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NAIPAUL’S CHANGE OF HEART AND MIND
By the time Naipaul came to write his third
travelogue on India, India: A Million Mutinies Now
(1990) he “had succeeded in making a kind of return
journey … abolishing the darkness that separated
me from my ancestral past.” He writes:
I had carried in my bones that idea of abjectness and
defeat and shame (his ancestors had left as
indentured servants for the sugar estates and Guyana
and Trinidad). It was the idea I had taken of India on
that slow journey by train and ship in 1962; it was the
source of my nerve.
(Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now. London
Minerva Paperbacks, 1990, 516-517)
He unabashedly admits that his return to India
after 27 years has been different from his visit in
1962. Naipaul’s early attitude and later
transformation become more understandable when
we examine the circumstances of his life which
made him an outsides wherever he went. Landeg
White in book V. S. Naipaul writes:
His visit to the village of his grandfather, though briefly
enchanting, arouses problems over language, fears
about the food and water, demands for money, and
concludes with Naipaul’s angry refused to give a
relative a lift into town. There is no home for him in
India; his assumptions are too much of the West. Yet
just as it was in London that he wrote the Trinidad
novels, viewing his background from the security of
escape so it is in Kashmir that he writes Mr. Stone
and the Knight’s companion, projecting on to his
English hero a strong Hindu sense of the world as
illusion. Returning to Europe, he is no longer able to
believe in the places in which he as lived and worked.
A Brahmin – cum - Englishman in Trinidad, a
European and Indian in London.
(Landeg white, V. S. Naipaul (London: The
MacMillan, Press Ltd., 1975)7.
Defending his earlier stance of hostility in an
interview with Dilip Padgaonkar for The Times of
India, Naipaul says that this hostility stems from his
involvement. He says:
I do not have the tenderness more secure people can
have towards bush people … I feel threatened by
them. My attitude and the attitude of the people lime
me is quite different from the people who live outside
the bush or who just go camping in the bush on
weekends.
(Dilip Padgaonkar. “An Area of Awakening”
Times, 19 July, 1993, 10)
He is too much obsessed with his ancestral
country. His present book is an example of a
positive assessment of the confusion and cultural
variety represented by India. At the same time he is
quite aware of the cultural loss of immigrant
community. He says,
There was a fundamental difference between the new
generation in India and our immigrant community far
away. For the people of that community, separated
from the Indian earth, Hindu theology had bcome
difficulty; the faith had then been half possessed by
many, abandoned by many. It had been part of a
more general cultural loss, which had left many with
no strong idea of who they were. That wouldn’t
happen in India, however much ritualism was left
behind, and however much the externals changed.
(Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now)
The solution to the dilemma is given by Naipaul
through Pravas, an engineer, when he says,
The food restrictions … are known to some, but not
known to most in my generation. They don’t know that
such things existed and exist. And yet they are
perfectly at balance in local surroundings. If you get
too attached to your roots in the old sense, you might
actually become unrooted, fossilized. At least in form,
at least in style, you must get into the new stream; get
the new roots… style becomes substance in one
generation. Things that one starts to do because other
people are doing it – like wearing long pants, in my
father’s case – become natural for the next
generation.
Naipaul has projected through his characters a
large vision of Indian, an India with a human
association rather that a clannish, casteist obligation,
an India which will utilize all “the bravery and the
skills of its people” towards building a better nation.
The glory as well as shame of its past is a spent
force. Possibilities only lie in a future built upon the
lessons learnt from the past. According to Naipaul it
will have to be an India with a “larger view of human
association” and he is sure that “out of this large
idea, and out of the encompassing humiliation of
British rule, there will come to India the ideas of
country and pride and historical self-analysis, things
that seem impossible remote”.
After the dark ages of invasion, vandalism and
wars, the freedom movement which led to the
independence of India symbolizes to Naipaul “the
truest kind of liberation”. It has awakened people to
knowledge of who they are and what they owe
themselves and this liberation of spirit has taken the
form of rage and revolt. India is now a land of a
million little mutinies. The mutinies become
necessary stepping stones towards Indian’s growth
and its restoration. The mutinies here symbolize the
many struggles for identity in the modern India of
various groups.
