Shanghai International Studies University
A POSTCOLONIAL STUDAY OF V.S.NAIPAUL’S INDIA TRILOGY
用后殖民主义理论分析奈保尔的《印度三部曲》
A Thesis
Submitted to Graduate School and College of English
In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for
Degree of Master of Arts
By
Shan Shan
单珊
Under Supervision of Professor Zhang Xin
Student No.: 0093109223
Acknowledgements
This thesis could not be completed without the help and support of many people who
are fully acknowledged here.
First of all, I would express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Professor Zhang
who offers much inspiration, without her patience and generous assistance that my
efforts would not go so far. Her encouragement and recommendation give me impetus
and confidence to further my study in the field .
My gratitude also goes to other dear professors in SISU, who inspired and encouraged
me a lot. I am indebted to other professors who have given me thought-provoking
lectures of great significance during my study in SISU.
My thanks also go to my dear friends, who never failed to give me great
encouragement and suggestions. Special thanks should go to Bhawna Dwan who help
me find reference books about V.S.Naipaul in New Delhi. I am also indebted to my
roommates and classmates for encouraging me when I had problem in writing the
thesis.
Finally, I give my heartfelt thanks to my beloved parents, who support me in my
academic pursuit and care for me all the time. Their unconditional love and
understanding renewed my confidence in times of difficulties and frustration.
To all of these, and to the many others who have knowingly and unknowingly
contributed to my study, I offer my warmest thanks.
摘要
奈保尔是一位有着多重文化身份的移民作家。 自 20 世纪 50 年代以来，他
的作品受到越来越多的关注。它们主要反映了过去与现在的矛盾，殖民地独立后
的现状以及移民和生活在第三世界国家人民的生活。奈保尔曾经三度返回他的故
土印度并根据三次印度之行创作了《印度三部曲》：
《幽暗国度，记忆与现实交错
的印度之旅》
（1965），
《印度：受伤的文明》
（1975）， 《印度：百万叛变的今天》
（1988）。
本论文以《印度三部曲》为文本立足点，着重研究作家在三次印度之行中对
印度的不同印象并探索奈保尔如何通过不同的叙事手法来反映其内心的变化。从
三本书中，我们可以看出奈保尔一直试图回归传统文化，但他过去的个人经历却
给他带来了一定的隔阂。他通过多种叙事手法和叙事角度来反映了他在三次印度
之行中内心经历的挣扎。他通过虚实结合的方式创造了一种全新的手法来描述所
见所闻，并以此弥补自身经历的空白之处。
论文简介了奈保尔的职业生涯，相关的文学研究，
《印度三部曲》文本分析中
用到的方法论以及研究意义。在主体部分，论文先探讨奈保尔三次印度之行对于
其母国的不同印象，他的态度从彻底的失望逐渐转变为乐观的包容。这主要得益
于他多年行走于发展中国家，可以挣脱西式思维的束缚，在感情上更贴近母国。
接着论文分析了奈保尔的叙事角度，作者从内部参与者逐渐演变为外部观察者，
文本的主观感情色彩也因此得到了淡化，给读者一个更客观的视角观察印度社
会。最后探讨奈保尔如何通过其特有的叙事手法来表达他的感受。三部游记柔和
了多种叙事手法，包括引用历史材料，著作和新闻，人物描写和采访对话等。结
语部分总结了奈保尔如何通过写作重拾其文化身份以及其作品反映的现实意义。
关键词:
奈保尔
印度三部曲 叙事
文化身份
ii
Abstract
V.S.Naipaul is an immigrant writer with multicultural background. Since the
1950s, his literary works have received more and more attention. They reflected the
conflicts between the history and the present, the current situations of past colonies as
well as life of immigrants and people in the third world. Naipaul has visited his
motherland India three times and wrote three books recording his trips: An Area in
Darkness (1964), A Wounded Civilization (1975) and A Million Mutinies Now (1988)
Based on his India Trilogy, the thesis aims to explore how he gradually changed
his impressions about his motherland India and the way he reflected those inner
changes from the travelogues. Throughout the three books, Naipaul tried to embrace
the traditional culture but was somehow kept away from it due to his past experiences.
He combined fiction with record, integrated a perfect narration method to create a
new channel to observe the world, that is to observe the society, make on-spot record,
refer to history, find out material through traveling, which finally fill the blanks of his
own background.
