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Karim Raslan

He was painstaking. Respectful. Patient.
He sat alongside his interview subjects with his notebook open, asking questions, probing slowly but steadily, exploring, in minute detail, the personal and intimate.
He didn’t use a tape-recorder. Instead, he wrote everything down, in longhand.
It was laborious. Full sentences.
He wanted to hear it all – life stories that stretched back in time, ranging across cities and countries, with details about wayward fathers with multiple families and migrant grandparents, until his notebooks were full.
There were many Sir Vidia Naipauls (full name: Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul).

There was the gauche colonial from Trinidad, eking out a living on the margins of literary London; the chronicler of empires in retreat – Conrad’s supposed heir; a Western cheerleader fearful of man’s primordial and atavistic nature and then, much later, the supercilious, tweed jacket-wearing cultural grandee.
Throughout them all, the self-effacing, travel writer-cum-collector of stories barely merits a mention.
Yet it was this Sir Vidia that I encountered 23 years ago, when he visited Malaysia researching for the sequel to his Muslim world travelogue, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey.
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And it was this man, or rather, his way of working, that was to have such a deep and lasting impact on how I approached my writing.
I didn’t accompany him to all the interviews. I only sat with him when he needed a translator. Those who spoke English, he could manage himself.

I would leave them to talk, sometimes for hours, coming back when they were finished. It was as if he was immersing himself in their lives, accumulating stories – colour and nuances – until V.S. Naipaul, the man was submerged, weighed down and almost obliterated by the sheer mass of details.
Years later when I read his book Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (the essays outlined the way he researched and wrote), I began to understand that his approach – this endless looping back in search of some kind of order or centre or home – was an intrinsic part of his search for the truth. It also revealed a surprising gentleness and yes, even humility about a man who by the time I met him had acquired an unparalleled reputation for irritability and self-centredness.

The truth was that Naipaul liked people. He found respite in their stories.
What he didn’t like was the rigid theories of belief, the philosophical and religious systems that men and women had erected around their lives. Those, he abhorred and his scorn was vituperative.
His most successful novels were about figures, whether Mohun Biswas or Salim the trader from the East African coast, who tried to assert themselves – their independence and integrity – in the face of these didactic and unforgiving systems.
As I watched him teasing stories, observations, insights and emotions from his interlocutors, I began to realise the significance and relevance of what he was doing.
For Naipaul the author, it was straightforward enough. He had a commission: he needed to comprehend and then write about these non-Arab Muslim lands. To do so, he gathered stories – narratives that would help him map this unfamiliar terrain. But he didn’t just ask about their faith, about their beliefs.
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The ordinary and the everyday details of life provided him with the core around which he built his narrative and his argument. In “swallowing” their lives and “consuming” their stories, he was preparing himself to understand their world from the inside out.
By the time I met him in Kuala Lumpur in the mid-90s, I had embarked on my Ceritalah (Tell me a Story) columns. Having observed the way with which he handled his subjects, I found myself doing much the same – especially since I too was starting to travel and with greater frequency across Southeast Asia.
I was bored of listening to politicians and famous people. Tired of their carefully-crafted narratives. I just wanted to sit down with farmers, factory workers and office clerks. It was their lives that really intrigued me, and it was this fascination with listening that took my columns in the resolutely ground-up direction they have since assumed.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to a cantankerous old Nobel laureate in literature, who would have hated it if people realised that he was a “softie” deep down inside. But I saw how fascinated – and yes, even distracted – he became as he listened to different stories.

To be fair, the sections on Malaysia from Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (the book that he eventually wrote based on the trip I helped with) are a muddle. Still, I like to think that they’re a mess because I reinforced and encouraged his fascination with storytelling to the extent that he lost interest (or focus) in his initial objective: chronicling the growing, global wave of Islamisation.
Maybe in years to come, people will likewise accuse my work of the same messy outcomes, of becoming too obsessed with people’s stories to the detriment of an overarching narrative.
But isn’t that the point?


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Malaysia

I was bored listening to the famous ... then I met V.S. Naipaul

The Nobel laureate’s painstaking ways in interviewing subjects while gathering materials for his book left a deep and lasting impact on writer Karim Raslan

Women shop for headscarves at a Ramadan bazaar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Friday, June 8, 2018. During the holy month of Ramadan, a daily bazaar offers various selections of clothing, food, prayer mats and other religious items to Muslims who traditionally shop for new outfits to welcome the end-of-the-month Eid al-Fitr celebrations. (AP Photo/Sadiq Asyraf)

FILE - In this file photo dated Dec. 10, 2001, British writer V.S. Naipaul receives the Nobel Prize for literature from Sweden's King Carl Gustaf, right, at the Stockholm Concert Hall. V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate whose brittle, misanthropic personality made him one of the world's most admired and contentious writers, has died at his London home aged 85, his family said Sunday Aug. 12, 2018. (Henrik Montgomery / TT FILE via AP)

(FILES) This May 03, 1973 file photo shows Nobel prize-winning British author V.S. Naipaul, who has died at the age of 85, his family announced on Saturday, August 11, 2018. - Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul wrote more than 30 books and won the Nobel Literature Prize in 2001. Born in Trinidad, the son of an Indian civil servant, he studied English literature at Oxford University before basing his life in England. But he spent much of his time travelling and became a symbol of modern rootlessness. (Photo by STF / LEHTIKUVA / AFP)

V.S. Naipaul. Photo: Washington Post

Naipaul visited Malaysia 23 years ago to gather materials for his book, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples. Photo: Shutterstock

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The Nobel laureate’s painstaking ways in interviewing subjects while gathering materials for his book left a deep and lasting impact on writer Karim Raslan


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.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}On Reflection | I was bored listening to the famous ... then I met V.S. Naipaul

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The Nobel laureate’s painstaking ways in interviewing subjects while gathering materials for his book left a deep and lasting impact on writer Karim Raslan

On Reflection | I was bored listening to the famous ... then I met V.S. Naipaul

The Nobel laureate’s painstaking ways in interviewing subjects while gathering materials for his book left a deep and lasting impact on writer Karim Raslan