Author: Fiachra Gibbons, arts correspondent
Publication: The Guardian
Date: February 22, 2002
Nobel prize winner's short fuse
explodes during debate on colonialism and gender oppression
Two of India's leading women writers
were yesterday taught a very tough lesson. You must never, ever bore VS
Naipaul with trifling matters such as colonialism or the enslavement of
your sex.
Sir Vidia, in the land of his ancestors
to celebrate his Nobel prize for literature, cut loose after listening
to Shashi Deshpande and Nayantara Sehgal - a niece of Nehru, India's first
prime minister - debate how gender oppression had affected their work.
As the pair moved on to talk about
the harmful influence of English on Indian literature, Naipaul's famously
short fuse exploded: "Banality irritates me. My life is short. I can't
listen to banality. This thing about colonialism, this thing about gender
oppression, the very word oppression wearies me," the 69-year-old Trinidad-born
author told a literary festival held to honour him south of New Delhi.
"If writers talk about oppression,
they don't do much writing. Fifty years have gone by. What colonialism
are you talking about?"
Amid uproar and with Naipaul apparently
shaking with fury, the writer and film-maker Ruchir Joshi shouted, "You're
being obnoxious!"
The situation was pacified by the
poet and novelist Vikram Seth, who allowed Deshpande to reply to his tirade.
"What does not affect anybody would be banal to them," she said. "When
I was listening to this talk about the anguish of the exile, I was really
cool about it," she added in a pointed reference to Naipaul's life in England.
This was not the first - or is it
likely to be the last - time that Naipaul's temper or his sharp tongue
have got the better of him. His love-hate relationship with India, the
land of his fathers, has been trying for both parties.
Many Indians have never forgiven
him for the fierce candour of his books about the subcontinent, An Area
Of Darkness, and India: A Wounded Civilisation. It did not help that days
after becoming a Nobel laureate in October he said no one in India had
been intellectual enough to understand the books when they were first published.
He followed that up by railing against
the "calamitous effect of Islam on its subject peoples - it was much worse
than colonialism", and further outraged liberal Indians by seeming to throw
in his lot with the Hindu nationalists of the BJP.
"Islam destroyed India," he said.
"There is this ill-informed idea that it was the British, in the short
time that they were there, that ruined and defaced all those temples you
see. The bitter fact is that the people of India were ill-equipped to face
the organised military power of Islam and were destroyed by it.
"The intellectual life of India,
the Sanskrit culture, stops at 1000AD. Islam was the greatest calamity
that befell it. Now people think only the Muslims built anything but what
they brought was a slave culture that lasted in some parts of India until
almost the other day.
"To be a Muslim you have to destroy
your history, to stamp on your ancestral culture. The sands of Arabia is
all that matters. This abolition of the self is worse than the colonial
abolition, much worse."
Naipaul said he was not troubled
by the way the BJP had appropriated his writing, particularly Among the
Believers and Beyond Belief, which were damning about Islam. "I am very
glad, I think it is the beginning of self-awareness [in India] which is
the beginning of an intellectual life."
