8 - Writing About India, and Conclusion

Summary

I have kept the discussion of Naipaul 's writings about India for the end precisely because these provide a useful overview of Naipaul's development as awhole (appropriate to a conclusion). Through these I can rehearse all the stages in the development of the Naipaul oeuvre that have been charted above, and the more recent of these give interesting insights into Naipaul 's political and ideological commitments now. Naipaul's excavations into Caribbean history were initiated in terms of personal history (the Indian indentured labourer ancestry, the childhood within an insular Hindu Trinidad community), and naturally throughout his writing career he has determinedly tried to understand India. The interest which began with regard to a largely unknown and mythical space in his personal history (‘an area of darkness’), and gradually concretized itself in subsequent visits and revisits, through an expanding range of encounters, through disappointments and reanalyses, is indubitably a significant preoccupation across his career. At any rate, his writings about (and visits to) India are spread evenly over four decades: these include An Area of Darkness (1964); essays about India which appear in The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972); India: AWounded Civilization (1977); India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990); and a series of short articles and interviews in various papers and magazines since 1990. Naipaul has revisited India as recently as early 1998.

Written in the early 1960s, An Area of Darkness delineates the author's first visit to and engagement with India in terms of the modes of cultural analysis he had developed already. Naipaul had, by this time, sorted out his view of the New World: fictionalized reminiscences of the Hindu Trinidad of his childhood, speculations on his encounter with England and Englishness, and exploration of a range of Caribbean and South American countries had thrown up for him a consistent idea of the New World. Naipaul felt persuaded that the New World was caught up in a cultural vacuum; that it was bound to a fantasy play-acting which denies itself; that the West – the former colonizers and neo-colonists – provided images and aspirations which were constantly mimicked in the New World. The New World, in short, is a mimic culture, and the West is mimicked.