutting off Negro's ears, the stake and torture cells. And it's a devastating book, isn't it? It's an astonishingly brutal book.
- [31:42]
C
That's a devastating book indeed. And it's a book really about the history of Trinidad, which is again, a history that's never been written in quite this way. Just how cruel it was and how brutal it was. And he astonishes himself. This book comes out of a visit he makes to the British Library, or he's working in the British Library, and when it was back in the old round reading room in the British Museum now. And he goes in there and he finds the name of an Indian chief. He grows up in this town that you visit, Chaguanas, this, this Indian name, Chaguinas, or, you know, something, it's spelled sort of right. But he realizes they're writing about these people that lived in my town, who were ethnically cleansed, who were genocided, and who had left nothing at all of themselves at all except for a name here and there. And on the basis of that, he starts delving into the history of what the British were really coming for. It's a lot about Sir Walter Raleigh.
- [32:41]
And these British pirates, basically, who came. That's an extremely moving book because when you go back to the Middle Passage and you say, like, what. What's the future of these places? He knows very well the brutality to which they've been subjected. I don't think he's judging them. You know, he's just saying this is the historical reality, and how are they going to move past this?
- [33:05]
B
Can we also talk about, you know, the Indianness of him as well, and how much of that mattered to him as much as the Caribbean roots that he had? Area of Darkness is one such where he thinks and considers it. Tell us a little bit about the book and tell us about his attitude towards his Indianness.
- [33:23]
C
He adores being Indian. He always says it's not just his identity, as we would say now, but it's his sort of fetish almost more than that.
- [33:30]
B
He sort of talks about being a Brahmin as well, doesn't he? Brahminical pride is something that he wears openly and proudly.
- [33:37]
C
Well, he wears it as a mark of something that survives this brutal uprooting. And I think that, you know, they don't have Indian culture anymore. They have some food, they have some things, but they've lost their language. They've basically lost a lot of their religion. They have these kind of ritual reflexes. So he was very fastidious. He was very Brahminical in a way that I actually recognize from my own background, which is not India, but it's something I think survives in certain uprooted peoples. In my case, Jewish immigrants from Europe. He goes to India for the first time and he writes a book called An Area of Darkness. Now, it's really important to point out that. That he's not referring to India as dark or as an area of darkness. He's referring to it in a very specific way, which is that when he's in Trinidad, he feels these, quote, areas of darkness around him, but he doesn't have any access to them, really. One of them is the African world, because, of course, Trinidad is half African. But again, these people are uprooted Africans. They have some African cultural reflexes, but they don't actually have access to the metropolis of African civilization. He feels India around him, which is his own community. And Indians in Trinidad divided into Muslims and Hindus, as in India. So he is fascinated by the African world, the Hindu world and the Muslim world. But he can't quite see it. You know, he can't quite grasp it. And then he goes to India and he writes this book. I think this is one of his most dark books, if we're going to say the Word darkness. Again, it's a quite pessimistic view of what's happened to India in the decade and a half since partition and independence. And it's a book that really upset a lot of Indians and still does. I mean, it's a funny way, I'm sure. Willy, you know this. If you ever want to throw a grenade into a dinner party in Delhi, you just say, has anyone read An Area of Darkness?
- [35:28]
A
I had this even at an airport conveyor belt in the security. I was reading An Area of Darkness coming through, and it had to be Chennai in Madras airport, where even the security guys are so well read, and the guy saw an area of darkness and Very bad man. Very bad man.
- [35:46]
C
Very bad man. Well, because again, I think Indians, like other peoples who had been humiliated by colonialism, they wanted this flattering picture and many white liberals from the imperial capitals were willing to give it to them.
- [36:00]
A
This is my entire career.
- [36:03]
B
But to both of you, you know, like when they're saying very bad man, what is it that people are react to in the writing in that particular book? If we're talking from the perspective of ruins, you know, he looks at the ruins of the south of India with the ruined Hindu temples, and, you know, it's sort of a flux and continuity and it's almost poetic. And then he looks at the ruins of the north, which are the Mughal ruins, and he says, you know, they are testament to waste. Are they objecting to that simple binary that, you know, Hindu good, Muslim bad, or are they reacting to something else? Or are they the whole thing? I mean, what is it that people say there?
