Why those who dismiss V.S. Naipaul as a defender of colonialism should take a closer look at his writing

When a great writer dies, so does their mystique. Previously muttered complaints about inflated reputations and unpleasant personal traits are brought into the open. (A scandalous biography helps.) But when V.S. Naipaul died in 2018 the work had already been done. Naipaul was best known as a snob, always keen to dismiss modern England or lament the dark failure of Africa.

Derek Walcott, who once admired his fiction as much as Naipaul did Walcott’s early poems, composed a satire called ‘The Mongoose’: ‘Each studied phrase is poison, / Since he has made that sneering style a prison.’

His old friend Paul Theroux wrote a memoir, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, that depicted him, in Theroux’s words, as ‘a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain.’ In 2008, Patrick French’s authorised biography exposed his mistreatment of his first wife Patricia Hale, and the sexual sadism he inflicted on his Argentinian mistress Margaret Gooding.

Morally suspect, he was also deemed politically culpable: Edward Said, in one of his final interviews, accused Naipaul of believing ‘not that colonialism lasted too long, but that it didn’t last long enough—look what happened after the white man left!’

Barack Obama, former commander-in-chief of the US armed forces, admired his work but was uncomfortable with his ‘curmudgeonly sort of defence of colonialism’. Posthumous judgement was sealed in 2020, when the BBC commemorated Britain’s first non-white winner of both the Booker Prize and the Nobel with a documentary entitled The Trouble with Naipaul.   

But the image of Naipaul as an olympian reactionary in both his politics and his art – everyone admits he wrote beautiful English – relies on a selective and superficial reading of his work. In the 10-year period from the late 1960s onwards, Naipaul wrote excoriating books about the colonial history of his native Trinidad and white settlers in Africa; he also showed surprising empathy for revolutionary black nationalists.

His novels about damaged post-colonial societies and tragically unmoored migrants invented a genre that contemporary writers such as Mohsin Hamid, Teju Cole and Pankaj Mishra have since taken up. Neither was he formally conservative in his writing style. In the 1970s, he abandoned the solid Victorian realism of A House for Mr Biswas (1961) for a more disjointed, experimental style, one that suited a series of protagonists who always remain, unlike Biswas, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

The English, meanwhile, wanted the Indian gold but also wanted to be loved. For Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘to be received among them as a liberator: that was part of the dream.’ He wanted to create a ‘Raleana’, where he would be adored by the natives. Raleigh wrote: ‘To tell you I might be here King of the Indians were a vanitie; but my name hath still lived among them… all offer to obey me.’

Naipaul is withering about such pretensions to imperial benevolence. By the late 18th century, he tells us, the British ruled over ‘an empire of plantations and Negroes, the whip, the branding-iron, the knife (for cutting off Negro ears), the stake and the torture cells of the Port of Spain jail’.

In an infamous case, General Thomas Picton, Trinidad’s governor, tortured Luisa Calderón, a 14-year-old mixed-race girl accused of theft. Naipaul’s exacting description of the torture is excruciating to read. Ten years after his death at Waterloo, Picton would have a monument raised to him in Carmarthen and later a statue in Cardiff’s Marble Hall of Heroes. (In 2020, Cardiff Council voted to remove the statue.) For Trinidadians like the young Naipaul, ‘Picton was the name of a street; no one knew more’.  

The Loss of El Dorado casts a somewhat different light on Naipaul’s reply to Bernard Levin’s question about his Trinidadian roots. ‘Yes, I was born there,’ he said, ‘I thought it was a great mistake.’ Usually read as hauteur, I hear instead genuine anguish: Trinidad itself was the mistake, and his Indian ancestors’ arrival after abolition as indentured labourers – near enough a form of slavery – simply one more layer of oppression.   

Yet Naipaul’s essay reserves its real contempt for fellow travellers such as John Lennon, who gifted Michael X a £400 piano; for the revolutionary himself, if not his ideology, he retains a subterranean sympathy.

The two men had a lot in common. Born a year apart, both were racial outsiders in Trinidad: Naipaul an Indian, Michael X half-white Portuguese, half-Black; both were educated at well-known colonial schools; both went to England to prove themselves to a white audience; both changed their names as they shifted their identities—Vidiadhar Surajprasad, Vido, V.S., Sir Vidia; Michael de Freitas, Michael X, Michael Abdul Malik; and both were published by André Deutsch. The second (unpublished) volume of Michael X’s autobiography even had the Naipaulian title Requiem for an Illusion. 

As explored in explicit detail in Guerrillas, Naipaul’s 1975 novel based on the case, there was also an uneasy overlap in their sexual tastes, especially in relation to white women. Gale Benson, the daughter of a Tory MP, who worshipped Michael X and was eventually murdered by his gang, was drawn to the cult, says Naipaul, through liberal masochism.

Jane, the character in Guerrillas based on her, sleeps with Jimmy Ahmed (the X character) for the same reason. One sex scene reveals Jimmy’s Othello complex: when she rejects anal sex, ‘sudden anger swept over him… he raised his hand to strike her’. (In the end, he gets his way and kills her.) The scene recalls Naipaul’s confession to his biographer that when he discovered Margaret Gooding had slept with another man, ‘I was very violent with her for two days with my hand… She didn’t mind it at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her… I have enormous sympathy for people who do strange things out of passion’. 

For readers who prefer their writers morally spotless, Naipaul will always be a difficult figure. But he understood intimately the toxic combination of racial self-hatred, sexual shame and violent sadism that colonialism had engendered.

Today, we see the same pathology in a figure like Islam4UK founder Anjem Choudary (known in his student days as party-boy ‘Andy’), who played the media with his clownish ‘behead those who insult Islam’ placards. Except the joke turned sour when he started recruiting British Muslims for Islamic State.   

For whites in Africa the situation is reversed – without the colonial state’s protection, their privilege fades. In a Free State’s long central narrative follows Bobby, a British civil servant living in a country resembling Uganda. There is a king and a president. ‘The white men who were appealed to liked the king personally. But the president was stronger… and the white men decided that the president was to be supported.’

Bobby was at Oxford with the king and, being a good liberal, wishes the king were more ‘African’ and less obviously pro-British (much good it does him). Yet Bobby is also used to being served by Africans; he often picks up young men in bars for a few shillings. He meets a Zulu in a recently integrated establishment called the New Shropshire, and begins speaking to him in pidgin; he puts his hand over his. But Bobby doesn’t realise this is a new Africa. The Zulu spits in his face. 
 
Bobby goes on a road trip with Linda, an unreconstructed racist whose generalisations about Africans he corrects; all the while, the country is descending into civil war, rendering their theoretical conversations irrelevant. Even when Bobby is being beaten up by the president’s soldiers, vestiges of liberal guilt remain: ‘He had thought at first that the soldier with the cigarette wished only to humiliate, denude, disfigure; and he had half understood, half felt sympathy.’ But then he ‘felt the boot hard on his right wrist’, and with that fracture ‘the knowledge that what had been whole all his life had been broken’.

Like Santosh, Bobby once lived in a world that made sense—the whites were in charge, and he was a good white. Now the Africans are in charge and, although intellectually Bobby welcomes this, only now does he realise his African life can never be the same.