February 23, 2002

The Nobel literature prize winner V.S. Naipaul may have provoked another row by claiming that 40 years ago people in India were not intellectual enough to read his books. Sir Vidia, who has previously come under fire for his views on race and religion, told an audience at the opening of Cheltenham literature festival that he believed he had helped to educate India’s people.

“The trouble with people like me writing about societies where there is no intellectual life is that if you write about it, people are angry.” If they read the book, which in most cases they don’t, they want approval. Now India has improved, the books have been accepted.

“Forty years ago in India people were living in ritual. This is one of the things I have helped India with,” the 69-year-old novelist said during his first public appearance since winning the 644,000 pound sterling Nobel prize. The comments follow closely behind his widely publicized attack on Islam in which he compared the “calamitous effect” of Islam on the world with colonialism.

The novelist, who was born in Trinidad of Indian parentage and travelled extensively in the Muslim world for his books Among the believers and Beyond belief, caused an outcry with his remarks.

Last year, in an interview with the Literary Review, he attacked E.M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes as homosexual exploiters of the powerless. He also described Forster’s novel A passage to India as rubbish.

In July 2000 he described Tony Blair as a cultural philistine and a champion of “an aggressively plebeian culture that celebrates itself for being plebeian”.

Naipaul, who lives in London, has become the first Briton since William Golding to win the Nobel literature prize. — Dawn/Guardian news service

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