From outsider to insider

V. S. Naipaul is one of the more striking figures of the great Indian literary diaspora. Yet he was not born in India and has never lived there. His family were originally impoverished high-caste peasants from the region of Gorakhpur. His grandfather migrated to Trinidad as an indentured servant at the end of the 19th century. His father was a small-time journalist and author of unsuccessful fiction and much worldly advice, on whom Naipaul based the eponymous hero of A House for Mr Biswas, his first famous novel and probably still his best. As for Naipaul himself, he came to England in 1950 on a government scholarship to Oxford, and has stayed ever since. ‘I am convinced,’ his father once wrote to him in his Oxford years, ‘that were you born in England, you would have been famous and rich and pounced on by intellectuals.’

Half a century later, Naipaul is famous, rich, pounced on by intellectuals and well on the way to having been born in England.