Naipaul's ‘India’: History and the myth of antiquity

Jabbar, Naheem

doi:10.1080/09502360600559803

Textual Practice

2006

DOI: 10.1080/09502360600559803

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Naipaul's ‘India’: History and the myth of antiquity

Naheem Jabbar

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“…It is true that he was enthusiastic about the destruction of the Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists in 1992, an event that sparked widespread violence against Muslims in India (French, 2008: 460). Critics have debunked his reductive view of Islam, tracing his theory of Muslim imperialism to British colonial stereotypes (Dalrymple, 2004;Jabbar, 2006). Even more overtly, his 2015 opinion piece on Islamic State atrocities in Syria and Iraq -published in the rightwing British tabloid The Daily Mail -implies that fundamentalist violence is, to some degree, a logical outgrowth of conservative Muslim education (Naipaul, 2015).…”

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V. S. Naipaul and the worlds of postcolonial realism

Dalley

2018

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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V. S. Naipaul’s career as a novelist, travel writer, and journalist presents a case study for exploring the links between realist form and the global imagination as they evolve over a 60-year period. This article argues that his work is shaped by an aesthetic of “world realism” that constructs plausible models, through form and content, of the contemporary world as a totalized, structurally-differentiated system. At the same time, it examines how Naipaul’s realism mediates the divisions between metropolitan and peripheral space that shape his entry into the world-literary sphere. Analysed in these terms, Naipaul’s career falls into three phases, in each of which a distinctive “world-concept” emerges from the conjunction of historical and biographical events, and aesthetic contradictions. Naipaul’s world realism complicates critiques in postcolonial studies that he is a puppet of imperial ideology, and unveils the latent commitment to totality underpinning the global novel. World realism reflects an under-theorized conjunction of aesthetics and the global imaginary that unlocks an alternative history of the modern novel produced in frontier spaces.

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V. S. Naipaul and the worlds of postcolonial realism

Dalley

2018

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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India From the Perspective of Biruni and V.S. Naipaul

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2024

Bingöl Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi

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This study is based on a comparison of two works on India, one by Biruni, who lived and wrote about India nearly a thousand years ago, and one by V.S. Naipaul, who lived in the twenty-first century. The first work, Kitâb’ut-Tahkîk ma li’l-Hind, written by Biruni, was written in Arabic in the first quarter of the eleventh century to help Muslims living among Hindus in different regions such as Sindh, Punjab, Kabul and Ghazni. The work was edited by Edward Sachau in the early 1880s and translated into German (1883-1884) and English (1887-1888) under the title Al-Beruni’s India; both the Arabic edition and the translations were published in the West in those years. An Arabic edition of the book, based on the copy in the Paris National Library, was published in Hyderabad in 1958 with the help of the Indian Ministry of Education. On September 30, 1932, Kıvameddin Burslan translated the work into Turkish, but due to various reasons, it was published only in 2015. Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul, on the other hand, has written three travel books on India and in these works, which are based on his travels to the country in 1964, 1977 and 1990, he refers to India as a dark, wounded and rebellious civilization respectively. With the publication of his books, Naipaul, himself of Hindu descent, was severely criticized for his views on India, Indians and non-Western societies and cultures, which went far beyond criticism, and caused intense debates. The most obvious conclusion that emerges from the comparative analysis of the works of both authors is that Biruni, despite being a Muslim, is extremely tolerant and objective in his approach to India, Hindu culture, traditions, and belief system, while Naipaul's approach, on the contrary, is far from tolerance and extremely biased.

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Naipaul's ‘India’: History and the myth of antiquity

Cited by 2 publications

References 4 publications

V. S. Naipaul and the worlds of postcolonial realism

V. S. Naipaul and the worlds of postcolonial realism

India From the Perspective of Biruni and V.S. Naipaul

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