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. A literary career which began at those palaces of 1950s Englishness, the BBC and the New Statesman, has culminated in a knighthood, a home in Wiltshire, a clutch of honorary degrees, and a command of the English language which for its lucidity, precision and elegance might have been borrowed from that other literary migrant, Joseph Conrad. Naipaul has written about himself all his life. His fiction, and much of his non-fiction, is all in one way or another about the fate of the human jetsam of Europe’s vanishing empires, about the process of assimilation into a dominant culture, about the experience of having roots but no natural home. ‘I am the sum of my books,’ Naipaul said in his Nobel Prize lecture.

Yet he resolutely refuses to adopt the slate of received opinions which are thought to go with this kind of background.