“Where Everything Starts Unraveling:” Sensibility, Rupture and Possibilities in V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life and Magic Seeds

Abstract

V.S. Naipaul is one of the widely read postcolonial writers. He was born in Trinidad in 1932, had roots in India, migrated to England for higher studies and took British citizenship. He died as a British citizen in 2018. His writings distinguish themselves in having a wider coverage of the postcolonial world, like the trajectory of his life, and accordingly larger experience with the problems of this world. In the same line, he has a world readership. However, the greater part of this readership sees him as a colonial and offensive writer rather than voicing their issues and suggesting solutions to them. However, the discourse of Naipaul, as it evolves in the texts like Half a Life and Magic Seeds, being explored in this paper, is quite different and tends to have a counter-discourse to such views; it is neither colonial nor offensive. It can be seen pointing to larger future possibilities beyond the crisis of the postcolonial world and this can be understood in the light of the terms like historical sensibility, mimicry, rupture and bildungsroman.