Though there is a resistance to change and an
adherence to a prescribed way of living it is
gradually giving way to new ways of seeing and
feeling. These winds of change bring hope with them
for the better-men and women opening up to
broader visions of community, like the south Indian
Brahmin Ashok marrying into a different community
or Nazir from Kashmir venturing to aspire beyond
the valley because of his education and abilities as
an accountant. These men demonstrate a step by
step rising. As Pravas (an engineer) writely says:
Change is a continuous process. You can discern a
change only once in a generation. Because once you
discern it, you are already there. So in these last 50
years I can discern only tow changes, but they are
large because a continuing process is being focused
… There are spans of transition. There are much
bigger spans with the succeeding generations.
The process at work in India and the direction
in which it is moving is best illustrated by Amir, a son
of a Raja. The son with his western education had
developed religious doubts, but these doubts do not
smother him. The cultural upbringing and historical
apprehension of his experience unfold a “path in a
dialectical manner” in which religion and the
concerns of the real would are simultaneously
present. He moves back and forth between the world
of spirit and world of matter. He says:
I find solace in both ways of thinking. The historical
way shows me that human destiny is above this - our
suffering, our little problems. This idea of human
destiny shows me that we are really moving towards a
better world, in spite of the trouble and conflagration.
The religious way teaches me endurance,
reconciliation with the divine plan of which this is a
part, but with hope and belief in better future.
(Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now, 381)
According to him “religion could be used to
bring about a great change of consciousness –
about the world and the place of men in it –and also
to bring men to action”.
For Naipaul India represented two things- a
great classical past and the sense of a communal
identity. At the same time, it also represented
“poverty and an abjectness too fearful to imagine” –
all the frightening things his ancestors had tried to
escape and which he himself continued to find
threatening. When he visited India for the first time in
1962 to write “An Area of Darkness”, he found
himself overwhelmed by a sense of “abjectness and
defeat and shame”.
The poverty of the Indian streets and the countryside
was an affront and a threat, a scratching at my old
neurosis. Two generations separated me from that
kind of poverty; but I felt closes to it than most of the
Indians I met.
An Area of Darkness is a work of sharp
luminosity. The book, however, was severely
panned by Indian critics and readers who found it
dwelling only on the negative, and inspection of the
gutters. Naipaul himself has moved on, stating this
particular book was the outcome of an emotional
reaction at that age.
The pain he suffered on his first arrival was
creative rather than numbing, has been well said by
John Wain:
Brilliant… true autobiography arises when a man
encounters something in his life which shocks him into
the need for self-examination and self-explanation. It
was natural that a sojourn in India should provide this
shock for Naipaul. The experience was not a pleasant
one, but the pain the author suffered was creative
rather that numbing. An Area of Darkness is tender,
lyrical, explosive and cruel”.
(John Wain, observer)
Having said that:
Indian interpretations of their history and almost as
painful as the history itself; and it is especially painful
to see the earlier squalor being repeated today, as it
has been in the creation of Pakistan and the
reawakening within India of disputes about language,
religion, caste and region. India, it seems, will never
cease to require the arbitration of a conqueror. A
people with a sense of history might have ordered
matters differently. But this is precisely the saddening
element in Indian history; this absence of growth and
development. It is a history whose only lesson is that
life goes on.
(Naipaul, An Area of Darkness, Page no. 216)
Now he realizes a process of awakening through
which India is going:
What is happening in India is a new historical
awakening … India intellectuals, who want to b secure
in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is
going on. But every other Indian knows precisely what
is happening: deep down he knows that a larger
response is emerging even if at times this response
appears in his eyes to be threatening.
