 Mishra |  Mishra's new book on Naipaul |  Naipaul |  Lal |
Naipaul, Mishra, and Me: An Indo-Fijian Reading of V. S. Naipaul and World Literature
Fijileaks Editor's Note:
* I took time out of my busy schedule to read Melbourne-based and Fiji-born Emeritus Professor Vijay Mishra’s new book on Naipaul. My interest is three-fold. First, like Mishra, I share with Naipaul an indenture ancestry: he was from Trinidad, and we are from Fiji, all children of the girmit past.
*Second, I have always loved reading Naipaul’s novels.
* Third, I am just completing a biography of V. S. Naipaul as a student at Oxford (1950–1954), where he read English Literature.
We break with tradition to revisit the Indo-Trinidadian Nobel laureate Vidiadhar Surajprasad (V. S.) Naipaul. Though he never set foot in Fiji, the themes that run through his novels - migration, indenture, exile, the wounds of colonialism, and the fraught politics of belonging - speak directly to Fiji’s own story.
For Indo-Fijians, his fiction resonates with the legacies of indenture and diaspora. For the iTaukei, his sharp portraits of dispossession, tradition under pressure, and uneasy modernity carry equal weight. It is therefore fitting that Melbourne-based, Fiji-born Emeritus Professor Vijay Mishra has published his new book, V. S. Naipaul and World Literature, placing Naipaul’s work in a global frame that also casts light on Fiji’s contested past and uncertain future.
For Mishra, the story of V. S. Naipaul and World Literature does not begin in the lecture room but in the family home. As a young man in Fiji, Mishra read passages of A House for Mr Biswas aloud to his mother, herself the granddaughter of indentured labourers. The novel’s haunting word - “unaccommodated” - struck her like a truth from her own life. Plantation descendants in Trinidad or Fiji knew what it meant to live without secure homes, without recognition, and always struggling for dignity. That moment of recognition became the seed for Mishra’s lifelong engagement with Naipaul.
Mishra’s new book, V. S. Naipaul and World Literature, grows out of that encounter. It is part memoir, part literary criticism, and part meditation on what it means for displaced communities like Indo-Fijians and Indo-Caribbeans to find themselves in Naipaul’s often harsh mirror.
The book opens with a prologue, “The Tears of Things,” where Mishra recalls how Naipaul’s writing touched the deepest nerves of memory and loss in families like his own. From there, he guides readers through Naipaul’s work and reputation.
Mishra closes by reflecting on Naipaul’s contested legacy. For some, his prejudices overshadow his art; for others, his honesty defines his greatness. Mishra argues for reading Naipaul within a critical universal humanism, a framework that acknowledges his contradictions but recognizes the extraordinary unity he gave to world literature through his exploration of displacement, memory, and survival.
Naipaul was difficult, controversial, often offensive but also brilliant. He gave voice to the struggles and contradictions of people like us, shaped by migration, loss, and displacement. Whether we claim him or reject him, Naipaul’s work forces us to face uncomfortable truths about history, identity, and belonging.
Mishra’s V. S. Naipaul and World Literature is dense, theoretical, and uncompromising, but also profoundly moving. It speaks to us because it speaks of us. And it confirms that Indo-Fijians, like our Trinidadian cousins, are not shadows in someone else’s history. We are authors of the world’s literature.
For Fijileaks readers reference, we have reproduced at the end of this article an academic review of Vijay Mishra's V. S. Naipaul and World Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2024), written by Nivedita Misra in the Journal of West Indian Literature.
For Indo-Fijians, his fiction resonates with the legacies of indenture and diaspora. For the iTaukei, his sharp portraits of dispossession, tradition under pressure, and uneasy modernity carry equal weight. It is therefore fitting that Melbourne-based, Fiji-born Emeritus Professor Vijay Mishra has published his new book, V. S. Naipaul and World Literature, placing Naipaul’s work in a global frame that also casts light on Fiji’s contested past and uncertain future.
