British novelist  and Nobel laureate VS Naipaul passed away at his age of 85. He was born in Trinidad with Indian ancestors. He went to Oxford University on a scholarship and continued to live in London for the rest of his life.

Basically, he was a misanthropist whose fiction and non-fiction reflected his personal and long traverse from Trinidad to London. His journeys to many developing countries which inspired him to write about the backdrops of Africa, India, Latin America, Islamic countries etc. He often dealt with colonialism and attacked religion, politicians and the conventional literary pillars. He was awarded Nobel Prize in 2001 “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of

suppressed histories.” 

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul or Sir Vidia began his career as a writer while he was working for BBC in Caribbean service. His first novel “The Mystic Masseur” published in 1957 was well received in Trinidad. The story portrays the transformation of a school teacher into a guru who later become a political figure. One of his autobiographical novel “A House for Mr. Biswas” published in 1961 gave him breakthrough in his career. The novel sets in Trinidad tells the story of a journalist who is struggling to free himself from the dependency on his wife's wealthier family. The book helped him to gain readers all over the world. This novel, about how one man’s life was restricted by the limits of colonial society, was a tribute to Naipaul’s father. The 

novel still considered to be the best of him.Later works were mostly based on his experiences from the third world. He expressed his deep discontent with the poor condition and undergrowth of the Caribbean under the imperialist rule through his book "The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America”. He wrote, "The history of the islands can never be told satisfactorily. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation, and nothing was created in the West Indies.” 

In 1962 he visited India, his ancestor’s country, for the first time in his life, he felt anonymous, even faceless. He was no longer identified, he felt, with a special ethnic group as he had been in Trinidad and England; it made him anxious. Based on his experience in India he wrote “An Area of Darkness” where he condemned that ‘born in India is a sin’. Also published another book on India “India: A Wounded Civilization” which prompted him to write at the wake of emergency in India.

It was upon his visit to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania Naipaul wrote the fiction “In a free state” which published in 1971. Towards the end of his life he published “The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief “.The book explores indigenous religious beliefs and

rituals, where Naipaul portrays the countries he visited in real life as bleak, and the people primitive. 

Why was he a hot topic in his entire life? How he became a super sensation and a defiant figure?

He was a soulmate of controversy in his entire life. Naipaul never felt a stress in making misogynic arguments, said he can easily understand a women work by not even reading first two pages. His books on Islamic fundamentalism, the 1981 work “Among the Believers” and the 1998 book “Beyond Belief” were written after he travelled through non-Arab Islamic countries shows he was a great criticizer of Islam. Edward Said said: “It is hard to believe any rational person would attack an entire culture on that scale”. He described the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa on Salman Rushdie as “an extreme form of literary criticism”. Naipaul’s criticism on India triggered a controversy where he marked India as a ‘Society of slaves’. We can assume that his ideology must be from the first line of his renowned novel “A bend in the river” says “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it”.

VS Naipaul was knighted in 1990, won numerous other major writing prizes throughout his life, including the Booker in 1971 and the David Cohen literature prize. Salmanul Faris