TRIBUTE
V.S. Naipaul
Loved by many and critiqued by others, V.S. Naipaul was a writer whose compositions captured the imagination of the world. His fierce depiction of the colonized world, the brutality of oppression, the paradoxes of the third world and his amazingly honest travelogues made him a cherished writer. Here is a tribute to his enormous potential.
The New Leam Staff
V.S. Naipaul was a storyteller who wrote several novels and essays about people who had migrated to different lands, the unravelling of the British Empire, and the irony of people in exile in a series of novels that were sharp and not afraid of anything. He died at the age of 85 in his London home among loved ones. Most of Naipaul’s works were about embodying the struggles of the colonized mind. Naipaul was born in Trinidad to Indian parents and to a home that economically suffered.
He went to Oxford University at a very young age and lived in England for most part of his life. He carved for himself a very luminous career as an author and received Knighthood in 1990. In his lifetime, Naipaul was compared to other luminaries like Tolstoy, Dickens but he also received major criticisms for his sharp critics, unapologetic revelations about communities, religions and colonialism.
Mr. Naipaul left alone neither the colonizer nor the colonized and brought them both under the purview of his scrutiny. He wrote extensively about the arrogance and self-aggrandizement as part of the attitude of the colonizers and also exposed the self-deception and ethical ambiguities of the liberation movements that took place in different parts of Africa and the Caribbean. The feelings of a migrant, his fears and apprehensions formed the core of Naipaul’s work, as even though he lived in England all his life here never really forgot his own origins or Trinidad. Naipaul received the Nobel Prize in 2001.
Mr. Naipaul was an ardent practitioner of Yoga and even though his back pained a lot, he continued.
His home in London was full of books from all around the world and had a family composed of his wife and their cat Augustus. It is universally agreed that Naipaul had a sharp eye for paradoxes, tragedies and suffering and wrote in a manner that was often alleged as cold. His travel writings as argued by his fans had an unusual degree of honesty about them that was never glamourized or beautified to look ready friendly or cast a positive impression. He was brutally honest in his depiction of the third world.
Naipaul may be loved by some and disliked by many but what is undoubted is the fact that he will be remembered as a legendary writer in English. He has left us with great array of work composed of biography, history, novels and travelogues. He saw himself as non-partisan, non-political and free and his proponents saw this honesty come across through his works.
