My mother had asked me to leave India to the Indians, says Naipaul at Zee LitFest

After Nobel Laureate V S Naipaul penned books on India with titles such as An Area of Darkness and A Wounded Civilisation, his mother asked him to leave India and write on other subjects, the Nobel Laureate said on Saturday.

The Indian-origin British author, who was born in Trinidad narrated what his mother had to say to him. "The only Hindi word my mother carried from India was beta and she said 'beta please leave India to the Indians'," Naipaul recalled during the ongoing Zee Jaipur Literature Festival.

The 82-year-old wheelchair bound author has published 30 books over half a decade and that includes those on travel. "I came to India first because of curiosity about my ancestral land. My publisher had agreed to pay me an advance for anything I would write on India. Although it was a petty amount even then but I felt at peace to get it. I didn't know how to move in India but eventually I had to find my way," he said.

Naipaul broke down at this point and his wife as his wife Nadira assisted him in wiping away his tears. On the inaugural day of the festival too the author had been in tears after listening to travel writer Paul Theroux, with whom he reportedly had his first public reunion in 19 years.

Naipaul's first travel book was called The Middle Passage (1962). He had also written the India trilogy starting with An Area of Darkness (1964), which relates to his first journey to India, followed by India, A Wounded Civilisation and India, A Million Mutinies Now. "I began to write but I realised that I was writing frivolously and it wasn't't coming out the way it should have.

I used the term an area of wounded civilisation in an attempt to suggest the effect of its history on India of the precarious evasion," Naipaul said.The session on the fourth day of the festival saw Naipaul in conversation with Farrukh Dhondy in a session titled, The Writer and the World.

Festival organiser William Darlymple in his tweeted about the session said, "V S Naipaul got a larger crowd on the front lawn than anyone else we've ever hosted- just under 6,000- more than Oprah, more even than Amitabh. US talk show host Oprah Winfrey had visited the festival in 2012 while Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan had spoken at the event in the year 2009. 

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