V.S. Naipaul has been written and spoken about as a novelist and writer from many perspectives: as a Trinidadian and West Indian writer; as a writer of the Indian/Asian diaspora; as a British writer; as a writer in the context of the post-colonial tradition; as a third world writer and generally as a writer of some substance writing in the English language. This is largely because of the complexity of his background as a writer; the period during which he began to write; the subjects and places that he has chosen to write about; his preferred place of residency for most of his writing career and the ideological cross currents which have been heatedly debated by others over the course of the evolution of his writing career.

Naipaul has always been a controversial writer principally because of his ideas; but also because of his detached, unsympathetic and sometimes brutal assessments of political realities in the developing world as well as his revulsion to the tendency to ideological excess and dogmatism wherever it emerges. The truth of the matter is, however, that Naipaul has perpetually found himself swimming against the current as a writer. Why is this so?

I take the liberty of suggesting in this presentation that it is because V.S. Naipaul is a critical thinker. I will get to a definition of this term, which as an enlightened audience, I am sure that you are anticipating. However, let us for a moment examine the issues that would have been swirling around V.S. Naipaul as he was struggling to find subject matter at the beginning of his writing career. I will begin at the beginning with a focus on his first four (4) books all set in Trinidad.

Naipaul arrived in Oxford in 1950 and studied there until 1954. In 1954 he began to write his first book. In 1961 his fourth book was published. He would have been acutely aware of post WWII realities and the anti-colonial wave that was rising to a crest across the post colonial world. In the household in which Naipaul grew up, he would have been very aware of Mahatma Gandhi and the anti-imperialist struggle in India leading to Independence in 1947, three years before Naipaul actually left Trinidad. At Oxford, between 1950 and 1954 he would have been exposed to the build up of anti-colonial resentment that would have been the subject of heated debate and discussion at places such as Oxford and in cities such as London. He would have been aware of what was happening in Ghana and across the African continent. Federation across the West Indies, its subsequent collapse, and the rise of nationalism in individual territories leading to independence for both Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica in 1962 could not have escaped him.

Yet none of his first four books take any of these matters, their context, the possible implications of these events into account even though Naipaul acknowledges his deep understanding of the swirling post-colonial world around him with all its implications in several places. This is how he writes about it in the Enigma of Arrival published in 1987:

Because in 1950 in London I was at the beginning of that great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century – a movement and a cultural mixing greater than the peopling of the United States, which was essentially a movement of Europeans to the new world. This was a movement between all the continents…cities like London were to change. They were to cease being more or less national cities; they were to become cities of the world, modern-day Romes, establishing the pattern of what great cities should be, in the eyes of islanders like myself and people even more remote in language and culture. They were to be cities visited for learning and elegant goods and manners and freedom by all the barbarian peoples of the globe, people of forests and desert, Arabs, Africans, Malays. (Enigma, p. 130)

So Naipaul understood very well the time and context in which he lived and against which background he was writing. Yet Miguel Street focuses on the claustrophobic nature of life in a small country of limited options and basically concludes that for the ambitious and/or the talented, escape from such a society in search of greater options is the only reasonable thing for an enterprising person to do.

The Mystic Masseur presents politics as one option in a small society that presents itself as a means of escape from the drudgery of a mundane existence. Ganesh Ramsumair is bereft of any communal or national sense and basically seizes the option of personal advancement first inside and later in the wider world made possible by the political platform that he has grasped the opportunity to build.

Naipaul has on many occasions described The Suffrage of Elvira as a farce and he uses that book to focus on the futility of politics in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious colonial society where neither politicians nor people have developed any larger view of themselves or nobler view of possibilities.

House for Mr. Biswas focuses on one man’s story of his life of 41 years and the interweaving narratives and people which connect to that life in various ways as he struggles to meet his multiple obligations and yet find space to pursue his dreams.

Amidst the global upheavals taking place at the time of writing of his early books and the swirling currents being unleashed in his own region, Naipaul’s entire focus was on something else – something he considered more important than the political changes. One has the impression that, in his view, all of this would pass soon enough even if the consequences might pose challenges later.

I want to suggest that at the age of 22 when Naipaul began work on his first book, he had already grasped the fundamental dilemma of small societies of a particular kind. Those societies which from his point of view had no continuous history as a community and therefore no strong sense of themselves or of the possibilities for a common future. Naipaul had already sensed that such communities, consisting as they did of transplanted peoples, would find it very difficult to create a society together and to cohere and would have great difficulty building the capacity required to make genuine development and lasting achievement possible.

