By mentioning India in his Nobel acceptance statement as 'the land of his ancestors' along with Britain -- the country of his adoption -- V S Naipaul delighted not only his readers in this country but non-readers as well. The result was the Indian media's scramble to appropriate him. Newspapers vied with each other to claim him as the "second Indian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature after Rabindranath Tagore" (The Times of India) or "the seventh Indian to win the Nobel" (Deccan Chronicle) if one counted men from other fields as well. What no one commented on was his total erasure of the country of his birth and adolescence -- Trinidad -- where he spent his formative years and which provided him material for the first five books that established his reputation as a writer.

It is one of these early books A House for Mr Biswas (1961) that still remains his unquestionable masterpiece. Forty years ago when the world had not yet turned postcolonial, long before marginality, migration and hybridity had become trendy concepts, it must have taken unusual courage and conviction to write this massive -- nearly 600 pages -- novel about the life of an unremarkable Indian family transplanted in Trinidad. The subject was totally unfamiliar not only to the Western readers whom his London publisher would normally target, but to everyone else, including us in India. But the novel built up its own intricate universe with bright lucidity, piling up vivid details, naming every object, creating numerous characters with humour and compassion. Neither of these two last named qualities have been much in evidence in his later work where his vision as well as his prose get progressively marked by a detached and ruthless precision.

Despite our unseemly eagerness to label this Nobel Laureate as an Indian writer, his actual links with our sub-continent are tenuous indeed. Along with other indentured labourers his ancestors left eastern Uttar Pradesh more than a century ago, and if he is to be considered an Indian writer, by the same logic another Nobel winner Toni Morrison would have to be called an African writer because her ancestors were shipped to the US as slaves. Naipaul himself had no personal connection with India until he was thirty. His family's past was to him part of a "historical darkness". Later he reflected on this: "The India where Gandhi and Nehru and others operated was historical and real. The India from where we had come was impossibly remote, almost as imaginary as the Ramayana… I lived easily with that darkness, that lack of knowledge. I never thought to inquire further."

When he did inquire further, the first attempt was a disaster -- as far as his relationship with this country was concerned. As all his readers know, after An Area of Darkness Naipaul had to write two more India books , increasingly benign, to redeem himself to his readers here. His most recent novel Half A Life (2001) is the first time he has used India as fictional material. He prefaces the book by saying "This book is an invention. It is not exact about the countries, periods and situations it appears to describe". Yet, of the three locations presented in the novel, while India and Africa remain inexact and vague, London is accurately presented with street names and other markers mentioned clearly. Apparently for Naipaul, England is situated at a different level of reality-firm, stable and at the center of the universe-while other regions can be relegated to haziness.

Decades before either of them dreamt of being a recipient of the Nobel, a young Derek Walcott while interviewing Naipaul had asked him about his relationship with the country of his origin. Naipaul's cryptic response 'I am not a cricketer' conveyed his well-known aversion to the game of cricket as much as his refusal to be labelled. He has deliberately chosen to remain unhoused, but unlike the new generation of postcolonial writers who celebrate the fluidity of their locations and rejoice in the plurality of their heritage, Naipaul's lack of roots is a burden that he carries with him in his restless travels around the world, as well as a weapon with which he can ironically slice up the countries he visits. It is the source of his strength as well as his acerbity.

Meenakshi Mukherjee
meemuk@hd2.vsnl.net.in