title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: During World War II, Zhivago's old friends Nika Dudorov and Misha Gordon meet up. One of their discussions revolves around a local laundress named Tanya, a "bezprizornaya", or war orphan, and her resemblance to both Yuri and Lara. Tanya tells both men of the difficult childhood she has had due to her mother abandoning her in order to marry Komarovsky. Much later, the two men meet over the first edition of Yuri Zhivago's poems.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: Although it contains passages written in the 1910s and 1920s, "Doctor Zhivago" was not completed until 1955. The novel was submitted to the literary journal "Novy Mir" ("Новый Мир") in 1956. However, the editors rejected Pasternak's novel because of its implicit rejection of socialist realism. The author, like Zhivago, showed more concern for the welfare of individuals than for the welfare of society. Soviet censors construed some passages as anti-Soviet. They also objected to Pasternak's subtle criticisms of Stalinism, Collectivization, the Great Purge, and the Gulag.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: In 1957, Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli arranged for the novel to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union by Sergio D'Angelo. Upon handing his manuscript over, Pasternak quipped, "You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad." Despite desperate efforts by the Union of Soviet Writers to prevent its publication, Feltrinelli published an Italian translation of the book in November 1957. So great was the demand for "Doctor Zhivago" that Feltrinelli was able to license translation rights into eighteen different languages well in advance of the novel's publication. The Communist Party of Italy expelled Feltrinelli from their membership in retaliation for his role in the publication of a novel they felt was critical of communism.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: A French translation was published by Éditions Gallimard in June 1958, with an English translation being published in September 1958.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency realized that the novel presented an opportunity to embarrass the Soviet government. An internal memo lauded the book's "great propaganda value": not only did the text have a central humanist message, but the Soviet government's having suppressed a great work of literature could make ordinary citizens "wonder what is wrong with their government".


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: The CIA set out to publish 1,000 copies of a Russian-language hardcover edition at Mouton Publishers of the Hague in early September 1958, and arranged for 365 of them, in Mouton's trademark blue linen cover, to be distributed at the Vatican pavilion at the 1958 Brussels world's fair.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: The printing by Mouton Publishers of the 1,000 copies of an adulterated Russian-language version, organized by the CIA, had typos and truncated storylines, and it was illegal, because the owner of the manuscript was Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who later put his name on the Mouton edition.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: Author Ivan Tolstoi claims that the CIA lent a hand to ensure that "Doctor Zhivago" was submitted to the Nobel Committee in its original language, in order for Pasternak to win the Nobel prize and further harm the international credibility of the Soviet Union. He repeats and adds additional details to Fetrinelli's claims that CIA operatives intercepted and photographed a manuscript of the novel and secretly printed a small number of books in the Russian language. Recently released CIA documents do not show that the agency's efforts in publishing a Russian-language edition were intended to help Pasternak win the Nobel, however.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: , a Russian philologist, also contributed her research about the history of publications, following the publication of Lazar Fleishman's book "Russian Emigration Discovers "Doctor Zhivago"", where she thought that the only possible conclusion was that the pirated edition of "Doctor Zhivago" was initiated by one of the biggest émigré organizations in Europe: the Central Association of Postwar Émigrées. While CAPE was known to engage in anti-Soviet activities, the printing of this edition was not an imposition of its own political will but rather a response to the spiritual demands of the Russian emigration that was greatly stirred by the release of Pasternak's novel in Italian without an original Russian edition.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: Some people believe the Nobel Prize may be awarded to me this year. I am firmly convinced that I shall be passed over and that it will go to Alberto Moravia. You cannot imagine all the difficulties, torments, and anxieties which arise to confront me at the mere prospect, however unlikely, of such a possibility... One step out of place—and the people closest to you will be condemned to suffer from all the jealousy, resentment, wounded pride and disappointment of others, and old scars on the heart will be reopened...


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: On 23 October 1958, Boris Pasternak was announced as the winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature. The citation credited Pasternak's contribution to Russian lyric poetry and for his role in, "continuing the great Russian epic tradition". On 25 October, Pasternak sent a telegram to the Swedish Academy:


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: On 26 October, the "Literary Gazette" ran an article by David Zaslavski entitled, "Reactionary Propaganda Uproar over a Literary Weed".


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: Acting on direct orders from the Politburo, the KGB surrounded Pasternak's dacha in Peredelkino. Pasternak was not only threatened with arrest, but the KGB also vowed to send his mistress Olga Ivinskaya back to the gulag, where she had been imprisoned under Stalin. It was further hinted that, if Pasternak traveled to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Medal, he would be refused re-entry to the Soviet Union.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: In view of the meaning given the award by the society in which I live, I must renounce this undeserved distinction which has been conferred on me. Please do not take my voluntary renunciation amiss.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: This refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award. There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: Despite his decision to decline the award, the Soviet Union of Writers continued to denounce Pasternak in the Soviet press. Furthermore, he was threatened at the very least with formal exile to the West. In response, Pasternak wrote directly to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, "Leaving the motherland will mean equal death for me. I am tied to Russia by birth, by life and work." After being ousted from power in 1964, Khrushchev read the novel and felt great regret for having banned the book at all.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: As a result of this and the intercession of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Pasternak was not expelled from his homeland.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: Ultimately, Bill Mauldin produced a political cartoon lampooning the Soviet State's campaign against Boris Pasternak. The cartoon depicts Pasternak and another convict splitting trees in the snow. In the caption, Pasternak says, "I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?" The cartoon won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1959.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: Pasternak died of lung cancer in his dacha in Peredelkino on the evening of 30 May 1960. He first summoned his sons, and in their presence said, "Who will suffer most because of my death? Who will suffer most? Only Oliusha will, and I haven't had time to do anything for her. The worst thing is that she will suffer." Pasternak's last words were, "I can't hear very well. And there's a mist in front of my eyes. But it will go away, won't it? Don't forget to open the window tomorrow."


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: Shortly before his death, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church had given Pasternak the last rites. Later, in the strictest secrecy, an Orthodox funeral liturgy, or Panikhida, was offered in the family's dacha.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: Despite only a small notice appearing in the "Literary Gazette", handwritten notices carrying the date and time of the funeral were posted throughout the Moscow subway system. As a result, thousands of admirers traveled from Moscow to Pasternak's civil funeral in Peredelkino. According to Jon Stallworthy, "Volunteers carried his open coffin to his burial place and those who were present (including the poet Andrey Voznesensky) recited from memory the banned poem 'Hamlet'."


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: One of the dissident speakers at the graveside service said, "God marks the path of the elect with thorns, and Pasternak was picked out and marked by God. He believed in eternity and he will belong to it... We excommunicated Tolstoy, we disowned Dostoyevsky, and now we disown Pasternak. Everything that brings us glory we try to banish to the West... But we cannot allow this. We love Pasternak and we revere him as a poet... Glory to Pasternak!"


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: Until the 1980s, Pasternak's poetry was only published in heavily censored form. Furthermore, his reputation continued to be pilloried in State propaganda until Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed perestroika.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: In 1988, after decades of circulating in samizdat, "Doctor Zhivago" was finally serialized in the pages of "Novy Mir", which had changed to a more anti-communist position than in Pasternak's lifetime. The following year, Yevgeny Borisovich Pasternak was at last permitted to travel to Stockholm to collect his father's Nobel Medal. At the ceremony, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich performed a Bach composition in honor of his fellow Soviet dissident.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: The novel has been part of the Russian school curriculum since 2003, where it is taught in 11th grade.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: In the shadow of all this grand political change, we see that everything is governed by the basic human longing for companionship. Zhivago and Pasha, in love with the same woman, both traverse Russia in these volatile times in search of such stability. They are both involved in nearly every level of the tumultuous times that Russia faced in the first half of the 20th century, yet the common theme and the motivating force behind all their movement is a want of a steady home life. When we first meet Zhivago he is being torn away from everything he knows. He is sobbing and standing on the grave of his mother. We bear witness to the moment all stability is destroyed in his life and the rest of the novel is his attempts to recreate the security stolen from him at such a young age. After the loss of his mother, Zhivago develops a longing for what Freud called the "maternal object" (feminine love and affection), in his later romantic relationships with women. His first marriage, to Tonya, is not one born of passion but from friendship. In a way, Tonya takes on the role of the mother-figure that Zhivago always sought but lacked. This, however, was not a romantic tie; while he feels loyal to her throughout his life, he never could find true happiness with her, for their relationship lacks the fervor that was integral to his relationship to Lara.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: In the beginning of the novel, between the 1905 Russian Revolution and World War I, characters freely debate different philosophical and political ideas including Marxism, but after the revolution and the state-enforced terror of war communism, Zhivago and others cease to talk politics. Zhivago, a stubborn non-conformist, rants within himself at the "blindness" of revolutionary propaganda and grows exasperated with "the conformity and transparency of the hypocrisy" of his friends who adhere to the prevailing dogma. Zhivago's mental and even physical health crumble under the strain of "a constant, systematic dissembling" by which citizens, rather than thinking for themselves, are expected to "show [themselves] day by day contrary to what [they] feel." In the epilogue, in which Russia is enveloped in World War II, the characters Dudorov and Gordon discuss how the war united Russia against a real enemy, which was better than the preceding days of the Great Purge when Russians were turned against one another by the deadly, artificial ideology of totalitarianism. This reflects Pasternak's hope that the trials of the Great Patriotic War would, to quote translator Richard Pevear, "lead to the final liberation that had been the promise of the [Russian] Revolution from the beginning."


