Literary Issues
By Dilip Menon
Dilip Menon is the Chair of Indian Studies and the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of the Witwatersrand
No author in contemporary times more willfully damaged his reputation with cantankerous observations as did VS Naipaul. He had extreme and contrarian opinions on the big issues of the day, from colonialism to Islam and the travesties of nationalism in Asia and Africa.
A generation of readers who came of age in the last decade of the 20th century saw, and heard, him at his worst, even as his literary career was capped with the ultimate accolade of the Nobel Prize in 2001. The citation emphasized his “perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.”
But it must have seemed incomprehensible to those who had only listened to his intemperate words and read his later work which seemed like tired caricatures of his earlier oeuvre.
