Abstract:
This study examines the failures in decolonization and its political outcomes leading
to a phenomenon called ‘totalitarianism’ in a transitional post-colonial context, as
characterized in the works of V.S. Naipaul. It attempts to articulate how the postcolonial nations, once ‘abandoned’ by their Colonial Masters and then taken over by
unsuccessful indigenous rulers, have encountered symptomatic political development
within themselves ‘as finite limitations of their existence’ as they have emerged
and are ideologically embedded in a historically affected consciousness (Gadamer
2006). To escape from the humiliation, dislocation, anxiety, jealousies and alienation
generated by modern secularism and rationalism transmitted through colonialism
itself, they seem to ‘return’ (Amin 2014: 81) to an ideology largely borrowed from
history and tradition as ‘retrogressive nostalgia’ for today’s and tomorrow’s problems,
which ultimately results in nothing but violent totalitarianism. In such transitional
contexts where societies still struggle to come to terms with modernity, though the
material conditions of life improved, the shift in mentality (Miao 2000) from one
condition to a completely unprepared and unexpected phase remains crucial. The
destructive energy that is often used against the universal civilizing force is seen
here as a ‘compensation for the pain suffered through the disintegration of traditional
forms of live’ (Habermas 2007: 102). This study, with the support of contemporary
philosophical, political, literary and psychoanalytical interventions, dialectically
examines how such symptomatic developments are empirically explored in the
fictional and biographical works by V.S. Naipaul.