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: In contrast to the socialist realism that was imposed as the official artistic style of the Soviet Union, Pasternak's novel relies heavily on unbelievable coincidences (a reliance for which the plot was criticized). Pasternak uses the frequently-intersecting paths of his cast of characters not only to tell several different people's stories over the decades-long course of the novel, but also to emphasize the chaotic, unpredictable nature of the time period in which it is set, and of reality more generally. In the end, immediately before his death, Zhivago has a revelation of "several existences developing side by side, moving next to each other at different speeds, and about one person's fate getting ahead of another's in life, and who outlives whom." This reflects the crisscrossing journeys of characters over decades, and represents the capricious chance governing their lives.


title: Doctor Zhivago (novel)

text: Edmund Wilson wrote of the novel: "Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man's literary and moral history". V. S. Pritchett wrote in the "New Statesman" that the novel is "[t]he first work of genius to come out of Russia since the revolution." When the novel came out in Italian, Anders Österling, the then permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in January 1958: “A strong patriotic accent comes through, but with no trace of empty propaganda... With its abundant documentation, its intense local color and its psychological frankness, this work bears convincing witness to the fact that the creative faculty in literature is in no sense extinct in Russia. It is hard to believe that the Soviet authorities might seriously envisage forbidding its publication in the land of its birth.” Some literary critics "found that there was no real plot to the novel, that its chronology was confused, that the main characters were oddly effaced, that the author relied far too much on contrived coincidences." Vladimir Nabokov, who had celebrated Pasternak's books of poetry as works of "pure, unbridled genius", however, considered the novel to be "a sorry thing, clumsy, trite and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers and trite coincidences." On the other hand, some critics praised it for being things that, in the opinion of translator Richard Pevear, it was never meant to be: a moving love story, or a lyrical biography of a poet in which the individual is set against the grim realities of Soviet life. Pasternak defended the numerous coincidences in the plot, saying that they are "traits to characterize that somewhat willful, free, fanciful flow of reality." In response to criticism in the West of his novel's characters and coincidences, Pasternak wrote to Stephen Spender:


title: Delonix regia

text: Delonix regia is a species of flowering plant in the bean family Fabaceae, subfamily Caesalpinioideae native to Madagascar. It is noted for its fern-like leaves and flamboyant display of orange-red flowers over summer. In many tropical parts of the world it is grown as an ornamental tree and in English it is given the name royal poinciana, flamboyant, phoenix flower, flame of the forest, or flame tree (one of several species given this name).


title: Delonix regia

text: This species was previously placed in the genus "Poinciana", named for Phillippe de Longvilliers de Poincy, the 17th-century governor of Saint Christopher (Saint Kitts). It is a non-nodulating legume.


title: Delonix regia

text: The flowers of "Delonix regia" are large, with four spreading scarlet or orange-red petals up to long, and a fifth upright petal called the standard, which is slightly larger and spotted with yellow and white. They appear in corymbs along and at the ends of branches. The naturally occurring variety "flavida" (Bengali: "Radhachura)" has yellow flowers. The pods are green and flaccid when young and turn dark-brown and woody. They can be up to long and wide. The seeds are small, weighing around on average. The compound (doubly pinnate) leaves have a feathery appearance and are a characteristic light, bright green. Each leaf is long with 20 to 40 pairs of primary leaflets or pinnae, each divided into 10–20 pairs of secondary leaflets or pinnules. Pollen grains are elongated, approximately 52 µm in size.


title: Delonix regia

text: "Delonix regia" is endemic to Madagascar's dry deciduous forests, but has been introduced into tropical and sub-tropical regions worldwide. In the wild it is endangered, but it is widely cultivated elsewhere and is regarded as naturalised in many of the locations where it is grown:


title: Delonix regia

text: In the continental United States, it grows in South Florida, Central Florida, and in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. It also grows in humid parts of Mexico, especially in the Yucatan peninsula.


title: Delonix regia

text: In the Caribbean it is featured in many Dominican and Puerto Rican paintings. It can also be found in Belize, The Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, U.S. Virgin Islands, Sint Maarten,Trinidad and Tobago, Cayman Islands, Grenada, Jamaica, Curaçao and Saint Vincent And The Grenadines. It is the national flower of St. Kitts and Nevis. It can also be found in Bermuda, and Hawaii. The town of Peñuelas, Puerto Rico, located about west of Ponce, is nicknamed "El Valle de los Flamboyanes" ("The Valley of the Poinciana Trees"), as many flamboyant trees are found along the surrounding Río Guayanes, Río Macana, and Río Tallaboa rivers.


title: Delonix regia

text: "Delonix regia" is planted in Mediterranean parts of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, including the southern coast of Spain, the Valencian coast, the Canary Islands, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan and Cyprus.


title: Delonix regia

text: The tree is planted in India, where it is referred to as the "May-flower tree", "Gulmohar" or "Gul Mohr." In West Bengal, Odisha it is called krushnachuda(কৃষ্ণচূড়া/କୃଷ୍ଣଚୂଡ଼ା). In Sri Lanka it is known in Sinhala as the "Maara tree", although for a short while it was known as the "Lamaasuriya tree" after Le Mesurier, the British civil servant who was responsible for introducing it as a shade tree. It is also grown in Karachi, Pakistan. In Mauritius and La Réunion it announces the coming of the new year.


title: Delonix regia

text: In Bangladesh it known as krisnachura(কৃষ্ণচূড়া). You can find this tree in various places of Bangladesh. It is found all over Dhaka City and is one of iconic symbols of the Bengali month of Boishakh.


title: Delonix regia

text: In Myanmar, where it is called "Sein-pann-ni", the time of flowering is March in the south and early to late April in the north. It is planted in gardens and as a roadside tree. In Myanmar, this tree is a sign of Thingyan Festival (13–16/17 April). In the Philippines, its flowering signals the imminent arrival of the monsoon rains. It also grows in Thailand and Indonesia. In Vietnam it is called "phoenix flower" and mostly grows in Haiphong. In Malaysia, it is called "Semarak", used to be the name of a street in the country's capital city, Kuala Lumpur, now renamed as Jalan Sultan Yahya Petra where one of the oldest and highest rank Malaysian university, University of Technology Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur campus is located. "Semarak Api" is also the official flower of the Sepang district.


title: Delonix regia

text: It grows in Southern China such as in Hong Kong. It is the official tree in Tainan, Taiwan; Xiamen, Fujian Province, and Shantou, Guangdong Province, People's Republic of China. National Cheng Kung University, a university located in Tainan, put royal poinciana on its emblem.


title: Delonix regia

text: It is very widely grown in the Northern Australia, the southern extremes previously limited to South East Queensland where it is a popular street tree in the suburbs of Brisbane. It now grows and blooms successfully in Sydney and other parts of New South Wales.


title: Delonix regia

text: The royal poinciana requires a tropical or near-tropical climate, but can tolerate drought and salty conditions. It prefers an open, free-draining sandy or loamy soil enriched with organic matter. The tree does not like heavy or clay soils and flowers more profusely when kept slightly dry.


title: Delonix regia

text: The royal poinciana is most commonly propagated by seeds. Seeds are collected, soaked in warm water for at least 24 hours, and planted in warm, moist soil in a semi-shaded, sheltered position. In lieu of soaking, the seeds can also be "nicked" or "pinched" (with a small scissors or nail clipper) and planted immediately. These two methods allow moisture to penetrate the tough outer casing, stimulating germination. The seedlings grow rapidly and can reach in a few weeks under ideal conditions.


title: Delonix regia

text: Less common, but just as effective, is propagation by semi-hardwood cuttings. Branches consisting of the current or last season's growth can be cut into sections and planted in a moist potting mixture. This method is slower than seed propagation (cuttings take a few months to root) but is the preferred method for ensuring new trees are true to form. As such, cuttings are a particularly common method of propagation for the rarer yellow-flowering variety of the tree.


title: Delonix regia

text: In addition to its ornamental value, it is also a useful shade tree in tropical conditions, because it usually grows to a modest height (mostly , but it can reach a maximum height of ) but spreads widely, and its dense foliage provides full shade. In areas with a marked dry season, it sheds its leaves during the drought, but in other areas it is virtually evergreen.


title: Delonix regia

text: In the Indian state of Kerala, royal poinciana is called "kaalvarippoo" (, ) which means "the flower of Calvary". There is a popular belief among Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala that when Jesus was crucified, there was a small royal poinciana tree nearby his Cross. It is believed that the blood of Jesus Christ was shed over the flowers of the tree and this is how the flowers of royal poinciana got a sharp red color. It is also known as "Vaaga" in many areas of Kerala.


title: Delonix regia

text: Its blossom is the national flower of St. Kitts and Nevis, and in May 2018 the royal poinciana was adopted by the city of Key West as its official tree. Known locally as , "Delonix regia" is the city flower of Sepang, Selangor, Malaysia.


title: Delonix regia

text: In Vietnam, this tree is called , or "phoenix's tail", and is a popular urban tree in much of Vietnam. Its flowering season is May–July, which coincides with the end of the school year in Vietnam. Because of this timing, the flower of poinciana is sometimes called the "pupil's flower". The tree is also commonly found on school grounds in Vietnam, however after several trees incidents where the tree fell on students, with one student killed, schools started cutting down or severely pruning the trees. Hải Phòng is nicknamed ("City of red poinciana").