Naipaul’s early books are very revealing in this regard and his later books and writings make it clear that this issue of the special challenge of small countries, created only because of the colonial encounter – that this issue of the special challenge of small countries, has remained one of his obsessions up to the very end.

It is my view that Naipaul, in the writing of Miguel Street,began to discern clearly the human resource and capacity issues which would inevitably challenge the development of a small country such as Trinidad and Tobago. How would people without the capacity for self examination, self scrutiny and self criticism ever be able to develop themselves and create a vision for development of a country? And wasn’t it inevitable that anyone with talent and or ambition would seek to escape? Naipaul saw no future for him in Trinidad as a boy and would have reflected on the possibilities and options for the country of his birth at Oxford and after. Perhaps, at the time, he saw no future for Trinidad and Tobago either.

In Mystic Masseur Naipaul is really asking the question, what is the future of a small, relatively backward colonial country, if the leadership which emerges is not equal to the challenge at hand, will not accept responsibility for the place and is incapable of thinking through a possible way forward?

In The suffrage of Elvira he is looking at the political limitations of the place because it is a society which has been artificially created and finds it inherently difficult to cohere. How is a society to be forged, if disparate interests can find no common ground? And if there is no leadership capable of rising to the challenge of lighting the way.

In Biswas, what Naipaul recognizes is that education of one kind or another, (in the case of Biswas it is all self education) is essential for the promptings that are required to stimulate the citizen to demand freedom and independence and to assert their individual will to make these things possible for themselves. Free and independent individuals capable of making choices make democracy possible because institutions for freedom and democracy can only be created by men and women who are free and independent. And such a society, with such institutions is only possible where the individual is valued and protected. Few other novels are as explicit as A House for Mr. Biswas on how little the value of an individual is to the community and society which surrounds him.

While Naipaul may have been sensitive to the upheavals and cross currents that surrounded him after the Second World War, and while from the 1954 he was wrestling within himself to draw on material within his memory to create books of fiction, I don’t think that it is far fetched to say that one of his central concerns was how his society would survive in a world of turmoil, change and transition. This dilemma—of small limited societies and migrating talent—he addressed by critically appraising his society, hoping to find a readership in the process. Naipaul has explored these ideas in various pieces. His story of Anguilla published in The Overcrowded Baracoon and titled “The Shipwrecked Six Thousand” comes to mind immediately. But his concerns about smallness of size and an attendant narrowness of perspective persists. In fact, the six short pieces which make up the final section of The Overcrowded Baracoon including the title story which is about Mauritius, all explore this theme in one way or another.  And in his latest book, A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, V.S. Naipaul writes:

…small places with simple economies bred small people with simple destinies. And these islands were very small, infinitely smaller than Ibsen’s Norway. Their literary possibilities, like their economic possibilities, were as narrow as their human possibilities.

When Naipaul came here earlier this year to meet commitments to the University of the West Indies he seemed to have a more positive view of Trinidad and its possibilities—he felt that the quality of people had improved generally through education and exposure but he still expressed worry about its capacity and potential for development in spite of the oil wealth and about the unlikelihood of truly significant talent choosing to stay. I challenged him on that point of view insisting that many had stayed or chose to come back and that much progress had been made, but he retorted by saying that while a writer might be able to live in today’s Trinidad and with travel be able to produce, a scientist of world stature would still need more than Trinidad and Tobago or the West Indies has to offer, even now, in order to attain best-in-the-world stature in his field.

In an interview with Naipaul filmed on April 11, 2007 in Trinidad, the author makes a distinction between small ex-colonial societies such as those in the West Indies which he claims were “left on their own…without any guiding idea” and countries such as Finland, Norway or Switzerland, which though small have had a long and continuous autonomous history and strong sense of community.

I want to shift gears a bit to another kind of book that Naipaul has written. In a Free State (1971) is a remarkable work of fiction consisting of a Prologue, an Epilogue and three seemingly unconnected narrative pieces, which are in fact mutually reinforcing. Each of the three main stories “One Out of May,” “Tell Me Who To Kill” and the title story “In A Free State” is about displaced persons, the consequence of the great imperial upheavals, and how these displaced individuals cope with their various realities. The first story is about a Bombay Indian in Washington. The second about two Trinidad Indian brothers in London and the third about English expatriates in an unnamed African country.

