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Indians not intellectual enough 40 years ago: Naipaul

Nobel literature prize winner V S Naipaul has provoked yet another row by claiming that 40 years ago people in India were not intellectual enough to read his books.

Naipaul told an audience at the opening of Cheltenham literature festival on Friday night that he believed he had helped to educate Indians.

"The trouble with people like me writing about societies where there is no intellectual life is that if you write about it, people are angry. If they read the book, which in most cases they don't, they want approval. Now India has improved, the books have been accepted," he said.

"Forty years ago in India people were living in ritual. This is one of the things I have helped India with," the 69-year-old novelist said during his first public appearance since winning the $1,000,000 Nobel prize.

Naipaul has attacked Islam many times, comparing the 'calamitous effect' of the religion with colonialism.

The novelist, who was born in Trinidad of Indian parentage, in an interview with Literary Review earlier this year, alleged that British novelists E M Forster and John Maynard Keynes were 'homosexual exploiters of the powerless'.

He described Forster's novel A Passage to India as 'rubbish'.

In July last year, he described British Prime Minister Tony Blair as a 'cultural philistine' and a champion of 'an aggressively plebeian culture that celebrates itself for being plebeian'.

Naipaul, who lives in London, has become the first Briton since William Golding to win the Nobel literature prize.

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