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (; 17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018) was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul's breakthrough novel "A House for Mr Biswas" was published in 1961. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel "In a Free State".<ref name="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/1971"></ref> He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1983, and in 1989, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honour. He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: V. S. Naipaul was born to Droapatie ("née" Capildeo) and Seepersad Naipaul on 17 August 1932 in the sugar plantation-town of Chaguanas on the island of Trinidad, the larger of the two islands in the British crown colony of Trinidad and Tobago. He was the couple's second child and first son.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul's father, Seepersad, was an English-language journalist. In 1929, he had begun contributing stories to the "Trinidad Guardian", and in 1932 he joined the staff as the provincial Chaguanas correspondent. In "A prologue to an autobiography" (1983), Naipaul describes how Seepersad's great reverence for writers and for the writing life spawned the dreams and aspirations of his eldest son.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In the 1880s, Naipaul's paternal grandfather had emigrated from India to work as an indentured servant in a sugar plantation. In the 1890s, his maternal grandfather was to do the same. During this time, many people in India, their prospects blighted by the Great Famine of 1876–78, or similar calamities, had emigrated to distant outposts of the British Empire such as Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, and Fiji. Although slavery had been abolished in these places in 1833, slave labour was still in demand, and indenture was the legal contract being drawn to meet the demand.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: According to the genealogy the Naipauls had reconstructed in Trinidad, they were Hindu brahmins—embraced from the knowledge of his mother's family; his father's background had remained less certain. Their ancestors in India had been guided by ritual restrictions. Among these were those on food—including the prohibition against eating flesh—drink, attire and social interaction.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In Trinidad, the restrictions were to gradually loosen. By the time of Naipaul's earliest childhood memories, chicken and fish were eaten at the family's dining table, and Christmas was celebrated with a dinner. The men wore only western clothes. The women's saris were being accessorized with belts and heeled footwear, their hemlines rising in imitation of the skirt, and they were soon to disappear altogether as an item of daily wear. Disappearing as well were the languages of India. Naipaul and his siblings were encouraged to speak only English. At school, other languages were taught, but these were usually Spanish and Latin.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul's family moved to Trinidad's capital Port of Spain, at first when he was seven, and then more permanently when he was nine.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul was enrolled in the government-run Queen's Royal College (QRC), an urban, cosmopolitan, high performing school, which was designed and functioned in the fashion of a British boys' public school. Before he turned 17, he won a Trinidad Government scholarship to study abroad. He reflected later that the scholarship would have allowed him to study any subject at any institution of higher learning in the British Commonwealth, but that he chose to go to Oxford to do a degree in English. He went, he wrote, "in order at last to write..." In August 1950, Naipaul boarded a Pan Am flight to New York, continuing the next day by boat to London. He left Trinidad, like the narrator of "Miguel Street", hardening himself to the emotion displayed by his family. For recording the impressions of his journey, Naipaul purchased a pad of paper and a copying pencil, noting, "I had bought the pad and pencil because I was travelling to become a writer, and I had to start." The copious notes and letters from that time were to become the basis for the chapter "Journey" in Naipaul's novel "The Enigma of Arrival" written 37 years later.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Arriving at Oxford for the Michaelmas term, 1950, Naipaul judged himself adequately prepared for his studies; in the judgment of his Latin tutor, Peter Bayley, Naipaul showed promise and poise. But, a year later, in Naipaul's estimation, his attempts at writing felt contrived. Unsure of his ability and calling, and lonely, he became depressed. By late March 1952, plans were made for his return to Trinidad in the summer. His father put down a quarter of the passage. However, in early April, in the "vacs" before the Trinity term, Naipaul took an impulsive trip to Spain, and quickly spent all he had saved. Attempting an explanation to his family, he called it "a nervous breakdown." Thirty years later, he was to call it "something like a mental illness."


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Earlier in 1952, at a college play, Naipaul had met Patricia Ann Hale, a history student. Hale and Naipaul formed a close friendship, which eventually developed into a sexual relationship. With Hale's support, Naipaul began to recover and gradually to write. In turn, she became a partner in planning his career. When they told their families about their relationship, the response was unenthusiastic; from her family it was hostile. In June 1953, both Naipaul and Hale graduated, both receiving, in his words, "a damn, bloody, ... second." J. R. R. Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, however, judged Naipaul's Anglo-Saxon paper to have been the best in the university.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In Trinidad, Naipaul's father had had a coronary thrombosis in early 1953, and lost his job at the "Guardian" in the summer. In October 1953, Seepersad Naipaul died. By Hindu tenets, it fell to Naipaul to light the funeral pyre—it was the mandatory ritual of the eldest son. But since there was not the time nor the money for Naipaul to return, his eight-year-old brother, Shiva Naipaul, performed the final rites of cremation. "The event marked him," Naipaul wrote about his brother. "That death and cremation were his private wound."


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Through the summer and autumn of 1953 Naipaul was financially depleted. His prospects for employment in frugal post-war Britain were unpromising, his applications to jobs overseas repeatedly rejected, and his attempts at writing as yet haphazard. Working off and on at odd jobs, borrowing money from Pat or his family in Trinidad, Naipaul reluctantly enrolled for a B. Litt. post-graduate degree at Oxford in English Literature. In December 1953, he failed his first B. Litt. exam. Although he passed the second written examination, his viva voce, in February 1954, with F. P. Wilson, an Elizabethan scholar and Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, did not go well. He was failed overall for the B. Litt. degree. With that also ended all hopes of being supported for academic studies at Oxford. Naipaul would later say that he 'hated Oxford'.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul moved to London, where he reluctantly accepted shelter in the flat of a cousin. Pat, who had won a scholarship for further studies at the University of Birmingham, moved out of her parents' flat to independent lodgings where Naipaul could visit her. For the remainder of 1954, Naipaul exhibited behaviour that tried the patience of those closest to him. He denounced Trinidad and Trinidadians; he castigated the British who he felt had taken him out of Trinidad but left him without opportunity; he took refuge in illness, but when help was offered, he rebuffed it. He was increasingly dependent on Pat, who remained loyal, offering him money, practical advice, encouragement, and rebuke.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Gainful employment appeared for Naipaul in December 1954. Henry Swanzy, producer of the BBC weekly program, "Caribbean Voices", offered Naipaul a three-month renewable contract as presenter of the program. Swanzy, on whose program a generation of Caribbean writers had debuted, including George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, the 19-year-old Derek Walcott and, earlier, Naipaul himself, was being transferred to Accra to manage the Gold Coast Broadcasting System. Naipaul would stay in the part-time job for four years, and Pat would remain the critical breadwinner for the couple.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In January 1955, Naipaul moved to new lodgings, a small flat in Kilburn, and he and Pat were married. Neither informed their families or friends—their wedding guests limited to the two witnesses required by law. Pat continued to live in Birmingham, but visited on the weekends. At the BBC, Naipaul presented the program once a week, wrote short reviews and conducted interviews. The sparsely furnished freelancers' room in the old Langham Hotel flowed with the banter of Caribbean writers and would-be writers, providing camaraderie and fellowship. There, one afternoon in the summer of 1955, Naipaul typed out a 3,000-word story. It was based on the memory of a neighbour he had known as a child in a Port of Spain street, but it also drew on the mood and ambience of the freelancers' room. Three fellow writers, John Stockbridge, Andrew Salkey, and Gordon Woolford, who read the story later, were affected by it and encouraged him to go on. Over the next five weeks, Naipaul would write his first publishable book, "Miguel Street", a collection of linked stories of that Port of Spain street. Although the book was not published right away, Naipaul's talent caught the attention of publishers and his spirits began to lift.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Diana Athill, the editor at the publishing company André Deutsch, who read "Miguel Street", liked it. But the publisher, André Deutsch, thought a series of linked stories by an unknown Caribbean writer unlikely to sell profitably in Britain. He encouraged Naipaul to write a novel. Without enthusiasm, Naipaul quickly wrote "The Mystic Masseur" in Autumn 1955. On 8 December 1955, his novel was accepted by Deutsch, and Naipaul received a £125 payment.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In late August 1956, six years after arriving in England, three years after his father's death, and in the face of pressure from his family in Trinidad, especially his mother, to visit, Naipaul boarded TSS Cavina, an Elders & Fyffes passenger-carrying banana boat, in Bristol. From on board the ship, he sent harsh and humorous descriptions of the ship's West Indians passengers to Pat, recording also their conversations in dialect. His early letters from Trinidad spoke to the wealth created there during the intervening years, in contrast to the prevailing frugal economy in Britain. Trinidad was in its last phase before decolonization, and there was a new-found confidence among its citizens. Among Trinidad's different racial groups, there were also avowals of racial separateness—in contrast to the fluid, open racial attitudes of Naipaul's childhood—and there was violence. In the elections of 1956, the party supported by the majority blacks and Indian Muslims narrowly won, leading to an increased sense of gloom in Naipaul. Naipaul accompanied a politician uncle, a candidate of the Hindu party, to his campaign rallies. During these and other events he was gathering ideas for later literary use. By the time he left Trinidad, he had written to Pat about plans for a new novelette on a rural election in Trinidad. These would transmute upon his return to England into the comic novel "The Suffrage of Elvira".


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Back in England, Deutsch informed Naipaul that "The Mystic Masseur" would not be published for another ten months. Naipaul's anger at the publisher together with his anxiety about surviving as a writer aroused more creative energy: "The Suffrage of Elvira" was written with great speed during the early months of 1957. In June 1957, "The Mystic Masseur" was finally published. The reviews were generally complimentary, though some were also patronizing. Still shy of his 25th birthday, Naipaul copied out many of the reviews by hand for his mother, including the 's, "V. S. Naipaul is a young writer who contrives to blend Oxford wit with home-grown rambunctiousness and not do harm to either." Awaiting his book royalties, in summer 1957, Naipaul accepted his only full-time employment, the position of editorial assistant at the Cement and Concrete Association (C&CA). The association published the magazine "Concrete Quarterly". Although he disliked the desk job and remained in it for a mere ten weeks, the salary of £1,000 a year provided financial stability, allowing him to send money to Trinidad. The C&CA was also to be the office setting for Naipaul's later novel, "Mr. Stone's and the Knight's Companion". Around this same time, writer Francis Wyndham, who had taken Naipaul under his wing, introduced him to novelist Anthony Powell. Powell, in turn, convinced the publisher of the "New Statesman", Kingsley Martin, to give Naipaul a part-time job reviewing books. Naipaul would review books once a month from 1957 to 1961.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: With many West Indian writers now active in England, "Caribbean Voices" was judged to have achieved its purpose and slated to terminate in August 1958. Naipaul's relations with his BBC employers began to fray. Despite three years of hosting the program and three completed novels, he had been unable to make the transition to mainstream BBC programming. He claimed later that he was told those jobs were reserved for Europeans. In July 1958, after arriving late for a program, Naipaul was reprimanded by the producers, and, in his words, "broke with the BBC."


