With a career spanning over 50 years, Trinidad-born Nobel Prize winning author Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul Vidia, better known as VS Naipaul breathed his last on Saturday night in his London home. The author who died at 85, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and is most famously known for his books A Bend in the River and A House for Mr. Biswas, among others.
Naipaul’s books spoke about his journey from Trinidad to London and has described the common man struggle in a developing world. VS Naipaul's breakthrough came in 1957 with his first published novel The Mystic Masseur, a humorous book about the lives of powerless people in a Trinidad ghetto. Among many other things, he has described his journey as a ‘self-footed colonial’ from his childhood to ‘upper class England’ The Swedish Academy while awarding him the Nobel Prize said his works having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.
Interestingly, he was also involved in a lot of controversial situations because of the remarks he made openly. The remarks like India is a “slave society” while also saying that Africa has no future also said that women in India wearing the red dot indicates that their head is empty. Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott even said Naipaul’s prose shows his repulsion to Negroes. One of the many other controversies he was involved in was with American author Paul Theroux who wrote a stinging memoir about Naipaul saying that he was racist, sexist and even beat up women. While he ignored the book, in a biography later he devoted a few chapters to the claims and made a mention of it.
VS Naipaul was married twice - first to Patricia Ann Hale Naipaul who died in 1996 of breast cancer and is currently survived by his wife Nadira Khannum Alvi Naipaul whom he married immediately after Patricia's death.