(Source: An Area of Awakening – Interviews
with V.S. Naipaul – By Dilip Padgaonkar,
Times July 18, 1993)
The question arises that whether his book
depict genuinely the India of the 1960s? The answer
is affirmative. Naipaul visited India when it was a
country in flux. The initial euphoria of Independence
had evaporated, the Chinese was had deflated its
confidence and crushed its philosophy of non-
violence, the economy was non-existent and at the
helm was an ageing, crestfallen Prime Minister;
definitely not an optimistic picture. So when Naipaul
suggests, much to the dislike of some Indian, that
there was little intellectual life in India 40 years ago,
he is probable right. The guiding principles of India
at that time had failed.
Gandhian principle of non-violence had fallen
flat in the face of Chinese aggression, socialism had
failed miserable and the image of India as a beggar
with a begging bowl was gaining strength. Resistant
and oblivious to the changing world, India’s ageing
leaders, proponents of this decaying ideology clung
stubbornly to it, ruthlessly suppressing any
alternative thought process and allowing India to
sink deeper and deeper into a quagmire. In the
absence of a rejuvenating force, there, indeed
existed an intellectual vacuum. Though rather harsh,
Naipaul rightly concludes:
Indian has been a shock for me because – you know,
you think of India as a very old and civilized land. One
took this idea of an antique civilization for granted and
thought it contained the seed of growth in this century
… India has nothing to contribute to the world, is
contributing nothing.
On a personal note he ends: “It was a journey
that ought not to have been made; it had broken my
life in two”. But he did return. The greater frequency
of his visits to India in recent years signifies a
yearning for ‘identity’. He returns again and again
until he had made peace with the civilization of his
origin.
Ten years later in 1975, at the height of Indira
Gandhi’s “Emergency”, Naipaul returned to India and
the shock, disgust and anger persist. Louis Heren in
The Times described this travelogue as:
A devastating work, but proof that a novelist of
Mr. Naipaul’s stature can often define problems
quicker and more effectively than a team of
economists and other experts from the World
Bank.
When in an interview by Rachael Kohn he was
asked:
Rachael Kohn: Well does not complexity attract
you over and over again, because
you have gone back to India and
written several times about it?
Naipaul answered: Well I was interested in India
because, and I still am, because of
my concern, I hate distress, I hate
poverty, and I wish to see it
alleviated, it can’t disappear
unfortunately, but I wish to see it
alleviated, that’s what I go back to
look for, I look for signs of that.
(Interview with Rachael Kohn at
Radio National)
It’s quite evident that Naipaul is looking for the
signs of Indian self help and self renewal.
Amongst the chawls, the substandard
accommodation blocks for factory labour, Naipaul
found those signs of self help and renewal in the
Shiv Sena Movement. Taking their name from a 17th
century guerrilla leader, Shivaji, who fought against
the Moghul Empire, these neo-warriors are on the
march, not for India itself, but for their own
betterment in the state of Maharastra and the city of
Bombay.
Identity was what the young men of the sena were
reaching out to, with the simplicities of their politics
and their hero figures (the 17th century Shivaji, warrior
Chieftain turned to war-god, the 20th century Dr.
Ambedkar, untouchable now only in the sanctity.)
For the Sena men, and the people they led, the world
was new; they saw themselves at the beginning of
things, unaccommodated men making a claim on their
land for the first time, and out of chaos evolving their
own philosophy of community and self-help. For them
the past was dead, they had left it behind in the
villages.
(Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now)
Having uttered plenty of unpleasant things
about India in his travelogues, Naipaul later on
realizes that he was a bit too harsh; he speaks to
Farrukh Dhondy in an interview first published in
the Literary Review. He defends himself saying:
I didn’t think of it that way, as an attack on India. I
thought of it as a record of my unhappiness. I wasn’t
knocking anybody; it was a great melancholy
experience actually. Mark you, it’s full of flaws: what it
says about caste is influenced by ideas I had picked
up here, British ideas. I think different about caste
now, I understand the clan feeling, the necessity of
that in a bign country. Ant the book was bad about
Indian art. I should have understood that art depends
on patrons, and that in independent India, with the
disappearance of Indian royal courts, the possibility
for art had been narrowed instead of thinking that this
was rather terrible, that there was no art. It will nag at
me now, it will nag at me for some years.
