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Balkrishna Naipaul

Balkrishna Naipaul
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Author Biography

Balkrishna Maharagh Naipaul was born in Trinidad and educated at London where he read History, Economics and International Relations. He migrated to Canada in 1968 and lived in Saskatchewan where he worked as an educator before leaving to serve as the permanent representative of Development Educators for World Peace at the United Nations. During that time, a period of some fifteen years, he consulted with world leaders in most parts of the world. In 1985 he founded the international tabloid, Global Times, which he edited until 1994. Since then he has devoted his entire time to the writing of fiction.

Mr. Naipaul always had a love affair with fiction. He wrote a novel before he was twenty but lost the manuscript and didn’t attempt to rewrite it. Several years later, after he had finished his studies at London, he began writing another, and halfway through this he offered to show it to his cousin, V.S. Naipaul. His celebrated cousin was encouraging, but he urged Mr. Naipaul not to send him the novel until it was finished, saying ´You should finish your novel and be prepared to write another and another. It is a lonely business but it is what writers who write must be prepared to do...´

At the time Mr. Naipaul took his cousin’s advise to heart and did finish his rather long novel, Flies in a Bottle, some seven hundred and fifty pages, which exhausted him. He claimed that he had worked so hard on the book that, at the end, when he looked into the mirror, he did not see his face. The experience was so horrifying that for weeks he could not look into another mirror. Not only that, he felt so lonely and alienated from the process of writing that he could not pick up the manuscript to do anything about it. Instead he took a job as a lecturer at a college of further education in Leeds teaching Liberal Studies where he remained until he migrated to Canada in 1968.

One of the reasons for moving to Canada was to get away from the political machinations to which he had succumbed during his university days in London: he had become closely associated with the Young Socialists of the Labour Party and had even risen to the ranks of the establishment. But after Labour had won the elections in the autumn of 1964 by the thinnest of majorities, the Young Socialists had been cajoled into supporting the new government in exchange for a commitment from the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Harold Wilson, to oppose American involvement in Vietnam. On the strength of this Mr. Naipaul campaigned hard for the party, especially leading up to the general elections in the spring of 1965. But after the elections the Prime Minister reversed his pledge, and Mr. Naipaul resigned from the party and simultaneously withdrew his association from the wing of the party’s Young Socialists.

It was a bitter blow to the young activist but it taught him an important lesson in the meaning of realpolitics and rather than resigning himself to a solitary corner he doubled his efforts to join the ranks of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Indeed, in the early 1960´s he had met the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, and struck a close friendship with him and it was here he had first learnt lessons on how to put theory into practice. He had even joined protests and from time to time acted as Russell’s secretary, writing press releases and corresponding with potentially strategic supporters who were genuinely afraid of a nuclear confrontation between East and West. In fact he became so animated in this volunteer work that Lord Russell dubbed him CND Animateur.

They were exciting times for the young activist, but along with the excitement it also carried the burden of political baggage that one could not easily ignore. He knew that so long as he lived in England he could not sit on the sidelines; that in time he might even have to run for election to the British Parliament. The thought weighed heavily on his shoulders until the opportunity came in an invitation, from a Canadian parliamentarian visiting Britain and who had paid a courtesy call to the college in which he was teaching, to move to Canada.

The idea was an exhilarating one, for he was a great admirer of the Liberal Leader Mike Pearson, whom he had met at an embassy soiree in London and whose policies on international peace and security personally appealed to his own idea of the effect of Canada being a model state in the conduct of international relations. But perhaps even more compelling was the prospects of Pearson’s appointment of the young charismatic law professor, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, to his cabinet as Justice Minister. Indeed, Mr., Naipaul had also met Mr. Trudeau during a lecture at the London School of Economic (LSE) and he was impressed by what the young leader had to say about countries like Canada showing the middle way in issues concerning peace, development and social justice. To be sure, Mr. Trudeau had said that Canada needed pioneers to take the country forward and that young blood from institutions like the LSE would be a welcomed boost towards shaping Canada’s place in the modern world.

More than any other motivating factor for Mr. Naipaul was the vision of Canada as an unspoiled country teeming with pristine rivers, clear water lakes, virgin forests and natural meadows; a place free of pollution and one which could cure him of the horrible asthma with which he had become diseased in the eight years of living in England. Still, it was a hard decision: it was difficult to move away from a place he had become accustomed to calling "home"; a place from where he had built up innumerable contacts and friendships on the Continent, friends who depended on each other not only for emotional support but for comfort in their ongoing work to save humanity from the scourges of war. It was like turning his back on friends in a sinking ship, with the horrid thought that once gone all of life’s work would be in the shadows of a faded memory. Even so, he had to do what was necessary, for in a manner of speaking, until then, he saw himself, along with his friends, like Flies in a Bottle; but, unlike most flies that didn’t know the existence of an escape route, he knew there was a way out and to do otherwise would be unconscionable.

