Award-winning author claims he helped educate india
Nobel Literature Prize winner VS Naipaul has sparked controversy by claiming people in India 40 years ago were not intellectual enough to read his books.
The Trinidad-born writer told a crowd at the opening of Cheltenham Literature Festival he had helped educate India's people.
It was his first public appearance since winning the award yesterday.
The 69-year-old author said: "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 and books have been accepted. Forty years ago in India people were living in ritual. This is one of the things I have helped India with."
Naipaul has previously come under fire for his controversial views on race and religion, particularly when he described the "calamitous effect" of Islam and criticised Muslim fundamentalism.
He refused to be drawn on his views on the conflict in Afghanistan when asked by a member of the literary audience whether he thought the war against Afghanistan was just. Instead the audience member was heckled and booed by the crowd.
Naipaul, who lives in London, has become the first Briton since William Golding to win the Nobel prize.
He was knighted in 1990 and has won many other literary awards, including the Booker prize 30 years ago and the David Cohen literature prize in 1993.
