Speaking Volumes: Some notes on Sir Vidia's spleen

(Published in the Business Standard, June 7, 2011)

1. The fact that I possess a womb should disqualify me from commenting on V S Naipaul’s latest broadside. A writer who believes that no woman is his equal as a writer, that women suffer from a “sentimentality, a narrow vision of the world” and that women writers are “quite different” is not going to take the criticism of women readers seriously.

2. Which isn’t going to stop me or other owners of wombs anyway.

3. Not that Mr Naipaul’s criticisms should shock anyone, after all these years. A list of Sir Vidia’s targets over the decades includes Africans, Muslim invaders in India, infies (inferior people) of all colours and races, Indian women writers, his wives, his lovers, his friends, his editors, including the nonagenarian Diana Athill, the issuers of worthless degrees (Oxbridge), foolish people, people who do not serve him his vegetables in separate dishes, people who have not read his writings, people who have read but not understood his writings, people who have read and understood his writings but have also read writers he disapproves of, which is most writers, regardless of whether they own wombs or not.

4. So the best way to approach this fracas is to repeat the apocryphal line Ved Mehta is supposed to have said after Mr Naipaul had a spat with the German ambassador’s wife in Neemrana: “You’ll never guess what that terrible old man has gone and done now.” The spat, now forgotten, was over Mr Naipaul’s dismissal of a certain woman intellectual, to which the German ambassador’s wife is supposed to have said: “We all know what your views on women are, Sir Vidia, we don’t have to take them seriously,” which put the Nobel laureate in a towering rage.

5. There’s a very old pattern at work here; the wide, and widening, gap between Mr Naipaul the public figure and Naipaul the writer. The bulk of the pronouncements made by Mr Naipaul the public figure are rubbish — cantankerous, peevish statements meant to provoke anger and irritation. Some commentators suggested that this was a version of the West Indian tradition of picong — the swift trading of insults and banter as a kind of conversational game — but the truth is that it’s just spleen. The few interviews given by Mr Naipaul the writer, most notably his Paris Review interview, in 1998, are illuminated with insight and wisdom, despite all the bigotry and the petulance of the public man.

6. Read this sentence by Mr Naipaul: “I think the world is what you enter when you think – when you become educated, when you question – because you can be in the big world and be utterly provincial.” And then this sentence by Jane Austen, whom he slammed for her “sentimental ambitions”: “The literary world is inspiring, but it is not all there is. I let my daily life be my raw material, even if paintings, fiction and sonatas are the fire in my forge.” They led such different lives; Mr Naipaul wrested for himself the freedom to travel, to learn and to explore. Ms Austen, trammelled by the twin lack of independence and income, wrote her novels from the observation of the limited world around here, but she shares with Mr Naipaul several things: the sense of humour, the detached accuracy and the lack of sentimentality. They had a similar, excoriating wit, though Ms Austen’s was caustic, Mr Naipaul’s splenetic.

7. There is little need to address Mr Naipaul’s central grouse, with its implication that women cannot write, or that women writers are by definition sentimental. It displays his lack of reading — could anyone who had read Hilary Mantel, Lionel Shriver, Marilyne Robinson, Margaret Atwood, Mary Shelley, Susan Sontag and company actually believe this? You could, of course, if you were a fossil, a relic from another age.

8. I could go back to Mr Naipaul’s work — not the disappointing late novels that show the waning vigour and drooping powers of a played-out novelist, or the feeble African travelogue, but the humour and sharp acuity that marked books like A House for Mr Biswas, or The Mimic Men, or A Bend in the River. Books from the time when Mr Naipaul’s ability to see things clearly had not been overtaken by his arrogance and his choler. But instead, I find myself reaching for Pride and Prejudice. The novel’s comedy is restorative, and nothing could be more appropriate to the present situation than the title.

Book review: The Sly Company of People Who Care

(Published in India Today, February 2011; this is a longer version.)