In the beginning, the thesis gives a summary about Naipaul’s career life, relevant
research works about his books, methodologies which will be used in the thesis as
well as the significance of the research about Indian Trilogy.
In the main parts, the thesis gives detailed analysis about Naipaul’s different
impressions of India, which changed from total disappointment to acceptance and
optimism. The thesis analyzes Naipaul’s narration perspective, which changes from an
insider to an outsider, making the narration more and more objective, and Naipaul’s
unique narration ways to express his feelings. The travelogues are a mix of different
narrations, ranging from quotations of historical documents, famous literary work,
news to description of characters and conversations. In the conclusion part, the thesis
summarized how Naipaul retrieved his cultural identity through writing.
Key Words:
V.S.Naipaul
--- India Trilogy ---- Narration -----
Cultural Identiy
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Contents
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................i
摘要 ..................................................................................................................................................ii
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... iii
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter One Naipaul’s Impression of India in India Trilogy ............................................................ 9
1.1. A Hopeless Country from An Area of Darkness ................................................................. 9
1.2 India in Stagnation from A Wounded Civilization ............................................................. 12
1.3 The Rebirth of India in A Million Mutinies Now ............................................................... 14
Chapter Two Relationship Between Naipaul’s Emotion and Writing Perspective .......................... 18
2.1 The Extent of Alienation and Writing Perspective ............................................................ 18
2.2 “Homesickness” and the Character’s Perspective ............................................................. 20
2.3 Emotional Acceptance and Narrative Transition ............................................................... 23
2.4 Complete Understanding and the Observer’s Perspective ................................................ 25
Chapter Three Hybridity of Literary Forms in India Trilogy ....................................................... 29
3.1 Cross-cultural Survival and Literary Challenge ................................................................ 29
3.2 Intertextuality in An Area of Darkness .............................................................................. 31
3.3 Cultural Travelogue Based on Discussions and Narrations .............................................. 34
3.4 Optimistic Interviews during Traveling ............................................................................ 36
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 39
Reference ............................................................................................................................................
Introduction
Significance of Postcolonial Interpretation of V.S.Naipaul’s India
Trilogy
V.S.Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932 and migrated to Britain in 1950.
He has received western education, but was also strongly influenced by traditional
oriental culture. Besides, he has traveled a lot in the third world countries. Since 1950,
Naipaul has published about 30 literary works, including novels, travelogues, essays,
collected letters and collected papers, which brought numerous honors to him. He has
been considered one of the greatest contemporary English writers, the father of
Caribbean Literature and has won Booker prize, Somerset Maugham award,
Hawthorne Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature as well as many other important prizes.
Naipaul has visited his motherland India three times and wrote three books recording
his trips: An Area in Darkness(1964), A Wounded Civilization (1975) and A Million
Mutinies Now (1988). Throughout the three books, Naipaul expressed a love-hate
relationship between him and his motherland India. No matter how hard he tried, it
seemed there was always an unseen obstacle keeping him away from the old land. He
used many narration ways as well as perspectives to reflect those inner struggles as
well as his experiences during the trips.
From India Trilogy, Naipaul used different narration ways and perspectives to
present social aspects of India as well as his own feelings. Throughout his trips, there
were conflicts of industrial civilization originated from the western world and the
agricultural civilization which still remains in the countryside. As postcolonial study
comes from the west but focuses in the oriental culture and literature, it is a sharp
contrast to oriental literature, which comes from the eastern world but is now
mimicking the western literature. In the thesis, we can have a detailed analysis of the
law of the unity of opposite between regional culture and global culture. Naipaul has
succeeded in combining western and oriental literature by using all types of
narrations.
In addition, since the 21th century, cross-cultural writing have become an
important feature in world literature development, which can be proved by the success
of modernism, postmodernism and immigration literature. In recent years, the works
of many Nobel Laureates also feature distinct cross-cultural trend and pluralism.
Thanks to his immigration and traveling experience, V.S.Naipaul is typical of Cultural
Hybridity, raised by Homi.K.Bhabha, and his works are very important in postcolonial
literature. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish
Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible
scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." The
Committee added, "Naipaul is a modern philosopher carrying on the tradition that
started originally with Lettres Persians and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has
been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak
with their own inherent irony." From the postcolonial study of his India Trilogy, we
will learn that under the western cultural impact, people from the third world should
protect their own culture. But instead of complete rejection of western culture, they
should combine western and their own culture, making innovations through mimicry
in order to challenge the western authority and retrieve their own cultural identity.
