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WHAT
DOES VS NAIPAUL DO RIGHT?
The VS Naipaul of mass media is a mix of impatient remarks
and sensational sound bytes pulled out of context. The VS Naipaul
of the books is a nuanced and challenging thinker. In a three part
essay Farrukh Dhondy tracks the validity and masterful
insight of the writer and his most controversial views
 Beyond
Belief, VS Naipaul’s second excursion into five Islamic countries
was published in 1998. It’s a book of discovery, a follow up to Among
the Believers a book of stories garnered through travel in Iran, Pakistan,
Indonesia and Malaysia, which was published in 1977. Both dates are important
because they are sandwiched between the Islamic revolution in Iran in the
early ‘70s and the murdering attack on the World Trade Centre in 2002.
Both books are compilations of stories about people, their journeys, the
generations that bred them, the nuances of faith and belief that sustains
them.
Beyond Belief may be read as a panoramic portrait of these countries of
‘converts’ as Naipaul calls Muslims who are not Arabs, Muslims
who have through history and mostly through conquest converted to the religion
that sees Arabia as the centre of civilisation and their own history as
an adjunct of the Arab story.
As such, the book is magnificently ambitious, central to the concerns of
the world today, portentous and, for those who put their faith in forces
outside literary insight, as prophetic.
In the Prologue to Beyond Belief Naipaul anticipates a question that the
reader may reasonably ask:
“It may be asked if different people and different stories in any
section of the book would have created or suggested another kind of country.
I think not: the train has many coaches, and different classes, but it passes
through the same landscape. People are responding to the same political
or religious and cultural pressures. The writer has only to listen very
carefully and with a clear heart to what people say to him, and ask the
next question, and the next.”
In India, the metaphor of the train would become real. Sitting in, shall
we say, a third class railway carriage, making a sustained journey for any
purpose, one’s fellow passengers would open conversation with ‘Where
are you from?’ And then the next question and the next. We Indians
are used to the locative question and have prepared answers. But suppose
(unlikely, but just suppose) VS Naipaul found himself on such a journey
in such a train. Any answer he gave to the questions that would follow ‘Where
are you from?’ would, in all probability, confound the understanding
of the questioners. What would he say?
“Wiltshire”?
Or “Trinidad”?
And the remark that followed would perhaps be ‘I apologise, I thought
you were Indian.’
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October 02, 2004
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