In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul from a visit he made to Portland, Oregon in 1991.

The storied career of Naipaul spans more than a half century. In his lifetime, he was compared to Conrad, Dickens, and Tolstoy. Born in Trinidad to an Indo-Trinidadian family, he lived a peripatetic life, travelling the world constantly, though ultimately based in England. He often stirred controversy with strong opinions, and was sometimes accused of being an apologist for colonialism who yet, to quote his obituary in The New York Times, “exempted neither colonizer nor colonized from his scrutiny.” He scoffed at multiculturalism, yet celebrate diverse societies.  His temper was famous. He declared novels a 19th century relic, and yet continued to write them.  He infuriated and delighted critics and readers. What more can we ask of our writers and public intellectuals but for the compelling and intelligent stories that spark our own discussions?

Naipaul came to Portland on the occasion of the publication of India: A Million Mutinies Now. The book was the third installment of travelogues about his ancestral India, at time when the nation was in the midst of a massive transformation. The tribology was important for being part of a new and pioneering category of nonfiction that documented the lives of “regular” people in a style more like a novel, a style we are now so familiar with. In writing about India and its people Naipaul is both outside and insider and this is what gives him a unique perspective. And in this episode, he gives us an intimate look at the lives of both the wealthy upper caste, and also their servants. The stories take us from palaces to slums, to the homes of the burgeoning middle class, and his writing is attentive to the details, and sympathetic to his subjects.

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. His novels include A House for Mr. Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971, he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now. In 1990, Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lived with his wife Nadira and cat Augustus in Wiltshire, and died in 2018.