Contemporary Pakistan has strayed from the vision of its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who died only a few months after the country’s birth. So says Nobel Laureate Sir VS Naipaul.

“People quote a lot from Jinnah’s first speech in which he appeared to say, ‘We have a state in which everyone will be equal as far as their religion goes.’ And that has been twisted and twisted and warped and warped. And many people in Pakistan say he really meant a Muslim state. Perhaps he didn’t mean that. But we don’t know - its all lost and buried and we have to live with the reality.”

This was Naipaul’s response to my question about whether Jinnah’s idea of a Muslim homeland in South Asia still made sense in the 21st century.

I was deliberately seeking his reaction to the founding of India and Pakistan on the eve of their 64th independence anniversaries.

Naipaul used the opportunity to also comment on Mahatma Gandhi. He admits to admiration for the Father of the Indian nation, describing him as “magical” and “extraordinary”, but also calling him a “very strange man “ who “was not above offering nonsense in the place of history. He wrote a book called Hind Swaraj - Indian Home Rule. I think he was quite young and it was an extremely stupid book and yet it is admired still by people who haven’t read it, the Mahatma’s first book.”

Asked if Islam was enough of a glue to keep a country like Pakistan together, he responded, “Yes, yes. You see it’s the odd thing about deep religion, or deeply held religion. When things go very bad, what you say is not that we’ve been holding on to the wrong ideas. What you say is we’ve not been holding on to those ideas hard enough, or fast enough.”

Some analysts have predicted the collapse of Pakistan, comparing it to former Yugoslavia where different parts of the country eventually asserted their independent identity.

Naipaul did not agree with this thesis. He said of Yugoslavia, “That’s a separate country, that was made from separate pieces. It was put together after the war, or during the war. Pakistan wasn’t like that. It came together because they were very happy to be together, you know. Very happy. That has to be understood too. Some Indians do, they should try to understand it.”

But he was more enthusiastic about India, saying the “The future of India is quite bright actually, if you think brightness is increasing wealth. I don’t know what will happen in Pakistan. They have not made a success of what they’ve got, or left with or what they took over. And yet they are not an uneducated people. One of the things about Pakistan is that they worship education and this will have an effect in the long run.”

“India was very fortunate in that the democratic process suited the great mixture, the great disparate quality of the country… there’s no one group to claim sovereignty on its own. It always needed to get a little support here. It needed to be a coalition in fact and that is India’s blessing. It is the basis of its democratic lifeblood that you’ve got to have a government in Delhi supported by the people in the south, sometimes by people in Bengal. Its very varied, so its lucky that way and I’m sure it was not intended. I’m sure it was an accident. You know Karl Popper talks about the unintended consequences of various forms of government. So I think this is one these unintended consequences.” At his Chelsea flat, the London bolt hole away from his main residence in Wiltshire that he has created together with his Pakistani wife, Nadira, Naipaul is besieged by admirers from all parts of the world.

A French academic and a Brazilian reviewer have to take their turn for a valued one-on-one session with the Trinidad-born author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Naipaul has not been in the best of health - he is recovering from a countryside allergy- but he has time and old world courtesy for each of his visitors who are escorted to him under the watchful gaze of a young Englishman representing his new literary agent, Andrew Wylie. To one of them he hints of writing another book.

Naipaul further reveals how he recently received a letter from a Nepalese woman who says he bears a strong resemblance to one of her ancestors, her great, great grandfather’s brother, who left Nepal to look for work in India before embarking on one of the émigré ships for the Caribbean. Naipaul says his father’s ancestors were from Gorakhpur in Eastern U.P. in India and “if you look at the map, you’ll see it is connected to Nepal.”

I asked Naipaul which identity predominates in his character, given his residence in England, his birth in Trinidad and his ancestral links to India and now possibly Nepal. He responded, “I don’t think about it at all. I think we are complex enough. I think we have enough brain to deal with lots of strands in our past.” He agrees that he used to think of himself as an Indian, or at least as someone of Indian origin, “but I don’t any longer. Now I think I am more universal. We are movements of so many ancestries, so many genetic strains in us. How can we define ourselves any more. We can’t be confined to a race or a gene pool.”

Asked about his Brahmin links, he answers, “That’s very important. I think its given me the idea of dharam. If you are true to your dharam you are true to your essence. When I was starting out, my dharam was to be a writer and that comforted me enormously. I wouldn’t try to break that or go beyond it. It’s a very grand thing to profess the idea of a vocation. Not everyone has it. I was rather shocked that people don’t have it. I am shocked to discover some people totally without ambition.”

Nadira, who has been hovering in the background, breaks in to remind Naipaul what her aunt said on the eve of their marriage. “Thank God, my niece is marrying a Brahmin.”