Last but not least, because of globalization, there are deeper interactions between
different areas, peoples and culture across the world and the number of immigrants is
surging in recent years. The cultural identity definition, way of existence and value of
these people are of importance, since those immigrants can be served as a critical link
between the world and their own country, and they can see their motherland from a
fresh perspective.
2
Literature Review
The study of V.S.Naipaul mainly began in the 1970s when the writer rose to
fame and the newly developed postcolonial theories injected vitality to the study of
his work. In 1972, Naipaul’s friend, American writer Paul Theroux published V. S.
Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work, the first monograph for the study of Naipaul. In
this book, Paul analyzed Naipaul’s writing style, cultural rootless condition as well as
way of recording trips and historic events. Robert D. Hammer is also one of the early
scholars of Naipaul study. In 1977, he edited Critical Perspective on V.S.Naipaul,
which included 14 commentary articles and some short essays written by Naipaul
himself. This book mainly discussed local colorism, symbolism and sarcasm in
Naipaul’s novels as well as Naipaul’s image as a man without root. John Thieme is a
major scholar in Naipaul study in the 1980s. In 1987, he published The Web of
Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction. In this book, Thieme made a
detailed analysis of the relationship between Naipaul’s work and the tradition of
western literature, Caribbean literature and Indian literature. He also challenged Paul
Theroux’s idea that Naipaul had never been influenced by anyone. Thieme insisted
that Naipaul’s work didn’t avoid the net of tradition by listing Conrad, Kipling, Indian
Culture, tradition European literature, Hollywood as well as other allusions in
Naipaul’s books. After winning Nobel Price in 2001, Naipaul became the center for
postcolonial literature and a lot of research achievements have been produced from
literature research institutions across the world.
In contrast, the study of Naipaul in China is still in the very beginning. Before
2000, Naipaul was in the margin of foreign literature research. He was unfamiliar to
most people involved in foreign literature teaching. But after 2001 Nobel Prize, there
was a research tide in mainland of China for Naipaul. Up till now, 11 of his books
have been translated into Chinese and around 120 relevant introductory and research
papers have been published in China. But the study of Naipaul mainly focuses on his
novels and cultural identity.
Presently, the study of Naipaul’s non-fictional work is limited in China. The
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study made by Mei Xiaoyun and Zhang Han is of some value. The former points out
that the problem of cultural belonging is in fact the crisis of self-identification, which
exists in ethnic identity, idea absorption and value reception. On the other hand, in the
study of India Trilogy, the latter holds that it is Naipaul’s ambivalence towards his
native culture that causes the narrative contradictions between inner perspective and
outside perspective.
Purpose of Postcolonial Interpretation of V.S.Naipaul’s India
Trilogy
According to V. S. Naipaul, fiction and travelogue are two important ways for
him to observe the world. In the early stage of his career, he has written several
fictions about the Caribbean world and achieved certain success. But after A House
for Mr. Biswas, his writing came to a bottleneck, then he began to try travelogue under
the suggestion of a friend. As a result, the new way of writing not only expended his
horizon and enriched his writing content, but also enabled him to see the world
beyond the Caribbean world.
Because of his Indian immigrant background, Naipaul has been highly interested
in the third world. His travelogue mainly focuses on his motherland-India and other
third world countries such as countries in Caribbean, Africa, Middle-east and
Southeast Asia.
India Trilogy includes An Area of Darkness, A Wounded Civilization and A Million
Mutinies Now. It is based on his three trips to India in the exploration of his identity,
the Indian culture and the fate of the country. From the three books, we can see that
his attitude and description of India changed, the latest book is especially different
from the other two. The image of India in the mind of the writer changed from a
country without hope to one with dynasty. My thesis aims to study Naipaul’s focus
and attitude in each book and his writing style in order to find how he constructed his
4
cultural identity and strengthened links with his motherland.
