A year ago, to the week, as people around the world struggled to even begin to comprehend what it was that could inspire a group of well-educated men towards annihilation, many were quietly referred to “Our Universal Civilization”, the text of a talk delivered by V.S. Naipaul in Manhattan in 1990. Even as the roots of Muslim rage were listed and plans for action formulated, one point remained sorely unresolved: if acts of suicide bombers could be rationalised and, in turn, the legitimacy of state response to perceived acts of terror actually termed terrorist, could there be any respite from politically correct ambiguity? Naipaul’s text, written in another context, provided focus.

Some of the questions Naipaul — then yet to embark on a tour of Muslim lands that would result in Beyond Belief — addressed were: “Are we — are communities — as strong only as our beliefs? Is it enough for beliefs or an ethical view to be passionately held? Does the passion give validity to the ethics?”

The Writer and the World By V.S. Naipaul Picador India Price: Rs 395He negotiated them in his characteristic manner: with a mix of travel, reportage and personal history. He began his inquiry by stating his ambition to become a writer, given to him at the age of 11 by a father pulling himself out of the petty concerns of Trinidad’s immigrant Indian agricultural community yet sensing the magnetism of a literary sensibility in the world beyond.

Naipaul grasped the ambition, but realised the apparatus to achieve it lay far away, that he would have to journey from his tiny Caribbean to England. In his itinerary from that personal ambition to writerhood lay an inkling of the universal civilisation. “If I have to describe the universal civilization,” he wrote, “I would say it is the civilization that both gave the prompting and the idea of the literary vocation; and also gave the means to fulfil that prompting; the civilization that enabled me to make that journey from the periphery to the centre.” In essence, the civilization that allowed him to lay claim to shifting notions of identity, of history, that enabled him to “carry four or five or six different cultural ideas inside my head”.

But while among the believers, he said he found himself “among a colonized people who had been stripped by their faith of all that expanding intellectual life, all the varied life of the mind and senses, the expanding cultural and historical knowledge of the world. I found myself among people whose identity was more or less contained in the faith. I was among people who wished to be pure.”

It’s not a clash of civilizations. It’s the divide between the pure and the eclectic.

That is the Naipaulian way. As he has said elsewhere, “I go to places which, however alien, connect in some way with what I already know.” In this collection of essays — most written in the 1960s and 1970s — these connections are made most meticulously, the writer’s eye always watchful, missing nothing, the prose dignified with the apt phrase, the traveller’s empathy never stretched to embrace mimicry or post-colonial shenanigans.

So there he is in the early ’60s, making first acquaintance with India, the land of his ancestors, arriving with great expectations, but finding “a nation ceaselessly exchanging banalities with itself”. There he is, conversing with former princes, tired politicians seeking re-election and Calcutta boxwallahs, each of them failing to make deeper connections with the past and the present. And here is that harsh, famous, verdict: “Incapable of lasting reform, or of a correct interpretation of the new world, India is, profoundly, dependent. She depends on others now both for questions and answers; foreign journalists are more important in India than in any other country.”

That obsession with the foreign gaze was to be found everywhere. In Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad, a spectacular inquiry into Black Power in former Caribbean colonies and misplaced enthusiasm whipped up in Britain and the US, he wrote: “For people like (Michael X) there was no point in being black and angry unless occasionally there were white people to witness.” The losers, however, would be these islands, substituting borrowed ideologies of Black Power and pan-Africanism for dialogues with the past and education programmes. As these islands drifted into anarchy, he warned, “United States helicopters will be there, to take away United States citizens, tourists; the British High Commission will lay on airlifts for their citizens.”