Book Review: A Writer’s People by VS Naipaul

‘A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling’

By: V. S. Naipaul

Picador

ISBN: 978-0-330-48524-1

The winner of Nobel Prize in Literature, 2001, VS Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went on to England in 1950 on a scholarship and studied at University College, Oxford. After his college, he started writing, as a passion and profession. He has authored more than 20 books. This is the first time I got to read one of his books.

In “A Writer’s People”, VS Naipaul tries to explore “the ways we think, see and feel”. He covers a wide range of issues, along with a wide range of personalities (authors) and their books. He starts with a chapter named “the Worm in the Bud”, recounting his young days in Trinidad. He reflects on local culture, the movements to revive ‘local culture’ (by men like Albert Gomes, a city politician). He recollects poetry of Derek Walcott, and thinks about his time spent with the established and struggling writers in the profession. His analysis of people (writers/poets) and their creations are so wonderful to read. Even though those are autobiographical, the pleasure of writing is nonetheless more than any other form. For example read this paragraph:

“I was living at the time in an over-furnished, neglected attic flat in Muswell Hill. My elderly landlord and landlady had both been married before and the attic was full of their surplus furniture. A partitioned corner space in the sitting room, which was quite large, was for coal; it also had mice, bright-eyed and startled when you came upon them. The dormer window at the back overlooked a bowling green. From a house on the other side of the green, there came on some evenings the sound of someone practicing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. Blackbirds raided the gardens all around and brought back their booty to the dormer roof. Sometimes a cherry escaped their beaks and rolled down slowly from tile to tile, and the disappointed birds squawked and scratched on the tiles with apparent rage.” (P59)

Reading this page of his book, I became a huge fan of his writing.

In second Chapter “An English Way of Looking”, he talks much about Anthony Powell. We get to know how his open ways led to a lot of acquaintances but also those who spoke badly about him on his back. He spoke well and highly of others (fellow writers), while they insulted him in their writing and in speech behind his back.

The third chapter is more interesting. It is titled “Looking and Not Seeing: the Indian Way”. Here he reflects on issues of migration (Indians were taken to Trinidad as workers by the British, in the 19^th century). As Naipaul grew up, he expected people around him in Trinidad to tell him about India, their motherland, about the villages and the cities of India. But to his surprise, no one told him any account of those. In fact he felt that no one was interested in thinking about India or remembering one’s past. Was it because they had no choice to go back to India and hence thought to forget about it? It was not always so. Once a carpet-maker came to his house (he had immigrated to Trinidad recently), and the author tried to ask him about his memories from India. The poor guy could only utter “there was a railway station”, and then went back to his work. The guy didn’t speak at all. These portions in the book have come out very well. For example, here is a portion from this chapter where author reflects:

“It wasn’t that as colonials we had forgotten or wished to forget where we had come from. The opposite was true. The India we had come from couldn’t be forgotten. It permeated our lives. In religion, rituals, festivals, much of our sacred calendar, and even in our social ideas, India lived on, even when the language began to be forgotten. It was perhaps because of this Indian completeness that we never thought to ask people who had come from India, and whose memories would have been reasonably fresh, about the country. And when we lost this idea of completeness, and a new feeling for history drove us to wonder about the circumstances of our migration, it was too late. Many of the old people we might have asked about their lives in the other place had died; and some of us, becoming truly colonial now, fell into the ways of colonial fantasy, fabricating ancestry and a past, making up in this way for what we now felt to be our nonentity.

Our immigrants, few and poor and unprotected, had brought their language, their diet; their many-sided religion, its festivals, its social and caste distinctions, sometimes small smooth colored pebbles standing (by further leap of the imagination) for the images; the conches, gongs, and bells associated with worship; other musical instruments; book rests for their bulky holy books; wood printing blocks to stamp designs on cotton; sometimes even everyday objects, brass places, water jars.

It would have been possible, from the objects the immigrants brought with them, and the religious rites and festivals they carried in their memory – taken together, like a folk memory – it would have been possible for the civilization to be reconstructed, more than is possible for the Mayan or the Etruscan, So in one way it cannot be said that the immigrants brought little from India; they brought their civilization. (P80-81)

In his quest to learn more about India, and about the time and era when his father had migrated to Trinidad, he comes across a book written by a Muslim named Rahman. Rahman had gone to Surinam when he was much young, as a worker, and in later part of life he wrote his autobiography about his experiences. The book was written in Hindi, named “Jeevan Prakash”. Curious to find more about the society and about India as it was in old days, Naipaul read his book but was hugely disappointed. In these pages he analyses the man and his book and thinks that this man always lived in an imaginary world of “Arabian Night” days. In his book, which was in fact an autobiography, Rahman writes 50 pages on “history of India” – which was merely a list of Muslim Kings and the British generals who ruled over India. He gives a detailed description of how a sick person was cured by Hakim with tablets made from mixing tortoise urine with two and a half-quarter powdered earthworm. Now Naipaul goes harsh on this absurd writer and his humorous taunt on Rahman can be seen in this sentence:  

‘The Light of Life’ ends with a poem in Hindi in praise of the Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, ‘Maharani Queen Wilhelmina Sahab Bahadur’; if Rahman had stayed in British India something as loyal to the British sovereign, and fulsome, might have come from his pen. (P88)

A major attraction of the book is Naipaul’s take on Mahatma Gandhi. He reads Gandhiji’s autobiography and tries to analyze why he wrote those portions in “My Experiments with Truth”. He thinks about the time, the environment and the acquaintances of Gandhiji, when he was actually writing some portions of the book decades after the actual events, and gives a wonderful analysis where the writer (or translator) could have gone slightly ego-boasting rather than being factual. But very soon, we see Naipaul appreciating Gandhi for his courage and strength (we see a fine balance in Naipaul as a critic). Naipaul also analyzes Nehru’s autobiography and finds it worse – Nehru just names the cities of Britain and doesn’t care to describe anything for the readers. After that, we have some pages on Vinoba Bhave and his Bhudan movement. Here, I couldn’t understand why, Naipaul turns bitter and too harsh on the man. He starts this portion with saying, “There was a foolish man, Vinoba Bhave, …” (P172) and only gets worse in the later paragraphs. Though his points are valid, but the way he calls Vinoba a “parasite” (for living in Gandhiji’s ashrams) for example, makes me wonder. The way Naipaul analyzes authors and their books by thinking about their life and circumstances at the time of actual writing of the book, if I do the analysis of this portion I think Naipaul won’t be very happy when he was writing these and must have some personal biases. Anyways, there is much more in this book than I describe here in this piece.

It has been an absolute delight to read Naipaul. Reading him, I rediscovered the beauty and pleasure of reading literature. His writing is both inspiring and revealing. I feel privileged to read one of his books and would love to read more from him.

© Rahul