The Sly Company of People Who Care
Picador India,
Rs 495, 281 pages
Rahul Bhattacharya








VS Naipaul made two observations that should be committed to memory by all aspiring authors, and travelers. The first was that his travel books, specifically the ones about India, were all books about himself as much about the country. The second was about technique; in his early years as a traveler, Naipaul said, he was so taken “with the odd idea of the writer as the reader of externals that [he] never thought to make simple inquiries of people”.

Naipaul weaves through the pages of The Sly Company of People Who Care, referenced explicitly twice, paid homage to in several gorgeously written, sharp passages about Guyana. But of all the men—and they are, mostly, young, ambitious men—who have genuflected at Naipaul’s shrine, Rahul Bhattacharya may be his one true heir.

To say that is also to diminish the impact of this first novel, one of the most original and striking debuts of an already crowded year. “Guyana had the feel of an accidental place,” writes the narrator, an accidental voyager in search of meaning, a shape to his life; but this will be no ordinary bildungsroman. As Uncle Lance will tell him about Guyana, “it have everything… It have Hindu chu’ch, Muslim chu’ch, chu’ch of Christ. We got embassy, orphanage, vulcanisin, pawnshop, cookshop, rumshop, short-time’—the by-the-hour humping rooms. “..We got Blackman, redman, buck, chinee, coolie, dougla all lashin each other.”

The task Bhattacharya sets himself is not easy; The Sly Company of People Who Care could, in less skilled hands, have become a 21st century version of the 20th century novel where the protagonist takes the Grand Tour, goes to darkest Africa or mysterious India, and finds himself, conveniently and sharply outlined against a new landscape. And Guyana, as the author is well aware, is one of the last of the places on the map marked Here Be Dragons, one of the few places relatively untouched by the gritty prose of the indefatigable travel writer.

One clever way to avoid writing the exotic Indian novel is to write the exotic Guyana novel instead; but Bhattacharya's interest in place is far deeper than that. Guyana doesn't stand for anything except itself; and it is the country's history that allows the author to explore issues like migration, displacement and the rediscovery of self against a richly contemporary landscape.

The narrator becomes, briefly, a porknocker, prospecting for diamonds along with a bandit called Baby; it is not Baby’s banditry but the slow revelation of his possible insanity and his evident penchant for violence that will derail this relationship. The soundtrack to The Sly Company of People Who Care is there in every chapter; “gospel-soaked romps”, ska, chutney and reggae, soca and militant ballads.

“If water was Guyana’s essential truth, then porknocking was its most essential endeavour.” The porknocker is the man who goes after “the shimmers of desperate human coveting”; they get the glory, the rawness, the adventure—“got even the lone sorrow”. Every page of this novel glimmers with Rahul Bhattacharya’s controlled but wonderfully evocative prose; as you would expect from the author of a brilliant non-fiction work on cricket, Pundits From Pakistan, this is not journeyman or amateur writing in any sense. If Naipaul provides one kind of reference point for Bhattacharya, another is less obvious: the young Graham Greene, exploring the dark political comedies of just-hatched, unfledged regimes, would have shared Bhattacharya's eye for the grotesque.

In the second section, Bhattacharya switches pace, bringing the journalist to the fore. “You leave: what wound do you leave behind?” he asks, interrogating history through the fictional but unforgettable Ramotar Seven Curry, “whose passion was attending weddings”, through the Indian family who are terrified of their own success and what it might attract.

And finally, his narrator explores yet another foreign country—love and the erotic, courtesy Jan, short for Jankey, both of them “surprised by one another’s Indianness”. Praise god that Bhattacharya is one of the few writers who can tackle the bawdy, the erotic and the grimly pedestrian journeys of lovers with equal ease. The final chapters, the final lines, take this powerful, funny and poignant novel to a pitch-perfect finish.

There have been some outstanding debuts this year, including novels by Shehan Karunatilake and Mirza Waheed, but The Sly Company of People Who Care towers above the rest. Naipaul, if he had been a young man exploring an unknown world today, could have written it. But Rahul Bhattacharya’s understanding of displacement and drifting comes from a completely original place, and he has all of the humour and the sharpness of the young Naipaul, with none of the spleen. This book, and this writer, are here to last.