In An Area of Darkness, we can see disappointment from the beginning to the
end. The first time he arrived in Mumbai, he suffered a lot just to get back two bottles
of wine because wherever he went he met corruption, poverty and bureaucracy,
Though India had been independent for 15 years from Britain at that time, Naipaul
could still feel the trace of Britain everywhere. He had come to India with eagerness
and hope, but when he was about to leave India after staying for one year, he found
out that he could never approve of India. In spite of occasional intimate feelings, he
was always an outsider. The second book A Wounded Civilization was published more
than ten year after his first trip in India. In this book, we can find that Naipaul’s basic
attitude towards India remained the same. But during the second trip, he began to
think in a more reasonable way, trying to stay away from the ambivalent feelings
toward India. The narration is more objective and there are much less personal
feelings. He tried to find out the inner cause of India’s decline and backwardness and
commented on quotations from historic and cultural documents. According to Naipaul,
the main causes of backwardness were the idea of balance advocated by Hinduism
and excessive self-regard and endurance of Ghandiism. In the third book, the tone is
much different; we can feel more warm feelings and expression of approval. Naipaul
becomes more tolerant towards the national reality and Indian way of thinking.
Although Indian culture is facing great challenges and inner conflicts, the national
stagnancy is fading away, there is hope that the country will become somewhat
different.
Because of Naipaul’s mixed cultural identity and western educational background,
he has an ambivalent attitude toward India. On one hand, he is sympathetic of the
quivering poverty in India, on the other hand, he expresses strong criticism of the
national condition. Although Naipaul’s analysis is limited and of strong western
values, it reflects Indian social and historic condition as well as existing problems in a
real way, and serves as a warning for the development of India. As China is India’s
neighboring country, it also shares some of the problems and reality. Naipaul’s
comment about India is also helpful to our development.
5
Methodology
The conception of post-colonialism starts from the beginning of the 20th
when scholars from the third world entered the academic circle of the first world
(p.329,Arif Dirlik: The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism, In Critical Inquiry, No.20, 1994). During its development, there are two
important scholars: Edward. Said and H.K.Bhabha. Said is best known for his book
Orientalism (1978). In this book, he contended that Orientalist scholarship was and
continues to be inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, making
much of the work inherently politicized and servile to power. As an Indian British
writer, Naipaul expresses his unique idea about the relationship between suzerain and
colony and explores the current state as well as future of the third world. Therefore
the theories of Said are helpful to understand Naipaul’s work. Bhabha developed
Said’s theories and coined a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such
as hybridity, mimicry, difference, ambivalence to describe ways in which colonized
peoples have resisted the power of the colonizer. His theories are of great importance
to the study of immigration culture and cross-cultural conflicts. Relevant theories will
be used as reference for the discussion of Naipaul’s cultural identity and multi-cultural
writing.
The thesis will use Said’s post-colonial theory and relevant interpretation of
Indian scholars to explore Naipaul’s multi-cultural identity. Naipaul was born in an
Indian family in Trinidad, a former British colony in the Caribbean, but he received
the British education and married a British wife. In addition, he has traveled across
the world, and his way of things was influenced by different geographic surroundings,
political atmosphere, culture, religion and literary tradition. According to Said’s
theory in Orientalism, the so-called Orient is defined by the westerner. In this way, if
the colonized want to get rid of the fate of orientalization, they must first admit the
existence of orientalization, and then overthrow the western cultural hegemony so as
6
to retrieve their “selfness” in the colonial culture. As an immigrant writer from the
third world, Naipaul had a strongly westernized way of thinking. Before he set foot on
India, all the image of this oriental land was created by western culture, thus he was
shocked in his first trip in India, which was too different from his own imagination. In
the second trip, India was still distant to him, for his construction of Indian cultural
identity remained unfinished. However, in the third trip, as he had already been
heavily involved in the oriental cultural in his long term trips in Asia, he had a much
more tolerant attitude towards India. Indian scholar Vasant S. Patel compared
Naipaul’s three trips with the famous Indian epic Ramayana, the first trip was a trip of
exile, the second; a trip of sufferance; and the third; a trip of struggle
In his major work The Location of Culture, Professor Bhabha raised the theory
of cultural hybridity. He holds that in the background of globalization, there is no
ethnically cleansed culture, but a transnational and translational sense of hybridity of
imagined commutinies. According to Bhabha, the rule of the colonist is not a one-way
movement, because the colonized people are active. Though they have lost most of
their language, culture and identity, they still can influence the colonist in colonial
language localization. As Naipaul has experienced geographical and cultural change
and stayed in the mixed area of all kinds of culture, his writing style is also mixed and
keeps changing, so is his way of observation. From Darkness to A Million Mutinies
Now, we can see that Naipaul has been radiated more and more by Indian culture in
his intimate contact with the real orient. Under such impact, his cultural estrangement
began to fade away, his attitude about Indian culture was becoming more and more
positive. Besides, as in his first book Naipaul was still limited by the orientalist’s
tradition of “Others' Description”, he kept himself from the expressed, but in A
Million Mutinies Now, he used “Self-expression”, which signified a fundamental
change of the writer’s self-awareness.
