I have divided the 1970s writings into two sections: the first section deals with In a Free State, the Black Power Movement, ‘Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad’ and Guerrillas; the second section deals with the impact of the Black Power Movement on Naipaul’s writings with a focus on The Return of Eva Perón, India: A Wounded Civilization and A Bend in the River. The 1970s saw Naipaul establish himself as an independent writer with a steady income and readership in England and America. The readership in the Caribbean remained steady but small. Political unrest in Trinidad that finally took the shape of the Black Power Movement had many political and cultural ramifications. It had a personal dimension for Naipaul and his relationship with Trinidad. There are clear indications that Naipaul began to feel alienated from the Trinidad he knew as a child.

The 1970s were also undoubtedly the busiest, controversial, yet most rewarding time for V. S. Naipaul. In 1970, the Trinidad government awarded him the Hummingbird Gold Medal. In 1971, Naipaul received the Booker Prize for In a Free State. The advent of the new academic disciplines of Commonwealth Literatures and/or New Literatures in English at British universities and other places established Naipaul as a writer of repute. His popularity in academic and intellectual circles led to many book-length studies being written about him. At least six book-length studies, Paul Theroux’s V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to his Works (1972), William Walsh’s V. S. Naipaul (1973), R. K. Morris’s Paradoxes of Order: Some Perspectives on the Fiction of V. S. Naipaul (1975), Landeg White’s V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (1975) and Robert Hamner’s V. S. Naipaul (1973) and Critical Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul (1977) further established his stature within English literature. In 1977, V. S. Naipaul switched publishers, choosing Secker and Warburg with Gillon Aitken as his agent. After all, he was aware that Paul Theroux and even his younger brother, Shiva Naipaul, had received better remunerations for their first books. But he was unhappy with the new publisher for calling him a West Indian writer and returned to Deutsch later.