When Nobel Literature Prize winner VS Naipaul first wrote The Overcrowded Barracoon in 1972, portraying Mauritius as a stinky hell-hole, his whole anthology was promptly banned by the Labour government. There is an embattled Labour government back in power, still busy muzzling free expression. But VS Naipaul could not have foreseen advertising execs turning Mauritius into ‘paradise’, nor the IMF/World Bank branding it a ‘success story’, nor Mauritius conceivably becoming the ‘biggest investor in India’.
Strangely, all four portrayals contain both truth and lies. Mauritius is like that. Contradictions and extremes.