(Interview first published in the Literary Review,
Naipaul speaks to Farrukh Dhondy with
reference to India: A Wounded Civilization)
No doubt, when Naipaul returned to India,
during Indira Gandhi’s period of rule by decree he
found some hopeful signs of change, but his overall
view of the country, remained grim: he saw the
nation as paralyzed by its inward - looking tradition
of Karma and debilitated further by its stubborn
adherence to ritual and caste.
His latest sojourn on the sub-continent (from
December 1988 through February 1990) has
produced a third book on India – and a far more
optimistic and generous assessment of the country’s
condition, In part, this shift in Naipaul’s views stems
from what he sees as positive social and economic
developments. In part, it stems from an evolution in
his own consciousness – time and distance and
perhaps the security conferred by the recognition he
has achieved as a writer have enabled him to make
“a kind of return journey, shedding my Indian
nerves, abolishing the darkness that separated me
from my ancestral past.”
Although “India: A Million Mutinies Now” is
filled with scenes of wrenching poverty (a family of
10 living in a room 10 feet by 10 feet) and horrifying
injustice (brides being set on fire by their husbands’
families for failing to bring a sufficient dowry),
Naipaul emphasizes that the country seems to have
embraced “the idea of freedom” and achieved a kind
of “liberation of spirit”. He reports noticing not only
increased wealth but also a new confidence and
pride among the poor.
Some of Naipaul’s favorite themes about post-
colonialism resurface in “A Million Mutinies Now.”
He compares the international style buildings that
were cheaply erected in recent years unfavorably
with the ornate edifices left over from the days of the
British Raj. He complains about the shoddy goods,
the bad hotels, the difficulties of travel and the
growing “criminalization” of Indian business and
politics. In addition, he dwells at length on the
extremes of ideology that have fractured the country
– from the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims to
the tensions between different castes to the
terrorism of radical Sikhs.
In the end, though, Naipaul says he regards
the excesses in India – “group excess, sectarian
excess, religions excess, regional excess” – as
something encouraging, as signs of growing
freedom and self – awareness, as the “beginning of
a new way for many millions, part of India’s growth,
part of its restoration”.
Indeed “A Million Mutinies Now”, which is made
up dozens of overlapping profiles, leaves the reader
with a powerful sense of people’ dedication,
perseverance and passion. Seemingly selected at
random, these individuals may not be entirely
representative of the country, but they come from a
variety of religious, social and economic
backgrounds. What they have in common is a
willingness to brave enormous hardships to realize
their ideals or their dreams. Some lead existences
light-years removed from those of their fathers and
grandfathers; others resolutely attempts to preserve
tradition and ritual in their lives.
Among the people whom Naipaul introduces
are Namdeo, a poet whose childhood experience
with caste prejudice fostered his decision to found
the Dalit Panthers (a group dedicated to liberating
India’s so called untouchables); Dipanjan, a member
of the Bengali gentry, whose awareness of the
poverty and misery around him led him to join the
Communist Party and live among the very poorest
of the village peasants; and Kakusthan, an
employee of a large company, who tries to live as “a
full Brahmin”- meaning that he cannot eat or drink
anything that he has not already offered up to his
god and that he must wear religious marks on his
forehead and traditional attire at all times.
In fact, two overarching themes occur in many
of these profiles. The first is the pervasiveness in
India of religion and faith (be it faith in God, ritual or
ideology). The second is the conflict in so many
people’s lives between the old and the new, the
traditional and the modern. In the course of the
travelogue, we meet Muslims who make a living as
gangsters but who pray five times a day, a pujari
who obliges time pressed clients by reciting the
traditional six hours wedding verses in half the time
and businessmen who spend hours praying before
works every day.
In the introductory chapter of his elegant
account of a journey around the world’s largest
democracy, Naipaul says, “Independence had come
to India like a kind of revolution”. He further says:
Now there were many revolutions within that
revolution… All over India scores of particularities that
had been frozen by foreign rule, or by poverty or lack
of opportunity or abjectness had begun to flow again.
