WHAT DOES VS NAIPAUL DO RIGHT?

Tehelka - The People's Paper

The VS Naipaul of mass media is a mix of impatient remarks and sensational sound bytes pulled out of context. The VS Naipaul of the books is a nuanced and challenging thinker. In a three part essay Farrukh Dhondy tracks the validity and masterful insight of the writer and his most controversial views

Beyond Belief, VS Naipaul’s second excursion into five Islamic countries was published in 1998. It’s a book of discovery, a follow up to Among the Believers a book of stories garnered through travel in Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia, which was published in 1977. Both dates are important because they are sandwiched between the Islamic revolution in Iran in the early ‘70s and the murdering attack on the World Trade Centre in 2002. Both books are compilations of stories about people, their journeys, the generations that bred them, the nuances of faith and belief that sustains them.

Beyond Belief may be read as a panoramic portrait of these countries of ‘converts’ as Naipaul calls Muslims who are not Arabs, Muslims who have through history and mostly through conquest converted to the religion that sees Arabia as the centre of civilisation and their own history as an adjunct of the Arab story.
As such, the book is magnificently ambitious, central to the concerns of the world today, portentous and, for those who put their faith in forces outside literary insight, as prophetic.

In the Prologue to Beyond Belief Naipaul anticipates a question that the reader may reasonably ask:

“It may be asked if different people and different stories in any section of the book would have created or suggested another kind of country. I think not: the train has many coaches, and different classes, but it passes through the same landscape. People are responding to the same political or religious and cultural pressures. The writer has only to listen very carefully and with a clear heart to what people say to him, and ask the next question, and the next.”

In India, the metaphor of the train would become real. Sitting in, shall we say, a third class railway carriage, making a sustained journey for any purpose, one’s fellow passengers would open conversation with ‘Where are you from?’ And then the next question and the next. We Indians are used to the locative question and have prepared answers. But suppose (unlikely, but just suppose) VS Naipaul found himself on such a journey in such a train. Any answer he gave to the questions that would follow ‘Where are you from?’ would, in all probability, confound the understanding of the questioners. What would he say?

“Wiltshire”?

Or “Trinidad”?

And the remark that followed would perhaps be ‘I apologise, I thought you were Indian.’

VS doesn’t answer such questions because the real answer is that he doesn’t belong to Wiltshire, Trinidad or indeed, in the sense of being circumscribed by its culture and prejudices, to India. He belongs to literature or to ‘writing’, the home of his intellect. But that’s not the sort of answer you give to “Aap kahan se janab ?”

This sense of not belonging has enabled VS Naipaul, the quintessential writer for our times, to look at the world without the constraints of a mission. In a century in which literature, the very art and act of writing, has been coerced into a dedication to Soviet Realism, to ‘progressive’ causes, to feminism to self-discovery, to anti-racist protest, to proselytising in the cause of Islam, Hindutva, Indian secularism, fraudulent spirituality, shallow and humbug ‘life-guidance’, advertising travellogues and ark-loads of imitative ‘novel’ writing, grist to the mill of popular, pap publishing, Naipaul has uniquely, gone his own way. And his own way has always implicitly posed and answered the question ‘What is writing for?’ This is not a question that can be asked or answered independent of a time and place. It’s not a question that can be answered for all societies at all points in their material and cultural development. And yet the word ‘societies’ is not here misplaced. Writing is for and from within a society. Writers need readers. That readership has always consisted of those who will treat the formulated thought, the organised narrative, the expressed subtlety of ideas, the sharpness of insight as definitions of truth, as keys to their civilisation. And that presumes a ‘modern’ readership whose idea of reading is not derived from revealed literature or from ancient epics and myths from which moral prescription may be derived.
Societies produce the literature that they need. Dysfunctional societies, for instance the Stalinist constructs of the Twentieth century, produce the literature that has been prescribed for them, literature they don’t need, distorting literature.

Ancient India, ancient Greece lived by their great epics. Greek society, evolving into city-states and democracies in which there was a profound necessity for a comic and tragic self-consciousness, generated the theatre. Eighteenth and Nineteenth century Europe turned to the novel form to explore the possibilities of life in a changing world to which poetry and the essay could not offer sufficient guidance. Naipaul’s work, from his novels of the Caribbean through his books of discovery and enquiry in Africa, Britain, India and the Islamic countries are essential explorations of our time. Taken together they could define the burden of literature in our times.

