The World is What it is — The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French; Picador; Price: Rs.595; 555 ppFor an individual to be acknowledged as the greatest living writer in the English language by V.S. Prichett, arguably the greatest living literary critic in the English language, is a rare honour indeed. More so when the recipient of the encomium is a small brown man of Indian origin born in a tiny island (Trinidad) in the obscure West Indies. Neither is that an exceptional opinion. Queen Elizabeth II awarded him a knighthood in 1990, and the jury of the Nobel Foundation conferred the Nobel Prize for literature upon him in 2001. These are just a few of the honours that have been heaped upon London-based writer and chronicler Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul. A descendant of indentured labourers shipped from rural Bihar in inhuman conditions to work the sugar plantations of the West Indies, during the span of half a century as a full-time writer, Naipaul has emerged as the most perceptive interpreter of the maladies of the post-colonial world. Nor unlike most heavily honoured writers, is Naipaul unrewarded by the market. According to Patrick French, the author of this authorised but unsparing biography of this controversial writer, Naipaul owns several homes in Britain, and has a million pound bank deposit in the tax-free Channel islands, which makes him one of the richest writers in the world, certainly of non-fiction. Born on August 17, 1932 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul (‘Vidia) was the second child of Seepersad and Droapatie (charming mutations of ‘Sreeprasad and ‘Draupadi) Naipaul. In popular legend in 1930s Trinidad, Indians were depicted as poor, mean, rural, heathen, aggressive, ethnically exclusive and illiterate. This then was the rough world into which Vidyadhar (later re-spelt as Vidiadhar) Naipaul was born, writes French. Remarkably, although he had to tend cows and goats before going off to school, barefoot, by the time he was in his late teens, Seepersad had taught himself to read and write English, and even before Vidias birth had begun to work as a freelance reporter for the Trinidad Guardian — an unusual job for an Indian to be doing at the time. Although at best a moderately successful journalist and a failed novelist, Seepersad implanted the idea of a life of letters in his young son, nurturing him on Dickens, Shakespeare and Somerset Maugham in his growing years. In 1950, Vidia Naipaul, a student of Trinidads top school, Queens Royal College where government paid his fees and gave annual grant for the cost of books, was awarded a scholarship to study at University College, Oxford. Intensely aware that he was cut out for greater things, getting out of the closed and intellectually arid environment of Trinidad was vitally important for young Vidia. Ascribing the scholarship which was initially denied to him, as one of the lucky things in my life, Naipaul is quoted by French as saying that had he not been able to escape from…
