Naipaul’s example

A Noble Man

I came to know of V.S. Naipaul through a profile done by Tarun Tejpal in Outlook magazine, The Last Emperor. Tejpal wrote it like a man possessed — it certainly cast a spell on me — and it still is the best piece I have read on Naipaul. There was also an interview in which Naipaul said that he got the writing ambition from his father: “Or rather, I took up his example; I took up his example”. I immediately went to a library to get A House for Mr Biswas.

Another article on Naipaul appeared soon, this time by T.G. Vaidyanathan in The Hindu Literary Review, titled The Writer’s Writer. And then, suddenly, I started seeing Naipaul’s name everywhere. Those were days when cyber cafes were few, TV channels were few, but newspapers and magazines were aplenty. I wonder if that was the time when the Indian media started celebrating Naipaul. It was the year 1998.

I was a young man in Lucknow with dreams of becoming a literary writer. The more I read of Naipaul, the more I identified with him. I had grown up in a similar maternal grandparents’ household, I had a similar father who wished to do extraordinary things, and I had a similar ambition — of not pursuing any profession except writing. I, too, disdained most of the world; I was born almost on the same date; and I was also a Brahmin with a father from east U.P. Besides, so much of Naipaul’s character, his attitude, was in me. Like him, I felt marked — “I am going to be either a big success or an unheard-of failure.”

Like Eklavya, I chose Naipaul as my guru. The Nobel may have been given to him for being an annalist of the destiny of empires and narrator of the history of the vanquished, to me his distinction lay in that he wrote about the writer. No one else has written so insightfully about the process of writing, the struggle and ambition to be a writer, the experience of being a writer. He stood for not what a writer does but what a writer is. Naipaul’s devotion to literature is heroic; his chronicling of the devotion inspiring. I did not really choose to be his disciple; if you wished to be a writer and if you read Naipaul, you just fell at his feet.

In Lucknow, soon after discovering Naipaul, I met Nasir Abid, “the man who met Naipaul” (that is how he begins his account, Five days with V.S. Naipaul). An old bachelor, Nasir had also wished to be a writer. “To me, Naipaul was God,” he told me. Nasir, like many Lucknow wallahs, could never leave Lucknow, which he thought was the reason why he could not become a writer. His greatest achievement was showing Naipaul around the city when the famous man came to Lucknow. I was impressed by Nasir; the house full of books, no family, a collection of Western classical music. But when I met him recently, I was disturbed by the severity of his disillusion and loneliness. Naipaul had no “humanity”; not marrying was “suicide”; Lucknow was a trap. I told him that I still admired Naipaul, that I will never marry, that I am going to live in Lucknow.

In a review of A Million Mutinies Now, T.G. Vaidyanathan wrote: “Nothing in Naipaul’s book quite matches the self-reflective and biting intensity of the Lucknow pages.” In Lucknow, with Nasir singing praises of the city’s glorious heritage, Naipaul remembered the “cultural deprivation” he grew up amid in Trinidad. That is why he had first come to India, in search of the glory of Hindustan his family spoke about. Instead, he had found squalor and shame. He could not live in India; it was no place to be a writer.

“Lucknow is for leaving,” a friend said to me once. I wanted to tell him that Lucknow was impossible to leave. But I had an older Lucknow in mind, the city to which Delhi wallahs once used to come and not the other way round, as was happening now, with students going to study in Delhi colleges as soon as they finished school. In the past, you came to Lucknow and you were treated to such hospitality that you stayed. Or, like Abdul Halim Sharar, you tried your luck in various cities but “as usual” kept returning to Lucknow. The city’s greatest writer, Naiyer Masud, described himself as a “ghar-ghusna”, stayer-at-home, and shuddered at the thought of living anywhere else. Characters like Nasir were a dime a dozen in Lucknow, people who wanted to leave the city but never could. Kafka had a similar relationship with Prague, “the mother with sharp claws”.

I left Lucknow to study for an M.A. in Delhi, at JNU. Lucknow University was a cesspool; people from backward, godforsaken places studied there, and there was so much violence and politics that the girls ran away at the sight of men. I attended three classes in the three years of the B.A.; I was from an elite convent school and I despised the riff-raff at the university. But the main reason I went to Delhi was because I had been bewitched by the JNU campus: it was in a forest!

Naipaul had given me the idea that you have to make your way in the world. That you have to be in a place that allows you to be what you want to be; otherwise, you will be nothing. Delhi was the best such place in India. I lived in Delhi seven years, then I went to Europe, lived in Denmark, Holland, Wales. But I could not stop longing for Lucknow; I also realized that the journey Naipaul made from Port of Spain to Oxford was for reasons entirely different from mine. I had not grown up amid cultural deprivation; rather, I was the inheritor of a great cultural legacy. London was no more the publishing capital of the world; if anything, it was in rapid decline. The world in which Naipaul became a writer had changed too much. Now, India was the land of opportunity.