Naipaul is not an Indian writer. He writes in English but he is not a ‘post-colonial’ writer in the popular, but doomed, classification of today’s universities. Neither is a he a British writer with neurotic post-imperial concerns or the narrow prospects of the British writers who accept their shrunken perspectives and world.

His personal history is Indian, in so far as India was colonised by the British who sent indentured labour to the West Indies and handed out island scholarships to a handful of the progeny of these marooned islanders to study at Oxford and Cambridge. His childhood was spent in a recognisably Indian but rapidly transforming family whose very language, rural Indian morality, religious observances and traditional professions would change in the space of a generation. The family would be scattered – to England, to Canada. There would be no going back to India.

Except for the writer who acknowledges that India is in his blood and feels both drawn to but removed from it. The exact nature of that attraction and removal is examined several times by Naipaul. In his second book of discovery in the country, India: a Wounded Civilization, he writes, “India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far…..

India, which I visited for the first time in 1962, turned out to be a very strange land. As hundred years had been enough to wash me clean of many Indian religious attitudes; and without these attitudes the distress of India was – and is—almost insupportable……

Any inquiry about India has quickly to go beyond the political. It has to be an inquiry about Indian attitudes; it has to be an inquiry about civlisation itself, as it is. And though in India I am a stranger, this starting point of this inquiry has been myself.”

That is what I would call a true statement of commitment to writing: the inquiry that begins with the memory and insights of one’s own life and goes immediately beyond it to an inquiry into a civilisation.

Naipaul’s three books and some essays on India began to draw fire as far back as 1963 when he published An Area of Darkness. One of the attitudes of which he had been washed clean, was the characteristic Indian blindness to poverty, to extreme inequality, to suffering and to the filth around.

I remember reading An Area of Darkness in my college days in Pune. The book caused a furore. It was compared by ‘critics’ to Mother India, a book written by Katherine Mayo an American writer of the ‘20s, who it was said wrote of the suffering and the malpractices of child-marriage and female infanticide in India to put a spoke in the wheels of the Indian Independence movement as it gathered momentum.

Naipaul wrote of his revulsion at the social habits that Indians seemed to ignore – the defecation in public, the total ignorance of social hygiene, the superstition, hypocrisy, double standards and the comic and malappropriate mimicry of the West which he encountered during his year’s sojourn. The Indian intellectual community exploded with righteous indignation. Naipaul was a traitor. He was giving a bad impression of the country. They wrote and spoke of him as though they had hired an advertising agent for the civilisation who had ended up doing a bad job. Even then, and in the face of what can only be seen as the reaction of injured national pride, I admired the vision of the man who stated what should have been obvious, but stated it in an irrefutable style. Did I dare say that to my contemporaries? I can’t remember.

In all the noise generated by this book the objection which seemed to hold some water came from the left, from intellectuals who had presumably evolved a socialistic or communistic outlook as a retreat from the very attitudes which Naipaul exposed. Yes, they said, we were all guilty of turning away from the beggars and the starvation, but Naipaul should understand that this was the inheritance that colonialism left India and we were battling to overawe this legacy with political action. That first book and Naipaul’s perspective were unique. His vision had to have an answer. This leftist critical objection to Naipaul’s vision pacified the conscience of my generation of readers, but certainly left me with begged questions.

Naipaul turned to those questions when he returned to India in 1977 to write A Wounded Civilization. The book contains many more ideas than can be given room here but the germ of an idea, first developed in this book and later becoming the centre of Naipaul’s vision of Indian history, is that enshrined in its title. India is a wounded civilisation. Its wounds were inflicted by continuous conquest, the slaughter and obliteration of culture and continuity that the conquests entailed. And, unlike the historians of the nationalist era who consciously adhere to the credo that the pre-British conquests of India are best left in the shadows of history, lest they inflame irrational and uncontrollable passions, Naipaul points a wagging historical finger.

