THE HINDU Editorial Vocabulary - August 13, 2018 - Topic 2
A complicated man: On
Sir Vidia
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, who passed away at his London home
on August 11 just six days short of his 86th birthday, will continue to
challenge his readers and critics after death as he did in a writing career
spanning more than five decades. It’s the way with great writers, and Naipaul’s
claim to being among the greatest of them was settled long before he won the
Nobel prize in 2001 — but he defied simple appraisals more than anybody else.
To read Naipaul, to listen to him, to follow his life story, was to be
perpetually nudged to reassess not just him, but also his subject matter and
one’s own view of the world.
He once said, “All my work is really one. I am
writing one big book.” In that big book, he kept pushing back the chronological
beginnings to understand how colonialism and migration shaped the modern world,
and travelling ever wider to examine how post-colonial societies shape-shifted.
It was an endeavour that started, and never veered too far, from his own biography.
Born in Trinidad to parents of Indian origin, whose forebears had come to the
West Indies as indentured labour, Naipaul was consumed by one ambition: to be a
writer. It was, in large measure, acquired from his father, a journalist in
Port of Spain struggling with the needs and bickering of a sprawling family and
the lack of intellectual wherewithal to realise his dream. His father’s story
would inspire Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1961), part of an
early-life burst of brilliant fiction that began with Miguel Street,
written when he was just out of Oxford University, and concluded in 1979
with A Bend in the River.
It was Naipaul’s travels, however, that spanned
the greater part of his writing life as he crafted his own way of seeing the
world. He said in his Nobel lecture that as a child in Trinidad he felt himself
“surrounded by areas of darkness”, and these became his subjects. He travelled
across continents, always with a theme in mind. He opened up lines of inquiry
on identity and progress. His unsparing eye and spare, clear prose ensured that
readers could not un-see what he saw, whether they were in agreement or not. He
was criticised for depicting the developing world through an imperial filter;
he was accused of Islamophobia in his travels in Muslim countries; he raised
hackles with his India trilogy — An Area of Darkness (1964), A
Wounded Civilisation (1977), A Million Mutinies Now (1990). But
he presciently bookmarked the debates that coming events would spark. There was
definitely low-grade bigotry at play, and misogyny, too. Naipaul’s writings are
too important to be overlooked on account of his intolerance; equally, his
opinions cannot be excused while understanding his literary legacy.
Vocabulary
Defied: openly
resist or refuse to obey.
Example: A
woman who defies convention
Synonyms: disobey, go
against, flout, fly in the face of, disregard, ignore
Appraisal: an
act of assessing something or someone.
Example: Treatment
begins with a thorough appraisal of the patient's condition
Synonyms: assessment, evaluation, estimation, judgment, rating, gauging
Perpetual: never
ending or changing.
Example: Deep
caves in perpetual darkness
Synonyms: everlasting, never-ending, eternal, permanent, unending
Nudge: a
light touch or push.
Example: He
gave her shoulder a nudge
Synonyms: poke, prod, jog, jab, push, dig
Migration: seasonal
movement of animals from one region to another.
Example: This
butterfly's annual migration across North America
Forebear: an
ancestor.
Example: One
cannot hope to rise or succeed in the world unless one's forebears had the
requisite abilities.
Synonyms: ancestor, forefather, antecedent, progenitor, primogenitor
Ambition: a
strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination
and hard work.
Example: Her
ambition was to become a model
Synonyms: aspiration, intention, goal, aim, objective, object, purpose, intent
Unsparing: given
freely and generously.
Example: She
had won her mother's unsparing approval
Synonyms: ungrudging, unstinting, willingly
given, free, ready, lavish
Misogyny: dislike
of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.
Example: She
felt she was struggling against thinly disguised misogyny
Intolerance: unwillingness
to accept views, beliefs, or behavior that differ from one's own.
Example: A
struggle against religious intolerance
Synonyms: bigotry, narrow-mindedness,
illiberality, parochialism
Legacy: an
amount of money or property left to someone in a will.
Example: Bentham
tells the family that they are about to inherit a legacy from a relative.
Synonyms: bequest, inheritance, heritage, endowment, gift, patrimony