From winter to spring: it is a comforting image
reassuring, suggestive of natural cycles and an
inevitable movement toward warmth and light. The
ground thaws, the sap flows, then comes the leaf,
the bud, the full flowering of national and individual
entitlements, an unstoppable surge towards the
glorious fruition promised by the idea of
independence. And yet blight intrudes: “Disruptive,
lesser loyalties – of region, caste, and clan – now
played on the surface of Indian life.”
Democracy, after the first exciting flush of its
birth struggle, is often fractious, frequently inefficient
and unstable, a maelstrom of “disruptive lesser
loyalties”. Its great strength lies in its willingness to
tolerate this messiness in the service of an ideal of
fair government. Democracy’s toughest test case is
India, with its population of 800 million, with more
than a dozen major language and hundreds of
dialects, with many faiths and religious traditions in
conflicts and symbiosis. In “India: A Million
Mutinies Now,” Naipaul is an erudite and sensitive
guide at a time when the strain of accommodating
the revolutions within the revolution – the growth of
that internalized awareness of the meaning of
independence, the sometimes violent clash of
competing rights and entitlements, the “million
mutinies now” – is particularly intense.
With the passing of time Naipaul is able to see
pattern and meaning in the fragmentation. During
his latest visit he crisscrossed India from Bombay to
Calcutta (Now Kolkata) from Kashmir in the North to
Chennai in the South. He sought out many of the
people he met on his first trip, examining the
changes in their lives and altitudes, at the same time
scrutinizing his own memories and changed
reactions. He has also sought out the more
explosive “revolutions within the revolutions,”
meeting with individuals who are representatives of
the “million mutinies” now fermenting.
The tone of Naipaul’s first two travelogues
about India was intensely person and often harsh.
This time he is altogether gentler, more
compassionate, an observer who has made private
peace with is ancestral land and is moved both to
humility and to celebration by its diversity. What is
extraordinary is the sheer exuberance and
catholicity of his curiosity. He meets with a criminal
gang leader in Bombay, with Hindu and Muslim
extremists with a leader of the Dalit Panthers (the
aggressive political arm of the untouchable caste),
with Maoist anti – Brahmin rebels and their police
tortures in Chennai. He meets with Sikh terrorists
and with a former naxalite rebel who had belonged
to a splinter group of Communist peasants. But
there are ordinary people too – government clerks,
film-makers, stock - brokers, holy men.
Voices on all sides tell Naipaul that “India has
changed; it was not the good and stable country it
had once been.” They maintain that “the great
investment in development over three or four
decades had led only to this: to ‘corruption’, to the
criminalization of politics. ‘In seeking to rise, India
had undone itself. No one could sure of anything
now; all was fluid.”
Independence, that heady celebration of Aug.
15, 1947, is recalled by many as a brief and shining
moment, a joyous birth only to be followed by
betrayals and rivalries, Camelot tragically undoing
itself. But there was no “good and stable country” at
the time of independence. There was chaos. India
was bloodily partitioned, its east and west flanks
were looped off to form the two halves of Pakistan,
and millions of Hindus and Muslims were resettled
on a redrawn map of roughly 10 million people
exchanged by the two new countries, at least half a
million were slaughtered. The new nation was in fact
an abattoir.
Yet Naipaul understands the yearning for
Utopia, the evocation of a world that was once
whole. The search for the unfragmented ideal is the
most urgent and consistent theme in all of his
writing. It is an idea at the core of both his personal
and his literary survival. Ant the threat of losing that
unified world has haunted him. “To see the
possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment
of creation: it was my temperament,” he wrote in
“The Enigma of Arrival” (1987), a brilliant work
which is really in the tradition of St. Augustine’s
“Confessions”, an inner voyage of discovery. “The
history of carried with me, together with the self
awareness that had come with my education and
ambition, had sent me into the world with a sense of
glory dead.”
“ I dreaded change”, Naipaul explained, “and
that was why, meeting distress halfway, I cultivated
old, possibly ancestral ways of feeling, the ways of
glory dead, and held on to the idea of a world in flux;
the drum of creation in the god’s right had, the flame
of destruction in his left.”