But I was not going back to Lucknow to be a famous writer. I had lost interest in worldly success. I was appalled by the way literature was being dumbed down, I did not want to deal with the publishing industry, and I saw books as just another pile on the media clutter burying us. I wished to write in peace and quiet, for a select readership, and postpone the publishing for a while. It came from an aversion I had developed against everything that can be called “media” and from a slightly different reading of Naipaul.

I had always admired Naipaul for his truthfulness, for he wrote only of his own experience. In the past few years, I had arrived at the philosophical position that there is no point in trying to imagine oneself as someone else. All your thoughts are your own, and all thoughts come from what you know. Initially, I thought that to be a writer you must have the range of experience and knowledge like Naipaul had. But I realized that whatever your experience, however limited your knowledge, you can still be a writer if you write well. It does not matter how many readers a writer has, or what he writes about, because writing is only the writer’s thoughts. If these thoughts make sense, if they have universal value or niche appeal, if readers identify with them, is secondary. What the writing does to the writer, how the writer engages with the writing, is all that matters. It is a personal, solitary activity, and a writer may or may not want to share his thoughts with others.

A writer is someone who writes. It is not necessary to be published because you don’t need a certificate from others to prove to yourself what you are. There is a general fallacy that you are what the world thinks you are. Everyone indeed wants to be acknowledged for what they claim to be, but if you think of it logically, the acknowledgement makes not much of a difference, for unless you know yourself, the world will only confuse you by telling you a hundred different things. And if you really want to be a writer, all that you should do is write. Your experience is all the material you need, your knowledge of the language all your tools. After that, it is up to you whether you want to publish your writing or burn it.

We live in times when acknowledgement has become the key to our existence: I am known, therefore I am. We wish to be part of the world that we see in the media, do things that will be talked about, or talk about things that people are talking about, especially on the Internet. But we forget that what we know of ourselves at the deepest level will never be known to others; certain aspects of the self cannot be shared: we cannot dream someone else’s dreams, feel someone else’s sensations. Writing is the only medium that allows you to record your thoughts exactly as they are — you don’t have to translate them into drawing or music, you don’t have to act or dance them out, and you need nothing more than a pen and paper. Writing down one’s thoughts is especially useful if you want to study yourself. Writing for someone else means that you are trying to communicate, but you can only communicate what is common to you and him, what will make sense to him. The world is full of people. With most of them one has nothing in common; one might want to avoid the riff-raff, rather. But because everything is now so globalised we think we can communicate with everyone. It is a good time for social people but a writer is a solitary creature. The spotlight can scare him.

I am stressing the solitary nature of writing because it is not a performative art, and because it is about thoughts — only the person thinking the thoughts knows what they are. The writer tries to make sense of the weird feelings and ideas inside him by writing them into sentences (because they make sense) or poetry (which evokes images, sounds, sensations). Whether you construct a narrative or an argument, you have to deal with your own thoughts. You publish the writing not out of an urge to communicate but because you think it has a larger value. Unless, of course, you want to, like Naipaul, earn your living through the writing.

The problem is, in these times when everything has been professionalised and commercialised, one doesn’t want the writing to be treated like a commodity, or even a craft (think of the creative writing courses!). One does not want to be part of the media circus that the publishing industry has become. Every writer wishes to see his work printed in a book, but these days the writer feels a sense of trepidation. So many books are published, so much trash. You fear that your book will be lost in the heap, will be subjected to the same idiotic critics, sold in those obnoxious shopping malls. Writing is like a child to the writer; how do I send it out in the big bad world all alone.

I took up Naipaul’s example as a writer, but I have no wish to match his experience. I cannot travel to all continents and talk to thousands of people. I have no opinion about the world except that it has become too intrusive. I need privacy, I need only a few friends and loved ones who are there in Lucknow. I am interested in things like rivers and ghosts, and I will write of them. Neither do I have to ask them anything, nor are they worried about how I represent them. It is not what a writer thinks that is important, but whether he thinks well. I certainly think well and all I have to do is write down what I think as clearly and interestingly as I can. Whether a reader agrees with me is not for me to decide.

Finally, a Naipaul quote that is often misunderstood: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” This is supposed to mean that in the eyes of the world you can be nothing and therefore have no place in it. But Naipaul is clearly putting the responsibility on the man to not allow himself to become nothing; the world has nothing to do with it. The world is what it is, that is all. Whatever you have to become, you have to become in it; instead of changing the world so that it can accommodate you, you have to find a place for yourself in it. If you want to be a writer, then write; don’t let the world stop you.

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