A'native informer' is definitely not an LTTE spy
Academic writing in English is -- not without reason -- accused most of the time of being put together to please a Western audience. This contention is not untrue most of the time. The authors have to think of research grants, they have to think of where their next meal comes from, and that's not necessarily a crime.

But then academic writing is ephemeral. It is to some extent an industry -- sometimes as prosaic and as humdrum as a cottage industry. But, then, when a novelist or a good storyteller is accused of pandering to a Western audience, that's an entirely different matter.

No less a person than the Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul has been called a "scavenger" and a "native informer" by Edward Said. Naipaul is a white man's writer who catered to the white man's version of the Third World according to Said. (That's what he said in essence even though in his own words what he said was: "Naipaul's compromised colonial situation made him ideal to address an implied audience of disenchanted Western liberals, so that he could be cited as an exemplary figure from the Third World who can always be relied on to tell the truth about it.'')
Tariq Ali who never got canonised like Edward Said, said that "Naipaul writes about the dung heaps of India.''

Of course nobody has disputed Naipaul's stature as a great writer of English prose. So let's get that out of the way first. It is not as if Said is suddenly claiming that Naipaul was a bad writer - - it's just that he thinks his content was subversive.
This column however does not want to cosset the whole issue and keep it within the exotic realm of "writing.'' Basically, to pander or not to Western dictates is a dilemma that thinkers, whether creative or otherwise, and even just plain and ordinary people have to put up with in this part of the world.

When we live, we are required to do things in a way that will pander to the global lifestyle that propagates Western value systems. Basically, if we do not drink Coca Cola, the global market tends to reject us, and then we are in an unmentionable soup. Of course we can choose to fight this reality or not.

But for writers and a country's intellectual fringe, meeting this problem has been of great concern. For example, Naipaul is being branded a man who was liked by the West because he wrote in the way the West was fond of hearing about the former colonies. (That these colonies "have failed'' etc., etc.,)

One thing is that even Naipaul must have been seeking a market for his work. A writer must get noticed first. But also Naipaul wrote about the postcolonial reality in some of the colonies, and he wrote it as it is. But the critics in the West just don't get it. Even Said is a critic who operates from the West, I might add (…never mind which side he really is on….)

When Naipaul writes about the failures in some of the colonies, he is not saying that de-colonisation "is a tragic failure in many lands, and that the victims are those who live there.'' That's the Western version of what he is saying. He is in fact saying that there never really was any decolonisation. The colonisers just physically got disengaged, sort of pushed-off after granting independence, but their stamp is there in a most odious way.

One is that it is there in terms of the rotten legacy that they have left behind. For example, this is very visible in our country, in which all the ethnic conflagrations and the class divisions can be traced to the British policy of divide and rule, which was practised to a brutal perfection in the colonies.

The other is that there isn't only a legacy but also a continuum. There is neo-colonialism which is not a new shirt that has been put on soon after the old garb of colonialism was removed. It is the same old shirt, but maybe it has been given a new look - tie and dyed maybe, but the same old material -- the same old oppression, operating in different ways.

So in many ways writers like Naipaul are observing this continuum. That's not to pander to Western views about ''why the former colonies failed left to their own devices.' 'In an interview with me last year, novelist Amitav Ghosh said almost the same thing about India. He said a lot of people are still operating from a colonial mind-set in India. That's not any indication the colonies have failed and that the West should be jubilant about it because writers such as Naipaul and Ghosh are telling them about this failure. It cannot certainly be made out that writers such as Ghosh and Naipaul are clapping and asking for the colonisers to come back.

They are only mapping the prevailing conditions in the colonies, and of course there were Sri Lankan writers who did the same thing, such as Martin Wickremesinghe.
They would have been exposed to the same charge of writing about the colonies through the eyes of the coloniser, had they written in English. In fact, Martin Wickremesinghe has been sometimes accused of doing this even though he wrote in Sinhalese.

That's a very unfair assessment. There is a pathetic side to the postcolonial story which needs to be dispassionately told, and told as it is. The fact that this story is being told doesn't make those who tell the story such as Naipaul "exemplary figures from the Third World (in the eyes of disenchanted Western liberals) who can be relied to tell there truth about it.'' That's unnecessarily pejorative.

To some extent of course, there must have been a need to tell the postcolonial reality in the way that publishers of Western publishing houses wanted it. But that's part of the pathetic reality also -- except that Naipaul cannot necessarily write about that particular reality. Naipaul cannot write a novel about "a writer who finds it hard to write about certain things about the former colonies, because, if he did he would not be accepted by the publishers.'' There is a conundrum there - - if he writes such a work, it would not be accepted by the publishers, and that particular novel would never see the light of day.

The conclusion is that there are things that we still cannot totally avoid doing because we are caught up in the reality of the "colonialism'' that follows colonialism. Sometimes, when we write in English and to a global audience, we can tell only some of the story, and perhaps not the entire story. But that doesn't make such writers (as an indignant friend ranted recently) "supercilious barstards."

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