For Mishra, the story of V. S. Naipaul and World Literature does not begin in the lecture room but in the family home. As a young man in Fiji, Mishra read passages of A House for Mr Biswas aloud to his mother, herself the granddaughter of indentured labourers. The novel’s haunting word - “unaccommodated” - struck her like a truth from her own life. Plantation descendants in Trinidad or Fiji knew what it meant to live without secure homes, without recognition, and always struggling for dignity. That moment of recognition became the seed for Mishra’s lifelong engagement with Naipaul.
Mishra’s new book, V. S. Naipaul and World Literature, grows out of that encounter. It is part memoir, part literary criticism, and part meditation on what it means for displaced communities like Indo-Fijians and Indo-Caribbeans to find themselves in Naipaul’s often harsh mirror.
The book opens with a prologue, “The Tears of Things,” where Mishra recalls how Naipaul’s writing touched the deepest nerves of memory and loss in families like his own. From there, he guides readers through Naipaul’s work and reputation.
Mishra closes by reflecting on Naipaul’s contested legacy. For some, his prejudices overshadow his art; for others, his honesty defines his greatness. Mishra argues for reading Naipaul within a critical universal humanism, a framework that acknowledges his contradictions but recognizes the extraordinary unity he gave to world literature through his exploration of displacement, memory, and survival.
Naipaul was difficult, controversial, often offensive but also brilliant. He gave voice to the struggles and contradictions of people like us, shaped by migration, loss, and displacement. Whether we claim him or reject him, Naipaul’s work forces us to face uncomfortable truths about history, identity, and belonging.
Mishra’s V. S. Naipaul and World Literature is dense, theoretical, and uncompromising, but also profoundly moving. It speaks to us because it speaks of us. And it confirms that Indo-Fijians, like our Trinidadian cousins, are not shadows in someone else’s history. We are authors of the world’s literature.
For Fijileaks readers reference, we have reproduced at the end of this article an academic review of Vijay Mishra's V. S. Naipaul and World Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2024), written by Nivedita Misra in the Journal of West Indian Literature.
Chosen by Fijileaks Editor with Commentary: How Naipaul's Novels Speak Directly to Indo-Fijians Lived Experiences in Fiji and in Diaspora
A House for Mr Biswas: An Indo-Fijian Mirror
When V. S. Naipaul published A House for Mr Biswas in 1961, he gave the world a masterpiece about one man’s struggle for dignity in colonial Trinidad. But for Indo-Fijians, the novel has always read like a mirror. Mr Biswas, awkward, stubborn, perpetually at odds with family and society, could just as easily have been one of our own girmitiya grandfathers, chasing the dream of owning land, a house, and with them, independence.
The struggle for a house. the struggle for belonging
In the novel, the house is not just a shelter. It is the symbol of autonomy in a world that keeps Mr Biswas marginal within his wife’s domineering Tulsi clan, and within the wider colonial society where Indians were second-class. Indo-Fijians know this script by heart. Our grandparents cut cane, saved pennies, and built tin-roof homes in Labasa, Ba, and Nausori, fragile sanctuaries that represented more than property. They were declarations: we are here to stay.
Humour, humiliation, survival
Mr Biswas’s life is a comedy of errors - jobs lost, money squandered, houses collapsing. Yet his story is also tragic: a life lived on the edge of respectability, constantly battling to assert selfhood. Indo-Fijians, too, have carried this ambivalence. Successes built from struggle sit beside humiliations imposed by politics, coups, and discrimination. The novel’s tone, at once funny and heartbreaking, feels like the texture of Indo-Fijian life itself.
The Tulsi clan and Indo-Fijian extended families
Naipaul’s portrait of the suffocating Tulsi household - sprawling, quarrelsome, bound by ritual and debt - resonates deeply with Indo-Fijians raised in multigenerational homes where privacy was scarce, obligations endless, and escape only possible through education, migration, or stubborn rebellion. Many Indo-Fijian readers have seen their own families in the Tulsis: protective, oppressive, nurturing, stifling.
