VS Naipaul, Nissim Ezekiel and a forgotten literary debate on post-independence Indian identity

In 1962, VS Naipaul left London on his first visit to India. At the time Naipaul was no literary behemoth; he could only fund the trip through a book contract from an English businessman. He had just found some success with his novel A House for Mr Biswas, much of which drew from Naipaul’s childhood, a migrant Hindu household in Indo-Trinidadian society, confronting an era of receding empire, and new, yet uncertain sense of the future.

Fame and notoriety

Naipaul’s reason to visit India stemmed from these post-colonial contradictions, searching for meaning in a land he knew best from his grandfather’s stories and his families’ traditions. The book that emerged at the end of the trip – An Area of Darkness – was in equal parts travelogue and polemic, a searing, pessimistic indictment of the poverty, corruption, and false spirituality of newly independent India.

Naipaul discovered neither the religious tone of his grandfather’s punditry, nor the mendicant pluralism of Gandhi. He felt that “India was sad, simple and repetitive”. His return to his grandfather’s village is a particularly piercing passage. Naipaul thought it should have been the return of a long-lost son, reconnected to a homeland from which his family had left under a rapacious colonial regime. Instead, he felt entirely disconnected, coming...

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