How Naipaul made the crowd weep at Jaipur Literature Festival

It was the arrival of one of the world's best and enigmatic literary giants to the country of his forefathers. He had famously visited India in the early 1960s as a young, angry man in search for his familial roots, but instead encountered "an area of darkness". Fifty years later, VS Naipaul recalls that episode but with a sense of warmth and irony. "The only Hindi word my mother carried from India was beta; and she said 'beta, please leave India to the Indians'," recalled the Nobel laureate after the furore his books, An Area of Darkness and A Wounded Civilisation, created in the country of his ancestors.

The 82-year-old Trinidad-born British author was in conversation with his old friend Farrukh Dhondy in the session, 'The Writer and the World', at Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) on Saturday. Recalling his journey then, Naipaul said: "I came to India first because of curiosity about my ancestral land. My publisher had agreed to pay me an advance of £500 for anything I would write on India. Although it was a petty amount even then, I felt good about it."

That, however, was just the beginning of the struggle, as he knew nothing about India. Eventually, he found his way. Defending what he wrote, Naipaul said, "I wrote what I saw. I wanted to be true to facts and write without any prejudice." The author, however, accepted that his attempt to analyse was more 'physical' in nature. "I didn't go into why India became an area of darkness or a wounded civilisation. I didn't go into the internal reason. In my later book, A Million Mutinies, I attempted to suggest the answer through the effect of history and invasions on India," he said.

The session began with Naipaul revealing he had no training or ambition to become a writer. "I can tell you straight away that there was probably no reason for that (for wanting to become a writer). It didn't mean that I had special literary judgement, it didn't mean that I had great things to write about. In fact, I didn't. I had to find all these things out later when I settled down to being a writer," he confessed.

"I know when people say they want to be a writer they go on to say they were always writing since they were 10 or something. But that wasn't so with me. I wanted to be a writer without having anything to write about. I had to find out what I wanted to write about."

Recounting his initial struggles, Sir Vidia said: "When I approached a publisher with my first book, he asked me to leave that piece as it is and do something else. I was disappointed but that's exactly what I did - left it and wrote something else," he told the besotted audience which, if JLF director William Darlymple is to be believed, was more than "anyone else we've ever hosted - just under 6,000 - more than Oprah, more even than Amitabh".

US talk show host Oprah Winfrey had visited the festival three years ago, while actor Amitabh Bachchan was here in 2009. The session also showed a softer side of Naipaul, with a tinge of tragedy. The firebrand writer seemed forgetful, absentminded and quiet at more occasions than one.

Most of the time Dhondy, the moderator, had to pitch in as Sir Vidia would speak a line or two and then forget what he was talking about. For anyone who has read Naipaul and seen him over the decades, it was a depressing sight. As the session got over, the author bade a teary-eyed goodbye to applause which is generally reserved for a rockstar. Sir Vidia will always be a rockstar.