V. S. Naipaul Quotes (1932-2018)

“In 1946 there were the Hindu-Muslim massacres. They marked the beginning of the end for the city. The next year India was independent, but partitioned. Bengal was divided. A large Hindu refugee population came and camped in Calcutta; and Calcutta, without a hundredth part of the resilience of Europe, never really recovered. Certain important things were in the future – the cinema of Satyajit Ray, especially – but the great days of the city, all its intellectual life, were over. And it could appear that the British-built city – its grandeur still ghostly at night – began to die when the British went away.”

“It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'”

“The Taj Mahal is exquisite. Transported slab by slab to the United States and re-erected, it might be wholly admirable.But in India it is a building wastefully without function; it is only a despot’s monument to a woman, not of India, who bore a child every year for fifteen years.”

“The poor are almost fashionable. And this idea of Intermediate technology has become an aspect of that fashion. The cult in India centres on bullock cart Intermediate technology. The bullock cart is not to be eliminated; after three thousand or more of backward years Intermediate technology will now improve the bullock cart. ‘Do you know’ someone said to me in Delhi that investment in bullock carts is equivalent to that in the Railways.... Under the Intermediate technology improvements such as Metal axles, bearings, rubber tyres? But wouldn't that make the carts even more expensive? Wouldn't it take generations, and a lot of money, to introduce those improvements.”

“Calcutta, more than New Delhi, is the British-built city of India...In the building of Calcutta, known first as the city of palaces, and later as the second city of the British Empire, the British worked with immense confidence, not adopting the styles of Indian rulers, but setting down in India adaptations of the European classical styles as emblems of a conquering civilisation. But the imperial city, over 200 years of its development also became an Indian city…To me at the end of 1962, after some months of Indian small-town and district life, Calcutta gave me the immediate feel of the metropolis, with all the visual excitement of a metropolis… Twenty-six years later the grandeur of the British-built city… could still be seen in a ghostly way, because so little had been added since independence, so little had been added since 1962… The British had built Calcutta and given it their mark. And though the circumstances were fortuitous – when the British ceased to rule, the city began to die.”

“The Hindus, especially in Bengal, welcomed the New Learning of Europe and the institutions the British brought. The Muslims, wounded by their loss of power, and out of old religious scruples, stood aside. It was the beginning of the intellectual distance between the two communities. This distance has grown with independence; and it is this—more even than religion now — that at the end of the twentieth century has made India and Pakistan quite distinct countries. India, with an intelligentsia that grows by leaps and bounds, expands in all directions. Pakistan, proclaiming only the faith and then proclaiming the faith again, ever shrinks. It was Muslim insecurity that led to the call for the creation of Pakistan. It went at the same time with an idea of old glory, of the invaders sweeping down from the northwest and looting the temples of Hindustan and imposing the faith on the infidel. The fantasy still lives; and for the Muslim converts of the subcontinent it is the start of their neurosis, because in this fantasy the convert forgets who or what he is and becomes the violator.”

“…the very grandeur of the Mogul buildings is oppressive. Europe has its monuments of sun-kings, its Louvres and its Versailles. But they are part of the development of a country’s spirit; they express the refining of a nation’s sensibility; they add to the common, growing stock. In India these endless mosques and rhetorical mausolea, these great palaces speak only of a personal plunder and for a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered. The Mogul owned everything in his dominions; and this is the message of the Mogul architecture. I know only one building in England with this quality of dead-end personal extravagance…the Blenheim. Imagine England as a country of Blenheims, continually built, destroyed and rebuilt over five hundred years, each a gift of the nation and seldom for services rendered…leaving at the end no vigorous nation…no principle beyond that of personal despotism. The Taj Mahal is exquisite…But in India it is a building wastefully without function; it is only a despot’s monument to a woman, not of India, who bore a child every year for fifteen years. It took twenty-two years to build; and the guide will tell you how many millions it cost.”

“I can see how what I said then could be misinterpreted. I was talking about history, I was talking about a historical process that had to come. I think India has lived with one major extended event, that began about 1000 AD, the Muslim invasion. It meant the cracking open and partial wrecking of what was a complete cultural, religious world until that invasion. I don't think the people of India have been able to come to terms with that wrecking. I don't think they understand what really happened. It's too painful. And I think this BJP movement and that masjid business is part of a new sense of history, a new idea of what happened. It might be misguided, it might be wrong to misuse it politically, but I think it is part of a historical process. And to simply abuse it as Fascist is to fail to understand why it finds an answer in so many hearts in India. .... It could become that. And that has to be dealt with. But it can only be dealt with if both sides understand very clearly the history of the country. I don't think Hindus understand what Islam means and I don't think the people of Islam have tried to understand Hinduism. The two enormous groups have lived together in the sub-continent without understanding one another's faiths.”

“I quite like Naipaul's absence of sentiment, but if I have a quarrel with Naipaul, it is that I don't like the way that that absence of sentiment is not conveyed or expressed with richness of metaphor or generosity of character-creating. King Lear is fucking bleak, man, nothing is more bleak, but look how beautiful it is. So while one eschews sentiment because it creates bad art, I think one has got to express bleakness with a generosity of creativity, with music and sensuousness, otherwise it's just a dry, tedious self-denial.”

“Naipaul is essentially a writer of discovery. He tries on occasion to look into the past through the evidence of the present. That’s what he did in writing about the ruins of Vijayanagar in India: A Wounded Civilisation. He is not a professional historian, but his insights and perspectives on Indian history are unique and as startling in their accuracy as the observations of his travel.”

“Naipaul’s legacy will never be entirely straightforward – which does not mean he should not be read, enjoyed, debated and critiqued. Salman Rushdie’s brief tribute to Naipaul indicates the complexities: “We disagreed all our lives, about politics, about literature, and I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother,” he wrote on Twitter. In an era that yearns to render life in black and white, the complications of VS Naipaul are a reminder that it is more wisely seen in shades of grey.”

“I think that there are writers who I don’t necessarily agree with in terms of their politics, but whose writings are sort of a baseline for how to think about certain things — VS Naipaul, for example. … His A Bend in the River starts with the line, "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." And I always think about that line, and I think about his novels when I’m thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy, and I resist and fight against sometimes that very cynical, more realistic view of the world. And yet, there are times where it feels as if that may be true.”

“Let us add one more complication success brings: the illusion of predestination. In this regard I cannot help recalling a long conversation with V. S. Naipaul in which he insisted that he could not have failed as an author, and that recognition, even immediate recognition, of his genius was inevitable, simply because he was so good. I could not persuade him to accept that he only believed this because he had in fact been successful and that it must have been possible, given the world’s perversity, for recognition to have eluded him. The conviction of predestination came after the event.”