Iconoclasm and fundamentalism manifest much affinity since they contribute to a common objective, an ideology leaving out all possible liberty in creativity or cogitation.
V.S. Naipaul’s contradictory writings lambastingly tell off the iconoclasm and fundamentalism in some postcolonial societies, like Pakistan, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, while he is himself ensnared in an idolized past in ruins, endeavoring to uproot and vandalize the current values fossilized and naturalized through centuries of enactment, consecration, and assimilation, to replace them with the old stale ones from which they have sprung off by evolvement. Claiming himself to be an unprejudiced atheist with a high degree of tolerance, he believes deeply in Hinduism and ancient India as the Lost Paradise, and the only way out to prosperity.
The current paper will try to analyze the notion of ‘fundamentalism’ and freedom of religion in Naipaul’s travel books, covering his expedition odyssey through the realm of the postcolonial ‘converts’. His longing for the glamorous pre-Islamic past of the nations in the traveled regions is not atypical with the regressive ideality he berates, substantiating Hinduism instead as the idealized value, is confessed by himself in his autobiographies, regressively encouraging the so called ‘converts’ to retrieve their genuine identities from beneath the load of ‘dust’ of history, from the depth of the dark past of dubiety.