ABSTRACT
I have returned to that homage and to much of its substance to rethink the question of the links between a very colonial literary imagination and V.S. Naipaul’s writings, especially in so far as they take us to a specifically ‘old Indian diasporic’ link between a colonial education and the aesthetic. At the heart of the link is a trauma about belonging (to a nation-state) and ownership of a language not one’s own. The discourse I adopt here is, after a phrase used in Shakespeare criticism, ‘memorial reconstructions’, which I believe in this instance has a special place. Memorially constructing one’s response to texts at their first moments of encounter is, after all, one way of locating oneself more immediately in an author’s writing. Of course, critical judgment – the scholarly enterprise – requires something else; it requires detachment and the placing of the speaking subject under erasure; it presupposes judgment and analysis only after the corpus has been re-read in its entirety, only after the bibliography has been more or less exhausted. It requires a dispassionate engagement with the subject matter. I am, therefore, undertaking something which sits a little uncomfortably with scholarly judgment by rethinking, in an intensely personal manner, the literary intertexts of the old (plantation) Indian diaspora via V.S. Naipaul and doing so through memory, and through the genre of homage. If there is a certain
urgency in my prose, a rush to connect ideas, a pressure from within to round off matters even before the analytic is complete, it is because Naipaul is like an indwelling spectre – in my style, in my attempt to break into the grand narratives of English literary history, even, shamefully, in my barely suppressed nostalgia for the Pax Britannica. I have lived with Naipaul for some 40 years and very much in his shadow. I own first editions of all his works. He has also denied me the privilege of critical originality by being everywhere before me – the Indian plantation diaspora, Oxford, India – as indeed, to have mine back for the moment, Conrad denied Naipaul that privilege by being everywhere before him.