The Prologue is about a tramp who has been traveling from country to country for a considerable length of time. The Epilogue ends the book with hundreds of Chinese tourists in the centre of Cairo against the background of traditions and habits which have continued uninterrupted in Egypt for a thousand years.

While the novel is exploring post colonial realities as they unfold, it is also foreshadowing the emergence of the phenomenon of failing states in post colonial Africa; the challenge of migration to the metropolitan centres; the aftermath of post-colonial disorder, the psychic realities of displacement, homelessness and exile, both for colonizer and colonized. The book takes into account the changing role of India in the international system and a new Indian migration to the USA, the emerging phenomenon of China in the contemporary world and draws to our attention the fact that, as the phenomenon of change unleashes itself on the planet, there will continue to be countries that persist, in their seemingly timeless ways, relatively impervious to modern civilization. It is ideas such as these that have, from time to time, steered Naipaul in the direction of controversy.

Naipaul does not anticipate failing states in Africa simply because of errors or incompetence of national governments or even the limitations of national leaders. He is absolutely clear on the complicating factors. This is how, almost in fairy tale-like style he explains the situation in In a Free State:

The King and the President intrigued with the local representatives of white governments. The white men who were appealed to liked the king personally. But the President was stronger; the new army was wholly his, of his tribe; and so the white men decided that the President was to be supported. So that, at last, this weekend, the President was able to send his army against the King’s people. (p. 99)

Naipaul is careful not to ignore the complicity of colonial agents in his early Trinidad novels either. When, for instance, Ganesh Ramsumair stands up on behalf of disgruntled workers he is described in colonial reports as “an irresponsible agitator with no following” (p. 214) but when he turns his back on the working class movement and brands it as communist he is embraced by the colonial office as “an important political leader” (p. 216). In The Suffrage of Elvira, a documentary film is made on political progress in the colonies, “the script of which was to be written, poetically, in London by a minor British poet.” (p. 180). The irony is that while the high election poll is viewed by the Colonial office as significant, the colonial office fails to appreciate that all the basic infrastructure required for genuine democracy is missing.

In a fundamental way, Naipaul, almost two decades before the Berlin Wall fell, anticipates the phenomenon of globalization, the intensification of the internationalization process, and foreshadows the discourse that has emerged about identity, home, citizenship and human security in our time. Remember this is a book published in 1971 and this is what the seemingly, homeless tramp says in the Prologue:

I’ve been to Egypt six to seven times, gone around the world about a dozen times. Australia, Canada, all those countries…I’ve been traveling for thirty-eight years…Youth-hostelling, that’s how I do it. Not a thing to be despised. New Zealand, have you been there? I went there in 1934. Between you and me, they’re a cut above the Australians. But what’s nationality these days? I myself, I think of myself as a citizen of the world.” (p. 3)

Today, curriculum reform theorists argue that we should be preparing our graduates for global citizenship. In 1971 what were we wrestling with here in our part of the world? – the first traumatic signs of our post Independence crisis?

How much more post modernist can one get? Everywhere is home; no place to call home; home is wherever you end up. And, perhaps with hindsight now, it seems clear to me, that when one considers small ex-colonial societies with limited opportunities and migrating talent, developing countries alongside the prospect of failing states, continual big country interference in the developing world in pursuit of self interested gains, and the spirit of ambition and adventure which always drive humans to explore—all elements of simultaneous, often contending strands of thought in Naipaul’s head—we begin to discern that Naipaul foresaw the inevitability of globalization, which the fall of the Berlin Wall might have intensified by bringing the other empire to an end, but which the end of European empire had already unleashed and set in motion and, for which, European imperialism from the fifteenth century onwards had established the foundations.

In his own mind he might have seen it more as modernization and the rise of global cities and of a “universal civilization” which he would identify later in his talk to the Manhattan Institute in October 1990. But Naipaul, in the early 1970s had already glimpsed the fact that not everywhere would benefit from this modernization process – some countries such as the one described in In a Free State might regress, an issue intensely explored in A Bend in the River (1979) while others surrendering to fundamentalist impulses, might retreat from the process altogether. If my reading of these matters is correct, and I am open to persuasion otherwise, then this anticipation of the contradictory currents which now crisscross our contemporary world represents a remarkable feat for V.S. Naipaul as a writer.

So Naipaul’s capacity for critical thought and assessment told him that the foundations had not been properly laid for Independence in the ex-colonies, that failing states might well be the result because of a range of complex circumstances and that a new process of human interrelations would emerge on a global scale, facilitated by what he would describe as “Our Universal Civilization” which would nevertheless cause a stressful degree of displacement and existential angst, but which could also lead to a degree of liberation available to the individual hitherto unknown in human history and civilization.

