V. S. Naipaul, postcolonial orientalism and Islam (Trinidad and Tobago, India)

This dissertation investigates V. S. Naipaul's discursive representation of India and Islam from the perspective of Orientalism. It examines the India trilogy, An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now and his two books on the Islamic world, Among the Believers and Beyond Belief. It also scrutinizes essays and interviews where the subjects of India and Islam are addressed. Naipaul's complex and evolving attitudes to India and Islam as manifested in his most recent books and in recent interviews and articles compel a reevaluation of his relationship with them.; This dissertation argues that Naipaul's most recent work on India manifests a self-conscious distancing from the protocols of metropolitan narrative and from his earlier representations. It claims that critics have been insufficiently sensitive to the primacy Naipaul accords to human agency and the dynamics of historical processes in this work. Naipaul deploys the framework of the European Enlightenment to evaluate developments in India but India : A Million Mutinies Now also represents his most ambitious attempt to apprehend a culture in indigenist and non-European terms. This dissertation argues that Naipaul's most recent work on Islam, Beyond Belief, manifests a more complex engagement with Islam than Among the Believers but remains implicated within the framework of Orientalism. This study explores inconsistencies in his representation of the role of religious faith in the construction of identities in India: A Million Mutinies Now and Beyond Belief. This dissertation also examines the consequences of his representation of Islam as a manifestation of Arab imperialism. Naipaul indicts Muslims in the four non-Arab Islamic countries for not engaging their histories holistically because their Arab faith compels them to excise their pre-Islamic past. In his representation of Indian civilization, however, he performs a dangerous amputation of its Islamic history and defines the civilization in exclusionist terms. The Manichaeism implicit in this endorsement of historical atavism suggests a resurfacing of the earlier Naipaul in his incarnation as a cultural imperialist, and seriously undermines efforts to project him as a belated postmodernist.