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: With promotional help from Andre Deutsh, Naipaul's novels would soon receive critical acclaim. "The Mystic Masseur" was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1958, and "Miguel Street" the Somerset Maugham Award in 1961, W. Somerset Maugham himself approving the first-ever selection of a non-European.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Not long after Naipaul began writing "A House for Mr Biswas", he and Pat moved across town from their attic flat in Muswell Hill to an upstairs flat in Streatham Hill. It was the first home in which they felt comfortable. In his foreword to the 1983 Alfred A. Knopf edition of the book, Naipaul was to write: "I had more than changed flats: for the first time in my life I enjoyed solitude and freedom in a house. And just as, in the novel, I was able to let myself go, so in the solitude of the quiet, friendly house in Streatham Hill I could let myself go. ... The two years spent on this novel in Streatham Hill remain the most consuming, the most fulfilled, the happiest years of my life. They were my Eden."


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: The book is an imagined version of his father's life as fashioned from childhood memories. The story as it evolved became so real for Naipaul, that he later claimed it had "destroyed memory" in some respects. The protagonist, Mohun Biswas, referred to throughout the book as Mr Biswas, is propelled by the forces of circumstance into a succession of vocations: apprentice to a Hindu priest; a signboard painter; a grocery store proprietor in the "heart of the sugarcane area"; a driver, or "sub-overseer," in a dark, damp and overgrown estate; and a reporter for "The Trinidad Sentinel". What ambition or resourcefulness Mr Biswas possesses is inevitably undermined by his dependence on his powerful in-laws and the vagaries of opportunity in a colonial society. His in-laws, the Tulsis, with whom he lives much of the time, are a large extended family, and are caricatured with great humour, and some unkindness, in the novel.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: There is a melancholic streak in Mr Biswas which makes him at times both purposeless and clumsy, but it also stirs flashes of anger and of sniping wit. Humour underpins the many tense relationships in the book. Eventually, as times change, as two of his children go abroad for college, and as ill-health overcomes him, he buys a house, with money borrowed from a friend, and moves into it with his wife and remaining children, and in small measure strikes out on his own before he dies at age 46. According to author Patrick French, "A House for Mr Biswas" is "universal in the way that the work of Dickens or Tolstoy is universal; the book makes no apologies for itself, and does not contextualize or exoticize its characters. It reveals a complete world."


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: The writing of the book consumed Naipaul. In 1983, he would write:The book took three years to write. It felt like a career; and there was a short period, towards the end of the writing, when I do believe I knew all or much of the book by heart. The labour ended; the book began to recede. And I found that I was unwilling to re-enter the world I had created, unwilling to expose myself again to the emotions that lay below the comedy. I became nervous of the book. I haven't read it since I passed the proofs in May 1961.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: The reviews of the book both in the British press and the Caribbean were generous. In "The Observer", Colin McInnes wrote that the book had the "unforced pace of a masterpiece: it is relaxed, yet on every page alert." Francis Wyndham, writing in the "London Magazine", suggested that the book was "one of the clearest and subtlest illustrations ever shown of the effects of colonialism ..." In his "Trinidad Guardian" review, Derek Walcott, judged Naipaul to be "one of the most mature of West Indian writers."


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In 2011, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of "A House for Mr Biswas", and ten years after Naipaul had won the Nobel Prize for literature, he dedicated the book to his late wife Patricia Anne Hale, who had died in 1996.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In September 1960, Naipaul was sounded out about visiting Trinidad as a guest of the government and giving a few lectures. The following month an invitation arrived offering an all-expenses-paid trip and a stipend. Naipaul and Pat, both exhausted after the completion of "A House for Mr Biswas", spent the next five months in the Caribbean. In Port-of-Spain, Naipaul was invited by Dr. Eric Williams, Premier of Trinidad and Tobago within the short-lived West Indies Federation, to visit other countries of the region and write a book on the Caribbean. "The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America", Naipaul's first work of travel writing, was the result. To gather material for the book, Naipaul and Pat traveled to British Guiana, Suriname, Martinique and Jamaica.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: The book begins with perceptive, lively, but unflattering and gratuitously descriptive portraits of the fellow passengers bound for Trinidad. Although he was later criticized for the insensitivity of these descriptions, he stood by his book, claiming it was "a very funny book," and that he was employing a form of irreverent West Indian humour. Naipaul does not attempt to be detached in the book, continually reminding the reader of his own ties to the region. For him, the West Indies are islands colonized only for the purpose of employing slaves for the production of other people's goods; he states, "The history of the islands can never be told satisfactorily. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies." As the narrative progresses, Naipaul becomes more sympathetic and insightful, noting that no African names remain on the islands; that slavery had engendered "self-contempt," impelling the descendants of the slaves to idealize European civilization and to look down on all others; and that the debasement of identity has created racial animosity and rivalry among the brutalized peoples. As Naipaul does not see nationalism as having taken root in these societies, only cults of personality, he does not celebrate the coming of independence, though he does not suggest a return to colonial subjecthood.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In early 1962, Naipaul and Pat, arrived in India for a year-long visit. It was Naipaul's first visit to the land of his ancestors. The title of the resulting book, "An Area of Darkness", was not so much a reference to India as to Naipaul's effort to understand India. Soon after arrival, Naipaul was overwhelmed by two sensations. First, for the first time in his life, he felt anonymous, even faceless. He was no longer identified, he felt, as part of a special ethnic group as he had in Trinidad or England and this made him anxious. Second, he was upset by what he saw was the resigned or evasive Indian reaction to poverty and suffering. After a month in Bombay and Delhi, Naipaul and Pat spent five months in Kashmir, staying in a lakeside hotel, "Hotel Liward," in Srinagar. Here, Naipaul was exceptionally productive. He wrote a novella "Mr. Stone and the Knight's Companion", set in London, and based, in part, on his experiences working for the Cement and Concrete Association, and, in part, on his relationship with Pat. He wrote a number of short stories which were eventually published in the collection "A Flag on the Island". His evolving relationship with the hotel manager, Mr. Butt, and especially his assistant, Mr. Aziz, became the subject of the middle section of "An Area of Darkness", Naipaul bringing his novelistic skills and economy of style to bear with good effect. During the rest of his stay, his frustration with some aspects of India mounted even as he felt attraction to other aspects. Gorakhpur, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, he wrote later, had "reduced him to the early-Indian stage of (his) hysteria." During his visit to his ancestral village, soon afterwards, Naipaul impatiently turned down a request for assistance and made a quick escape. But in a letter, he also wrote: "As you can imagine I fell in love with these beautiful people, their so beautiful women who have all the boldness and independence ... of Brahmin women ... and their enchanting fairy-tale village."


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Just before he left India, Naipaul was invited by the editor of the "Illustrated Weekly of India", a prominent, established, English-language magazine, to write a monthly "Letter from London" for the magazine. Naipaul accepted for a fee of £30 a letter. He wrote a monthly letter for the next two years. It would be the only time he would write regularly on the contemporary culture in England, his country of domicile. The topics included cricket, The Beatles, the Profumo affair, advertising in the London Tube, and the Queen.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul had spent an overwrought year in India. Back in London, after "An Area of Darkness" was completed, he felt creatively drained. He felt he had used up his Trinidad material. Neither India nor the writing of "Mr Stone and the Knight's Companion", his only attempt at a novel set in Britain with white British characters, had spurred new ideas for imaginative writing. His finances too were low, and Pat went back to teaching to supplement them. Naipaul's books had received much critical acclaim, but they were not yet money makers. Socially, he was now breaking away from the "Caribbean Voices" circle, but no doors had opened to mainstream British society.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: That changed when Naipaul was introduced to Antonia Fraser, at the time the wife of conservative politician Hugh Fraser. Fraser introduced Naipaul to her social circle of upper-class British politicians, writers, and performing artists. In this circle was the wealthy second Baron Glenconner, father of novelist Emma Tennant and owner of estates in Trinidad, who arranged for an unsecured loan of £7,200 for Naipaul. Naipaul and Pat bought a three-floor house on Stockwell Park Crescent.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In late 1964, Naipaul was asked to write an original script for an American movie. He spent the next few months in Trinidad writing the story, a novella named, "A Flag on the Island," later published in the collection, "A Flag on the Island". The finished version was not to the director's liking and the movie was never made. The story is set in the present time—1964—in a Caribbean island, which is not named. The main character is an American named "Frankie" who affects the mannerisms of Frank Sinatra. Frankie has links to the island from having served there during World War II. He revisits reluctantly when his ship anchors there during a hurricane. Naipaul wilfully makes the pace of the book feverish, the narrative haphazard, the characters loud, the protagonist fickle or deceptive, and the dialogue confusing. Balancing the present time is Frankie's less disordered, though comfortless, memory of 20 years before. Then he had become a part of a community on the island. He had tried to help his poor friends by giving away the ample US Army supplies he had. Not everyone was happy about receiving help and not everyone benefited. Frankie was left chastened about finding tidy solutions to the island's social problems. This theme, indirectly developed in the story, is one to which Naipaul would return again.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Not long after finishing "A Flag on the Island", Naipaul began work on the novel "The Mimic Men", though for almost a year he did not make significant progress. At the end of this period, he was offered a Writer-in-Residence fellowship at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. There, in early 1966, Naipaul, began to rewrite his material, and went on to complete the novel quickly. The finished novel broke new ground for him. Unlike his Caribbean work, it was not comic. It did not unfold chronologically. Its language was allusive and ironic, its overall structure whimsical. It had strands of both fiction and non-fiction, a precursor of other Naipaul novels. It was intermittently dense, even obscure, but it also had beautiful passages, especially descriptive ones of the fictional tropical island of Isabella. The subject of sex appeared explicitly for the first time in Naipaul's work. The plot, to the extent there is one, is centred around a protagonist, Ralph Singh, an East Indian-West Indian politician from Isabella. Singh is in exile in London and attempting to write his political memoirs. Earlier, in the immediate aftermath of decolonization in a number of British colonies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Singh had shared political power with a more powerful African Caribbean politician. Soon, the memoirs take on a more personal aspect. There are flashbacks to the formative and defining periods of Singh's life. In many of these, during crucial moments, whether during his childhood, married life, or political career, he appears to abandon engagement and enterprise. These, he rationalizes later, belong only to fully made European societies. When "The Mimic Men" was published, it received generally positive critical notice. In particular, Caribbean politicians, such as Michael Manley and Eric Williams weighed in, the latter writing, "V. S. Naipaul's description of West Indians as 'mimic men' is harsh but true ..."