A universal story of the girmitiya legacy
At its heart, A House for Mr Biswas is the story of an indentured descendant trying to carve out a life of dignity against history’s weight. This is why Indo-Fijians read it not as “foreign” but as our own. Mr Biswas could have been a cane cutter in Seaqaqa, a clerk in Lautoka, or a schoolteacher in Nadi. His small victories and bitter defeats echo our own struggle for a place in Fiji, to build a house, to hold onto land, to insist that our lives matter.
Why it still matters
For Indo-Fijians today, A House for Mr Biswas is more than literature. It is a parable of our condition. Even after 140 years in Fiji, we are still fighting for recognition, for security, for the right to call our houses home. Naipaul captured this universal diasporic longing in Trinidad, but through Mishra’s reading of Naipaul, we can see how the same longing animates Indo-Fijian life.
This is why Mishra’s book, and Naipaul’s novel before it, continue to resonate. They remind us that the story of one obstinate man in Trinidad is also the story of a whole people in Fiji, still wrestling with belonging, still building, still dreaming of houses that will not fall.
When V. S. Naipaul published A House for Mr Biswas in 1961, he gave the world a masterpiece about one man’s struggle for dignity in colonial Trinidad. But for Indo-Fijians, the novel has always read like a mirror. Mr Biswas, awkward, stubborn, perpetually at odds with family and society, could just as easily have been one of our own girmitiya grandfathers, chasing the dream of owning land, a house, and with them, independence.
The struggle for a house. the struggle for belonging
In the novel, the house is not just a shelter. It is the symbol of autonomy in a world that keeps Mr Biswas marginal within his wife’s domineering Tulsi clan, and within the wider colonial society where Indians were second-class. Indo-Fijians know this script by heart. Our grandparents cut cane, saved pennies, and built tin-roof homes in Labasa, Ba, and Nausori, fragile sanctuaries that represented more than property. They were declarations: we are here to stay.
Humour, humiliation, survival
Mr Biswas’s life is a comedy of errors - jobs lost, money squandered, houses collapsing. Yet his story is also tragic: a life lived on the edge of respectability, constantly battling to assert selfhood. Indo-Fijians, too, have carried this ambivalence. Successes built from struggle sit beside humiliations imposed by politics, coups, and discrimination. The novel’s tone, at once funny and heartbreaking, feels like the texture of Indo-Fijian life itself.
The Tulsi clan and Indo-Fijian extended families
Naipaul’s portrait of the suffocating Tulsi household - sprawling, quarrelsome, bound by ritual and debt - resonates deeply with Indo-Fijians raised in multigenerational homes where privacy was scarce, obligations endless, and escape only possible through education, migration, or stubborn rebellion. Many Indo-Fijian readers have seen their own families in the Tulsis: protective, oppressive, nurturing, stifling.
A universal story of the girmitiya legacy
At its heart, A House for Mr Biswas is the story of an indentured descendant trying to carve out a life of dignity against history’s weight. This is why Indo-Fijians read it not as “foreign” but as our own. Mr Biswas could have been a cane cutter in Seaqaqa, a clerk in Lautoka, or a schoolteacher in Nadi. His small victories and bitter defeats echo our own struggle for a place in Fiji, to build a house, to hold onto land, to insist that our lives matter.
Why it still matters
For Indo-Fijians today, A House for Mr Biswas is more than literature. It is a parable of our condition. Even after 140 years in Fiji, we are still fighting for recognition, for security, for the right to call our houses home. Naipaul captured this universal diasporic longing in Trinidad, but through Mishra’s reading of Naipaul, we can see how the same longing animates Indo-Fijian life.
