Mumbai, Nov. 3: A scathing attack by Girish Karnad on V.S. Naipaul has brought the MumLitfest to life and divided India’s literati.

Karnad today found support from several celebrated authors after slamming Naipaul yesterday for his “rabid antipathy to the Indian Muslim” and asking why the festival had bestowed a lifetime achievement award on him. Naipaul had left after receiving the award on Thursday.

“Every time Naipaul comes to India and talks about the country, he puts his big foot in his mouth. I find it funny that this time somebody else did that to take him on,” author Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi told The Telegraph.

“That said, I kind of endorse what Girish Karnad has said in a way. Not only his (Naipaul’s) view of Islam in India, I also find his comment about women writers condescending and grossly general.”

Karnad has refused to apologise. “I completely stand by my statement. I haven’t made any mistake; rather I came prepared for it,” he told reporters after participating in another panel discussion at the festival on Saturday morning.

He had suggested yesterday that Naipaul won the Nobel because of the West’s wariness about Islam in the aftermath of 9/11.

“Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in 2001. In London in 2000, word was that Naipaul would never get the Nobel because of what he’d written about Indian Muslims,” Karnad said.

He also expressed surprise that “given that music defines our daily existence... you find it in the streets, in the restaurants”, not one of Naipaul’s three books on India “contains any reference to music”.

“I think that only means that he is tone deaf,” Karnad said. He, however, described Naipaul’s books on India as “brilliantly written” and the author as “certainly among the great English writers of our generation”.

Writer William Dalrymple, one of the brains behind the acclaimed Jaipur Literary Festival, backed Karnad.

“Naipaul is a rare example of an extremely sophisticated writer who is factually wrong and potentially pernicious in his depiction of Islam. I applaud Girish for what he said, but it is a complex matter and requires a more sophisticated response,” he said.

Popular author Chetan Bhagat chose to stay away from the controversy, saying: “When elders are talking, younger ones should stay silent.”

The festival organisers staunchly defended Naipaul. “I was surprised as he (Karnad) was to speak on his life and theatre. As an organiser, I could do little till he ended his speech,” said columnist Anil Dharkar.

“Many later told me that I should have stopped him earlier. In retrospect, I should have — he was misusing the platform. But Girish was a guest too and my position was difficult. I was furious.”

Dharkar publicly reprimanded Karnad at the end of his speech for calling Naipaul “anti-Islam”.

“He (Karnad) also slammed us at the end of his speech for giving the award to Naipaul, suggesting by implication that we too were communal. I have been fighting for Gujarat riot victims since 2002 and this kind of suggestion is preposterous,” Dharkar said.

He said in a statement: “His (Naipaul’s) wife Nadira is Muslim and her two children are being brought up as Muslim. Naipaul writes about how Muslim rulers and invaders of the past destroyed temples, monuments and so on. That’s historical facts, and who can argue against that? That does not make Naipaul anti-Muslim.”

Dalrymple said “literary festivals gain from such open views” as those expressed by Karnad but Naipaul’s friend, writer and TV producer Farrukh Dhondy, was not amused. “It seemed like a courtroom where the prosecution is allowed to make points but the defence is silenced,” Dhondy said.

“His books are just about the history of Muslim conquest in India and shouldn’t be taken as his personal views…. Naipaul has never expressed views about the religion or any animosity towards Muslims.”

Naipaul is no stranger to literary spats. Last year, he was castigated by some writers for an interview in which he dubbed women’s writing “inferior” and “sentimental” with a “narrow view of the world” and dismissed Jane Austen for “her sentimental sense of the world”.