It is at the moment of loss, in Naipaul’s
experience, that the darshan comes, the moment of
glory revealed, that moment in Hindu Temple ritual
when the devotee is given a glimpse of the deity. It
was not until he left Trinidad and was living in
London that Naipaul recognized the wholeness, the
perfection of his own childhood. He enshrined it in
“Miguel Street”, but almost as soon as he found
that glory, it was gone. He returned to Trinidad and
nothing was the same. He fled, wrote the story of his
father’s life in “A House for Mr. Biswas”, then fled
again – to India – and again to Britain.
Now Naipaul no longer seems to dread
change. The world may be in flux, but the drum of
creations more powerful than the flame of
destruction. Past glories return in new and more
hopeful incarnations in every city in India, in every
village, in every life.
In one of many memorable encounters,
Naipaul visits a high official of the Shiv Sena, a
militant Hindu fundamentalist sect that has had
much to do with the current turbulence of Bombay
politics. The Shiv Sena official, despite position,
power and increased income, still lives with his
family in two rooms in the Bombay chawl (tenement)
where he grew up. Were it not for the
encouragement of his young Brahmin guide, Charu,
Naipaul notes:
I don’t think I would have made it even to the internal
staircase of the place – I was so demoralized, so
choked, driven so near to a stomach heave, by the
smell at the entrance, with we mangled garbage and
scavenging cats … and then, in the suddenly dark
passage, by a thick warm smell, catching at my throat,
of blocked drains. It was Charu, with his Brahmin’s
sense of duty … who (constantly looking back at me,
and sometimes even stretching out a hand, like a
father leading his child from sand to sea for the first
time) led me on and on, up the chawl steps, past open
doors giving glimpses of family living spaces.
(Naipaul; India: A Million Mutinies Now).
When Naipaul questions Mr. Ghate, the Shiv
Sena Official, about the filth and the overcrowding of
the chawl, Mr. Ghate responds with a paean to
chawl life. There had a fact been a time when Mr.
Ghate and his wife had moved to a modern
apartment (“after 100 square feet for 10 people in
the chawl, they had 300 square feet for three people
in the new apartment”). And Mrs. Ghate had come
close to a nervous breakdown from claustrophobia
and isolation, so they had returned to the chawl. Mr.
Ghate rhapsodizes: “In a chawl, you always know
what’s happening every where … There is no life in
an apartment.” There is no overcrowding as far as
Mr. Ghate is concerned. He does not notice the
stench or the filth.
In this elucidation of disparities, this revelation
that what is seen by the Trinidadian / British eye is
precisely what is not seen by the Bombay eye lies
Naipaul’s particular brilliance as a cultural analyst.
There is a constant interplay of dualities of
vision, so that the culture being examined grows
ever sharper in focus, gains an ever greater depth.
There is not only what Ghate sees and what Naipaul
sees; there is also the after-image of the ‘glory dead’
that throws the present into high and ghastly relief.
Naipaul insists on the simultaneity of these
perspectives; he refuses to romanticize, to suppress
the ugly views for false reasons of political
sentimentality.
This truth – tilling has not always endeared him
to Indians. He gazes into every shadowy corner of
the society, giving us a picture that is both, harsh
and beautiful, familiar and strange. At the same time
he is hopeful about future.
“I am sure there’s going to be a revolution,
“predicts Papu, jain stock-broker, gloomily. “In a
generation or two. It cannot last, the inequalities of
income. I shudder when I think of that… It will be
totally chaos.” Some people think the descent into
chaos has begun. A journalist for the Indian Express
was stabled outside the Golden Temple by sikh
terrorists, who Naipaul said, “lived hectically, going
out to kill again and again.” “It’s madness, it’s
fanaticism”, another journalist cried. “It can’t really
be explained.”
Yet Naipaul sees some pattern in the mutinies:
The idea of freedom has gone everywhere in India …
There was ... Now what didn’t exist 200 years before:
a central will, a central intellect, a national idea.
He goes on, “The Indian Union was greater
than the sum of its parts; and many of these
movements of excess strengthened the Indian state,
defining it as the source of law and civility and
reasonableness.”