- [36:37]
C
He doesn't really admire Hindu civilization in a lot of ways. He's extremely harshly critical of it. And he thinks that both Muslim and Hindu civilization contributed to the weakness of India and to its ability to be conquered repeatedly.
- [36:51]
A
There's a passage in Area of Darkness where he talks about the continuity and flow of Hindu India ever shrinking. And the ruins of the north amongst the great Mughals only speak, he says, of waste and failure. Even the Taj, with its magnificent garden and the great dome, are to Naipaul, symbols of oppression. Europe has its monuments of Sun Kings, its Louvre and Versailles. They are part of the development of the country's spirit. They express the refining of a nation's sensibility. But he says that the moguls speak only of personal plunder and a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered.
- [37:29]
C
So maybe we don't then need to elaborate much on why Indians found this offensive.
- [37:35]
B
Nailed it.
- [37:35]
C
But you know, is he wrong? My principle with great figures such as him, as a student and still as a student of people like this, is when you have a problem, a question with a great master, a mind this brilliant, I've always tried to look at the failure in myself first, the failure to understand. So what is he actually saying here? I've been to the Taj Mahal, as I'm sure both of you have, and is he wrong? I mean, you can say it's the most beautiful building in the world, but where is it? All around it is poverty and want and need in the middle of this almost unbearably expensive construction. This maybe isn't unlike other imperial monuments and other monuments to wealth and power. But when he is talking about why is India weakened to the point where it can be conquered and it's conquered by all sorts of people, not just the British and not just the Muslims over the years, he's looking for a kind of intellectual explanation for economic and military defeat. And I find reading him about this fascinating. Certainly makes me look at the Taj Mahal in a different way, where I.
- [38:46]
A
Think he is wrong. Ben and I wrote a long Guardian piece attacking his view of Indian history is that he doesn't understand how Islam, in my view, rooted itself in India. He has this vision that Indian Muslims were continually looking as colonized persons to Mecca. While in reality, there's a whole world of Indian Islam that he's never once mentions in all his books, which is the whole world of the Sufi shrine, which are localized saints, burial places that people go to. And every small Muslim town has one. And it's a place where many different communities come together. He'd never understood that there, as with any other religion, there are many different sides to Indian Islam. And he projects it as this tyrannical, autocratic, destructive force that is imposed from outside and is looking back to where it came from. And he doesn't understand how localized Indian Islamic culture became and rooted in local forms and took on local music and local dance. So I think he is wrong. But it is a great work of literature he's written in the process of attacking it.
- [39:57]
C
This is where I do part ways with him in my view of Islam, which is that he thinks of Islam as an imperial force, which it certainly has been in the past. I mean, nobody would deny that. But I think that the real thing that he should have understood better or differently about Islam is that that the Muslims are also colonized peoples at this point. By the time he's coming along, going to Pakistan, going to Iran, going to Indonesia. These are all countries that have been subjected to Western imperialism in far more devastating ways. And so Muslims, if you think West Indians and Indians don't like him, you should talk to Muslims. I mean, they really don't like him. They really feel caricatured by him. But by the end of his life, he created a body of war that stands to me, and I think to anyone who tries to understand our world as a real challenge. I mean, I've always wanted to write about him and I've never got past about a couple of pages because it's such a vast body of work and it feels very daunting to write about because he's written so much and every page of his work is new. All his books are very different to the previous ones. And, you know, by the time he dies In August of 2018, I think in certain ways the challenge was too great for a lot of people. And so he had, as he was accused of caricaturing others. I think he himself fell victim to the same kind of caricature. He says at one point that at the end, a writer is not his work but his legend. He's talking about Borges in this sense, and I think that is his fate.