The BS Column: Naipaul-The Twilight of his Travels

(Published in the Business Standard, September 21, 2010)

I think it’s very good to ask yourself who you are and why you’re here and what has made you.” In 1974, when V S Naipaul made that statement to an audience of students, he had been asking himself those questions for over a decade. Twelve years had passed since he had written The Middle Passage, his first collection of travel writings; 16 since he had written his first novels.


The Middle Passage is still an essential Naipaul work. It was a brave book to write at the time, and it set some of the rules by which Naipaul would travel, then and later. Intended as a kind of triumphal tour — the prime minister of Trinidad sponsored the trip around the Caribbean and some of the colonies of South America — The Middle Passage became a savage portrait of lost men, living in a “borrowed culture”, unaware of the extent of the losses colonialism had inflicted on them. He set down his own responses — flinching, as when he infamously described the sound of the steel bands of the West Indies as noise, often repelled — as faithfully as he did the lives and responses of those whom his open, merciless gaze fell upon.

“Other travellers, more haunted, carry questions, not answers or explanations, around with them wherever they go, and look to everywhere to give them some understanding, or even movement towards resolution, of the issue that is their lifelong companion (V S Naipaul is the archetype of this),” wrote Pico Iyer in a recent essay on different kinds of travellers. This is an accurate portrait, perhaps more accurate than the one we currently have of Naipaul the curmudgeon, or Naipaul the genius: polarising labels that over-simplify one of the world’s most complex writers.

In his seventies, Naipaul had no need to embark on a journey to Africa. This decade is set aside for the writing of memoirs, for late novels, or collections of essays: it is not, conventionally, an age at which most writers would set themselves the task of another exploration, or undertake the discomfort, physical and mental, of a journey with the intention of understanding the beliefs of a continent. But in the decade before he wrote The Masque of Africa, Naipaul had remained a traveller, choosing to meet revolutionaries in India as part of the research for his most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. (It was a journey of mutual disillusion.)

The Masque of Africa will not go down in the ranks of Naipaul’s greatest travel writings. “I found the place eluding me,” he writes of his return to Uganda after 42 years, and as he travels through Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa, the continent remains elusive. His explorations take him to witch doctors, animist shrines, forest initiation ceremonies. His observations on the thoughtless cruelty of some Africans to animals, especially to cats, that may be killed in a variety of ways of ascending brutality, become a running refrain, a sideways comment on the conflicts and bloodshed he doesn’t directly address. He ends by referencing Rian Malan, the author of My Traitor’s Heart — handing us over to a writer whose understanding of Africa is deeper and more nuanced than Naipaul can manage himself.

The Masque of Africa has been judged harshly for its stereotypes (“rubbish is the African way”, he comments of the piles of garbage he sees everywhere in Uganda), and for its limitations — Naipaul, once the most incisive of travel writers, can barely go beyond the surface of things in this book. This is Naipaul as a tourist rather than a travel writer, and it is his honesty about the narrowness of his journey that stands out.

Naipaul struggles with the difficulties of understanding cultures where the history is oral, not written. (In his view, not shared by Wole Soyinka and others, the oral tradition is always inferior to the written, because memory will not last beyond a few generations and may be wiped out entirely in a bloody war, a famine.) It is the practice in this century for journalists and travel writers to edit out the many filters between them and their experiences: the reader rarely sees the fixers, the interpreters, the useful local characters who will offer potted histories of a place.

Naipaul makes it clear that his African visit is mediated: he is too often at the mercy of those who take him around, as in one comic case where he walks too far, and is offered a wheelbarrow (inadequate to the task) for the next leg of his journey. He sets down the omissions and the gaps in each stage of his journey, and it is this honesty that may redeem an otherwise unconvincing, limited travelogue. As an inquiry into belief, The Masque of Africa falls short of Naipaul’s other journeys into faith and belief; but as an explication of the necessary limitations of travel writing as a genre, it is a surprisingly candid work.

