In early 1962, Dr Eric Williams and Dr Rudranath Capildeo, leaders of the People's National Movement (PNM) and the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) respectively, travelled to Marlborough House to negotiate Trinidad and Tobago's independence from Britain. Upon arrival in London, I was told by the late jurist and author, George Collymore, during a radio interview, there was a hiccup with Williams' luggage and he borrowed pyjamas from Capildeo on the first night.

A related event, as warm and historic as the Williams/Capildeo independence moment, had occurred just months before, in 1961, in Britain. VS Naipaul, 26 years old that year, had completed his fourth novel, A House for Mr Biswas; Andre Deutsch had published the epic story of an ordinary man's comic and peculiar resistances in pursuit of autonomy.

Having already authored The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) and Miguel Street (1960), Naipaul and his wife Patricia Hale were exhausted in August 1960 when the Biswas manuscript was done; one side of the gold nib of Naipaul's Parker pen had been worn away. The couple left for Italy on holiday. "I left the pile of papers on the dresser..." Naipaul told biographer Patrick French, "and magical as Italy was, I was tormented by the thought of the papers. I had no other copy, and when I went back, I was so relieved to see it there...I broke down towards the end because I had laboured so long...I did everything I could to cure the pain in my fingers, put tape on them, so painful, the typing. By the end I felt I had grown up; I felt I had become a writer."

Trinidad and Tobago, too, had grown up and was transitioning from British colonialism to a problematical independence.

Naipaul would not re-enter the world he had created in Biswas for another 20 years. In 1981, while in Cyprus, he turned on his radio to the BBC World Service and heard an instalment of Biswas. Though the words were comic, he wrote in The New York Review of Books in November 1983, "in no time...I was in tears, swamped by the emotions I had tried to shield myself from for twenty years". Having written and published 17 books at the time of reflection in the NY Review, Naipaul described Biswas as the one closest to him. "It is the most personal, created out of what I saw and felt as a child. It also contains, I believe, some of my funniest writing. I began as a comic writer and still consider myself one. In middle age now, I have no higher literary ambition than to write a piece of comedy that might complement or match this early book."

The empathy Naipaul reserves for Mohun Biswas is, of course, that which he has for his father, Seepersad Naipaul who worshipped writing and writers, and encouraged his son's ambition to be a writer. "He made the vocation of the writer seem the noblest in the world; and I decided to be that noble thing," Naipaul wrote in the NY Review. A House for Mr Biswas is Naipaul's homage to his father; he resisted efforts by Andre Deutsch editor Diana Athill to cut parts of it. "I worked very hard on that book," he wrote to her, "and I wrote with great judgement. If the book is any good, it will make its way."

It has. Over the last half century Biswas has secured its place as "one of the few virtually perfect novels in the English language" (Everyman's Library), a masterpiece that established Naipaul among the handful of living writers of whom the English language can be proud (NY Times). Upon publication, it was saluted as having "the unforced pace of a master-work" (The Observer); and as "one of the clearest and subtlest illustrations ever shown of the effects of colonialism" (Francis Wyndham). Derek Walcott wrote in the Trinidad Guardian that Naipaul had established himself as one of the most mature of West Indian writers; Edward Brathwaite would write, "The novels of Vidia Naipaul...have come, almost overnight, to topple the whole hierarchy of our literary values and set up new critical standards of form and order in the West Indian novel."

While Naipaul struggled during his early years in Britain against racism, hunger, cold, penury, and nervous breakdowns, his father suggested he write precisely the sort of book that Biswas turned out to be: "Be realistic, humourous when this comes in pat, but don't make it deliberately so. If you are at a loss for a theme, take me for it. Begin: 'He sat before the little table writing down the animal counterparts of all his wife's family.'"

Naipaul did; the poverty and cruelty in the book are sometimes alleviated and other times sharpened by humour; there is comedy in anger; the jokes sometimes give pain. Ultimately, it is buoyant and affectionate; Mr Biswas remains Naipaul's most human character – anguished, jokey, fragile, and inauspicious but for his unyielding ambition to escape the domineering Tulsis and have a house of his own.

With sufficient creative licence to make it a work of fiction, Biswas nonetheless overlaps significantly with history. Naipaul's fictional portrayal of the Capildeos, in particular, occasioned loud noises. Rudranath Capildeo telephoned the publisher to furiously demand the book's suppression; Simbhoonath Capildeo's granddaughter described to Patrick French how she was discouraged from reading books with "Naipaul" on the spine: "They were a source of contention, not pride. For our paternal grandfather hated the Naipauls. Who were they, after all? Ungrateful lesser members of his extended family who had got away with spreading lies and wicked stories about him and his family and Indian people and everyone on the island whose independence he, Mr Capildeo, had worked for..."

Thus, Mr Biswas has the last triumphant laugh at the expense of the Tulsis. Fifty years old now, the book has outlived its inspiration, Seepersad Naipaul, who died at 47 and who offered perhaps the most accurate characterisation of his son, "You know, at heart he is not a bad fellow; only a bit erratic and thoughtless and callously unconventional."