This is why Mishra’s book, and Naipaul’s novel before it, continue to resonate. They remind us that the story of one obstinate man in Trinidad is also the story of a whole people in Fiji, still wrestling with belonging, still building, still dreaming of houses that will not fall.
A Bend in the River and Sitiveni Rabuka’s racist and ethno-nationalist 1987 Coups: The Indo-Fijian Parallel
When V. S. Naipaul set A Bend in the River (1979) in an unnamed African country, likely inspired by the Democratic Republic of Congo (known as Zaire from 1971 to 1997 under dictator Mobutu Sese Seko), he was writing not only about Central Africa but about the postcolonial condition everywhere: fragile states, predatory elites, and the perpetual uncertainty of minorities caught in the middle.
For Indo-Fijians reading after 1987, the novel A Bend in the River, became eerily familiar.
The world after independence
Naipaul’s narrator, Salim, is an Indian-African trader whose family had migrated inland from the Indian Ocean coast. When the new African strongman seizes power, Salim’s community, tolerated under colonialism, useful as traders, but never fully accepted, finds itself despised, scapegoated, and vulnerable.
In 1987, Indo-Fijians recognised this script, atleast those having read Naipaul's books. After years of building Fiji’s economy and education system, they were suddenly branded “usurpers” by Sitiveni Rabuka’s coup. Like Salim in Naipaul’s Congo, Indo-Fijians discovered that citizenship could be revoked overnight by the politics of race and the violence of the gun.
The dictator’s rhetoric and Rabuka’s decrees
Naipaul’s dictator demands loyalty through slogans and ritual displays of “authenticity.” Rabuka, too, justified his coups by invoking “indigenous rights” and a distorted vision of tradition. Both regimes rewrote constitutions to enshrine exclusion, making minorities foreigners in the only home they knew.
Looting the state
Mobutu’s Zaire became infamous for what the World Bank itself called “kleptocracy”, the systematic looting of state resources by a narrow elite. Naipaul sketches this reality in A Bend in the River: roads crumbling, projects abandoned, the country collapsing while the ruler’s circle grew fat.
Fijians saw their own version under Rabuka. The National Bank of Fiji scandal of the early 1990s was nothing less than a state-sanctioned plunder by iTaukei elites. Loans were handed out to political cronies, debts were never repaid, and the taxpayer was left to foot the bill. Just as Mobutu’s Zaireans were told to be loyal while their future was stolen, Indo-Fijians and ordinary iTaukei alike watched a bank collapse under the weight of corruption dressed up as “indigenous empowerment.”
The exile’s dilemma
Salim’s choice in A Bend in the River is stark: remain in a land that rejects him, or migrate again, rootless, stateless, forever starting over. Indo-Fijians faced the same dilemma after 1987. Tens of thousands fled Fiji for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Those who stayed lived under a cloud of insecurity, watching land leases expire and opportunities shrink.
A lesson for Indo-Fijians
Naipaul captured the essence of survival in a world of uncertainty:
“You are nobody if you allow yourself to be treated as nobody.”
For Indo-Fijians, that was the warning of 1987. To accept silence, to accept erasure, was to accept nonexistence. Migration, resistance, education, and persistence became the ways of refusing to be “nobody.”
Naipaul’s Congo and Rabuka’s Fiji may be continents apart, but the Indo-Fijian reading of A Bend in the River is unavoidable. Both expose the precariousness of diasporic communities in postcolonial states where belonging is contested. Both show how elites can plunder a nation while preaching nationalism. The novel, like our own history, asks the same question: when the river bends, who gets swept away, and who insists on being somebody?
When V. S. Naipaul set A Bend in the River (1979) in an unnamed African country, likely inspired by the Democratic Republic of Congo (known as Zaire from 1971 to 1997 under dictator Mobutu Sese Seko), he was writing not only about Central Africa but about the postcolonial condition everywhere: fragile states, predatory elites, and the perpetual uncertainty of minorities caught in the middle.
For Indo-Fijians reading after 1987, the novel A Bend in the River, became eerily familiar.