Naipaul has told us that writing did not come easily to him. “To become a writer, that noble thing,”he has written,“I had thought it necessary to leave. Actually, to write, it was necessary to go back. It was the beginning of self knowledge. So step by step, book by book…I eased myself into knowledge. To write was to learn.”(Prologue p. 59)

And Naipaul also had to learn after completing his first book that there were many other ways in which to look at the material for writing and that once chosen, the way of looking was certain to influence the writing response and the written product. About the period after writing Miguel Streethe writes in his recent book A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling:

I knew even then that there were other ways of looking; that if so to speak I took a step or two or three back and saw more of the setting, it would require another kind of writing. And if, in a greater complication, I wished to explore who I was and who the people in the street were…that would require yet another kind of writing. It was to that complication that my writing took me. (Writer’s People, p. 2)

And later in this same recent book Naipaul tells us:

There is a specificity to writing. Certain settings, certain cultures, have to be written about in a certain way. These ways are not interchangeable, you cannot write about Nigerian tribal life as you would write about the English Midlands. (Writer’s People, p. 23)

Naipaul had to scrutinize himself as a writer. He was soon to discover that “to be an Indian or East Indian from the West Indies is to be a perpetual surprise to people outside the region.” (Baracoon, 33) and that reality created complications both for him as a writer and for the reception to the material that formed the substance of his writing.

The sheer incongruity of being an Indian from Trinidad in Naipaul’s early career became a formidable challenge for Naipaul. This is how he has written about it.

To be an Indian from Trinidad is unlikely…When in 1492 Columbus landed on Guanahani he thought he had got to Cathay. He ought, therefore, to have called the people Chinese…He called them Indians, and Indians they remained, walking Indian file through the Indian corn…

So long as the real Indians remained on the other side of the world there was little confusion. But when in 1845 these Indians began coming over to some of the islands Columbus called the Indies, confusion became total (Baracoon 33/4)

V.S. Naipaul made other discoveries and learnt other things. For instance, Naipaul discovered the life of the period 1906 to the time of his birth (1932) through his father’s stories. Naipaul discovered Trinidad’s history by poring over original documents and maps which reveals stories of “discovery, the new World, the dispeopling of the discovered islands; slavery, the creation of the plantation colony; the coming of the idea of revolution; the chaos after revolutions in societies so created.” (Enigma, p. 94). Naipaul discovered travel and the options available to a writer through travel beginning with The Middle Passage and through travel, again, Africa, India, the non-Arab Islamic world, Latin America, the United States of America and England where he settled after leaving Trinidad. Naipaul has described all of this as “areas of darkness around me as a child” that is to say places and things about which he knew very little. It is these areas of darkness that became the subject matter of both his fictional and non-fictional work (Naipaul makes little distinction between these two types of writing) and because they were areas of darkness, he had to discover them in his own original way.

He had to look at things in a particular way and critically assess everything that would come into his experience with a freshness of perspective, “…To write was to learn,” he writes in Prologue to an Autobiography, “Self assessment … is where learning begins” he says in his Nobel Lecture and it is this freshness of perspective, the suspension of assumptions, the taking of nothing for granted which provides the critical thinking, which ultimately leads to this writer’s keen and original insights. The writing process itself became not just a creative act of the imagination but a process of discovery and critical inquiry.

While Naipaul in Mimic Men diagnoses colonial neurosis in the West Indies where men can only mimic the idea of manhood; while he makes an assessment that India’s dilemma of “fitting one civilization to another” will lead to crisis in A Writer’s People, and while he is repulsed by the idea of converts who wish “to make their minds and souls a blank, an emptiness, so that they could be nothing but their faith” (Our Universal Civilization) his concept of the “half”—half a life, half-Indian world, half made societies, half man, is a bothersome repetitive motif in Naipaul’s work. What exactly does it mean? Could it be something as simple as “half baked” in the way we normally use it to mean, not quite ready, not quite up to it in the sense of half baked effort and thus half baked society? What does half a life mean? What does the “half and half world” mean? What does “half made societies” really mean, since according to Naipaul some of them are doomed to remain half made?

In the case of the individual, it is my view that it has to do with two things—identity on the one hand, and achievement of potential on the other. In Half a Life, Willie’s father who becomes the model for a character in a Somerset Maugham novel finds it hard to “step out of that role” (Half a Life, p. 5).