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Back in London in October 1966, Naipaul received an invitation from the American publisher Little, Brown and Company to write a book on Port-of-Spain. The book took two years to write, its scope widening with time. "The Loss of El Dorado" eventually became a narrative history of Trinidad based on primary sources. Pat spent many months in the archives of the British Library reading those sources. In the end, the finished product was not to the liking of Little, Brown, which was expecting a guidebook. Alfred A. Knopf agreed to publish it instead in the United States as did Andre Deutsch later in Britain.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: "The Loss of El Dorado" is an attempt to ferret out an older, deeper, history of Trinidad, one preceding its commonly taught history as a British-run plantation economy of slaves and indentured workers. Central to Naipaul's history are two stories: the search for El Dorado, a Spanish obsession, in turn pursued by the British, and the British attempt to spark from their new colony of Trinidad, even as it was itself becoming mired in slavery, a revolution of lofty ideals in South America. Sir Walter Raleigh and Francisco Miranda would become the human faces of these stories. Although slavery is eventually abolished, the sought for social order slips away in the face of uncertainties created by changeable populations, languages, and governments and by the cruelties inflicted by the island's inhabitants on each other.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Before Naipaul began writing "The Loss of El Dorado", he had been unhappy with the political climate in Britain. He had been especially unhappy with the increasing public animosity, in the mid-1960s, towards Asian immigrants from Britain's ex-colonies. During the writing of the book, he and Pat sold their house in London, and led a transient life, successively renting or borrowing use of the homes of friends. After the book was completed, they travelled to Trinidad and Canada with a view to finding a location in which to settle. Naipaul had hoped to write a blockbuster, one relieving him of future money anxieties. As it turned out, "The Loss of El Dorado" sold only 3,000 copies in the US, where major sales were expected; Naipaul also missed England more than he had calculated. It was thus in a depleted state, both financial and emotional, that he returned to Britain.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Earlier, during their time in Africa, Naipaul and Pat had travelled to Kenya, staying for month in Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast. They had travelled in rural Uganda to Kisoro District on the south-western border with Rwanda and the Congo. Naipaul showed interest in the clans of the Bagandan people. When Uganda's prime minister Milton Obote overthrew their ruler, the Kabaka of Buganda, Naipaul was critical of the British press for not condemning the action enough. Naipaul also travelled to Tanzania with a young American he had met in Kampala, Paul Theroux. It was upon this African experience that Naipaul would draw during the writing of his next book, "In a Free State".


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In the title novella, 'In a Free State', at the heart of the book, two young expatriate Europeans drive across an African country, which remains nameless, but which offers clues of Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda. The novella speaks to many themes. The colonial era ends and Africans govern themselves. Political chaos, frequently violent, takes hold in newly decolonized countries. Young, idealistic, expatriate whites are attracted to these countries, seeking expanded moral and sexual freedoms. They are rootless, their bonds with the land tenuous; at the slightest danger they leave. The older, conservative, white settlers, by contrast, are committed to staying, even in the face of danger. The young expatriates, though liberal, can be racially prejudiced. The old settlers, unsentimental, sometimes brutal, can show compassion. The young, engrossed in narrow preoccupations, are uncomprehending of the dangers that surround them. The old are knowledgeable, armed, and ready to defend themselves. The events unfolding along the car trip and the conversation during it become the means of exploring these themes.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: The short life and career of Michael de Freitas, a Trinidadian immigrant in the London underworld of the late 1960s, who returned to Trinidad in the early 1970s as a Black Power activist, Michael X, exemplified the themes Naipaul had developed in "The Mimic Men" and "In a Free State".


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In late December 1971 as news of the killings at Michael X's commune in Arima filtered out, Naipaul, accompanied by Pat, arrived in Trinidad to cover the story. This was a time of strains in their marriage. Naipaul, although dependent on Pat, was frequenting prostitutes for sexual gratification. Pat was alone. Intensifying their disaffection was Pat's childlessness, for which neither Pat nor Naipaul sought professional treatment, preferring instead to say that fatherhood would not allow time for Naipaul's sustained literary labours. Naipaul was increasingly ill-humoured and infantile, and Pat increasingly reduced to mothering him. Pat began to keep a diary, a practice she would continue for the next 25 years. According to biographer Patrick French, "Pat's diary is an essential, unparalleled record of V. S. Naipaul's later life and work, and reveals more about the creation of his subsequent books, and her role in their creation, than any other source. It puts Patricia Naipaul on a par with other great, tragic, literary spouses such as Sonia Tolstoy, Jane Carlyle and Leonard Woolf."


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul visited the commune in Arima and Pat attended the trial. Naipaul's old friend Wyndham Lewis who was now editor of the Sunday Times offered to run the story in his newspaper. Around the same time Naipaul received an invitation from Robert B. Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books to do some stories on Argentina. The Review, still in its first decade after founding, was short of funds and Silvers had to borrow money from a friend to fund Naipaul's trip.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In 1974, Naipaul wrote the novel "Guerrillas", following a creative slump that lasted several years. "A Bend in the River", published in 1979, marks the beginning of his exploration of native historical traditions, deviating from his usual "New World" examinations. Naipaul also covered the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, at the behest of Robert B. Silvers, editor of "The New York Review of Books", after which Naipaul wrote "Among the Republicans", an anthropological study of a "white tribe in the United States".


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In his 1998 non-fiction book "", Naipaul argued that Islam is a form of Arab imperialism that destroys other cultures.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul continued to write non-fiction works, his last being "The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief " (2010), written following the author's trips to Africa in 2008–09. The book explores indigenous religious beliefs and rituals, where Naipaul portrays the countries he visited in real life as bleak, and the people primitive.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: During his first trip to Argentina, in 1972, Naipaul met and began an affair with Margaret Murray Gooding, a married Anglo-Argentine mother of three. He revealed his affair to his wife one year after it began, telling her that he had never been sexually satisfied in their relationship. In Patrick French's biography, Naipaul recounts his domestic abuse towards Margaret: "I was very violent with her for two days with my hand ... She thought of it in terms of my passion for her ... My hand was swollen." French writes that the "cruelty [for Naipaul] was part of the attraction". He moved between both women for the next 24 years.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In 1995, as he was travelling through Indonesia with Gooding, his wife Patricia was hospitalized with cancer. She died the following year. Within two months of her death, Naipaul ended his affair with Gooding and married Nadira Alvi, a divorced Pakistani journalist more than 20 years his junior. He had met her at the home of the American consul-general in Lahore. In 2003, he adopted Nadira's daughter, Maleeha, who was then 25.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul's brother, Shiva Naipaul, was a novelist and journalist. Shiva died in 1985 at the age of 40.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul died at his home in London on 11 August 2018. Before dying he read and discussed Lord Tennyson's poem "Crossing the Bar" with those at his bedside. His funeral took place at Kensal Green Cemetery.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: In awarding Naipaul the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." The Committee added: "Naipaul is a modern "philosopher" carrying on the tradition that started originally with "Lettres persanes" and "Candide". In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony." The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the novelist Joseph Conrad:


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul's fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. The novelist Robert Harris has called Naipaul's portrayal of Africa racist and "repulsive," reminiscent of Oswald Mosley's fascism. Edward Said argued that Naipaul "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting what Said classified as "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies". Said believed that Naipaul's worldview may be most salient in his book-length essay "The Middle Passage" (1962), composed following Naipaul's return to the Caribbean after 10 years of exile in England, and the work "An Area of Darkness" (1964).


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul was accused of misogyny, and of having committed acts of "chronic physical abuse" against his mistress of 25 years, Margaret Murray, who wrote in a letter to "The New York Review of Books": "Vidia says I didn't mind the abuse. I certainly did mind."


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Writing in "The New York Review of Books" about Naipaul in 1980, Joan Didion offered the following portrayal of the writer:


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Nissim Ezekiel wrote the 1984 essay "Naipaul's India and Mine" as a reply to Naipaul's "An Area of Darkness".


