Author’s Note: This column grew from a memory I carried quietly for years—Naipaul’s remark on Austen, and the strange irony it held. Writing it helped me understand how literature outlives the noise around it, and how gentle voices endure longer than loud certainties.

A few years ago, I read in a newspaper V. S. Naipaul’s now-famous remark that no woman writer—not even Jane Austen—could match him in literary calibre. The comment came from a 2011 Q&A at the Royal Geographical Society. It struck me even then as the pronouncement of a man wrapped in his own self-glory, sculpting himself like an effigy of brilliance. When asked about Austen, he dismissed her as having a “narrow sense of sensibility.” In the same breath he mocked a woman who had been his editor, saying that when she turned to writing, her work became nothing but “feminine tosh.” I am not entirely sure whom he meant—perhaps Diana Athill or one of the other women who had edited him over the years—but the contempt was unmistakable.
In one bite of memory, I recall another detail about Naipaul. He once chose Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence as one of the greatest novels of the century. And what is Sons and Lovers if not the intimate saga of a close-knit, emotionally overheated world—a novel burning entirely with sensibility? Lawrence himself admitted that in the end, only feelings mattered. The contradiction is delicious: the same Naipaul who mocked Austen for her “narrow sensibility” worshipped a book whose whole force lies in precisely that. His sneer and his choice cancel each other out.
He also labelled Austen a tiny provincial writer, one who looked at teacups instead of history. But time has its own irony. Two hundred and fifty years later, it is Austen who is remembered, quoted, filmed, and taught in every corner of the world—while Naipaul, though once sharp and celebrated, is already receding into the solemn shelves. Her drawing rooms are still alive; his map of the empire is fading. History, it seems, keeps the gentle voice longer than the bitter one.
I have always felt that real history does not stand in palaces or parade grounds. It lives quietly in the teacup— in how people talk, hesitate, forgive, and move on. Empires draw their boundaries, but common people live within them, carrying the true calendar of time. A king’s reign may end, yet the small hand that pours morning tea continues its ritual, unbroken. Perhaps that is why I trust Austen’s world more than the grand wars of her century—she wrote where history truly breathes, in the rhythm of everyday life.
Naipaul died in 2018—barely seven years have slipped by—and already his more piquant sketches of certain communities are being questioned. What once drew admiration is now read with a wince. The image he painted, once held up as fearless truth-telling, is slowly losing its soft glow—those delicate petals of praise drifting away almost as soon as they had settled. Day by day, he is slipping into academic dust. Still, there is one book of Naipaul that refuses to be buried in the academic self—A House for Mr Biswas. The tenderness with which he sketches Mr Biswas, that fragile, quivering man battling the weight of his own life, has always stayed with me. His vulnerabilities cling to the memory like a soft bruise; his desire for a house feels like the quiet wish all of us carry somewhere.
This is simply the way I see history. For me, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar feels truer than God’s own creation. God’s Caesars were destroyed; the historians’ Caesars lie forgotten in dust-laden racks. But Shakespeare’s Caesar still walks among us—alive in our speech, our imaginations, our fears, our betrayals. Literature preserves what history loses.

In the next column, I will enter Austen’s Regency rooms and trace how their soft rituals crossed oceans and settled, quietly, into the Indian way of life.