Rural routes/roots: India, Trinidad and England in V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival

Abstract

Many postcolonial critics have viewed the colonial nostalgia evident in V.S. Naipaul's semi‐autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987) in a highly negative light. However, in a contrary reading, I argue through a historical materialist lens that the novel, situated in rural Trinidad and rural India, offers crucial social and historical contexts by which to understand Naipaul's cultivation of this nostalgia and his ability to come to terms with it after residing in rural Wiltshire for a number of years. A postcolonial scrutiny of the roots and routes that circumscribe Naipaul's colonial nostalgia, I suggest, affords a more complex and sympathetic reading of his fraught and paradoxical colonial identity in the novel.

Keywords:

• V.S. Naipaul
• Enigma of Arrival
• colonial nostalgia
• rural England
• Trinidad
• postcolonial identities