Naipaul acknowledges that there is corruption
and violence and excess, but, he says:
Excess was now felt to be excess in India. What the
mutinies were also helping to define was the strength
of the general intellectual life, and the wholeness and
humanism of the values to which all Indians now felt
they could appeal. And strange irony – the mutinies
wee not to be wished away. They were part of the
beginning of a new way for many millions, part of
Indian’s growth, part of it’s restoration.
(Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now)
For a thousand years (1000 AD to 1947)
foreign rule suppressed the native intellect and
stymied any growth of the native civilization. Tree of
shackles of alien subjugation, one would have
expected to see a positive assertion of ones identity
in the past 1947 period. Tragically this was not to
be. India’s intellectual power fell into the hands of a
myopic Indian intellectual community who failed to
give a sense of direction to free India.
These armchair intellectuals propounded new
fangled philosophies that only accelerated its sense
of purposelessness. One such concept was
secularism. This secularism did not subscribe to the
dictionary definition of the world. But took on a
totally different meaning in India. It was a corruption.
It led to showering on the non-Hindu communities a
set of privileges that could not be justified morally,
economically or legally. But more important it
expected the Hindu to negate his own identity. Any
attempt by the Hindu, however innocent, to assert
his identity was dubbed as reactionary and divisive.
This proved disastrous in terms of Indian’s self-
confidence. Naipaul was probable the first person to
make this observation and express it in no uncertain
terms: “The loss of the past meant the loss of that
civilization, the loss of a fundamental idea of India,
and the loss therefore to a nationalist- minded man,
of a motive for action. It was a part of the feeling of
purposelessness of which many Indians spoke.”
Even an attempt to precisely define Indian’s
historical past was frowned upon. Over the centuries
India had shrunk physically. Its boundaries had
receded from mountains of the Hindu Kush in the
West to deserts of Rajasthan forsaking in the
process even its traditional cradle of civilization –
the Indus Valley. Academics foolishly contended
that the very fact that India existed now was enough
to infer that the Islamic invasion was not detrimental
to India. They went on to add that invasions had
enriched India. Even it India had shrunk to a sliver of
land near the Southern tip of India – these
intellectuals would seek satisfaction that India still
existed, totally oblivious of its loss and incapable of
appreciating the magnitude of damage. India not
only suffered and intellectual depletion but also a
crass intellectual perversion that failed to identity
the true cause of its backwardness and thus
hampered progress during that period.
Finally when he returns to India in the 1990’s
(India – A Million Mutinies Now), Naipaul is more
mature and discerning:
What I hadn’t understood in 1962, or had taken too
much for granted was the extent to which the country
had been remade; and even the extent to which India
had been restored to itself had been restored to itself,
after its own equivalent of the dark ages-after the
Muslim invasions and the detailed, repeated
vandalizing of the North, the shifting empires, the
wars, the 18th - century anarchy.
(Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now)
Naipaul now sees the benefits of
independence, a crucial catalyst for human growth:
“The idea of freedom had gone everywhere in
India.” And he observes Indians discovering their
own identity: “People everywhere have ideas now of
who they are and what they owe themselves.”
Ultimately India had changed. It was a country
now something to be proud of. Naipaul had
something to be proud of. He is finally at peace with
India, the very essence of his origin and his existent.
Naipaul’s contempt for India was owing to his
British self. But with growing age, his sensibility also
became mellower. The change in Naipaul’s
approach and outlook and his becoming more
compassionate have been revealed in his latest
travelogue, India: A million Mutinies Nos. A
magnificent work about changes and development
in India. Indian conditions are honestly recorded
here. Paul Theroux, K. Natwar Singh and Joseph
Lelyveld appraise it for its faithful recorded of Indian
mind. Joseph Lelyveld states, “The most notable
commitment of intelligence that post –colonial India
has evoked… He is indispensable for anyone who
wants seriously to come to grips with the experience
of India.”
