Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'V S Naipaul, a great writer, passes away' that was published in Newsband

V S Naipaul, a great writer, passes away

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was one of the great writers.  He passed away at his London home on August 11 just six days short of his 86th birthday. His writing career spanned more than five decades. He won the Nobel Prize in 2001.

Naipaul wrote about how colonialism and migration shaped the modern world. He travelled widely to examine how post-colonial societies shape-shifted.

Born in Trinidad to parents of Indian origin, whose forebears had come to the West Indies as indentured labour, Naipaul was consumed by one ambition: to be a writer. He acquired the urge to write from his father, a journalist in Port of Spain. He had his own way of seeing the world. His unsparing eye and clear prose made him understood by the readers. He depicted the developing world through an imperial filter; he was accused of Islamophobia.  

His India trilogy — An Area of Darkness (1964), A Wounded Civilisation (1977), A Million Mutinies Now (1990) – were read by many. Naipaul’s writings are too important to be overlooked on.  

He resided in England as an adult, and traveled across and wrote about India, Africa, the Islamic world, and South and North America in his novels and non-fiction works. He published more than thirty books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some fifty years. Naipaul in his 2001 Nobel Prize lecture Two worlds, speculated that he may be paternally linked to Nepal.

Naipaul's mother came from a prosperous family. In 1939, when he was six years old, Naipaul's family moved in with them in a big house in Trinidad's capital, Port of Spain.

In 1952, before visiting Spain, Naipaul met Patricia Ann Hale, his future wife, at a college play. With Hale's support, he began to recover and gradually to write. She became a partner in planning his career. In January 1955, he and Pat were married. In 1995, as he was traveling through Indonesia with Gooding, his wife Patricia was hospitalized with cancer. She died the following year. Within two months of her death, Naipaul ended his affair with Gooding and married Nadira Alvi, a divorced Pakistani journalist more than 20 years his junior. He had met her at the home of the American consul-general in Lahore. In 2003 he adopted Nadira’s daughter, Maleeha, who was then 25.

Naipaul died at his home in London at the age of 85 on 11 August 2018, less than a week short of his 86th birthday.