The world after independence
Naipaul’s narrator, Salim, is an Indian-African trader whose family had migrated inland from the Indian Ocean coast. When the new African strongman seizes power, Salim’s community, tolerated under colonialism, useful as traders, but never fully accepted, finds itself despised, scapegoated, and vulnerable.
In 1987, Indo-Fijians recognised this script, atleast those having read Naipaul's books. After years of building Fiji’s economy and education system, they were suddenly branded “usurpers” by Sitiveni Rabuka’s coup. Like Salim in Naipaul’s Congo, Indo-Fijians discovered that citizenship could be revoked overnight by the politics of race and the violence of the gun.
The dictator’s rhetoric and Rabuka’s decrees
Naipaul’s dictator demands loyalty through slogans and ritual displays of “authenticity.” Rabuka, too, justified his coups by invoking “indigenous rights” and a distorted vision of tradition. Both regimes rewrote constitutions to enshrine exclusion, making minorities foreigners in the only home they knew.
Looting the state
Mobutu’s Zaire became infamous for what the World Bank itself called “kleptocracy”, the systematic looting of state resources by a narrow elite. Naipaul sketches this reality in A Bend in the River: roads crumbling, projects abandoned, the country collapsing while the ruler’s circle grew fat.
Fijians saw their own version under Rabuka. The National Bank of Fiji scandal of the early 1990s was nothing less than a state-sanctioned plunder by iTaukei elites. Loans were handed out to political cronies, debts were never repaid, and the taxpayer was left to foot the bill. Just as Mobutu’s Zaireans were told to be loyal while their future was stolen, Indo-Fijians and ordinary iTaukei alike watched a bank collapse under the weight of corruption dressed up as “indigenous empowerment.”
The exile’s dilemma
Salim’s choice in A Bend in the River is stark: remain in a land that rejects him, or migrate again, rootless, stateless, forever starting over. Indo-Fijians faced the same dilemma after 1987. Tens of thousands fled Fiji for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Those who stayed lived under a cloud of insecurity, watching land leases expire and opportunities shrink.
A lesson for Indo-Fijians
Naipaul captured the essence of survival in a world of uncertainty:
“You are nobody if you allow yourself to be treated as nobody.”
For Indo-Fijians, that was the warning of 1987. To accept silence, to accept erasure, was to accept nonexistence. Migration, resistance, education, and persistence became the ways of refusing to be “nobody.”
Naipaul’s Congo and Rabuka’s Fiji may be continents apart, but the Indo-Fijian reading of A Bend in the River is unavoidable. Both expose the precariousness of diasporic communities in postcolonial states where belonging is contested. Both show how elites can plunder a nation while preaching nationalism. The novel, like our own history, asks the same question: when the river bends, who gets swept away, and who insists on being somebody?
The Enigma of Departure: Indo-Fijians, Exile, and the Search for Belonging. From Naipaul to Nadi: How Indo-Fijians Live the Enigma of Departure
When V.S. Naipaul published The Enigma of Arrival in 1987, he offered a deeply personal meditation on exile, estrangement, and the unsettled identity of the colonial migrant. Set in the English countryside, the novel portrays the migrant’s uneasy arrival in a world at once alien and oddly familiar, where belonging is always partial and identity forever fractured. It is a work suffused with quiet melancholy: the stranger walks among layered histories of empire, class, and cultural estrangement, never quite at home.
For Indo-Fijians, the resonance is striking. 1987 was also the year that their own “enigma of departure” began. The military coups led by Sitiveni Rabuka shattered Fiji’s fragile democracy and unleashed ethnic politics that made Indo-Fijians, descendants of indentured labourers brought from India between 1879 and 1916, feel unwanted in the land their families had tilled for more than a century. Facing insecurity, discrimination, and periodic eruptions of violence, tens of thousands departed: cane farmers from Ba resettled in Auckland, schoolteachers from Suva found classrooms in Sydney, and shopkeepers from Lautoka rebuilt their lives in Toronto and Vancouver.