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Fouad Ajami rejected the central thesis of Naipaul's 1998 book "Beyond Belief", that Islam is a form of Arab imperialism that destroys other cultures. He pointed to the diversity of Islamic practices across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: Naipaul was awarded the Booker Prize for "In a Free State" in 1971. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1983.


title: V. S. Naipaul

text: He was awarded the Trinity Cross in 1990. He was also made a Knight Bachelor in the 1990 New Year Honours. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.


title: Michaela Watkins

text: Michaela Suzanne Watkins (born December 14, 1971) is an American actress and comedian. She is best known for starring on the Hulu series "Casual" and on the short-lived sitcoms "The Unicorn" and "Trophy Wife", as well as being a cast member on "Saturday Night Live" from 2008 to 2009. She has also recurred on television series such as "The New Adventures of Old Christine", ""Catastrophe"", "Enlightened" and "Search Party" and appeared in films such as "The Back-up Plan" (2010), "Wanderlust" (2012), "Enough Said" (2013) and "Sword of Trust" (2019).


title: Michaela Watkins

text: Watkins was born in Syracuse, New York, the daughter of former Latin teacher mother Myrna Watkins and Syracuse University mathematician father Mark Watkins. She has two sisters, Rebecca Kent and Sarah Fitts.


title: Michaela Watkins

text: Watkins was raised in DeWitt, New York, a suburb of Syracuse, in a Jewish family. After her parents' divorce, Watkins' mother obtained a marketing degree and relocated the family to Boston when Watkins was 15.


title: Michaela Watkins

text: Watkins attended Moses DeWitt Elementary School and Wellesley High School in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She graduated from Boston University, where she studied theater and acting. Watkins auditioned for a part in a British farce at a community theater when she was 15, and got the part. Joan Rivers was one of her inspirations to go into show business.


title: Michaela Watkins

text: After theater school, Watkins lived and worked in New York City for a year but struggled to build her career. She moved with a friend to Portland, Oregon. She lived there from 1996–2000 and appeared onstage with Portland Center Stage and the defunct improv group Toad City Productions. She traveled around the country doing regional theater, then decided to move to Los Angeles.


title: Michaela Watkins

text: She was active in Los Angeles Theatre for many years, taking on roles with Circle X Theatre and 2100 Square Feet.


title: Michaela Watkins

text: She became a regular performer at The Groundlings, where she was discovered by "Saturday Night Live". Watkins said the appeal of sketch work is that she can write her own material.


title: Michaela Watkins

text: In November 2008, Watkins joined the cast of "Saturday Night Live" ("SNL"). Watkins said (at that time) that she was the oldest woman they ever hired. Watkins has since been surpassed by Leslie Jones, who was 47 when she joined "SNL". Watkins made her first major appearance on the show as Arianna Huffington on the November 22nd Weekend Update. Watkins remained on "SNL" as a featured player throughout the rest of the 2008-2009 season, up to the season finale on May 16, 2009.


title: Michaela Watkins

text: However, while "SNL" was on summer hiatus, the news broke in early September 2009 that Watkins, along with fellow castmate Casey Wilson, were both to be let go from the show and would not be returning for the 2009-10 season.


title: Michaela Watkins

text: She recurred as Lucy opposite Hamish Linklater in the sitcom "The New Adventures of Old Christine", as well as appearing in recurring roles in the comedy programs "Enlightened", "New Girl", and "Anger Management". She has also made guest appearances on shows such as "Hung", "Childrens Hospital", "Kroll Show", "Key & Peele", "Curb Your Enthusiasm", and "Modern Family".


title: Michaela Watkins

text: Watkins also starred alongside Malin Åkerman, Bradley Whitford, and Marcia Gay Harden in the short-lived, but well-received ABC sitcom "Trophy Wife". The series aired for one season from September 2013 to May 2014.


title: Michaela Watkins

text: In 2015, it was announced that Watkins would star in the Hulu series produced by Jason Reitman called "Casual", which would be executive produced by Liz Tigelaar.


title: Michaela Watkins

text: In 2018, she recurred on season two of the Amazon Prime series "Catastrophe", playing the sister of lead character Rob Norris (Rob Delaney). From 2019 to 2021, she has co-starred on the CBS sitcom "The Unicorn".


title: Michaela Watkins

text: Watkins co-created (with writing partner and fellow Groundling, Damon Jones) the short-lived 2014 USA Network comedy series "Benched." The series starred Eliza Coupe and Jay Harrington and premiered on October 28, 2014. Watkins and Jones were also executive producers on the show.


title: Michaela Watkins

text: Watkins has appeared in supporting roles in films such as "Enough Said", "In a World...", "Afternoon Delight", "The Back-Up Plan", "Wanderlust", "They Came Together" and "Lazy Eye".


title: Michaela Watkins

text: In 2020, Watkins appeared in the supporting role of Irene O'Connor in the musical podcast "In Strange Woods".


title: Michaela Watkins

text: Watkins is married to Fred Kramer, who is a founding partner of Reason Ventures and General Manager of Critical Mass Studios, Inc. Kramer used to be Executive Director of the Jewish World Watch organization, a Los Angeles-based anti-genocide non-profit, focused on the situations in Sudan and Congo.


title: HAL TEDBF

text: The HAL Twin Engine Deck Based Fighter (TEDBF) is a canard delta wing, twin-engine, carrier-based, multirole combat aircraft currently under development for the Indian Navy. The TEDBF is being designed and developed by the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA), and will be manufactured by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL). The TEDBF is intended to perform a multitude of missions, including air supremacy, air interdiction, anti-access/area denial (A2/AD), anti-ship warfare (ASW) and electronic warfare (EW) missions. The TEDBF is expected to replace the Mikoyan MiG-29K onboard the and the .


title: HAL TEDBF

text: The programme was officially announced in 2020, in response to the Indian Navy's dissatisfaction in operating a single-engine carrier-based fighter based on the HAL Tejas, and its eventual withdrawal from the naval LCA programme in 2016. A model of the aircraft was displayed at Aero India 2021. The first flight is expected to be in 2026, with production planned for 2031.


title: HAL TEDBF

text: The design's twin engines are expected to allow shorter take-offs from the Indian Navy’s Short Take-Off Barrier Arrested Recovery (STOBAR) aircraft carriers. As a dedicated deck-based fighter, it will feature foldable wings for more compact storage. The TEDBF will predominantly be equipped with indigenous weapons systems.


title: HAL TEDBF

text: The naval LCA programme to develop a carrier-based fighter for the Indian Navy was launched in 2003. The ADA was entrusted with the task of designing and developing a new naval fighter based on the existing Tejas template. The programme was envisaged to be completed in two phases - in the first phase, two prototypes were to be built, based on the Tejas Mk. 1 design. In the second phase, two more prototypes were to be built based on the Tejas Mk. 2 design. The programme was jointly funded by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and the Indian Navy, with the latter funding 40% and 60% of the developmental cost of naval LCA Mk. 1 and Mk. 2, respectively. In 2009, the Cabinet Committee on Security approved the development of Mk. 2 variant of the naval LCA. The first naval prototype, a two-seater NP-1, was rolled out in 2010, and first flew on 27 April 2012. By 2015, another naval LCA prototype, a single seater NP-2, had joined the programme, and carried out first ski jump assisted take off from a shore-based test facility (SBTF) in Goa. In December 2016, the Indian Navy opted out of the programme completely, with the cited reason being that the nav variant was 'overweight', and issued a fresh RFI for the immediate procurement of 57 Multi-Role Carrier Borne Fighters (MRCBF). The stalled programme was revived once again in 2018, under the oversight of the then defence minister, Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman. The flight tests were resumed with NP-1 and NP-2 for attaining technological maturity of the carrier based fighter. By early 2020, the naval LCA had successfully carried out night-time arrested landing at the Goa SBTF, and carrier landing and take off on the aircraft carrier .


title: HAL TEDBF

text: In April 2020, the ADA announced work on a new naval fighter based on the Indian Navy's MRCBF 2016 requirement to replace the existing fleet of Mikoyan MiG-29K carrier-based fighters. The new naval fighter unveiled at the Aero India airshow 2021 turned out to be of a twin engine, medium weight class fighter, now called Twin Engine Deck Based Fighter (TEDBF). The experience gained in the Naval LCA (N-LCA) programme is expected to help in the development of the TEDBF.


title: HAL TEDBF

text: Government of India approved the TEDBF project in mid-2020. The aircraft will have canards to increase the lifting surface area, and will employ two General Electric F414 engines. The first flight is expected in 2026. According to Project Director TV Vinod Kumar, the estimated cost of four prototypes will be ₹14,000 crore. ADA is looking for joint development with Indian private sector. Indian Navy is planning the induction from 2032 when Mikoyan MiG-29K will start retiring. Upon induction of INS Vishal, TEDBF will be modified for Catapult Assisted Take-Off Barrier Arrested Recovery (CATOBAR) operations. As an interim measure, Navy will procure Rafale M or Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet until TEDBF is ready. Due to the TEDBF project, the Indian Navy reduced their orders for foreign fighters from 57 aircraft to 26, including trainer variants.


title: HAL TEDBF

text: A proposed air force variant of the TEDBF design, called the Omni-Role Combat Aircraft (ORCA) is also under study. The Indian Air Force is expected to need more than 750 aircraft between 2030 and 2050. ORCA, if funded, would be developed in parallel to the HAL AMCA. ADA will submit Preliminary Design Review on Q2 2023. The prototype will take 1,000 flights during test phase. TEDBF is undergoing wind-tunnel testing. DRDO is conducting high speed modelling to test the supersonic characteristics using internal funds.


title: W3Schools

text: W3Schools is a freemium educational website for learning coding online. Initially released in 1998, it derives its name from the World Wide Web but is not affiliated with the W3 Consortium. W3Schools offers courses covering all aspects of web development. W3Schools also publishes free HTML templates. It is run by Refsnes Data in Norway. It has an online text editor called TryIt Editor, and readers can edit examples and run the code in a test environment.


