India can justly be said to have been on Naipaul's mind his whole life, judging from the three books that were given over entirely to the country of his ancestors: An Area of Darkness (1964); India: A Wounded Civilization (1977); and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). But, in truth, it is the figure of Gandhi that stalks Naipaul's entire oeuvre, preying on his imagination, and moving him to epiphany and revelation, resignation and rage, loathing and grudging admiration. Gandhi is everywhere, in his readings of the Indian past, the wretchedness of the present, the ominous portents of an ancient and decaying civilisation; he appears whole at times and fleetingly at other moments; and he is both the subject and object of Naipaul's myriad inquiries. Gandhi plays a signal role in what was effectively Naipaul's last extended set of reflections, A Writer's People, on his intellectual journey, the books in his life, and the sensibilities that he brought to the writer's craft. And yet Gandhi was there at the very beginning, long before Vidia grew in his mother's womb: as he explained in his Nobel Lecture (2001), the world that he had been born into had in some manner been shaped by the Mahatma. "In 1917, because of agitation by Gandhi and others, the indenture system was abolished. And perhaps because of this, or for some other reason, the pledge of land or repatriation was dishonoured for many of the later arrivals. These people were absolutely destitute. They slept in the streets of Port of Spain, the capital. When I was a child I saw them. I suppose I didn't know they were destitute—I suppose that idea came much later—and they made no impression on me. This was a part of the cruelty of the plantation colony." It is at Gandhi's instigation that the cruel system of indenture is brought to an end; but he had unleashed something that he could not control. Therein is the source, always, of Naipaul's ambivalence: Gandhi is necessary but he was never sufficient. Failure is writ large in everything touched by Gandhi. "There was the writing of Nehru and Gandhi", Naipaul says in his Nobel Lecture, describing how he aimed "to get the true feel of the history of the colony"; "and strangely it was Gandhi, with his South Africa experience, who gave me more, but not enough." But not enough.

indentured labour

The Passage to Fiji

Misreading the Mahatma