In this sense he is like Ralph Singh playing the role that others expect him to play. Eventually Willie’s father finds it impossible to break out of the mould in which he has been cast and so he surrenders to fate: “I recognized that breaking out had become impossible and I settled down to live the strange life that fate had bestowed on me” (Half a Life, p. 6). The life of the father, unfulfilling for him as it is, is nevertheless understandable because of the rules and restrictions and sanctions that govern life in rural India. But Willie Chandran seizes the opportunity to turn his back on it all and ill equipped, ill prepared as he was, ends up in London in the bohemian 1950s and finds himself “unanchored, with no idea of what lay ahead” (p. 56).

But if Willie is lost he also begins to understand that he is free of the old shackles and could reinvent himself.

Willie began to understand that he was free to present himself as he wished. He could, as it were, write his own revolution. The possibilities were dizzying. He could within reason remake himself, his past and his ancestry…So, playing with words, he began to remake himself. It excited him and began to give him a feeling of power.

But Willie achieves little during the course of his life time. In London, in spite of the publication of one book, his life is a disaster. He ends up in parasitic relationship with Ana who takes her with him to her home in Mozambique just at that moment when time and opportunity have run out on Willie in London. At that point, Ana literally saves his life.

In Portuguese Mozambique, in the midst of an anti-colonial revolutionary struggle he becomes an idler and womanizer cut off by language from the world that he knows and without an identity that is meaningful to him or anyone else: “So people couldn’t place me and they let me be. I was Ana’s London man…” (p. 136). At the age of 41 he realizes that he has been living Ana’s life and that the best part of his life is gone and that he has achieved nothing although “there was another sense inside of him, in a silent space where all his external life was muffled.”

I said earlier that the concept of “half a life” is bound up with the issues of identity and achievement. This is how I think it works with Naipaul. Naipaul was discerning enough to sense the possibility of what Samuel Huntington would later describe as the “clash of civilizations” after travelling through the Far East. Naipaul was horrified that an entire people with a history, culture and civilization would be willing to wipe all of this out in order to become religiously devout and pure. He saw this as an attempt not only to close out the world but to deny reality. This fundamentalist world he saw as doctrinaire, closed, mind numbing and ritualistic. The world which was diametrically opposed to this was one that was open, embracing, celebrative of individual freedom and demanding of individual responsibility and that had given him an opportunity to strive and to thrive as a writer. This world Naipaul labels “Our Universal Civilization” and it is a world which Naipaul fully embraces. Not that this world is perfect, but from his point of view, it is the best that humankind has created in all of its history. This is how he describes what he calls the Universal Civilization

The universal civilization has been a long time in making. It wasn’t always universal; it wasn’t always as attractive as it is today. The expansion of Europe gave it, for at least three centuries, a racial taint which still causes pain.

Notwithstanding this, however, Naipaul celebrates this civilization because of “the extraordinary attempt of this civilization to accommodate the rest of the world and all the currents of the world’s thought” but also because in that civilization it is “necessary to be an individual and responsible,” and also one in which people “developed vocations and were stirred by ambition and achievement and believed in perfectability” (Universal Civilization).

Naipaul sees fundamentalism of any kind as diametrically opposed to this universal civilization. It is possible to retreat to the fundamentalist world and turn your back entirely on the universal civilization but the scientific and technological supports of the universal civilization will still be required for survival and for sustainability.

However, beyond fundamentalist retreat, civilizations and cultures connect and meet everyday. People from other cultures move to the metropolitan centres. The universal culture spreads outward globally impacting on people, societies and culture. East meets West. Africa interfaces with Europe. What, therefore, is the challenge? We get an insight from A Writer’s People. In an open democracy such as India, secular in its outlook, Naipaul makes a judgement that India is wrestling with the challenge of “fitting one civilization to another” (The Writer’s People) and he anticipates that this will lead to crisis since from his perspective “India has no autonomous intellectual life.” In A Writer’s People Naipaul makes the following comment about the Bengali intellectual Nirad Chaudhuri: “It is astonishing that Chaudhuri could without strain, have contained so many worlds within himself. But then the strain came, with the politics of the nationalist movement, with the new eyes that the movement gave, and everything that was so nicely balanced came tumbling down.” (Writer’s People)

Half made societies, therefore, from Naipaul’s perspective are societies which cannot coherently pull together the most meaningful elements of a multicivilizational, multicultural world to make a psychologically coherent whole; which cannot successfully integrate what is authentically theirs with what is available. Half a life, half a man, describes the individual who cannot summon the will to achieve because, moving through multiple cultures and societies or impacted by them, he is unable to effectively contain the many worlds which he carries within him and yet achieve clarity of perspective and purpose. At the extreme ends are colonial schizophrenia and fundamentalist retreat, therefore, but in the middle are the half and half lives living in their mental half and half worlds.