He is standing in the wide avenue of what used to be the main thoroughfare of the capital of the Fourteenth century kingdom of Vijayanagar. At one end is a temple which, 400 years after the destruction of the city, still stands. At the other, a giant statue of the bull of Shiva.: “That once glorious avenue—not a national monument, still permitted to live – is a slum. Its surface where unpaved, is a green-black slurry of mud and excrement, through which the sandaled pilgrims unheedingly pad to the food stalls and souvenir shops, loud and gay with radios. And there are starved squatters with their starved animals in the ruins, the broken stone facades patched up with mud and rocks, the doorways stripped of the sculptures which existed until recently. Life goes on, the past continues. After conquest and destruction, the past simply reasserts itself.”

Vijayanagar was wiped out by a confederacy of its Muslim neighbours, some of whom had been its allies against others in the years before the final obliteration of the kingdom and its ruling castes.

Naipaul goes on to say that by the time it was destroyed, Vijayanagar represented a fossilised Hinduism. It may not have deserved its fate, but it had ceased to generate the historical energy to withstand it.

Vijayanagar’s fate gives Naipaul the key to the wound that prevents India becoming whole again: “It was in Vijayanagar at this time… that I began to wonder about the intellectual depletion that must have come to India with the invasions and conquests of the last thousand years. What happened in Vijayanagar happened, in varying degrees, in other parts of the country. In the north ruin lies on ruin: Moslem ruin on Hindu ruin, Moslem on Moslem. In the history books, in the accounts of wars and conquests and plunder, the intellectual depletion passes unnoticed.” India makes itself archaic again.

This is the statement of a vast historical probability. Naipaul states this speculatively and then turns, here and in subsequent works, to the original sources of Indian history, to the accounts of travellers in the pre-Muslim and the Muslim and Mughal periods. The idea that begins here is substantiated and detailed in subsequent books and essays.

The book raised a second storm. Naipaul was again vilified by those who had a vision of India that was independent of its reality. A Wounded Civilization goes on o examine and condemn the living legacy of Gandhi. After the thousands of books written on Gandhi and Gandhianism, Naipaul is refreshingly brief and insightful. Through all his books Gandhi is mentioned with the deepest of intellectual respect. From Wounded Civilization to Magic Seeds, the novel which Naipaul has proclaimed is his last book, Gandhi is seen as uniquely honest in the community of Indian writers. Naipaul begins here his assessment of the Gandhian movement, which he says was built in 11 years from 1919 to 1930. Thereafter the structure survived and was the strongest factor in the gaining of Indian independence, but it generated a petrifaction of attitude, a compulsive return to the past which wouldn’t serve the material needs of the new India or propel it out of poverty. Gandhianism leads to an imaginary innocence, one that is not even fully understood, one that belongs to an undiscovered history before the wound. It leads to a cult of poverty – a religion India least requires.

There is a third idea in India; A Wounded Civilization, which has proved controversially prophetic. The book was written after a journey occasioned by the crisis in India’s political life which resulted in the state of Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi’s government. In Bombay Naipaul asks to see the chawls, the shanties and slums of the city and writes about the order and small benefits that the organisation of the nascent Shiv Sena has brought to the sanitation and, marginally, to the health and well-being of these filthy and neglected warrens overpopulated by the influx of villagers into the city. It’s 1977 and the Shiv Sena, a novel political movement, restricted to Maharashtra, has hit upon the idea of organising this neglected, all too visible mass of the cities – these people who have been driven by destitution to the metropoles and haven’t the attributes which will municipalise them. They may even be a majority in the city, but they are non-people in its civic life. The Sena sets out to organise and win them. Its patron saint is Shivaji. The Sena’s methods of disciplining and drilling are not far removed from those of popular militant movement in Europe with mystical philosophies and nascent grudges substituted for ideology. Their leader has been known to express an admiration for Hitler. The Sena are labelled ‘fascist’ by the liberals and the left.

“But this is an easy, imported word,” says Naipaul. “The middle-class leadership of the Sena might talk of martial glory and dream of political power. But at this lower and more desperate level the Sena had become something else: a yearning for community, an ideal of self-help, men rejecting rejection.”

At the time of the Emergency I was writing for the radical newspapers in London and remember the horror with which this endorsement of the ‘fascist’ Sena was met. They were fascists. They were extortionists and protection racketeers. The rich and the religious minorities had everything to fear from these political goondas. The combination of the cult of Shivaji and the sight of feeble young men with matchstick limbs parading each dawn in khaki shorts and with lathis may not have filled me with dread, but unlike Naipaul I had no premonition or idea that this movement was a symptom of something larger. At the time, if the police had smashed them into submission with a few cracked heads, I wouldn’t have been sorry.

