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Abstract
A “transplanted colonial nostalgia” for rural England was imposed through colonialism, while erasing the fact that the English countryside was materially maintained on the back of the profits of the plantation economy. The Enigma of Arrival combines elements of fiction and of non-fiction, and blends autobiography with material not directly concerned with the personality of the author. It interweaves a description of Naipaul’s development as a writer with a detailed narrative of rebirth in the Wiltshire countryside, in the course of which the lives of the local inhabitants are subjected to Naipaul’s intense and wondering scrutiny. The Enigma of Arrival is read as a dialogue of past and present selves, and is compared with other narratives of colonial migration to the metropolis, and with Naipaul’s other accounts of his life. The present paper is a comprehensive attempt to explore Naipaul’s idea of “identity” that is sometimes inherent in the scheme of things at social, political and even at psychic level. In the novel The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul establishes that historically when different culture and communities becomes antagonistic to each other.