- [41:34]
B
That's the case of all of us, though, isn't it? I was sort of telling a few friends, I said, you know, we're going to be covering Napoleon in this series. And they went, oh, be sure. And Ben, about the spat with Rushdie, now, those are the things that are sort of foremost, you know, despite this entire body of work, why was there such bad blood between him and other great Indian writers? I mean, like Rushdie, for example, also.
- [41:57]
A
Other great post colonial writers. I mean, most notably Edward Said, who had a major beef with it, didn't he?
- [42:03]
B
Why is that, Ben? It was vicious as well. It was a vicious falling out.
- [42:06]
A
And Derek Walcott from the Caribbean.
- [42:08]
B
And Derek Walcott, Yeah, another one.
- [42:09]
C
Well, Derek Walcott, whom he admired greatly, actually, who was from St. Lucia.
- [42:13]
B
I don't think he ever, ever admired Rushdie.
- [42:15]
C
I don't know that he did. I actually do know that he did not. He did get involved in these spats sometimes, which were often generated by journalists asking him, what do you think about so and so? And he said, rubbish, you know, and that was it. And then that becomes the headline, right? And then everybody talks about that as writers. I think it's kind of healthy to have these kind of conversations. I think it's fun for readers to have the clash of the titans.
- [42:39]
A
It's worth reading a bit of Said's take on him. Said complained that Naipaur was dismissing all national liberation movements as fraudulent public relation gimmicks and half native impotence. He prefers to indict guerrillas for their pretensions rather than indict the imperialism that drove them to insurrection.
- [42:59]
C
He says, well, see, I think this is unfair. I think that Said is thinking about Palestine, which Naipaul never touches, actually, unfortunately. I think that would have been an incredible thing for him to have done.
- [43:09]
A
It would have been wonderful, wouldn't it?
- [43:10]
C
Yeah, but, you know, when he's talking about national liberation movements being fraudulent, he is talking about places like Trinidad who are, you know, they're colonized, but they're not particularly oppressed by the British at this point. You know, they're just sort of left to fend for themselves. It's a very different thing to settler colonialism as in Palestine. He writes very elegantly about Algeria, actually, and about the conundrum of the settler colony that France and plants there. And I remember saying to him once, you know, Vidya, like, what was Algeria supposed to do after this devastating, devastating colonial war and oppression? And he said, the only solution for Algeria would have been to develop very serious intellectuals.
- [43:50]
A
There's a lovely quote from the reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, who is a great hero of mine. And Linton says he's a living example of how art transcends the artist, because he talks a lot of shit but still writes excellent books, which I think is a very good final quote.
- [44:08]
B
We're coming to an end. But I can actually see every time something critical comes, Ben, you look hurt because you know the man very, very well. I mean, just first of all, I mean, we're looking forward to seeing what you make of this epic life and these epic works. I mean, it's going to be very interesting.
- [44:23]
A
You've got to do this book, Ben. You've got to do it.
- [44:26]
B
But just what. What is the thought that you would like to leave Empire listeners with when it comes to Vs and Ipaul?
- [44:31]
C
Well, I don't think he was a terrible person at all. I thought he was a great person, and I thought he was one of the greatest people I've ever had a privilege to know. With all his warts, he's somebody who has inspired generation after generation of Indian writers. You cannot shake a stick at Jaipur Literary festival without finding 10 Indians who were either devastated or inspired or ravished by him. In some ways, I speak of him with warts and all. I still think that the world was lucky to have him and these, the societies he wrote about rather than mocking him should, should try to read him more profoundly because the legacy is, it's very troubling, it's very deep, it's very upsetting in a lot of ways. But to me, I don't know another writer who offers a more complete key to the post colonial world.
- [45:24]
B
He can't have a better ambassador than you, a more passionate ambassador than you. Ben, it is always such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much indeed. That's Benjamin Moser. Next time here on Empire we're going to be looking at photograph of Empire. We're going from the word to the image and we're talking specifically about photographers who made images of Hitler, Churchill and one who took down a king of Europe with her pictures. So till the next time we meet it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand and.
- [45:51]
A
Goodbye from me William Durrymple.