Naipaul’s narrative speaks uncannily to this experience. His arrival in Wiltshire mirrors the Indo-Fijian arrival in Auckland, Sydney, or Vancouver: a place of refuge but also of cultural estrangement. Settling abroad was never only about safety or opportunity; it was also about negotiating identity, carrying Fiji in memory while adapting to new lands that often failed to recognise the layered histories of Indo-Fijian life.
In The Enigma of Arrival, the narrator reflects on the slow erasure of old ways in the English countryside, a process of transition and decay. For Indo-Fijians abroad, a similar process has unfolded: the fading of a once-vibrant Fiji-Hindi culture, the gradual loss of plantation songs, dialects, and rituals transplanted from India and transformed in the South Pacific. Exile brought security, but at the price of cultural thinning. Children grew up speaking English or accented Hindi, knowing Fiji more through their parents’ nostalgia than their own lived experience.
Yet Naipaul also gestures toward renewal. The unsettled stranger eventually makes meaning in a new place, even if permanence never fully takes root. Indo-Fijians abroad echo this journey: remaking community through temples in Auckland, mandalis in Toronto, kava gatherings in Brisbane, and diaspora literature that continues to grow. The act of departure carried loss, but also the possibility of new beginnings.
By sheer coincidence, Naipaul’s Enigma of Arrival appeared in print just as Indo-Fijians were living their own enigma of departure. His meditation on displacement illuminates a paradox that continues to define the Indo-Fijian diaspora: to arrive elsewhere is always to depart forever; to find safety abroad is also to lose a homeland.
When V.S. Naipaul published The Enigma of Arrival in 1987, he offered a deeply personal meditation on exile, estrangement, and the unsettled identity of the colonial migrant. Set in the English countryside, the novel portrays the migrant’s uneasy arrival in a world at once alien and oddly familiar, where belonging is always partial and identity forever fractured. It is a work suffused with quiet melancholy: the stranger walks among layered histories of empire, class, and cultural estrangement, never quite at home.
For Indo-Fijians, the resonance is striking. 1987 was also the year that their own “enigma of departure” began. The military coups led by Sitiveni Rabuka shattered Fiji’s fragile democracy and unleashed ethnic politics that made Indo-Fijians, descendants of indentured labourers brought from India between 1879 and 1916, feel unwanted in the land their families had tilled for more than a century. Facing insecurity, discrimination, and periodic eruptions of violence, tens of thousands departed: cane farmers from Ba resettled in Auckland, schoolteachers from Suva found classrooms in Sydney, and shopkeepers from Lautoka rebuilt their lives in Toronto and Vancouver.
Naipaul’s narrative speaks uncannily to this experience. His arrival in Wiltshire mirrors the Indo-Fijian arrival in Auckland, Sydney, or Vancouver: a place of refuge but also of cultural estrangement. Settling abroad was never only about safety or opportunity; it was also about negotiating identity, carrying Fiji in memory while adapting to new lands that often failed to recognise the layered histories of Indo-Fijian life.
In The Enigma of Arrival, the narrator reflects on the slow erasure of old ways in the English countryside, a process of transition and decay. For Indo-Fijians abroad, a similar process has unfolded: the fading of a once-vibrant Fiji-Hindi culture, the gradual loss of plantation songs, dialects, and rituals transplanted from India and transformed in the South Pacific. Exile brought security, but at the price of cultural thinning. Children grew up speaking English or accented Hindi, knowing Fiji more through their parents’ nostalgia than their own lived experience.
Yet Naipaul also gestures toward renewal. The unsettled stranger eventually makes meaning in a new place, even if permanence never fully takes root. Indo-Fijians abroad echo this journey: remaking community through temples in Auckland, mandalis in Toronto, kava gatherings in Brisbane, and diaspora literature that continues to grow. The act of departure carried loss, but also the possibility of new beginnings.
