Sir Vidiadhar Naipaul TC
description: Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul TC, most commonly known as V. S. Naipaul, and informally, Vidia Naipaul, was a Trinidadian-British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in rural Trinidad on 17 August 1932. The island of his birth was a complicated post-colonial patchwork of racial tensions and subtle hierarchies. His grandparents had been labourers: part of the great nineteenth-century Indian diaspora who had settled in the Caribbean. The young Vidia was raised as a Hindu, part of a displaced community within a plantation society. It was a blend of histories, customs and ethnic identities which later formed an important part of his work. Naipaul's father, Seepersad, was a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian who revered Shakespeare and Dickens. He would read the great works of European literature aloud to his children - giving the young Vidia a burning ambition for writing, a "fantasy of nobility" and a "panic about failing.". He attended the Queen's Royal College, proving himself an able student. On graduating, he won a government scholarship giving him entry to the Commonwealth university of his choosing. In 1950, he arrived in Oxford. University College commencing a time of poverty and terrible loneliness. Isolated and unsure of his future, Naipaul became severely depressed For his numerous critics, Naipaul's writing was troubling and even bigoted. They recognised his literary gifts but saw him as a hater: an “Uncle Tom” who dealt in stereotypes, paraded his prejudices and bathed in loathing for the world from which he came. They hailed him as a towering intellect - delivering an original, scorching critique refreshingly devoid of political correctness: attacking the cruelty of Islam, the corruption of Africa and the self-inflicted misery he witnessed in the poorest parts of the globe. For his many supporters, his fiction had merciless comic clarity and his travel writing a terrifying honesty - refusing to …
source: stories,westindians
date: 1932-08-17
type: Person