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Amitav Ghosh reflects on Khal Torabully and V.S. Naipaul whilst travelling in Mauritius to undertake research for his novel Sea of Poppies. KEYWORDS Mauritius, cyclones, hurricanes, climate change, V.S. Naipaul

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul's (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries--Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of military slavery in the world. Then, he wrote an analysis of modern Islamic history In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (1983), which historicizes Islam as a politically failed force all over the world. These travelogues and history are generically different. But a common topological relationality can be mapped in the anecdotes of Naipaul's travelogues and the historiography of Pipes' history, as they use identical tropological configurations to historicize Islamic cultures. This similar tropological historiography, this article argues, is covertly an offshoot of the contemporary spatiotemporal context in which they were produced. The context was networked by certain ideological implications, ethnocentrism, and some cultural misapprehensions regarding Islamic/Muslim culture, making the historicism of both Naipaul and Pipes seem ahistorical.

Many critics have harshly criticized V.S. Naipaul's works, both fiction and trip memoirs on the postcolonial sociocultural milieu of Africa, for being racially objectionable. The indictment apparently has a rationale too in the sense that his writings- In a Free State (1971), A Band in the River (1979) and Masque of Africa for instance- outright seem to be intestinal butchery of the African life, past and present, without any sense of mercy. However, he has countered all the critics often to defend his writings. In fact, this stand of Naipaul on his writings prompts this paper for a scrutiny and apparently, it seems that, as it will be explored, his defense stands; he has seen “much” about Africa, its future. Paradoxically, in his internal butchery he is neither “anti-African” nor “anti-Negro.” His African discourse, though supposed to be they do not have any such offensive, butchery agenda in nature, rather seems to have a tendency of seeing “much” future possibilities in the postcolonial paradox with a spiral into its past. Although the African post-colonial paradox is colonial, he also understands it as a part of another form of ups and downs in the history of African civilization. This is more apparent in his writings and more perceptible in the context of the postcolonial viewpoint on displacement and dislocation. Postcolonial discourse usually emphasizes a crisis in its perspectives. However, for Naipaul, they are also, just like every other civilization, the nature of the history of the African civilization. It is in this understanding, being explored, he sees “much” possibilities, an enabling phenomenon, rather than a crisis in the African paradox.

V.S. Naipaul is one of the widely read postcolonial writers. He was born in Trinidad in 1932, had roots in India, migrated to England for higher studies and took British citizenship. He died as a British citizen in 2018. His writings distinguish themselves in having a wider coverage of the postcolonial world, like the trajectory of his life, and accordingly larger experience with the problems of this world. In the same line, he has a world readership. However, the greater part of this readership sees him as a colonial and offensive writer rather than voicing their issues and suggesting solutions to them. However, the discourse of Naipaul, as it evolves in the texts like Half a Life and Magic Seeds, being explored in this paper, is quite different and tends to have a counter-discourse to such views; it is neither colonial nor offensive. It can be seen pointing to larger future possibilities beyond the crisis of the postcolonial world and this can be understood in the light of the terms like historical sensibility, mimicry, rupture and bildungsroman.

V. S. Naipaul's call for realistic cosmopolitanism is discussed. In \"One out of Many,\" Naipaul pointedly reflects on the failure of two contrasting cosmopolitanisms on the individual: the Indian version of cosmopolitanism accommodates otherness on the basis of the enforced reduction of personal space and individuality for social solidarity, whereas the American mode retains a stubborn, almost obdurate sense of individuality, obscuring the basic importance of distinctive culture milieu and social relationship. Examining cosmopolitanism from its opposite, Naipaul questions about what can make cosmopolitanism really socially viable. The old notion of a borderless cosmopolitan community is obviously inadequate, for although the encounter with others and their culture may be a matter of people's free choice in the contemporary global world, the imbalance in power relations makes the negotiation not so favorable.

In their article \"Conflicting Neo-colonialist Narratives in the Representation of Africa in Ngugi and Naipaul's Novels\" Weiping Li and Xiuli Zhang analyze the conflicting neo-colonialist narratives by comparing the different representations of the post-independent Africa between Ngugi's Petals of Blood and Naipaul's A Bend in the River. The multiple narrators in Petals of Blood expose imperialists' continuing domination of Africa, while the limited third person narrator in A Bend in the River blames the African people for the deterioration and chaos of the African society. One from an insider's perspective, the other from the outsider's, Ngugi and Naipaul thus form conflicting narratives on neocolonialism. With their diverse perspectives, the two writers provide not only clashing representations of African women but also opposing visions of the African future.

The impact of colonial educational system or colonial cultural discourse on the cultural identity of the colonized is a prominent theme of postcolonial studies. According to Said Orientalism as a discourse recognizes an \"ontological and epistemological\" distinction between the East and the West. Consequently, for Said anyone who thinks, works and acts based on the existence of such a distinction is an orientalist. This paper argues that V. S. Naipaul’s Half a life illustrates the workings of this imaginary distinction that European cultural discourse finds between the Orient and the Occident on the formation of the cultural identity of the colonized people as they become subject to colonial cultural discourse. In Half a Life we observe Willie, the anti-hero of the novel, gradually losing his faith in the ingredients of his own cultural identity replacing them with the material served in the menu of colonial educational system to adopt himself with the requirements of being a colonial individual living on scholarship in the metropolitan London.

Set at the turn of the twentieth century, as Germany consolidated control over its East African colony, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 1994 novel encompasses the last of the “Arab” caravan trading expeditions from the East African coast deep into the interior of the continent. In doing so, it also engages with a complex of intertexts ranging from the Qur’anic and biblical versions of the Yusuf/Joseph story to Joseph Conrad’s . This essay adds V. S. Naipaul’s to this mix by reading Gurnah’s historical attentiveness as an overwriting of Naipaul’s second chapter, and the placement of Gurnah’s character, Kalasinga, as a Naipaul figure within the novel’s action. Gurnah’s novelistic play dramatizes the tension and concordance between his own generation’s and Naipaul’s postcolonial articulations.