The BS column: Naipaul's twilight travels

(Published in the Business Standard on September 12, 2010)

“I think it’s very good to ask yourself who you are and why you’re here and what has made you.” In 1974, when V S Naipaul made that statement to an audience of students, he had been asking himself those questions for over a decade. Twelve years had passed since he had written The Middle Passage, his first collection of travel writings; 16 since he had written his first novels.

The Middle Passage is still an essential Naipaul work. It was a brave book to write at the time, and it set some of the rules by which Naipaul would travel, then and later. Intended as a kind of triumphal tour—the Prime Minister of Trinidad sponsored the trip around the Caribbean and some of the colonies of South America—The Middle Passage became a savage portrait of lost men, living in a “borrowed culture”, unaware of the extent of the losses colonialism had inflicted on them. He set down his own responses—flinching, as when he infamously described the sound of the steel bands of the West Indies as noise, often repelled—as faithfully as he did the lives and responses of those whom his open, merciless gaze fell upon.

“Other travelers, more haunted, carry questions, not answers or explanations, around with them wherever they go, and look to everywhere to give them some understanding, or even movement towards resolution, of the issue that is their lifelong companion (V.S. Naipaul is the archetype of this),” wrote Pico Iyer in a recent essay on different kinds of travelers. This is an accurate portrait, perhaps more accurate than the one we currently have of Naipaul the curmudgeon, or Naipaul the genius: polarizing labels that over-simplify one of the world’s most complex writers.

In his seventies, Naipaul had no need to embark on a journey to Africa. This decade is set aside for the writing of memoirs, for late novels, or collections of essays: it is not, conventionally, an age at which most writers would set themselves the task of another exploration, or undertake the discomfort, physical and mental, of a journey with the intention of understanding the beliefs of a continent. But in the decade before he wrote The Masque of Africa, Naipaul had remained a traveler, choosing to meet revolutionaries in India as part of the research for his most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. (It was a journey of mutual disillusion.)

The Masque of Africa will not go down in the ranks of Naipaul’s greatest travel writing. “I found the place eluding me,” he writes of his return to Uganda after 42 years, and as he travels through Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa, the continent remains elusive. His explorations take him to witch doctors, animist shrines, forest initiation ceremonies. His observations on the thoughtless cruelty of some Africans to animals, especially to cats, who may be killed in a variety of ways of ascending brutality, become a running refrain, a sideways comment on the conflicts and bloodshed he doesn’t directly address. He ends by referencing Rian Malan, the author of My Traitor’s Heart—handing us over to a writer whose understanding of Africa is deeper and more nuanced than Naipaul can manage himself.

The Masque of Africa has been judged harshly for its stereotypes (“rubbish is the African way”, he comments of the piles of garbage he sees everywhere in Uganda), and for its limitations—Naipaul, once the most incisive of travel writers, can barely go beyond the surface of things in this book. This is Naipaul as a tourist rather than a travel writer, and it is his honesty about the narrowness of his journey that stands out.

Naipaul struggles with the difficulties of understanding cultures where the history is oral, not written. (In his view, not shared by Wole Soyinka and others, the oral tradition is always inferior to the written, because memory will not last beyond a few generations and may be wiped out entirely in a bloody war, a famine.) It is the practice in this century for journalists and travel writers to edit out the many filters between them and their experiences: the reader rarely sees the fixers, the interpreters, the useful local characters who will offer potted histories of a place.

Naipaul makes it clear that his African visit is mediated: he is too often at the mercy of those who take him around, as in one comic case where he walks too far, and is offered a wheelbarrow (inadequate to the task) for the next leg of his journey. He sets down the omissions and the gaps in each stage of his journey, and it is this honesty that may redeem an otherwise unconvincing, limited travelogue. As an inquiry into belief, The Masque of Africa falls short of Naipaul’s other journeys into faith and belief; but as an explication of the necessary limitations of travel writing as a genre, it is a surprisingly candid work.