title: W3Schools

text: On the site, source code examples with explanations are shown free of charge in English, most of which can also be edited and executed interactively in a live editor. Other important code elements are hidden so that the user can focus on the code shown (developer sandbox). The tutorials are divided into individual chapters on the development languages. In addition to the basics, application-related implementation options and examples, as well as a focus on individual elements of the programming language (so-called "references") are documented. In addition, there is a YouTube channel, which takes up and explains certain topics in web development, and an Internet forum. The languages HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, PHP, AngularJS, SQL, Bootstrap, Node.js, jQuery, XQuery, Ajax, and XML are supported.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: The Cherokee Nation (Cherokee: ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ "Tsalagihi Ayeli" or ᏣᎳᎩᏰᎵ "Tsalagiyehli"), also known as the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is the largest of three Cherokee federally recognized tribes in the United States. It was established in the 20th century and includes people descended from members of the Old Cherokee Nation who relocated, due to increasing pressure, from the Southeast to Indian Territory and Cherokee who were forced to relocate on the Trail of Tears. The tribe also includes descendants of Cherokee Freedmen, Absentee Shawnee, and Natchez Nation. As of 2021, over 400,000 people were enrolled in the Cherokee Nation.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: Headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation has a reservation spanning 14 counties in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma. These are Adair, Cherokee, Craig, Delaware, Mayes, McIntosh, Muskogee, Nowata, Ottawa, Rogers, Sequoyah, Tulsa, Wagoner, and Washington counties.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: During 1898–1906, beginning with the Curtis Act of 1898, the United States federal government all but dissolved the former Cherokee Nation's governmental and civic institutions, to make way for the incorporation of Indian Territory into the new state of Oklahoma. From 1906 to 1938, the structure and function of the tribal government was not clearly defined. After the dissolution of the tribal government of the Cherokee Nation in the 1900s and the death of William Charles Rogers in 1917, the Federal government began to appoint chiefs to the Cherokee Nation in 1919. The service time for each appointed chief was so brief that it became known as "Chief for a Day". Six men fell under this category, the first being A. B. Cunningham who served from November 8 to November 25. The short service times were often just long enough to have one sign a treaty, usually to cede more land.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: In the 1930s, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration worked to improve conditions by supporting the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which encouraged tribes to reconstitute their governments and write constitutions. On August 8, 1938, the tribe convened a general convention in Fairfield, Oklahoma to elect a Chief. They choose J. B. Milam as principal chief. President Franklin D. Roosevelt confirmed the election in 1941. W. W. Keeler was appointed chief in 1949. After the U.S. government under President Richard Nixon had adopted a self-determination policy, the nation was able to rebuild its government. The people elected W. W. Keeler as chief. Keeler, who was also the president of Phillips Petroleum, was succeeded by Ross Swimmer. In 1975, the tribe drafted a constitution, under the name Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, which was ratified on June 26, 1976. The tribe has also conducted litigation using this name. In 1985 Wilma Mankiller was elected as the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: The Cherokee Nation was seriously destabilized in May 1997 in what was variously described as either a nationalist "uprising" or an "anti-constitutional coup" instigated by Joe Byrd, the Principal Chief. Elected in 1995, Byrd became locked in a battle of strength with the judicial branch of the Cherokee tribe. The crisis came to a head on March 22, 1997, when Byrd said in a press conference that he would decide which orders of the Cherokee Nation's Supreme Court were lawful and which were not.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: A simmering crisis continued over Byrd's creation of a private, armed paramilitary force. On June 20, 1997, his private militia illegally seized custody of the Cherokee Nation Courthouse from its legal caretakers and occupants, the Cherokee Nation Marshals, the Judicial Appeals Tribunal, and its court clerks. They ousted the lawful occupants at gunpoint. Immediately the court demanded that the courthouse be returned to the judicial branch of the Cherokee Nation, but these requests were ignored by Byrd. The Federal authorities of the United States initially refused to intervene because of potential breach of tribal sovereignty.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: The State of Oklahoma recognized that Byrd's activities were breaches in state law. By August 1997, it sent in state troopers and specialist anti-terrorist teams. Byrd was required to attend a meeting in Washington, DC with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, at which he was compelled to reopen the courts. He served the remainder of his elected term. In 1999, Byrd lost the election for Principal Chief to Chad Smith but was elected to the Tribal Council in 2013.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: A new constitution was drafted in 1999 that included mechanisms for voters to remove officials from offices, changed the structure of the tribal council, and removed the need to ask the Bureau of Indian Affairs' permission to amend the constitution. The tribe and Bureau of Indian Affairs negotiated changes to the new constitution and it was ratified in 2003. Confusion resulted when the US Secretary of the Interior would not approve it. To overcome the impasse, the Cherokee Nation voted by referendum to amend its 1975/1976 Constitution "to remove Presidential approval authority," allowing the tribe to independently ratify and amend its own constitution. As of August 9, 2007, the BIA gave the Cherokee Nation consent to amend its Constitution without approval from the Department of the Interior. Certain non-Cherokee groups contest the viability of this constitution.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: The Cherokee freedmen, descendants of African American slaves owned by citizens of the Cherokee Nation during the Antebellum Period, were first guaranteed Cherokee citizenship under a new treaty made in 1866 with the United States. This was in the wake of the American Civil War, when the US emancipated slaves passed a constitutional amendment granting freedmen citizenship in the United States. In reaching peace with the Cherokee, who had sided with the Confederates, the US government required that they end slavery and grant full citizenship to freedmen living within their nation. Those who left could become United States citizens. However, despite "the promises of the 1866 treaty, the freedmen were never fully accepted as citizens of the Cherokee Nation" during the 19th and 20th centuries. A sizable number of Freedmen "were ignorant of the treaty clause which provided for their right of incorporation into the tribe."


title: Cherokee Nation

text: In practice, enrollment in the Cherokee Nation rolls was often strongly influenced by race. During creation of the Dawes Rolls prior to allotment of tribal communal lands to households, many freedmen and Afro-Cherokee were listed separately from Cherokee by blood, regardless of their ancestry or culture. As a result, they did not receive land allotments and later were for a time excluded from tribal membership.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: In the 20th century, the Cherokee passed a law to limit membership to descendants of those listed as "Cherokee by blood" on the Dawes Rolls, excluding numerous African Americans and Afro-Cherokee who had been members of the tribe. In a recognition of Cherokee sovereignty, in 1988 the federal court in the Freedmen case of "Nero v. Cherokee Nation" held that the Cherokee Nation could legally determine its own citizenship requirements, even if that meant excluding descendants of freedmen who had formerly been considered citizens.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: But on March 7, 2006, the Cherokee Nation Judicial Appeal Tribunal ruled that the Cherokee Freedmen were eligible for Cherokee citizenship. The Cherokee Freedman had historically been recorded as "citizens" of the Cherokee Nation since 1866, and their ancestors were recorded on the Dawes Commission Land Rolls (although generally in the category of Cherokee Freedmen, even if they qualified as "Cherokee by blood", as many did.) The ruling "did not limit membership to people possessing Cherokee blood," as some freedmen and their descendants had never intermarried with Cherokee. This ruling was consistent with the 1975 Constitution of the Cherokee Nation, in its acceptance of the Cherokee Freedmen on the basis of historical citizenship based on the Dawes Rolls, rather than documented blood relation. Well-known genealogist, historian, and Freedmen advocate David Cornsilk notes that other historical citizenship bases are still excluded to this day (such as an ancestor tied to an older roll). The Constitution had always restricted elected governmental positions to persons of Cherokee blood.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: On May 15, 2007, the Cherokee Nation Tribal Courts reinstated the Cherokee Freedmen as citizens while appeals were pending in the Cherokee Nation Courts and Federal Court. On May 22, 2007, the Cherokee Nation received notice from the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs that the BIA and Federal Government had denied the amendment to the 1975 Cherokee Nation Constitution because it required BIA approval, which had not been obtained. The BIA also noted that the Cherokee Nation had excluded the Cherokee Freedmen from voting on the amendment. On this issue, the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruled that the Cherokee Nation could take away the approval authority which it had previously granted the federal government. Pending the resolution of litigation, the Cherokee Freedman had all rights as full Cherokee Nation citizens, including voting rights and access to tribal services. In early 2011, the tribal district court ruled that the special election in 2007 on the constitutional amendment was unconstitutional, as it excluded Freedmen from voting. The Nation appealed. On August 22, 2011, the Cherokee Supreme Court upheld the results of the 2007 special election. Chuck Trimble, a former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, characterized the decision as the "Cherokee Dred Scott Decision", for depriving a group of citizenship.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: At the same time, the Cherokee Supreme Court ordered a special run-off election to be held September 24, 2011 to settle the office of Principal Chief. Earlier voting in this year's election had been so close that the incumbent Chad Smith and challenger Bill John Baker, longtime Cherokee National Council member, had each twice been declared the winner. On September 11, the Nation sent letters to Freedmen, notifying them of their loss of citizenship and voting rights. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development froze $33 million in funds to the Cherokee Nation while studying the case, pursuant to a stipulation in the 2008 congressional renewal of Self-Determination Act. On September 13, 2011, the Department of the Interior strongly urged the Cherokee Nation to restore voting rights and benefits to descendants of Cherokee Freedmen, including the right to vote in the special election for principal chief, at the risk of violating its constitution and the US Constitution. On September 14, the Cherokee AG recommended reinstatement of the Freedmen, pending a hearing for oral arguments. On September 20, Judge Henry Kennedy of the US District Court announced the Cherokee Nation, Freedmen plaintiffs and US government had come to an agreement in a preliminary hearing to allow the Freedmen to vote, with voting to continue through October 5 if necessary. On August 30, 2017, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the Freedmen descendants and the U.S. Department of the Interior, granting the Freedmen descendants full rights to citizenship in the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee Nation has accepted this decision, effectively ending the dispute.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: In 2021, the Cherokee Nation's Supreme Court ruled to remove the words "by blood" from its constitution and other legal doctrines because "[t]he words, added to the constitution in 2007, have been used to exclude Black people whose ancestors were enslaved by the tribe from obtaining full Cherokee Nation citizenship rights." However, all citizenship is still based on finding an ancestor tied to the Dawes Rolls, which is not without its own controversy apart from blood quantum. Some people of descent are still excluded, like the author Shonda Buchanan who states in her memoir "Black Indian" that she has ancestors on Cherokee Rolls that were not the Dawes, so would thus still not be recognized. The changes to the Cherokee Nation constitution are still being challenged after the change, most recently by Robin Mayes who appealed for a new election.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: On September 13, 2021, Marilyn Vann became the first Cherokee Freedmen descendant to be confirmed to a Cherokee government commission when she was appointed to the Environmental Protection Commission by Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr..