(Joseph Lelyveld. The New York Times Book
Review, The Back cover – Jacket of V. S. Naipaul’s
India: A Million Mutinies Now)
In the chapter entitled “The House on the lake, A
return to India,” Naipaul avers,
… I had grown up with my own ideas of the distance
that separated me from India. I was far enough away
from it to cease to be of it I knew the rituals but
couldn’t participate in them; I heard the language, but
followed only the simpler words. But I was near
enough to understand the passions; and near enough
to feel that my own fate was bound up with the fate of
the people of the country. The India of my fantasy and
heart was something lost and irrecoverable.
In the chapter ‘Breaking Out’, Naipaul writes about
the changing and developing agrarian system in
India. When he comes to Goa, he witnesses a
healthy change in Indian agriculture. In Banglore, he
comes to know the caste, money and power-factors
in politics. His visit to Madras (Chennai) makes him
aware about India, “an area of awakening”. The
mutinies like Dalit movement, Dravidian movement,
Movement against Brahminism leave him
flabbergasted. He understands about Sangam Age
and Tamil cultures are literature. He comes to know
about Periyar, Veeraswami and Prabhakaran. They
look appealing to hi,. Then he goes to Calcutta
where Dipanjan and other sub-leaders of Maoism,
peasant movement or Naxalbari tell him of their
objectives to kill the Zamindari system. Naipaul’s
encounter with Rashid leaves him patient and
purified. He comes to know how partition became a
cause for the death of millions of Indian, for the
separation of various families, and for the downfall
of the Moslem Community in independent India.
However, the health changes Naipaul learns
about Indian literature either in English or in
vernaculars and journalism impress him. The
magazines like Women’s Era, Savvy and Femina
and their striking sale due to their cause of
emancipation and empowerment of women, pacify
the traveler about the nation. Later he goes to
Punjab and understands much about the rise of
Sikhism and the later happenings in the Punjab.
Commenting on the present travelogue Paul
Theroux says that, “It is literally the last word on
India today, witness within witness, a chain of voices
that illustrates every phase of Indian life… with
truthfulness and a subtlety that are joy to read.
Something like love enters the narrative – a real
feeling for the land and its people.”
The Hindu past which he inherited in his blood
has always weighed very heavy on his
consciousness and in one form or the other it kept
him battered and pre-occupied. He was deeply
impressed by certain Hindu institutions like the four
ashrams and is evident by its artistic appropriation in
The Mimic Men.
Recently he has publicly announced his
retirement and in this way he is following the Hindu
tradition of Vanaprastha or voluntary retirement.
Remarking that “books require an immense amount
of energy”, Naipaul said that his recently published
novel Magic Seeds would be his last. By stepping
aside, Naipaul has ensured that he will not made a
mockery of him by churning out stale ideas of
producing writings that say nothing. Of suffer
Samuel Beckett’s anguish when he said, “I wish I
had the strength to get out of my chair and throw
myself out of the window because my mind won’t
stop working.”
Having once dismissed India and all things
Indian – as an area of darkness, Naipaul now seeks
to have come full circle.
Work Cited
Dilip Padgaonkar. Interview with V.S. Naipaul. “An
Area of Awakening” Times, 19 July, 1993.
Farrukh Dhondy. Interview with V.S. Naipaul, with
Reference to India: A Wounded Civilization.
Interview first published in the Literary Review,
Rachael Kohn. Interview with V.S. Naipaul at Radio
National’s The Spirit of Things on 09/09/2001.
John Wain, “observers”.
Joseph Lelyveld. The New York Times Book
Review, The Back cover-jacket of V.S. Naipaul’s
India: A Million Mutines Now.
Landeg White, V.S. Naipaul (London: The
Macmillan, Press Ltd., 1975).
Naipaul, V.S. India: A Million Mutinies Now, London,
Minerva Paperbacks, 1990.
---. An Area of Darkness Picador 2001.
---. A House for Mr. Biswas. London: Andre Deutsch,
1962.
---. Miguel Street, London: Andre Deutsch, 1959.
Theroux Paul. Sir Vidia’s Shadow- a Friendship
across Five Continents. New York: Houghton
Miffin, 2000.