V.S. Naipaul has a mixed legacy. Among hyper-literate sophisticates, his work remains essential reading, showcasing his virtuosity with the English language. There are, however, the customary caveats about his questionable politics, regressive social views, and less-than-admirable treatment of women.

At the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the British-Tanzanian academic and Nobel-winning novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah told an audience on Sunday that Naipaul, to whom he has been compared, is on the list of “nasty” writers — Saul Bellow and Philip Roth being his other examples — whom he can no longer bear to read. Gurnah admitted that he once read Naipaul “with great admiration”. But after learning more about Naipaul’s unpleasant character, especially his “racism,” his opinion changed.

Gurnah is entitled to his personal preferences. No one is obliged to like Naipaul, either aesthetically or politically. That is one thing. What matters more is the cultural context in which this is happening. Since the “Great Awokening” of 2020, many celebrated (and deceased) writers such as Philip Larkin, Virginia Woolf, and Naipaul himself have faced various forms of cancellation. This is often due to their association with a white, European racial hegemony that is seen as erasing marginalized groups, or because of their personal views on social issues such as race. Others, including Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, have had their works “sanitized” in an effort to align them with 21st-century values.

But there is a strong case to be made for why one should read Naipaul. Unlike Larkin and Woolf, Naipaul was not white or European. He grew up in Trinidad under British rule and wielded his pen to fiercely critique his own people. His sharp analysis of postcolonial societies highlights how the emancipation from European colonialism in many parts of the Global South fell far short of its utopian promises, instead giving way to brutal conflicts and disillusionment after independence.

For these reasons, he has garnered a reputation among his fellow postcolonial writers and intellectuals as the sour Uncle Tom who validated the prejudices of white audiences with racist stories about non-Europeans.

It is certainly true that Naipaul was a curmudgeon who had his bigotries. For all his love and identification with Western civilization — “our universal civilization” as he put it — he had a strong Hindu nationalist streak in him. When Naipaul wrote about Islam, as in Among the Believers, he did not merely condemn it as a religion he opposed. Instead, he portrayed it as a nefarious instrument of Arab cultural colonialism imposed upon the “converted peoples”, contrasting this with what he saw as a purer Hindu nationalist indigenism. Following this reactionary logic, he was surprisingly apologetic about the demolition of the Babri Mosque by Hindu mobs in 1992, almost defending it as an act of decolonization.

This is not to say that Naipaul was free from the hypocrisies he ascribed to European colonialists. In A Bend in the River, the narrator Salim reflects on the dual nature of colonial ambition: “The Europeans wanted gold and slaves like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.”

One should read Naipaul precisely because he is offensive. For those of us shaped by, or descended from, the postcolonial world, he jolts us out of comfortable dogmas about postcolonialism and forces us to question them. You do not have to agree with his conclusions to acknowledge that some of his observations about the postcolonial condition carry a stinging truth.

Great writers do not need to be squeaky clean; in fact, the most productive relationships between reader and writer are often challenging and combative. In this sense, Naipaul remains a formidable interlocutor.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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