By sheer coincidence, Naipaul’s Enigma of Arrival appeared in print just as Indo-Fijians were living their own enigma of departure. His meditation on displacement illuminates a paradox that continues to define the Indo-Fijian diaspora: to arrive elsewhere is always to depart forever; to find safety abroad is also to lose a homeland.
Shadows of Empire: Naipaul, India, and the Indo-Fijian Condition
When V.S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness in 1964, it unsettled readers in India and the diaspora alike. It was his first account of travelling to the ancestral homeland, and what he found was not a place of renewal but of dislocation. Poverty, bureaucracy, superstition, and decay.
Naipaul wrote with a sharp eye, exposing a reality that was jarred with the myths of India carried in migrant memory. For many Indo-Fijians, descendants of indentured labourers brought to Fiji between 1879 and 1916, his reflections cut close to the bone.
Though our forebears left India decades before Naipaul’s journey, they carried with them a remembered India - villages, rituals, dialects, a sense of civilisation interrupted by the colonial project of indenture. In Fiji, this memory was reshaped under the sugar plantations, where the British constructed a new social order: contracts binding labour, overseers wielding power, and communities fractured by distance from home. Reading An Area of Darkness, Indo-Fijians could recognise the disjunction Naipaul described, the gulf between an imagined homeland and the harsh realities of life under colonial systems.
When V.S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness in 1964, it unsettled readers in India and the diaspora alike. It was his first account of travelling to the ancestral homeland, and what he found was not a place of renewal but of dislocation. Poverty, bureaucracy, superstition, and decay.
Naipaul wrote with a sharp eye, exposing a reality that was jarred with the myths of India carried in migrant memory. For many Indo-Fijians, descendants of indentured labourers brought to Fiji between 1879 and 1916, his reflections cut close to the bone.
Though our forebears left India decades before Naipaul’s journey, they carried with them a remembered India - villages, rituals, dialects, a sense of civilisation interrupted by the colonial project of indenture. In Fiji, this memory was reshaped under the sugar plantations, where the British constructed a new social order: contracts binding labour, overseers wielding power, and communities fractured by distance from home. Reading An Area of Darkness, Indo-Fijians could recognise the disjunction Naipaul described, the gulf between an imagined homeland and the harsh realities of life under colonial systems.
By the time Naipaul published India: A Wounded Civilization in 1977, Fiji itself was still under the long shadow of British rule. Independence had come only in 1970, but the structures of colonialism lingered: land tenure laws that excluded Indo-Fijians from ownership of most agricultural land, political institutions designed to balance ethnic communities while never granting full equality, and an economic system that kept cane farmers dependent and vulnerable. Naipaul’s book, a searing critique of India’s failures after independence, spoke indirectly to Fiji’s own postcolonial anxieties. If India, with its size and resources, could stumble under the burden of history and tradition, what of small, divided Fiji?
Naipaul’s idea of a “wounded civilization” resonates with the Indo-Fijian story. Our community bore the wounds of indenture: families torn from ancestral villages, languages hybridised and ridiculed, faith reshaped in the barracks and cane fields. Under British colonialism in Fiji, Indo-Fijians occupied a paradoxical position- indispensable to the sugar economy yet denied full political and cultural recognition.
Like Naipaul’s India, we were shaped by history’s injuries, and those wounds continued to bleed into the politics of the 1970s and 1980s.
For Indo-Fijians, Naipaul’s works are more than distant critiques of India. They are mirrors, sometimes harsh, sometimes unflattering of what it means to inherit displacement. We know what it is to live with memory that is both anchor and burden. We know the ache of never quite belonging: in India, where we are seen as strangers; in Fiji, where our loyalty is questioned; abroad, where we become migrants once again.