What contributes to the creation of this “half and half” status to individuals and societies? Naipaul might answer “intellectual failure,” I might interpret that to mean the absence of critical thinking, that is to say, the failure to assess one’s situation realistically and, through a deep understanding, think one’s way through well enough to summon the will and courage required to meet the challenge no matter how formidable. “The world is as it is,” Salim tells us in the first sentence of A Bend in the River, “those who are nothing, who allow themselves to be nothing, have no place in it.” So it is for individuals, so it is for societies. Happiness is there for all to pursue; opportunities are there that all may pursue; development is there for all to strive for, but only some will truly triumph.

I promised you earlier to define what I mean by “critical thinking.” I begin with an explanation by Daniel Kurkland from a book called I Know What it Says … What does it mean?

Broadly speaking, critical thinking is concerned with reason, intellectual honesty and open mindedness.

Against this Kirkland juxtaposes “emotionalism, intellectual laziness and closed mindedness.” And he elaborates further “critical thinking involves following evidence where it leads; …considering all possibilities … being concerned more with finding the truth than with being right.”

Critical thinking is not a matter of accumulating information and critical thinking should not be confused with being argumentative or being critical of other people or things. Those who espouse the value of critical thinking emphasize its value as both the foundation of science as well as the foundation of a liberal democratic society. That is because science requires the critical use of reason for experimentation as well as for the confirmation of theory. For a liberal democracy to function effectively it requires citizens who can think critically about social issues to inform their judgements about good governance and also in order to overcome biases and prejudices.

Joanne Kurfiss who wrote Critical Theory, Research, Practice and Possibilities describes critical thinking as

A process to figure out what to believe or not about a situation, phenomenon, problem or controversy for which no single definitive answer or solution exists. The term implies a diligent open minded search for understanding, rather than for a discovery of a necessary solution.

There must be skeptics in the audience who may be thinking that Naipaul is a creative writer and what is at work here is really creative thinking or the creative artist or the creative mind at work.

While it is true that both critical thinking and creative thinking are high order cognitive skills and that both of these skills may be classified as high achievement of thought, we need to be clear that critical thinking leads the thinker to ask the question why, to understand the reasons behind something. The creative thinker may well ask why not, that is to say, such a person may well posit an alternative view or way or a solution.

Throughout his writing V.S. Naipaul asks the questions why and how. Why is this so? How did this get to be so? He is seeking to understand; it is a process of discovery. In a fundamental way, when he is wrestling with ideas he is thinking inside the box—evaluating material or a particular context to understand it much more deeply. But the creative thinker is also at work because he is a writer who is producing a new, tangible product—a book, essay, article, story as the case might be. And one needs to conceptualize critical and creative thinking as elements that are intertwined strands of a double helix in which, in the case of a writer such as V.S. Naipaul, the two types of thinking—critical thinking and creative thinking—are constantly reinforcing each other.

That is why we find his work thought provoking, sometimes jolting; that is why some are disappointed that there is a paucity of solutions to the dark visioned challenges that he poses. But that is also why, by looking outside the box as a creative imagination, he is able to conjure up new worlds, book after formidable book, to engage our imagination, provoke a response, entice our souls by illuminating his life and world as well as ours. At the end of the day, the reader is able to engage both his critical insight as well as his creative genius.

We may not like what Naipaul says or how he says it; we may not agree with his point of view at all; after all, the fact that he is a critical thinker does not necessarily make him right on everything. But we need, at the very least, to understand and appreciate what he is thinking and the meaning of his writing before we ourselves can accept his perspective, challenge it, dismiss it altogether or present an alternative point of view.

Naipaul’s work has been a prompting for other critical thinkers. Lloyd Best’s theory of tribes and its implications for national politics in Trinidad and Tobago derives from The Suffrage of Elvira and, not only does Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations owe a debt to Naipaul but Huntington’s work has provoked Amartya Senn to respond in a book entitled Identity and Violence. So Naipaul is not just a critical thinker himself, he is and has been an influence on other critical thinkers as well.