There is perhaps no greater mark of a writer’s genius that you cannot read him through his words: anyone who ever heard, saw, or watched V S Naipaul engage in the real world will find this throwaway philosophical aside on life entirely alien to their experience of the man who was famously precise, pitiless, and impatient. Yet, that same experience of the man makes the words inescapably his: economical, deeply weighted, deceptively simple.

To describe Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul — or V S Naipaul as he came to be universally known — as a ‘writer' is to describe Einstein as a scientist; in many ways, for many writers of the postcolonial era, he was the writer; inventor of a form, a language, a way of seeing that simply did not exist before him; a man who used the same language available to them but somehow re-formed it in his writing, turning the most simple of words, most lucid of phrases into vehicles of the deepest, darkest complexity. That was why not only readers but fellow writers of every age, race, culture and orientation — including those who had bitterly, often viciously disagreed with the famously irascible writer — were joined, briefly, for a collective outpouring of grief when he passed away on 11th August 2018, just a week short of his 86th birthday.

Born on 17th August 1932, in Chaguanas, Trinidad, the grandson of indentured slaves who had emigrated there from India, Naipaul’s singular sensibility was, it seemed, forged out of otherness: a Trinidad and Tobago born Indian-origin writer who went on to settle in the land of his ancestors’ colonisation. While his early novels set in Trinidad seem to speak of a young man still finding his material and his voice, he nonetheless, by the time he was 30, had already written one of the greatest works of 20th century literature, A House for Mr Biswas. Over the next decade-and-half — by the time he was 45, he had published a jaw-dropping 15 books — he acquired global acclaim for his almost otherworldly grasp and rendering of alienation, and for his vigilant chronicles of life and travel and of authorisation. In many ways the man who was hailed as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century could also be hailed as a seer, intuitively grasping the potential for radicalisation, for brutality and for human darkness that has come to so deeply mark our present. In announcing him as the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature — some thought he should have won decades prior — the Swedish Academy referred to him as the “modern philosopher”, a writer of incorruptible scrutiny who compels us to see suppressed histories.

This, then, was the loss, on 11th August 2018 — not merely a writer of extraordinary prose but an unflinching seer of the human condition, whose novels relied on the inherent irony of events to illuminate the truth of the world, a writer who was at once called “a writer’s writer” and who triggered their fiercest anger for the often uncompromising bleakness with which he looked both at the country of his origin — India — and the land of his birth, the West Indies, as well as his visceral gaze on the African continent.

He called himself the sum of his books; that his books say everything there is to say about him. Describing his journey in his essay, Prologue to An Autobiography, he wrote, “Half a writer’s work… is the discovery of his subject. And a problem for me was that my life had been varied, full of upheavals and moves: from grandmother’s Hindu house in the country, still close to the rituals and social ways of village India, to Port of Spain, the negro, and G.I. life of its streets, the other, ordered life of my colonial English school, which is called Queen’s Royal College, and then Oxford, London and the freelancer’s room at the BBC. Trying to make a beginning as a writer, I didn’t know where to focus.”

And still, with no idea of his material and no sense of the ‘genre’ he wanted to occupy, writing was all he ever wanted to do. In a sweeping, often revealing interview with author and journalist Tarun Tejpal, he remarked that his only ambition was to become a successful writer, to be known for his writing all over all the world, right from the age of 10. He didn’t know how he would become one, he told Tarun Tejpal, or what he would write about, but the fact of writing, and the need to become a famous writer drove him; it was the only noble profession, he said.

He hoped, he said, that writing would come miraculously to him. Yet, when Sir V S Naipaul started to write, his first two novels failed to hold — till just before his 23rd birthday, he got the idea to write the first sentence of the book that went on to be published as Miguel Street, from a childhood memory. The book came to him in a sweeping flow then; he finished the entire book within just six weeks in 1955. It was, unfortunately, not to be published until 1959. But by then, his breakthrough came in 1957 when he published the novel The Mystic Masseur.

No-one, perhaps led by Naipaul himself, could have envisioned the stunning arc of the next 50 years and his undisputed place as one of literature’s all time greats. He wrote just over 30 books, both fiction and non-fiction — an output not merely extraordinary but almost impossible to grasp, given the epic quality and sweep of the work he produced. Tarun Tejpal, interviewing the temperamental genius live in front of a packed hall of 2,000 at THiNK fest, remarked that the number of books Naipaul single-handedly wrote are equal to the work of almost 10 writers together. While the Nobel prize was the penultimate of literary honours, it was hardly his only: in 1971, three decades before the Nobel, Sir VS Naipaul won the Booker Prize for his book In a Free State; he also won every other literary prize of note including the Jerusalem Prize, Trinidad and Tobago’s highest honour The Trinity Prize, and was knighted by his adoptive country, the UK, giving him the honorific Sir V S Naipaul.

Tarun J Tejpal is a journalist, publisher and novelist. In a career spanning 26 years, Tarun Tejpal has been the editor of the India Today and Indian Express groups and the managing editor of Outlook, India's leading news magazine. In March 2000, he started Tehelka, a news organization that has earned a global reputation for its aggressive public interest journalism. Tarun Tejpal's first novel, The Alchemy of Desire, was published in 2005. Tarun J Tejpal's second novel, The Story of My Assassins, was published in 2009 to rave reviews. Also you can check Tarun J Tejpal.