V. S.

NAIPAUL
Author..
• Naipaul was born and raised in Trinidad, to which
his grandfathers had emigrated from India as
indentured servants. He is known for the wistfully
comic early novels of Trinidad, the bleaker novels
of a wider world remade by the passage of
peoples, and the vigilant chronicles of his life and
travels, all written in characteristic, widely
admired, prose.
 Author
• At 17, he won a Trinidad Government scholarship to study abroad. In the
introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition of A House for Mr. Biswas, he
reflected that the scholarship would have allowed him to study any subject at
any institution of higher learning in the British Commonwealth, but that he chose
to go to Oxford to do a simple degree in English. He went, he wrote, "in order at
last to write...." In August 1950, Naipaul boarded a Pan Am flight to New York,
continuing the next day by boat to London.

50 years later, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad "V. S." Naipaul was awarded the 2001
Nobel Prize in Literature "for having united perceptive narrative and
incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of
suppressed histories.“
 Author…..
• Naipaul is uniquely equipped to reflect upon
bereavement. Indian by blood, Trinidadian by
birth, Briton through his experiencer and spirit,
Naipaul is concerned with the loss of old dreams
and old definitions– the loss of what formerly
seemed to be guiding verities. A man of no single
nation, his allegiances held in abeyance.
 Bend in the river
• Multiple Hybridity
• Muslim, Indian, African
• Problems of early years of post colonial independence
• Illusion of big man as resurrector.
• In reality he abuses it to gain more power and wealth surrounding himself with
sycophants and crushing the opposition.
• Inescapable legacy of colonial rule.
• Wounded civilization
• Exploitative and parasitic dynamic between the colonizers and the locals they
oppressed.
• Greed
• Exploitative relationship in a corrupt political system.
• Lack of identity.
 Symbols
• River represents the connection of people in the
outline villages, such as zabeth to the commerce
and comradery of the town.
• Symbol of movement from past to the future
through present.
• River as a character.
• Unseen Presence………
 Ania loomba:
Situating post colonial studies :
• Colonialism
• Imperialism
• Neo-Colonialism
• Post colonialism
 Cololonialism/Post-colonialism
Colonialism/Postcolonialism is a remarkably comprehensive yet accessible
guide to the historical and theoretical dimensions of colonial and postcolonial
studies.
Ania Loomba deftly introduces and examines:
• key features of the ideologies and history of colonialism
• the relationship of colonial discourse to literature
• challenges to colonialism, including anticolonial discourses
• recent developments in postcolonial theories and histories
• issues of sexuality and colonialism, and the intersection of feminist and
postcolonial thought
• debates about globalisation and postcolonialism
 OED’s description
• “a settlement in a new country … a body of people
who settle in a new locality, forming a community
subject to or connected with their parent state; the
community so formed, consisting of the original
settlers and their descendants and successors, as
long as the connection with the parent state is kept
up.”
 Modern Colonialism
• Modern colonialism did more than extract tribute,
goods and wealth..
• Restructured the economics of the colonized.
• Flow of slaves, indentured labor as well as raw
materials from colonies as a captive markets for
the European goods.
 Globalization
Imperialisms as a global system:
• Modern world colonialism as the take over of
territory, appropriation of material resources,
exploitation of labor and interference with political
and cultural structure of another territory or
nation.
• When the social order could no longer be buttressed by legal sanctions it had to
depend upon the inculcation in the minds of both exploiters and exploited of a
belief in the superiority of the exploiters and the inferiority of the exploited. Thus
it can be argued that the doctrine of equality of economic opportunity and that of
racial superiority and inferiority are complements of one another. Racism serves
to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
• In some countries like South Africa it is systematically mobilized on a political
level to ensure continued white supremacy. But it is to say that when inequality,
exploitation and oppression are challenged by economic liberalism, they have
to be opposed by doctrines which explain the exceptions to the rule. While it is
admitted that all men are equal, some men are deemed to be more equal than
others.
(Rex 1980: 131)
• magic formula’ which allow capitalism to expand
and find all the labour power it needs, and yet pay
even lower wages, and allow even fewer
freedoms than are given to the white working
classes (Wallerstein 1988: 33).
• ‘Hybridity’ of identities and the ‘ambivalence’ of
colonial discourse more adequately describe the
dynamics of colonial encounter.
 Quotes
• “The world is what it is; men who are nothing,
who allow themselves to become nothing, have
no place in it.”
― V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
•
 Quotes
• “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
•
 Quotes
• “Going home at night! It wasn't often that I was on
the river at night. I never liked it. I never felt in
control. In the darkness of river and forest you could
be sure only of what you could see — and even on a
moonlight night you couldn't see much. When you
made a noise — dipped a paddle in the water — you
heard yourself as though you were another person.
The river and the forest were like presences, and
much more powerful than you. You felt unprotected,
an intruder ...
 Quotes
• “government that breaks its own laws can also
easily break you.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
 Quotes
• “The rage of the rebels was like a rage against
metal, machinery, wires, everything that was not
of the forest and Africa… the rage of simple men
tearing at metal with their hands(91-92).”