RIP V.S. Naipaul: he said what white men couldn't

So, farewell then, V.S. Naipaul -- racist, misanthropist and Nobel Prize winner. Another Trinidadian writer, C.L.R. James, said that his views on the world -- "The world is what it is" -- and its human inhabitants simply reflected "what the whites want to say but dare not." That explains why I, being Whiteman by name and white man in fact, have underlined so many passages in his books, of which I've read (and recommend) almost all.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born five days shy of 86 years ago in Trinidad, a descendant of impoverished Indians shipped to the West Indies as coolies -- bonded labourers. "I was born there, yes," he told an interviewer in 1983. "I thought it was a great mistake." In 1950, Mr Naipaul was awarded a scarce government scholarship to study in Britain, and left his family to study English literature at University College, Oxford. He never really returned.

Mr Naipaul saw himself as a lone, stateless observer, free of ideology, politics and illusion. From his base in England, he travelled for extensive periods to pen journalistic essays and travel books. He flew three times to India, the land of his ancestors, to write about its culture and politics, which he disliked intensely. He spent time in Buenos Aires to write about Eva Peron, the former First Lady of Argentina. And he went to Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia to research and write books about Islam, which he condemned.

That Sir Vidia Naipaul (knighted in 1990) was a great writer -- a master stylist and story-teller with a cold, clear eye for the ironies, tragedies and sufferings of mankind -- is beyond doubt. But he is one of those authors who one either loves or hates. To his detractors, he was essentially political, bearing witness against the post-colonial world with great writing but shielded from criticism by virtue of being "one of them". His many critics called him "troubling", even "bigoted". They saw him as a "hater", a purveyor of stereotypes, wallowing in loathing of the world from which he came.

His supporters, however, found in his fiction merciless comic clarity, and in his travel writing a terrifying honesty. He refused to glamorise or idealise the developing world, but delivered original, scorching critiques, devoid of political correctness. He was fearless and unbiased in his criticism, attacking the cruelty of Islam, the corruption of Africa and the self-inflicted misery he witnessed in the poorest parts of the globe. The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk said that Mr Naipaul represented third-world people "not with sugary magic realism but with their demons, their misdeeds and horrors -- which made them less victims and more human."

"There probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs", he once declared. He was scornful of the Caribbean, predicted that Africa would revert to bush (as indeed it has, IMHO) and often veered towards unapologetic misogyny. Indian women, he once wrote, wear a coloured dot on their foreheads to say "My head is empty."

V.S. Naipaul had little time for idealistic westerners who romanticised India and looked to it for a spiritual awakening. In the land of his ancestors, he saw only ugliness and a smug refusal to recognise the horror of the "narrow, broken lanes with green slime in the gutters, the chocked back-to-back houses, the jumble of filth and food and animals and people, the baby in the dust, swollen-bellied, black with flies, but wearing its good-luck amulet."

He was even more contemptuous of Islamic fundamentalism, which he decried long before 9/11 in The Believers (1981). One New York Times writer observed that it bore an antipathy to Islam so naked "that a book taking a comparable view of Christianity or Judaism would have been hard put to find a publisher" in America. An academic, Edward Said, said he found it hard to believe any rational person would attack entire cultures on such a scale.

Sir Vidia Naipaul will be remembered as a magical craftsman of English prose. He leaves behind a complex, challenging library of work which captures the complexities of the modern world in a unique blend of imagination, travel writing and autobiography. RIP.