title: Cherokee Nation

text: On June 14, 2004, the Cherokee Nation Tribal Council voted to officially define marriage as a union between a woman and man, thereby excluding same-sex marriage. This decision came in response to an application by a lesbian couple submitted on May 13. The decision kept Cherokee law in line with Oklahoma state law, which in 2004 passed a referendum on a constitutional amendment excluding gay marriage as legal. On December 9, 2016, same-sex marriage was legalized through an opinion by Todd Hembree, the Cherokee Nation's attorney general. In the opinion, Hembree stated that the 2004 law violated the Cherokee Constitution, which requires equal treatment of tribal citizens. He issued the opinion because the director of the tribe's tax commission sought a decision as to whether the tribe could issue a vehicle tag to a same-sex couple married outside the tribe's jurisdiction.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: On July 9, 2020, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 5–4 decision that the original treaties, and promise of a reservation, with the Five Civilized Tribes (specifically the Muscogee in "McGirt v. Oklahoma") were never withdrawn. This decision restored the reservation status of the Cherokee Nation and, as such, relinquished legal jurisdiction from the State of Oklahoma of Native American citizens on the previously designated land. The majority opinion was held by justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Neil Gorsuch.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr. said: "We have long held that Cherokee Nation has a reservation, rooted in our treaties, as the Supreme Court of the United States has now affirmed" and "This proposed legislation will cement our reservation boundaries and the broad tribal jurisdiction the Supreme Court recognized in the McGirt decision. We will continue to work with the state of Oklahoma and our federal partners to ensure the safety of the public." The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians claims it has rights to the reservation as well as a "successor of interest" because the original Cherokee Nation was "sunset" after "the last of its original members who signed the Dawes Roll died in 2012 at age 107." Thus stating that the current organization is no longer the same tribe that made the agreements with the federal government, it is only a "successor" like the UKB are.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: The COVID-19 pandemic struck the Cherokee Nation hard in 2020. Hundreds of Cherokees lost their lives under the pandemic. On March 18, 2021, the Cherokee Nation held a memorial to remember those Cherokees lost to the virus. The memorial honored 107 Cherokees including more than 50 Cherokee first-language speaking elders.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: On August 3, 2021, the Cherokee Nation Health Services suspended elective surgeries after experiencing an 80% increase in COVID-19 cases. It also activated its "surge plan" for W.W. Hastings Hospital in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The "surge plan" increases the in-patient capacity of the hospital by 50% by reallocating non-Intensive Care Unit space to emergency room space. The COVID-19 delta variant accounted for 80% of new cases in the nation.<ref name="TW-3/8/21"></ref>


title: Cherokee Nation

text: As of 2018, 360,589 people were enrolled in the Cherokee Nation as citizens. Citizens live in every state, with 2018 populations of 240,417 in Oklahoma, 22,124 in California, 18,406 in Texas, 12,734 in Arkansas, 11,014 in Kansas, and less than 10,000 in each other state. By 2021, enrollment reached 400,000, making the Cherokee Nation the second most populous tribe, closely behind the Navajo Nation. About 140,000 citizens live in the Cherokee Nation reservation area.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: To be considered a citizen in the Cherokee Nation, an individual needs a direct ancestor listed on the Dawes Rolls as a citizen of the Nation, whether as a Cherokee Indian or as one of the Cherokee Freedmen. The tribe has members who also have some degree of African, Latino, Asian, European, and other ancestries. In the case of the Cherokee Freedmen, members may be predominantly or wholly African American. Members of the Natchez Nation joined the Cherokee Nation, as did other southeastern tribes in the 18th century. Unlike the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians (UKB), blood quantum is not a factor in Cherokee Nation tribal citizenship eligibility. Neither is race, though race came into play when creating the Dawes Roll, where legitimate "Cherokee citizens of mixed blood who could get away with it were enrolled as less Cherokee than they really were in order to be able to sell or least their land sooner" and some "whites without a legitimate claim were falsely enrolled." Author Robert J. Conley has critiqued the use of the Dawes Roll to determine membership, stating that at one point he was only a registered voter in the Nation but did not actually hold a CDIB card as required by the nation, leading him to leave the tribe for the UKB, which required less "documentation" at the time, but still required blood quantum. Conley condemns the Dawes Rolls for "being inefficient, faulty, even fraudulent" and stating that if "the Cherokee Nation is really serious about exercising its sovereignty and determining its membership," then it should not use the roll that "was put together by the U.S. government and then closed by the U.S. government," meaning that the nation is "not allowed to have [a current roll] by the U.S. Congress" and therefore is still subject to the settler definitions of its members. Scholars like Osage Nation member Tink Tinker, critique tribes for functioning like a state, labeling it a "European construct" and wishing tribes would turn their attention from "reforming the state to (re)building the ‘small, local, autonomous communities’ that flourished around the world prior to 1492." They believe that this "would allow actual indigenous sovereignty and self-determination" and that "history tells us that nations and peoples can be organized in multiple and overlapping ways. Territories have long been shared between peoples, and individuals have often identified themselves within networks of relationships rather than as subjects of a particular state sovereign." Basing citizenship off the Dawes Rolls and other rolls is what scholar Fay A. Yarbrough calls "dramatically different from older conceptions of Cherokee identity based on clan relationship’s, in which individuals could be fully Cherokee without possessing any Cherokee ancestry" and that by the tribe later "developing a quantifiable definition of Cherokee identity based on ancestry", this "would dramatically affect the process of enrollment late in the nineteenth century and the modern procedure of obtaining membership in the Cherokee Nation, both of which require tracing and individuals’ lineage to a ‘Cherokee by blood.’" Thus, the Dawes Roll itself still upholds "by blood" language and theory. Mark Edwin Miller acknowledges in his work that many of descent people left the tribes and "assimilated into existing, non-tribal (if also nonwhite) communities," and thus, without a tribe, cannot be recognized by the BIA. Miller also states that even "so-called purely ‘descendancy’ tribes such as the Five Tribes with no blood quantum requirement jealously guard some proven, documentary link by blood to distant ancestors. More than any single BIA requirement, however, this criterion has proven troublesome for southeastern groups [seeking federal recognition] because of its reliance on non-Indian records and the confused (and confusing) nature of surviving documents." The Cherokee have opposed recognition for other tribes, such as the Lumbee.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: The Cherokee Nation instigated a 10-year language preservation plan that involved developing new fluent speakers of the Cherokee language from childhood on up through school immersion programs, as well as a collaborative community effort to use the language at home. This plan was part of an ambitious goal so that in 50 years, 80% or more of the Cherokee people will be fluent in the language. The Cherokee Preservation Foundation has invested $3 million into opening schools, training teachers, and developing curricula for language education, as well as initiating community gatherings where the language can be used.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: Formed in 2006, the Kituwah Preservation & Education Program (KPEP) of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, located on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina, focuses on language immersion programs for children from birth to fifth grade. It is also developing cultural resources for the general public and community language programs to foster use of the Cherokee language among adults.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: A Cherokee language immersion school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma educates students from pre-school through eighth grade.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: Several universities offer Cherokee as a second language, including the University of Oklahoma, Northeastern State University, and Western Carolina University. Western Carolina University (WCU) has partnered with the federally recognized Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) to promote and restore the language through the school's Cherokee Studies program. It offers classes in and about the language and culture of the Cherokee Indians. WCU and the EBCI have initiated a ten-year language revitalization plan consisting of: (1) a continuation of the improvement and expansion of the EBCI Atse Kituwah Cherokee Language Immersion School, (2) continued development of Cherokee language learning resources, and (3) building a Western Carolina University programs to offer a more comprehensive language training curriculum.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: On November 30, 2020, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma unveiled plans for the new Durbin Feeling Language Center, a converted casino that will house all of the tribe's language programs under one roof in Tahlequah. The project includes five nearby houses in which native speakers will be invited to live, to facilitate interaction between native speakers and others at the facility.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: The Cherokee Nation has legislative, executive and judicial branches with executive power vested in the Principal Chief, legislative power in the Tribal Council, and judicial power in the Tribal Supreme Court. The Principal Chief, Deputy Chief, and Tribal Council are elected to four-year terms by the registered tribal voters over the age of 18.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: The Nation's current system of government was established by the constitution of 1999, which was adopted by tribal citizens in 2003, and implemented in 2006. Every 20 years, the constitution requires a vote among tribal members, to decide whether a new constitutional convention should be held.


title: Cherokee Nation

text: The Congress of the United States, the federal courts, and state courts have repeatedly upheld the sovereignty of Native Tribes, defining their relationship in political rather than racial terms, and have stated it is a compelling interest of the United States. This principle of self-government and tribal sovereignty is controversial. According to the Boston College sociologist and Cherokee, Eva Marie Garroutte, up to 32 separate definitions of "Indian" are used in federal legislation, as of a 1978 congressional survey. The 1994 Federal Legislation AIRFA (American Indian Religious Freedom Act) defines an Indian as one who belongs to an Indian Tribe, which is a group that "is recognized as eligible for the special programs and services provided by the United States to Indians because of their status as Indians."