Speaking to Farrukh Dhondy, Nobel laureate VS Naipaul puts writers of every hue – Indians, Russians, Brits - through the sieve. Few come out looking good.

Augustus the cat is lying on a dining room chair where Nadira, Lady Naipaul gives me a cup of tea and oatmeal biscuits. I have driven from London to Wiltshire and she says I should warm up, there’s a cold spell over England. Augustus has the usual air of self-satisfaction but Nadira tells me he is in disgrace.

“Go and look in the sun room,” she says. I am familiar with the house and go through the kitchen and utility room to the cosy, sunny extension, as much Augustus’s domain as Vidia and Nadira’s. A dead wren lies in Augustus’s food bowl, placed on top of the crunchy cat food. Another, its little twiggy legs thrust upward from a round body, lies dead a foot away.

“He has found a nest of wrens,” Vidia says from behind me. “If I had a gun last night, I would have shot him.”

Vidia isn’t joking. He is a strict but not a proselytising vegetarian. He hates cruelty to animals and, though he doesn’t ever “want to be thought of as a crank” says he would lend his name and his passion to the cause of animal contentment.

“I admire Maneka Gandhi for her stance on cruelty to farm animals. It shouldn’t be allowed,” he says.

Later on, at a lunch of polenta and shrimps, he returns to the theme of animals.

“I told you I’ve been reading. Plutarch describes his journey to Greece and his fascination with Greek theatre. On his return to Rome and on his advice to the Emperor, a Roman theatre is built.

”At the inauguration,” Vidia says, “fifty lions were slaughtered – as a spectacle. The place must have been awash with their blood…”

Vidia stops eating. His face is pained and thoughtful.

He asks me to go over my notes after lunch and see if I need to clarify anything. I have taken instruction from him and left out the tape recorder. The last time I interviewed him, half way through our conversation, it had begun to play up. I had to press the cover constantly to get it to work and this distracted Vidia. He said he’d rather stop and go out with me to get another tape recorder. We drove five miles to Salisbury and I bought a new one.

“Take notes,” Vidia says, giving me an insight into his own methods. “That way you think of what is being said, rather than run on in your mind to the next question.”

He goes upstairs while I wait in the sitting room. He says he’ll fetch me his notebooks, I’ll be able to see for myself what he means, the note-taking method in operation. He returns with four blue-covered notebooks, each the size of a hundred-rupee note.

“The material for Beyond Belief,” he says.” The whole book was written in nine of these.”

They are written in a careful, neat hand and run on from singly worded questions he has posed to pages full of the answers.
“And these answers, are they verbatim?” I ask.

He corrects my pronunciation of ‘verbatim’ and says they are.

I have my own notebook ready. My pen works—good!

“What have you been doing Vidia?” is my first question.

“When I finished my latest novel (yet to be published) I sent it to Gillon (Gillon Aitken his literary agent) and I waited. I was exhausted. For a few days I did nothing. Then I began to read. I’ve been reading. In the old days, when I had to write to make money, you know, I would finish a book and then look for a commission from the newspapers. I would get in touch with the editors and get an assignment to travel. At the end of a book my mind gets tired. I would be mentally dead and it gets worse as you grow older. After this last one I rested for three weeks. I was drained and waiting to hear from Gillon. Then I began to read Flaubert again.”

He goes to the bookshelves in the room, takes down the volumes and hands them to me.

“In the original?”

“Yes, I can manage French and Spanish I did them in school.”

“I can’t manage French though I did too," I say.

“There’s really no need,” he replies.

“So what did you read?”

“I read Madame Bovary and The Sentimental Education. I was so disappointed. Devastated. I began to join the ranks of his detractors. I had all my life admired him immensely. But I see that Flaubert is a tireless self-publicist. If you are not interested in the France of the 1840s it is very difficult to read. It’s very parochial. Since our attitudes to sex have changed with contraception and the absence of taint, it becomes hard to read Flaubert on the life of the passions. I used to adore him because of the selectivity, the detail, the speed of the narrative. In the first part of Madame Bovary it still seems true. I often tell people about the scene in which Bovary – the young doctor—is called out and he meets his second wife. Everything in that scene is selected. Every detail. Then in the second half of the book something goes wrong.

Flaubert is the predecessor of writers who today hide themselves away in universities. He hid away in Rouen in his mother’s house. Occasionally he would go to Paris and meet people, but he knew very little of the world.

Some writers who hide away in universities only write about the arguments they have had or the students they have screwed. They stay in the universities because they want security. And you can’t be a writer if you want to be safe. You end up writing about the mortgage and the safe job.

In the English tradition very little has come out of the universities. Gibbon had nothing to do with universities though he produced a great work of scholarship. Dickens didn’t come out of the university.

In England, the occasional book by someone with deep experience, is almost always better than the work that comes from academia. I am thinking of Mungo Park and his insight into Africa.”

“Was it always so?”

“I think there is a difference between what the universities produced up to the 1940s and after 1950. In America for instance, a strange academic language has evolved.

What is even more strange is that some Indians want jobs at these universities and so they develop this mimic language, this hollow language and they become monkeys. The influence of all Western universities on India is bad. It imposes an idea of what thought is, of what history is, for instance. This idea of history doesn’t deal with India. There is an Indian history waiting to be written, a big view rather than these monographs that people write. The monograph method and form doesn’t serve the need. India should have and could have a Gibbon.”

“What about historians like Pannikar? He had a larger view, surely?”

“What I admired about Pannikar was his book Asia and Western Dominance.