Narratology examines the way that narrative structures our perception of both
cultural artifacts and the world around us. The study of narrative is particularly
important since our ordering of time and space in narrative forms constitutes one of
the primary ways we construct meaning in general. As Hayden White puts it, "far
7
from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience
with meaning, narrative is a meta-code, a human universal on the basis of which
transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted".
The exploration of narrative text is an important part in narratology. The research
made by Gérard Genett and his work: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, has
laid foundation for the study of narrative text. Numerous realist and modernist novels
have been selected as objects of study. As an immigrant writer, Naipaul develops a
unique way of narration, the thesis will focus on his observation perspective to
analyze how he constructs his cultural identity and learn to accept his motherland with
more tolerance.
8
Chapter One Naipaul’s Impression of India in India Trilogy
According to Said,
“the universal truth of exile is not that one has lost that love or home, but that inherent of in
each is an unexpected, unwelcome loss. One must have independence and detachment of someone
whose homeland is “sweet”, but whose actual condition makes it impossible to recapture that
sweetness, and even less possible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or
dogma, whether deriving from pride in one’s heritage or from certainty about who “we” are”
( Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993:172).
Homeland here refers to the world in general. Only by cherishing a tolerant heart
can one put aside nation-oriented prejudice and become really strong. From Naipaul’s
Impression’s of India in India Trilogy, we can have a general idea of how he learns to
get rid of the western prejudice, embrace his traditional culture and listen to what
people from his motherland have said. By doing so, he succeeds in constructing his
own culture identity and surviving between different cultures.
1.1. A Hopeless Country from An Area of Darkness
In Cultural and Imperialism, Edward Said has pointed out that V.S.Naipaul’s work
reflected his perspective of Orientalism: “his representation of India, that of a culture
indebted to the mother country for its own self and for a sense of “Englishness” and
yet turning toward the colony” (P324, Said, 1993). This west-oriented prejudice is
especially obvious in his first book of India Trilogy, in which he referred to India as a
country in darkness.
Firstly, he focused on caste problem. When first arrived in Mumbai, Naipaul
suffered a lot just to get back two bottles of wine. He was forced to fill numerous
application forms and go to three or four different departments in order to get some
“important” documents, because no one was willing to do work beyond his own duty,
9
“a clerk was a clerk, a messenger was a messenger” (V.S.Naipaul 1964:24). In the
story of Ramnath, he revealed the absurdity of caste. Ramnath, a clerk in a
government department, refused to type a letter for his director because he was just a
steno. He insisted his principle in spite of his director’s fury. Finally, his director
thought a good idea to punish Rmanath. He made a request to sack Ramnath and
asked the latter to take down the dismissal letter. Ramnath was terribly threatened.
What made him felt worst was not that he would lose his job, but that the letter would
be typed by someone below his position. In order to avoid such humiliation, Ramnath
had to put away his principle and kneeled down to beg for mercy. According to
Naipaul, it was the sense of caste that caused all those ridiculous phenomena,
“Adventure is possible, but the knowledge of degree is in the bones and no Indian is far from his
origins. It is like a physical yearning….However incongruous the imported mechanics of the new
world might seem, they have been incorporated into the rule of degree.”
Because of caste, everybody was imprisoned in his own identity. Caste had a long
history, in the Epic Ramayana, it was said that everybody should stick to their own
duties, be it humble or holy. This unique social system separates position and duty,
function and result. Consequently, the Indians were just concerned with the symbolic
things. The cleaner in the hotel swept the floor every day, but never cared to make the
floor clean. In Planting Day, officials went to the park to give a speech and heaved the
spade for a while, but 70% of the trees planted were dead after a short time.
Besides, the quivering poverty was also very shocking to Naipaul. Whenever he
went, he saw dirty districts, poor beggars. It made him feel that he was in the African
refugee camp. Poverty made everything in a mess. In the countryside, he saw clusters
of shabby houses, lumps of dung, heaps of rubbish and kids shitting everywhere. In
the city, he saw overcrowded streets, large area of slums. After the book was
published, his description of India had been strongly criticized by Indian scholars, he
was even considered as the enemy of the third world countries.
Though he
succeeded in forcing Indians to face the reality, it was evident that he saw India in the
eyes of a westerner.
10