Award a tribute to England, India, says Naipaul

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, OCT. 11. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature called the award a ``great tribute both to England, my home, and to India, home of my ancestors''. His new novel, Half A Life, is set in India -- a country which he once scathingly described ``an area of darkness''. Since then, however, he claims he has come to understand India better but he still arouses strong emotions both among his admirers and his critics who believe that he has moved closer to the right-wing Hindu idea of India.

In a statement, he said he was ``utterly delighted'' by the honour. ``This is an unexpected accolade,'' he said but the buzz is that he believes he should have got it long ago. He was apparently reluctant to take the call when the Swedish Academy phoned him to break to him the good news, and it needed some persuasion by his wife, Ms. Nadira, before he answered. ``He was very surprised and I don't think he was pretending,'' the head of the Academy, Mr. Horace Engdahl, said.

Sir Naipaul, who famously declared a few years that the novel was dead, surprised the publishing world when he announced that he was himself writing one. Half A Life, though well received by critics, has not been included in the Booker shortlist. Recently, he triggered a controversy when he ridiculed some of Britain's biggest literary icons, and criticised Indian writers, including R.K. Narayan, of lacking a sense of history.

AFP reports:

Born in Trinidad and son of an Indian Civil servant, Sir Naipaul has been based in England since the 1950s, yet has spent much of his life travelling around the world seeking answers and inspiration. Much of his writing examines the traumas of post- colonial change, which he explores with a moralist's outrage.

One of his first major works, A House for Mr. Biswas, looked at the almost impossible task for Indian immigrants in the Caribbean of trying to integrate into society while keeping hold of their roots. His ire has ranged from corruption in Indian politics to the West's cynical treatment of its former colonies to the cult of personality in The Return of Eva Peron. Sir Naipaul, now 69, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1990. He was educated in Port- Au-Prince, then Oxford University where he studied English literature.

Shortly afterwards, he embarked on travels that, in the space of just over three decades, have taken him around the world on a quest for home, as epitomised in works like The Enigma of Arrival. He was one of the first winners of the Booker Prize, now Britain's leading literary award, in 1971 for In a Free State.

During his early career he was dogged by money worries and loneliness. He met his first wife, Pat, at Oxford and married her in 1955, although he later admitted sleeping with prostitutes during the marriage and having a long-term affair. Pat died in 1996. The same year, he married Ms. Nadira Khanum Alvi. Critics have spoken of his feeling of ``congenital displacement,'' of having been born a foreigner, a citizen of an exiled community on a colonised island, without a natural home, except for an India to which he often returns, only to be reminded of his distance from his roots.

``The strength of Naipaul is the poignancy of Naipaul,'' one critic wrote - ``the poignancy of a wanderer who tries to go home, but is not taken in and is accepted by another home only so long as he admits he is a lodger there''. Last year, he vented his spleen on the Government of his long-term home, Britain, over its``aggressively plebian'' attitude to culture. He likened the Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair to a pirate at the head of a socialist revolution that was ``destroying the idea of civilisation in this country.'' ``Despite being so anti-elitist, the Prime Minister talks about the great geniuses of this country, as if somehow there is something going on. There is nothing going on. It is all over.''

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