Naipaul is a diasporic Indian writer who has visited India many times and has stayed here for a considerable time. As an outsider, his observations on India are a matter of fact, keen and insightful. According to Om P. Juneja “[he]… has an epistemological privilege of being an outsider insider with all the significant creative possibilities that such a vision can offer” (critical practice: 26). Naipaul’s forefathers belonged to India in Uttar Pradesh’s small village known as the village of Dubes. And he also bears emotional attachment for the country despite the fact that we is very angry, impatient with India. It is not surprising, therefore, that we find him as a postcolonial traveler of India with his curious love hate relationship with the country. Naipaul thus enjoys the privilege of both an outsider/insider due to his personal and familial displacements.

His admirers see him as the most uprooted writer of the twentieth century who has no national affiliations and hence prejudices. By them he is projected as an uninvolved outsider with an exotopic vision, even when he cannot absolve himself of his Trinidadian filiations of his birth in a Hindu family of the indentured laborers.

Even though Naipaul spent his life abroad, India was always calling him. All through his years in the Western World he had his eyes on India. India disappointed him, however, leading him to explore other cultures and civilizations. In his autobiographical piece, Beyond Belief, he

he says; "My first eighteen years were spent two oceans away, on the other side of the globe…I began to feel when I was quite young that there as an incompleteness, an emptiness about the place, and the real world existed somewhere else…It… might have had to do with the wretched condition of India itself; and with the knowledge at the same time that we who were Indian were an immigrant people whose past stopped abruptly with a father or a grandfather."

(Qtd. In Jain, 2)

Naipaul’s travel-writings, thus, may be located in such a diasporic vision. They mainly deal with the questions of race, religion and history operating as the larger forces of a given society. Amnong the, history is of utmost importance because it embraces a multiplicity of approaches. For instance, there us the cultural history of families and above all the history which is perceptible to the outsider as it is reflected through social discourse. 

Article Posted By : ceorahulgonsalves  On July 11, 2012lView All Articles

CEO and Founder of naashtapaani.com with a keen interest in Hr and Marketing

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V.S. Naipaul , Thesis on literature , thesis