File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0110, message 379


From: "Ismail Talib" <i_talib-AT-email.com>
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 16:29:12 +0800
Subject: Re: Said 1998: on Naipaul


Dear Prof Wallia

> 
> Mr. Talib also posted a quote from Naipaul stating the lack of 
> intellectual discourse in India. Naipaul is correct in this 
> observation too. With 500 years of Islamic colonization of India 
> followed by 200 years of British colonization, the muffling of Hindu 
> discourse was inevitable. Only in recent decades has Hindu 
> renaissance emerged.

No Prof Wallia! This was not what Naipaul said! He didn't mention anything at all about "Hindu discourse". Please read the entire report again (below), and tell me where Naipaul mentions "Hindu discourse" and how it is linked to "intellectual discourse" in India today! If you have the full source of what Naipaul actually said, would you be so kind, Prof Wallia, to post the more substantial article (if it is not too long) to the list? Or at least give us the source?

Thank you,

Ismail

----

Indians are improving, not there yet: Naipaul 
Rashmee Z Ahmed 


10/14/2001 
The Times of India 

Copyright (C) 2001 The Times of India; Source: World Reporter (TM) 

LONDON: Even as India cheers V S Naipaul's latest triumph, he continues his acerbic and controversial commentary on the "home of my (his) ancestors", telling Britain's literature lovers that 40 years ago, Indians were just not intellectual enough to be able to read and appreciate his books. 

India has "improved" over the years and "this is one of the things I have helped India with", he patronisingly told a literary festival in south-western England. 

Naipaul, whose deeply critical analysis of India, 'A Wounded Civilisation', had annoyed many, dismissed that anger as ignorant and ill-informed. "The trouble with people like me writing about societies where there is no intellectual life is that if you write about it, people are angry". 

News of Naipaul's remarks, during his first public appearance since winning the Nobel Prize for literature, has upset sections of Britain's large Indian community. Some said that his views were unnecessarily provocative and merely illustrated Naipaul's apparent compulsion to belittle the country and culture he paid tribute to just days ago whilst accepting the Nobel prize. 

One well-known Indian academic said he would only like to quote in response the cutting criticism of writer Edward Said. Professor Said had noted that the West regarded Naipaul as "a master novelist and an important witness to the disintegration and hypocrisy of the Third World, (but) in the post-colonial world he's a marked man as a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him". 

Naipaul's talent for controversy with a stream of impolitic remarks about the "calamitous effect" of Islam on the world has already raised questions about why he was awarded the Nobel prize at a politically sensitive time in the West's relations with Muslim countries. 

Sections of Britain's Muslim community have criticised the award as a cynical political gesture calculated to humiliate Muslims. 

Interestingly, for a coloured man born of Indian parents, he is also being denounced as racist in the extreme with his fellow Nobel laureate, Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, damning him with faint praise. Naipaul is "our finest writer of an English sentence", said Walcott, but his prose is "scarred by scrofula and a repulsion towards Negroes". 

Naipaul has long been considered a worthy candidate for the greatest accolade a writer can receive, but his unfashionably illiberal views are thought to have weakened his case time and again. 


-- 

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