On an unusually hot October day in 2001, three civil services aspirants—Arif, Sandeep, and yours truly—came to know from an All India Radio bulletin that Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

The news of what I thought was a well-deserved award wasn’t well received by Arif and Sandeep. Instead, it infuriated them for different reasons.

You expect such reactions to anything involving Naipaul. Arif speculated that with less than a month having passed since the 9/11 terror attack, the Nobel committee had possibly been swayed by the Islamic world-bashing tone of Naipaul’s travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981). Sandeep’s grouse had a nationalist tinge—a feeling of being hurt by how condescendingly Naipaul had portrayed India’s material deprivation and inhuman living conditions in his India trilogy: An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilisation (1976), and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).

Interestingly, like many all over the world, a sizeable number of Indians also thought that the prize had come a little late to Sir Vidia.

Khushwant Singh wrote in Outlook, “Why the coveted prize eluded him for so long I could only attribute to some kind of deep-seated prejudice against writers who did not write in their mother-tongue or political considerations. Although Naipaul is a Trinidad-born Hindu, English is his mother-tongue, and he is essentially an objective observer of political movements, bold enough to come to his own conclusions.”

Such different responses to Naipaul’s claim on the highest literary honour were more of a comment on the political import of his writings, not on its quality.

Clearly, there weren’t many in the world who were in any doubt over his place among the best in world literature. To borrow an often used expression for him, Naipaul was a writer’s writer. Few have used the English language with the creative mastery and clarity that illuminate his prose. The directness with which he dealt with a wide range of themes in different genres—ranging from memorable novels to seminal travelogues—established him as the master of modern prose. Even his critics mostly concede that he was one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. That’s what quality literature evokes: an appreciation irrespective of your disagreement with the writer.

Yet Sir Vidia risked his greatness for saying what he wanted to say, putting on paper what he observed and writing it with his trademark directness. In the broadest sense of the term, he was his own man. He never let his insights and observations of people and places become hostage to political correctness. He wrote it as he saw it. That’s probably one of the reasons he was able to see signs of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism two decades before it became an international security menace.

However, it’s unfair to see Sir Vidia only through his rich body of thought-provoking non-fiction. It must not deflect from the fact that he wrote novels of universal appeal, portraying human condition and everyday Caribbean life with impish humour and authenticity. The comic novel The Mystic Masseur (1957) was quickly followed with linked short stories in Miguel Street (1959)—stories which could be delightfully read as a fictionalised look at his Port of Spain days.

But nothing prepared the readers for what was to come two years later. It was A House For Mr Biswas (1961) that earned him worldwide literary fame—a widely loved novel for the accuracy and comic empathy with which Naipaul traces the journey of Mohun Biswas to have his space, house and freedom. A thinly disguised biographical account of his father’s unfulfilled life, it’s apt that Naipaul’s most memorable work had the imprint of his father: a failed writer who influenced his life and writing the most. Once on tour to Pakistan, when he was asked to name his favourite writer, Naipaul replied “my father”. It’s a pity his father couldn’t live longer to see his son’s success, a terrible emotion for children of a failed man to live with.

Naipaul’s two other significant novels came in the 1970s—In a Free State (1971), which won him the Booker Prize, and A Bend in the River (1979), set in mid-twentieth century Africa. These were considered by many as more important in his prolific range of writings. His later novels failed to evoke the same response.

His temperament, which some saw as arrogant and others as petty, sometimes nudged people to subject his work to non-literary considerations. He never concealed his impatience with mediocrity. To his credit, he authorised Patrick French to write his biography The World Is What It Is (Picador, 2008)—a book in which French brought out some starkly ugly aspects of his personal life. It was after Paul Theroux, his one-time friend, wrote a far from flattering account of Naipaul in Sir Vidia’s Shadow” (Penguin, 1998).

Many Indians took a lot of time to come to terms with the sharp observations and candour that Naipaul brought while writing on the country. Some could never reconcile with the ruthlessness of the outsider’s scrutiny to which Naipaul subjected his Indian experience in his three books on India. If An Area of Darkness riled post-Independence patriots for his analysis of Indian poverty and ignorance, India: A Wounded Civilisation angered secularists, as Naipaul took a hard look at the loss of the country’s civilisational construct and cultural vandalism suffered during centuries of Muslim rule.

Consistent with this line of historical survey and movements, he viewed the rise of political Hindutva as an inevitable development. “Babar was no friend of India,” was his terse response to the demolition of the Babri Masjid, and he analysed it with a detached lens.

Naipaul didn’t accept textbook definitions of Indian secularism, which didn’t stand his scrutiny of history. In an interview in the late 1990s, he said, “You say that India has a secular character, which is historically unsound. You say that Hindu militancy is dangerous. Dangerous or not, it is a necessary corrective to the history I have been talking about. It is a creative force, and it will prove to be so.”

Even as the world of letters is increasingly creaking under the weight of political correctness, Sir Vidia’s voice stood out for its authenticity. An exceptional talent like him didn’t need the crutch of borrowed virtues. “The only lies for which we are punished are those we tell ourselves,” he once wrote in In a Free State. To his credit, it didn’t seem like he lied much to himself.