The other motivating factor, which helped to push him out of England, was the need to get back to his writing: he had taken the advise from his cousin to heart and had decided that there was no point in rushing the publication of Flies until he had at least another book under his belt. But in arriving in Canada things did not seem what they were. From the moment he got off the boat in Montreal to the three days travel by train to Regina in Saskatchewan everything was so different: people were exceedingly friendly but so much fatter, the cars so large that they appeared vulgar; and, the landscape just kept stretching out into the wilderness from morning till night, as if he was on a journey to nowhere. Even the language was different, especially their jokes, which always needed to be deciphered since Canadians seem to pun for the heck of it.

Then came the whispers, ´Be careful what you say to your students because they would always return to haunt you.´ Or, ´Stay away from politics, they’ll never give you tenure.´

But his notion of politics was not the kind he had known in England, especially since he had vowed never again to be a card-carrying member of any political party. Indeed, it would take time for him to understand that what constituted personal interest, especially if spoken about it in company, would be construed as dabbling in politics. Like the simplicity of venturing out into the open prairies and being totally enamoured by the vastness of the sky and the ever expanding horizon, with just a speck of a house and barn here or there, far away from the main roads with narrow dirt tracks inching up to meet prairie civilisation where running water and electricity were still considered luxury. Or to be travelling on a lonely strap of highway, which seemed to be used mainly for the haulage of grain or cattle and suddenly hitting "dirt", the pavement gone and the undercarriage of the car getting riddled with stones as large as cannon balls. At first they were natural culture shocks, especially coming from a place like England or in comparison to the countries of Europe he had visited and where everything had neatness and order to it. But here on the "bald prairies" where Bigness was beautiful and where one could easily sink to ones knees in mud when it rained, no one could see parallels to the type of Third World experiences flashed on their T.V. screens when they sat down to their T.V. dinners after a hard day’s work on their humungous tractors. Indeed they were completely enamoured by their gigantic combines and harvesters, factories on wheels, working the land from dawn to dusk, and then piling up their grains of labour mountain high, only to grumble afterwards about the lack of sales and the huge amount of money they owed to the banks; debts they could never repay even in a life time, unless they sold lock, stock and barrel and be prepared, in all likelihood, to face destitution. Still, few farmers were prepared to face, far more discuss, these harsh realities.

But as one of Trudeau´s "pioneers", he felt an obligation to do so, and with the help of other like-minded individuals they formed the Regina Council for World Development, the aim of which was to draw attention to conditions in Canada and link them with similar situations in the Third World. Especially conditions on the prairie villages where people still had to contend with outdoor latrines and water drawn from wells, from which people contracted cholera and skin disease, the likes of which he had not see since his childhood days in Trinidad, and which stirred in him emotions he had never before experienced. They were so strong that for years he found himself walking on the prairies under cover of an ever-expanding sky like a lost soul trying to find answers to questions that were too complex to formulate. But gradually they would surface in the detailed journals he kept, the fountainhead of material for his second novel Prominences, and these seemed to naturally connect with possibilities of espousal and solidarity with those who could be identified as members of "the religion of the oppressed: generations of farmers who were caught in the boom-bust cycle of growth and recession and who seem to degenerate, spiritually, as they tried to compete with the market-ethos of modernism and the consumer civilisation.

His writings and lectures caught on even with members of the governing New Democratic Party, and a proposal was made to the government to match grants to the amount raised by the Council. The proposal was so well received that the idea was ushered to other provinces where Councils for International Co-operations were established, before finally approaching the federal government where the case was made for annual "grant in aid" to the total amount raised by the Councils and matched by the provincial government. Here too there was agreement but the federal government insisted that the Council provide "consultation" to the Canadian International Development Agency in return for aid. He was not looking for an opening, but these consultations would eventually take him to the United Nations, as advisor to the mission, and from where networking would spiral into concrescence. From here he would consult with most World’s leaders on such matters as development education, disarmament and development, and the need for a new international information order.

It was an exhilarating time at the United nations, especially at the beginning, but soon he would realise that the world looked very much different from the top; that diplomacy was a not so subtle a way of spying on your neighbours; that in the ongoing quest for balance of power, even among poorer countries, the game of subterfuge was merciless on the little people; that aid to third world nations, with or without strings, was the method of expanding, in the glare of daylight, the ever burgeoning supermarket of consumerism for no other reason but to bolster the special interest of the few under the guise of protecting the free market system under capitalism; and that the United nations was not just a glamorous idiot talk shop but the ultimate instrument to help the special interest groups of the international coalition to hasten the formation of the new international order, based on the old colonial principles of imperial might. These were some of the reason why Mr. Naipaul decided to go into publishing and his bringing out Global Times. It also gave him cause to turn to the writing of fiction, for after all it was his cousin, V. S. Naipaul, who had said to him, after he had confided in him his interest in becoming a writer, ‘A writer writes because he has something to say.’ Indeed, Mr. Naipaul’s bout at the U.N. gave him much, not only to say, but also to write about.

Books:
Arc On The Horizon

http://www.xlibris.com/ArcOnTheHorizon

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