And yet, as Naipaul himself embodied, exile does not mean silence. From the fragments of history and the pain of dislocation, Indo-Fijians have built new worlds: schools, temples, mandalis, unions, literature. If our civilisation is wounded, it is also resilient.
Naipaul’s early works remind us that colonialism leaves deep scars on nations, on communities, on memory. For Indo-Fijians, still navigating the legacies of British rule, they are an invitation to reflect on how far we have travelled, and how the shadows of empire continue to shape our journey.
Naipaul’s idea of a “wounded civilization” resonates with the Indo-Fijian story. Our community bore the wounds of indenture: families torn from ancestral villages, languages hybridised and ridiculed, faith reshaped in the barracks and cane fields. Under British colonialism in Fiji, Indo-Fijians occupied a paradoxical position- indispensable to the sugar economy yet denied full political and cultural recognition.
Like Naipaul’s India, we were shaped by history’s injuries, and those wounds continued to bleed into the politics of the 1970s and 1980s.
For Indo-Fijians, Naipaul’s works are more than distant critiques of India. They are mirrors, sometimes harsh, sometimes unflattering of what it means to inherit displacement. We know what it is to live with memory that is both anchor and burden. We know the ache of never quite belonging: in India, where we are seen as strangers; in Fiji, where our loyalty is questioned; abroad, where we become migrants once again.
And yet, as Naipaul himself embodied, exile does not mean silence. From the fragments of history and the pain of dislocation, Indo-Fijians have built new worlds: schools, temples, mandalis, unions, literature. If our civilisation is wounded, it is also resilient.
Naipaul’s early works remind us that colonialism leaves deep scars on nations, on communities, on memory. For Indo-Fijians, still navigating the legacies of British rule, they are an invitation to reflect on how far we have travelled, and how the shadows of empire continue to shape our journey.
Victor Lal’s Upcoming Book on Naipaul:
V.S. Naipaul - The Oxford Student, 1950-1954
Fijileaks is pleased to inform readers that its founding Editor-in-Chief is completing a full-length manuscript exploring the formative years of V. S. Naipaul at Oxford University (1950–1954). Long before he became one of the most celebrated and controversial literary voices of the twentieth century, and a Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Naipaul was an uncertain undergraduate at Oxford, struggling with questions of identity, exile, and vocation.
Based on his University College student file, his personal archives at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, intimate family correspondence, and other relevant materials, the forthcoming study brings together for the first time the materials that illuminate Naipaul’s Oxford years and the beginnings of his literary voice. The book also incorporates other archival collections, contemporary accounts, and unpublished sources to offer the most comprehensive picture yet of how a young student gradually transformed into the groundbreaking writer who would reshape postcolonial literature.
Ultimately, the study traces how Naipaul, born into a family of descendants of Indian indentured labourers, became the first person of such heritage to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.
V.S. Naipaul - The Oxford Student, 1950-1954
Fijileaks is pleased to inform readers that its founding Editor-in-Chief is completing a full-length manuscript exploring the formative years of V. S. Naipaul at Oxford University (1950–1954). Long before he became one of the most celebrated and controversial literary voices of the twentieth century, and a Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Naipaul was an uncertain undergraduate at Oxford, struggling with questions of identity, exile, and vocation.
Based on his University College student file, his personal archives at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, intimate family correspondence, and other relevant materials, the forthcoming study brings together for the first time the materials that illuminate Naipaul’s Oxford years and the beginnings of his literary voice. The book also incorporates other archival collections, contemporary accounts, and unpublished sources to offer the most comprehensive picture yet of how a young student gradually transformed into the groundbreaking writer who would reshape postcolonial literature.
Ultimately, the study traces how Naipaul, born into a family of descendants of Indian indentured labourers, became the first person of such heritage to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.
From Journal of West Indian Literature
V.S. Naipaul's childhood home in Port of Spain is located at 26 Nepaul Street, St. James, and is now a heritage site known as Naipaul House.
It was from this house, he accepted the offer to study at Oxford in 1950.
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