V.S. Naipaul: Likeness

“Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside.”

V.S. Naipaul A Bend in the River

Source: A Bend in the River

People , World

“Before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone.”

V.S. Naipaul book Half a Life

Half a Life (2001)

“It is like reading of a land periodically devastated by hordes of lemmings or locusts; it is like turning from the history of a coral reef, in which every act and every death is a foundation, to the depressing chronicle of a succession of castles built on the waste sand of the sea-shore. This is Woodruff on the difference between European history and Indian history. He has chosen his images well. But the sandcastle is not quite exact. The sandcastle is flattened by the tide and leaves not trace, and India is above all the land of ruins.”

V.S. Naipaul book An Area of Darkness

An Area of Darkness (1964)

Death , History , Reading , Success

“We knew nothing but despotism. That is why the very rich Mughal empire could break up into nothing. Turn to dust at the merest touch of a foreign power. There was no institution, there was no creative nation, no university, no printing press, there was nothing but personal power. …. How do you ignore history? But the nationalist movement, independence movement ignored it. You read the Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru, it talks about the mythical past and then it jumps the difficult period of the invasions and conquests. So you have Chinese pilgrims coming to Bihar, Nalanda and places like that. Then somehow they don't tell you what happens, why these places are in ruin. They never tell you why Elephanta island is in ruins or why Bhubaneswar was desecrated. So history has to be studied, it is very painful history. But it is not more painful than most countries have had. …It isn't India alone that has had a rough time, that has to be understood. But the rough time has to be faced and it cannot be glossed over. There are tools for us to understand the rough time. We can read a man like Ibn Battuta who will tell you what it was like to be there in the midst of the fourteenth century, terrible times. An apologist of the invaders would like to gloss that over. But it would be wrong to gloss that over, that has to be understood. …But I would like to see this past recovered and not dodged.”

V.S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul, Interview, with URMI GOSWAMI, JANUARY 14, 2003 0 'How do you ignore history?' https://web.archive.org/web/20070106194746/http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/comp/articleshow?artid=34295982

Pain , World , History , Understanding

“Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.”

V.S. Naipaul

Prologue
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998)

People , Religion , History , Idea

“I also bought a copy of The New York Times, the previous day's issue of which I had seen the previous day in Puerto Rico. I was interested in newspapers and knew this paper to be one of the foremost in the world. But to read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself. It made me feel a stranger, that paper.”

V.S. Naipaul book The Enigma of Arrival

"The Journey", p. 115
The Enigma of Arrival (1987)

World , Feeling , Understanding , Knowledge