Module 1

STUDY MATERIALS
Module No.: 1
Name of the faculty: Satabdi Roy
Semester: VI
Topic: World Literature (DSE- 3)
Bend in the River

V.S.Naipaul
• Go through the text thoroughly which will help you to write short questions
and explanations.
• Some study materials are attached below, refer to them while preparing your
answers.
A Bend in the River opens with a forthright statement of a sobering truth: “The
world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become
nothing, have no place in it.”1 To be nothing, both in material terms and in terms of
liberty, and to have no place of one’s own in the world have been the cruel lot of
most human beings over the course of history. As V. S. Naipaul conceives it, it is
only by way of an uncommon effort of mind, will, and faith—the commitment
required to create and sustain a higher civilization—that one can truly exist.
Indeed, it is only under the fortunate conditions of democratic capitalism, with its
respect for personal liberty and property rights, that this effort is likely to succeed.
In much of the world, however, these freedoms have been and remain limited at
best.
Among Naipaul’s finest novels, A Bend in the River most directly addresses this,
perhaps the most important moral concern of our times: the widespread failure to
acknowledge and support freedom and the rule of law in the context of an
increasingly ideological conception of politics and society. While tyranny has
always threatened and often overwhelmed liberty, perhaps only in our time has the
assault on freedom been so persistently and energetically carried out in the name of
progress. While in a broader sense the tyranny of the modern state may be viewed
as simply a manifestation of the enduring problem of human evil, those who
promise a utopian future in return for the loss of freedom are especially dangerous
because of the seductiveness of their appeal. What progressivism does share with
the more blatant tyrannies of the past is the impulse to secure power over a vast
number of subjects at whatever cost to human happiness.
Within Naipaul’s oeuvre, A Bend in the River marks a new turn toward a focus on
the nature of evil and a greater seriousness in its representation. Unlike a number
of Naipaul’s earlier works of fiction that employed the concept of mimicry to
probe the tragicomic failure of postcolonial island nations, including The Mystic
Masseur (1957) and Miguel Street (1959), A Bend in the River offers an
unremitting vision of human evil, unalleviated by humor or irony. Published nearly
two decades after his celebrated early work A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), A
Bend in the River is the first of Naipaul’s novels to offer an expansive, fully
articulated, and unflinching treatment of his newfound sense of human
vulnerability.
Set largely in an unnamed African country in a settlement at the bend of a great

river, the novel centers on the character of Salim, an ethnically Indian Muslim
from the east African coast who has decided to seek his fortune in central Africa.
Salim is unfortunate enough to have purchased his shop at a moment of civil
unrest, and though he arrives with buoyant hopes and enjoys success for a time, his
business is increasingly undermined by events beyond his control. Eventually, as
the country’s president consolidates power, Salim’s business is confiscated and his
very life is threatened by the ever more chaotic and violent course of events.
Though the president is unnamed in the novel, he would seem to be based largely
on Mobutu Sese Seko, the longtime ruler of the Congo whose creation of a
personality cult portraying his mother as the “African Madonna” and himself as the
savior of African culture helped secure his rule. The personality cult was bad
enough, but worse followed. As conditions degenerated, the result of
mismanagement and corruption, Mobutu ordered the Zairianization of the
economy, including the nationalization of foreign businesses.
In the novel Salim finds himself caught up in just such a course of events. With his
shop seized and its title transferred to Théotime, the overbearing new owner for
whom he is forced to work, Salim attempts to raise funds to flee the country by
trading in illegal ivory. This effort at self-preservation only leads to greater danger,
however, as Salim is betrayed by his house servant, is jailed, and faces the
possibility of execution. He escapes but only as a result of the fortuitous
intervention of Ferdinand, the son of a river trader whom he has assisted in the
past.
To understand the author’s intentions in A Bend in the River, it is necessary to

delve beyond the details of the plot and to appreciate the connotations of Naipaul’s
use of the word “civilization,” the word that grounds every aspect of the novel. In
his essay “The Universal Civilization,” the 1990 Wriston Lecture presented at the
Manhattan Institute, Naipaul singled out the right to “the pursuit of happiness”
from the American Declaration of Independence along with the Christian doctrine
of “do unto others” as prominent elements of what he meant by a redemptive
universal civilization. Naipaul might as well have included in his definition the
Declaration’s other two rights, “life” and “liberty,” and it is “life” in particular, that
most fundamental of human rights, with which he is most concerned in A Bend in
the River. At the center of the novel is Naipaul’s newfound grasp of the terrifying
fragility of human existence in the absence of civilization and his deepening
comprehension of the implications for moral action that such awareness entails.
As a vehicle for exploring this awareness, Naipaul’s choice of a susceptible

protagonist adrift in an unstable corner of central Africa was an inspired artistic
decision. Cast into the political anarchy of a fictionalized central African republic,
Salim finds his assumptions of individual autonomy challenged, especially as he
grasps the possibility of his own imminent demise. Everywhere he looks, Salim
encounters the specter of death. Significantly, however, it is not simply human
mortality, death as the natural end of existence, that unsettles him, but another sort
of death altogether. What this young man faces in the unraveling of civilized
norms is the likelihood of a sordid, utterly banal end at the hands of an unfeeling
minor official. Stripped of the most fundamental of human rights, he finds himself
in the clutches of a police state, and an unstable one at that, in which the execution
of anyone caught in officialdom’s net becomes purely a matter of routine.
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STUDY MATERIALS

Name of the faculty: Satabdi Roy

Topic: World Literature (DSE- 3)

Bend in the River

Set largely in an unnamed African country in a settlement at the bend of a great

To understand the author’s intentions in A Bend in the River, it is necessary to

As a vehicle for exploring this awareness, Naipaul’s choice of a susceptible

CLICK ON THESE ICONS FOR THE STUDY MATERIALS.

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