| In recent decades, some of the most outstanding literary achievements in the English language have been made by the natives of newly liberated or independent former British colonies, who are often referred to as "postcolonial writers." Naipaul is one of the most representative of these writers. Born of an East Indian family in 1932 in Trinidad, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul has been generally regarded as one of the leading novelists of the English-speaking world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001, 88 years after Tagore was awarded the Prize in 1913. As one of the greatest postcolonial writers, he is really difficult to define or categorize. So far, he has been given at least five labels: West Indian or Caribbean writer, Indian writer, Commonwealth writer, British writer, and postcolonial writer. Naipaul is really fit to reflect upon cultural displacement or loss that colonial and postcolonial people have encountered. He has been exposed to several cultures: he is an Indian by blood, a Trinidadian by birth, and a Briton by citizenship or choice of home. Above all, he is an exile or outsider by experience and spirit. He states that he does not represent any country and organization and works all on his own. As a restless man, a writer without roots or country, Naipaul has travelled extensively all over the world, especially in postcolonial societies, writing travelogues afterwards that record what he saw and contemplated. It is probably more appropriate to regard him as a citizen of the world, or a world's writer. This is in large measure due to his self-proclaimed rootlessness. Dissatisfied with the cultural and spiritual poverty of Trinidad, distanced or disconnected from India, and unable to properly relate to and share in the heritage of the Mother country, Naipaul regards himself as "content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors." As a result of his strong sentiments of nonattachment to any particular region, country or tradition, most of his works deal with people who, like himself, are estranged or alienated from the societies they are supposedly a part of and who are desperately trying to find a way to belong or to be "someone." The locations Naipaul chooses for his fiction represent an extension of this same theme, for most of his novels are set in emerging Third world countries in the throes of creating a new national identity from the tangled remnants of native and colonial cultures. With his complex backgrounds, he has been naturally concerned with postcolonial countries and the dilemmas or problems they face in the wake of the Empire. His writings mainly deal with cultural confusion or displacement of those societies and problems of an outsider or exile, a feature of his own experience as an East Indian in the West Indies, a West Indian in England, and a nomadic intellectual in postcolonial world. Naipaul has caused many disputes because of his "politically incorrect" views of the "half-made societies." He is extremely controversial in postcolonial world, as he gives a very outspoken, harsh and pessimistic assessment of those societies. Almost all of his writings are very politically charged, and relate to politics, race, and the legacy of colonialism. Few writers of his status have been so consistently and aggressively misunderstood or misinterpreted on account of ethnic and racial issues. Much of criticism about Naipaul stems not from what he writes but from expectations about what he ought to write, given that he is a brown man, born into the black and brown society of Trinidad. As a result of his sharp criticism of the Third World, including his land of ancestry and his country of birth, he has been unfairly accused of being a racialist, colonialist and imperialist. However, dismissing all the accusations against him, he continues on his solitary journey to explore the problems of the Third World as a truth-seeker.In the circle of literary criticism, Naipaul's oeuvre has long been regarded as an important part of postcolonial...
|
PDF Full Text Request