A Survey of Colonial vision in An Area of Darkness by V. S. Naipaul

Abstract

S. Naipaul’s travelogues, the British Trinidadian-Indian novelist and Noble prise winner, are useful tools for appreciating his paradoxical and complex identity. Naipaul’s identity is a terrain for various forces such as colonialist discourse, Indian culture, and the experience of migration. Considering Naipaul’s colonial experience and its consequences for his identity, the present research investigates colonial vision in An Area of Darkness (1964). This study is done by choosing postcolonial theory and through a colonialist approach. It is claimed that the outstanding features of colonialist approach are reflected in An Area of Darkness, the portrayal of India repeats and supports colonial stereotypes. The findings of this study shows that the blaming of Indian culture in An Area of Darkness indicates the profound impact of colonial vision on Naipaul’s identity. Despite Naipaul’s Indian ancestors, he takes on an impartial stance to India to assert his not belonging to her culture. Binary oppositions are central in his narration of India. Colonial vision makes his identity shaky through encountering him with issues of not-belonging, the sense of alienation, and paradox.

 
1. Introduction
The high position of V. S. Naipaul in the tradition of travel writing is due to his experience of immigration and in innovations in this literary genre. It is perhaps not easy to find a travel writer, in the second half of twentieth century, whose identity is so closely intertwined with immigration and travel becomes a metaphor by which to discover the inner world of the writer. “He will often lament having undertaken a journey and become lastingly angry with the countries he visits” (Nixon, 1992: p. 55). As a post-colonial writer, Naipaul attempts to offer a realistic picture in his travelogues and this realism rises out of his complex identity. In other words, Naipaul’s identity becomes disconcerted through his travels. This study investigates his first travelogue on India, An Area of Darkness (1964). Taking into account the writer’s experience of colonialism his identity constructed by different, and sometimes, contradictory elements, this research analyses Naipaul’s colonial vision in An Area of Darkness. This approach makes it possible to obtain a deeper appreciation of his identity and the reason for his disappointment with India. The main problem of this study is to reveal the interconnection between colonial vision and travel writing in An Area of Darkness. Followings are the research questions: 1. What are the prominent features of colonial vision reflected in An Area of Darkness? 2. As a post-colonial subject, how does Naipaul’s imagery of India in An Area of Darkness challenge or endorse colonial stereotypes about Indian society and culture?
1.1. Research Methodology
The methodology of research is based on library sources. The frame work of study is postcolonial theory and it uses the approach of colonial discourse to study the text. The strategy of reading includes close reading of the text and searching for thoughts and actions that reflect the mind-set and identity of the narrator in An Area of Darkness.
2. Discussion
Naipaul’s identity is profoundly linked the colonial experience and it overshadows Naipaul’s life and works. He has been grown up in a colonial culture and is its inheritor as well. His ancestors were Indian immigrant indentured workers who had escaped from colonial India and its poverty to Trinidad. He grew up in an Indian family who would do their best to preserve the memory and culture of India. He was directly introduced to Indian culture and traditions through his family surrounding. “ More than in people, India lay about us in things” (Naipaul, 1964: p. 29). In multi-ethnic and colonial Trinidad with which he could not cope, Naipaul grew up and went to school where colonial education import was done “like flour and butter are imported from Canada” (Lamming, 1992: p. 27). English literature possessed a high rank in colonial schools of Trinidad, and hence Naipaul’s attention to England. “Most of the West Indian authors who fetched up in England have written in one form or another about a double sense of displacement” a sense of their removal from Trinidad and sense of removal from their forbears in India (Nixon, 1992: p. 20).
As a colonial immigrant, Naipaul’s identity is overshadowed by the experience of immigration. His travels refer to his own wanderings in the unknown lands where he encounters with the dark angles of his identity. His travelogues indicate kind of colonial vision reflecting colonial policies and travel writing’s accomplice with it. An Area of Darkness provides us with a colonial perspective by which India is depicted. Travel writing gives Naipaul the opportunity to deal with his own subjectivity. “With the writer’s subjectivity centrestage, India usually serves as a backdrop– be it charming, exotic, infuriating, or comic– to the narrator’s travels” (Teltcher, 2002: p. 194). India, for Naipaul, is equal to the blurring of all differences that make his identity. Therefore, he faces the challenge of not belonging to the Indian community and culture. In order to find himself he is forced to define a difference between himself and India. Naipaul writes as an outsider to indicate his not-belonging and cruelly describes India and focuses on negatives aspects to keep his distance from India. In the concluding pages of An Area of Darkness, the narrator confesses that “In a year I had not learned acceptance. I had learned my separateness from India, and was content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors” (Naipaul, 1962: p. 269). No longer is India for Naipaul an exotic country to enchant him or add an exotic aspect to his work, as it did in colonial travelogues. This failure drives the narrator to expand the concept of exotic through dealing with disgusting topics to offer a picture of India that cannot be found in the works of other writers. At the same moment that Naipaul speaks of colonial suppression, he indirectly supports it. Colonial cultural heritage has so deeply influenced his identity that he finds himself as a stranger in the land of his ancestors. 
3. Conclusion
The formulation of Naipaul’s complex identity in the colonial space is central to his view of India. Colonial society and culture of Trinidad, the immigrant Indian ancestors, his education in colonial training system, his immigration to England to realize his dream of becoming a writer, and finally, his sense of alienation with Trinidadian, Indian, and British cultures, caused him to regard himself as a perpetual immigrant.  This is a situation, Naipaul claims, that prevents him from partiality and belonging. This claim is not necessarily realized. He is not able to get rid of the limitations of colonial vision, a vision that is central to his identity.
In An Area of Darkness, Naipaul takes the opportunity of exposing his postcolonial identity by traveling to India. The more the narrator visits further places in India, the more his understanding of India becomes intricate and contradictory. India makes invisible all the differences that have constructed his identity. So, he is faced with the painful sense of not-belonging to Indian culture and is compelled to define a distinction between himself and India. To display his not-belonging to India, he approaches India as an outsider and cruelly describes her in his writings and brings India’s poverty into light to keep his distance with her.
4. References
Ashcroft, B. Griffiths, G and Tiffin, H. (2007). Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 2^nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.
Cudjoe, S. R. (1988). V. S. Naipaul A Materialist Reading. Massachusetts: The University of Massachusetts Press.
Holland, P, Huggan, G. (2000). Tourists With Typewriters: Critical reflections on contemporary Travel Writing. Michigan: Michigan University Press. 
Lamming, G. (1992). The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Mahabir, K. (2008). “V. S. Naipaul: Childhood and Memory.” Journal of Caribbean Literatures. 5, 2: pp. 1-18.
Naipaul, V. S. (1964). An Area of Darkness. New York: Vintage Books.
Nixon, R. (1992). London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pennycook, a. (2002). English and The Discourse of Colonialism. London and New York: Routledge.
Pratt, M. L (2003). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge.
Rapport, N. and Overing. J (2002). Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge.
Said, E. (1994). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.
Shirkhani, A (2022). “A Comparative Study of Magical Exoticism in One Thousand and One Night and Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer Based on Said’s Orientalism”. JLLR. 19,36: pp. 115-134.
Teltcher, k. (2002). "India / Calcutta: city of palaces and dreadful night." The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Eds: Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, C. (2011). Travel Writing. London and New York: Routledge.
Zare’ie, M. S. and Ahmadzadeh Heravi, Sh (2019). “The Role of Ideology and Trace in V. S. Naipaul’s narratives of A House for Mr. Biswas and In a Free State”. CLLS. 16, 22 (59- 75).