More than ten years ago, V.S. Naipaul spoke at the Nehru Centre in London and read from some of his books. The audience was invited to send in written questions. I sent in what I thought would be a provocative one: “Between the writing of

An Area of Darkness and India: A Million Mutinies Now, had India changed or had Mr Naipaul?” The unexpected denouement of course was that Sir Vidia was not provoked one bit. He read the question, nodded appreciatively (or at least I thought so) and answered in what was almost a whisper, “A bit of both, I suppose.” My question was by no means an original one. The resident intellectual of Bangalore, T.G. Vaidyanathan (TGV), had asked the same and answered it as he saw it when he reviewed India: A Million Mutinies Now when it was first published.

Naipaul has had many avatars. The superb comic novelist who gave us characters like Biswas and neighbourhoods like Elvira, the sensitive historian of half-lives and semi-finished societies that survive and even flourish on our planet in these times, the prophet who predicted the malign potential of fundamentalist Islam almost three decades ago, long before 9/11 gave every mediocre academic in the field of Middle Eastern or Islamic Studies oracular status, the travel-writer who combines and improves upon de Tocqueville, Robert Byron and Doherty, the granite-hard intellectual who is committed to defending civilisation as it is assaulted by barbarian hordes almost like a cultivated Latin epigrammatist living in the Tuscan hills and flailing against history sometime around 409 A.D. — the year before Alaric sacked Rome — the English prose stylist who with his transparent simplicity has served the language as well as Lamb or Hazzlitt, the ultimate player who follows with superb aplomb Hamlet’s advice to his professional forebears on the way to Elsinore to “hold a mirror up to nature”. In short, a polychromatic writer of many seasons, of our troubled times and perhaps our chronicler for posterity.

... contd.