V. S. Naipaul

The recent passing of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, better known as V.S. Naipaul, was widely reported in the media. Born on Aug. 17, 1932 in rural Chaguanas, Trinidad, he was just six days shy of his 86th birthday. Exposed as a boy to English Literature by his father, his ambition from that time was to “be a writer”.
With dozens of highly praised works of fiction and non-fiction, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, thirty years after winning the man Booker Prize, and being knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1989, one could say he accomplished his goal quite adequately.
As a person educated in the grammar school Queens Royal of Trinidad during the colonial period, and then winning a scholarship to Oxford University, he finished his education there, and never returned to live in the Caribbean.
But in mining his experiences in Trinidad for his early novels and non-fiction works, he offered a new perspective to life in the West Indies. For one, as a person of Indian origin born not long after the end of indentureship, he exposed to the world the oft hidden reality of the Caribbean being inhabited by diverse peoples and facing unique challenges to creating viable societies.
His acknowledged magnum opus was the semi-autographical “A House for Mr Biswas”, which details the struggle of a family of Indian descent to create a life with a semblance of dignity after life in British-devastated India and indentureship in Trinidad.
The book was so insightful that it was used by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas, a giant in the field of behaviourial economics, to illustrate his approach to development, which he proposed hinges on an increase in the rate of accumulation of human capital:
“The novel (A House for Mr. Biswas) begins with the story of Mohun Biswas’s birth and death, all within its first 40 pages. He is born in rural Trinidad, a grandson of immigrants who had come from India as indentured servants. As a small boy, his ambition is to become a herder of cattle like his older brothers.
“At his death, he is an unemployed journalist in Port-of-Spain, living in a ramshackle house with no assets to support his wife and large family after he is gone. What life within such limits is there to sustain the reader for the novel’s remaining 540 pages? Yet, measured by the cultural distance between Mr. Biswas’s parents and his children, his life is a story of amazing progress.
“By the end of Biswas’s life, his oldest son, Anand — Naipaul’s own fictional counterpart — is a scholarship student at Oxford. Between Anand and Mohun Biswas’s parents is the entire 25-to-1 difference between living standards in India and living standards in Western Europe and the United States.
“Biswas himself is no Horatio Alger figure. His talents are modest, and his willingness to ingratiate himself with those who might advance his career is nonexistent. He passes from one mediocre, limited job to another. But his unwillingness to accept the limits of each current situation as permanent, to make the best of it, turns out to be his strength.
“Through all his misfortunes and setbacks, Mr. Biswas is able to maintain the sense of himself as a man with possibilities, with options; a man who is in a position to set limits on what he would put up with. And equally important, he lives in a society that will let him survive with this attitude.”
Lucas thus highlights Naipaul’s two great insights for poor societies such as ours to achieve “developed” status – the first stresses the responsibility of the individual, and the other, the responsibility of the society. The individual must not accept the limits of his current situation, but strive to overcome them. On the other hand, his society must not stifle, but facilitate that striving, so that the individual can create a better life.
Those who would wish to solve our economic problems by throwing money at poor people miss the concomitant point of the latter’s own responsibility to “strive”.