And yet Naipaul’s premonition proved to be right. The Sena was only one formation which was using legendary icons and allegiances to harness an energy which had to pull India out of Gandhian stagnation, out of a look backward.

Reading India: A Wounded Civilization and holding these three ideas in solution, the historical wound that has left India intellectually handicapped if not sterile, the limitations of the Gandhian project through which ancient stagnations and defeats reassert themselves, to the birth of the organising impulse within the neglected and destitute of India, one can see the book as clearest description of the developments of that era. The measured tones in which the connections are made is masterful. Its witnessed history.

His plea at the end of the book is not for any ‘fascist’ form of organisation, not for Shivaji or any renascent Hinduism. It is the understanding that the stability of the Gandhian India, an idea that came to the fore early in the Twentieth century and persisted, is an illusion. India will not be stable again for a long time: “While India tries to go back to an idea of its past, it will not possess that past or be enriched by it. The past can now be possessed only by inquiry and scholarship, by intellectual rather than spiritual discipline. The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill”

How then did this slayer of the past acquire a reputation for being, as Salman Rushdie so damningly pronounced “A cheer-leader for the bjp?” How then does William Dalrymple, expert on Mughal couture and cuisine, pronounce VS Naipaul to be historically ignorant and a self-confessed “supporter of the entire Sangh Parivar Programme”?

Both Rushdie and Dalrymple are latter-day critics of Naipaul. They join the attack after Naipaul writes his third book of travel and discovery in the country: India A Million Mutinies Now. It remains, even in the words of Naipaul’s critics such as Edward Luce, the clearest and most diverse account of the reality, the flux and the dynamic of contemporary India. It is, to my mind, a growth from, rather than a revision of, the ideas formed during the earlier journeys. It uses the form invented in Among The Believers and is a collection of stories discovered or revealed on a journey round the India from Mumbai, through a turn in the South and Communist Party ruled Bengal, to Lucknow, Delhi and Kashmir. It is a passage through India and Naipaul sees all over, through the lives of people he meets, in the large and small social and political movements, a new dynamic. Sections of society, which have been hitherto silent, for centuries and millennia, are, through the hurly-burly and even through the corruption and confusion of democracy, asserting themselves. The assertion is both the result of and a part of self-discovery, a newfound collective confidence, an atma-vishwas. Its political dimensions are caste politics and this may entail the rise of demagogues who will by force

majeur abolish the pernicious caste system though they may make themselves rich and perpetrate small tyrannies on the way. And caste has to go, even if it means reinforcing its political cohesion.

In A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul uses the strongest language against the practices of untouchability – a quotation would make a Communist party rabble-rouser proud. And the socio-political dimension of this new movement, the culmination of Indian democratic awakening, is the rise of ‘Hindutva’, a realisation after more than a 1000 years of subservience, that the ancient way of life which is Hinduism can also be a force for political cohesion.

“It is not a religion of private conscience and private practice. It comes with certain ‘legal concepts’. These concepts have ‘civic significance’ and create a certain kind of social order. The religious idea cannot be separated from the social order. Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the religious principle of solidarity is simply unthinkable….”

No, these are not the words of some Hindutva fascist. It’s a quote from Mohammed Iqbal making a speech in 1930 favouring the formation of Pakistan.
Pakistan was formed. Iran underwent a revolution using Islam as a uniting force to sweep away the modernisations and police state of the Shah. Now Al Qaeda calls on Muslims the world over to unite and aim at a universal Taliban-like Islamic polity and world. The rise of this Islamic force must be understood, I keep being told, even if one doesn’t sympathise with its ultimate aim. It is the reaction to humiliation, suffering and imperialism.

In India the movement of Hindutva is, according to Naipaul a reaction to humiliation suffering and historical imperialism. It doesn’t want to dominate the world. It is an awakening that can stimulate the population as it is into nationhood and that need not, under any tenet of classical Hindu belief turn its energies to suppressing or killing minorities. Awakenings carry criminals in their wake and there are vicious and foolish men who have ridden the wave to gain power and to betray the movement through which India stumbles and moves on. VS Naipaul has publicly, in my hearing denounced them. But should he not see in the contemporary movements of India this awakened energy?