It was about how Java and Sumatra, islands which were turned by the Dutch from nations into plantations, preserved their soul. He says they preserved their soul because of their religion and this is true, but he mistakes the religion. He thinks it is Islam. The Javanese and the Sumatrans were animists, Hindus, Buddhists and Islam was an imposition, destroying the soul of these nations. Islam is a proselytising religion.

It explains the need for fundamentalism. People have to be constantly told to give up their old evil ways and sprinkle themselves with the sands of Arabia.

I’ll tell you a story. In ’95, I met an Iranian woman who had returned to Iran from the West. She came back with a rage at the tyranny of the religious state. “We no longer have to give our wives and daughters to the Arabs, but we have to do this,” she said.

She meant to keep quiet, keep your head down and to submit yourself. The revolution in Iran makes no bones about the fact that it demands obedience. The Revolutionary guards are there to bully you into it. They delight in making a scene, you know. They suddenly turn up at the hotels and restaurants. You may be in Shiraz or somewhere and they’ll appear, just to see if men and women are together.”

We have in the past covered ideas about Indian writing and its directions; we go over them a little now. Vidia has maintained that Indian writing of any significance is still awaiting its beginning. “The writers I read in English seem to all be boasting. They boast about their families and their ancestry. They have no historical sense of where they come from or what the source of dysfunction in their society is. They are gazing down at their abdomens, they are enclosed, looking at themselves. They have nothing really to say about the world.”

In this context he has always maintained that Russia in the nineteenth century witnessed the real efflorescence. “Like them, do Indian writers now have India and its history to fall back on and claim as material?”

“I used to think they did,” Vidia says. “But I think I was wrong. Nineteenth century Russia is nineteenth century Russia, and independent India is independent India. In nineteenth century Russia, literature and books were a matter of life and death. They were extremely important. One of the startling things I discovered was that Russian writers were immensely well paid. When Turgenev went to Paris and talked to the Goncourts, the subject turned to how badly French writers were paid. Turgenev was embarrassed to tell them how much the Russian magazines paid him. Russians relied on their writers to give them a vision of themselves, to tell them who they were and to keep intellectual life alive. To tell them where they were going. The Russian critic Belinsky, who wrote about the necessity of writing before Dostoevsky and Tolstoy began to write, died without money. His widow got a publisher to collect his reviews and essays into book and she was well paid for that. She became comfortable, you know.

Indian magazines – as you know well enough – like paying almost nothing. The only value to Indians writing is a million dollar advance. Most of the stories about advances are not true of course – they are just puffery. But it’s the reason agents and publishers in the West are assaulted by tidal waves of paper about ‘Mamaji’ and ‘ Chachaji’ and ‘Abu’ and ‘Papaji’. The point about Mamaji and Chachaji is that they are like every other Mamaji and Chachaji. The writers have nothing to say. They want to show they can do it too. Indians who write in English are aiming abroad. Local Indians don’t need to read about ‘Mamaji’.”

“I suppose the first person to start this trend was Ved Mehta,” I say. “ He made a good trade of it.”

“Well – he made a trade,” Vidia says, “but do you think he really started it? Actually one of his books is not about that at all – I mean The Mahatma and his Disciples. It is a very good book. He talks to the people who had contact with Gandhi, before they are all dead, you know. It’s living history. But if you live in a monograph culture you can’t see it as history.

I thought for many years that Indian writers had a special function. But what has happened is that the high technological age has rendered writers redundant. This is true not only of India, it is true of everywhere else. In high-tech society there is no need for an intellectual life…”

“Surely there’s always a need,” I dutifully say.

“You think so? I feel technology takes over and becomes the complete intellectual life. The e-mail, the mobile phone, the gadgets people adore playing with, the gadgets that are tempting to buy and to master. They are open to everybody who can afford them – to the monkey with the palm pilot. The TV gives us the news, it gives us fifty stories a day in the soaps and hours and hours of commentary on the news. Writers become redundant.

And even in this high technological age things can go wrong. There are military catastrophes, political disasters, crises of some sort and this is where India leads the world in dealing with them. India has the best holy men. Its astrologers beat the astrologers of West Africa – the so-called African Spiritualists—right out of court.

The complement to the technological society is magic and the cult. People think there is a contradiction, but there is no contradiction, in India or the USA, of these things existing side by side.”

“And in England too?”

“Yes, England too. But English people see England as a great success – the complete reordering of a society which was shocking a hundred or so years ago. Dickensian England. The people were in rags, without fuel to keep warm. Berlin, St. Petersburg – they were the same – they all had sinks of appalling poverty. They’ve altered all that. It’s a great achievement. They are now happy.”

For once I can’t tell whether he is being ironical.

“You think they are happy?”

“Oh yes, they are happy. The only people who may be happier are the Bangladeshis. The outside world sees Bangladesh as a place of calamity. They have typhoons and floods and natural disasters. But when all these settle down and they rebuild the huts and houses in their villages, and the muezzin calls for prayers from the minaret in the evening, they know in their hearts that the infidel has been chased out of the land – and they are happy.”

We decide to end on this note of happiness. Vidia ushers me in to the dining room for polenta and daal.

“Doesn’t he look smart?” Nadira asks.

“I would say dapper, with the black fleece and grey turn-ups...”

“I mean his hair, you fool, ” Nadira says. “I cut it myself. He would have had to pay forty pounds.”

“Seventeen,” says Vidia, striving for the exact, “I pay seventeen.”