How he found & lost India

Naipaul has had many avatars. The superb comic novelist who gave us characters like Biswas and neighbourhoods like Elvira, the sensitive historian of half-lives and semi-finished societies that survive and even flourish on our planet in these times, the prophet who predicted the malign potential of fundamentalist Islam almost three decades ago, long before 9/11 gave every mediocre academic in the field of Middle Eastern or Islamic Studies oracular status, the travel-writer who combines and improves upon de Tocqueville, Robert Byron and Doherty, the granite-hard intellectual who is committed to defending civilisation as it is assaulted by barbarian hordes almost like a cultivated Latin epigrammatist living in the Tuscan hills and flailing against history sometime around 409 A.D. — the year before Alaric sacked Rome — the English prose stylist who with his transparent simplicity has served the language as well as Lamb or Hazzlitt, the ultimate player who follows with superb aplomb Hamlet’s advice to his professional forebears on the way to Elsinore to “hold a mirror up to nature”. In short, a polychromatic writer of many seasons, of our troubled times and perhaps our chronicler for posterity.

But it is with his Indian love affair that we are most concerned. Naipaul, the grandson of an Indian exile, is a sensitive soul who grappled with the idea of India long before he visited it and then kept grappling with himself and his many ideas of India again and again. We worry, we admire, we get angry, we get delighted, but we are never bored with the strange mirror he holds up to us as he gives us RIs (my newly coined term for Resident Indians) a guided tour of our own country. The mirror is alternately ironic, irritating, condemnatory and occasionally even laced with a little bit of praise. The India of the ’60s that he first visited was not just a disappointment but a malignant blister inflicted on his soul. He found nothing to admire, everything to reinforce a morbid pessimism. Had he actually stumbled on a place that was more hopeless, pointless and deadening than Trinidad? And given the size of India, this utterly negative setting where thin-legged dwarfs inhabited a continent without hope was actually a monumental disaster that could not be ignored just as an afterthought as one might a small Caribbean island.

While An Area of Darkness had the hallmark Naipaul style of bleak description that is almost an end in itself, in India: A Wounded Civilization one discovers a great deal more of analysis. I can never forget the incident at Hampi where Naipaul meets college students who have no knowledge at all of the history of that once-glorious, now-ruined city. Simultaneously, Naipaul seems to understand, condemn and even sympathise with these contemporary ignoramuses. Bereft of an interest in their own history, condemned to live in dirt and squalor without even being aware of it (elsewhere Naipaul has mentioned that an Indian who has not travelled abroad cannot and does not know what civic cleanliness means and hence does not mind its absence; Gandhi was intensely aware of it precisely because he had lived outside India for so long), their conversations resembling the pathetic characters of an ill-staged absurd drama, these inheritors of a wounded civilisation were not only living in a dark country but were actually blind so that they could recognise neither darkness nor light.

India: A Million Mutinies Now is the subtlest book in the trilogy. Here you can read cynicism or hope into each keenly observed situation or character. India just might be on the verge of a full-blown civilisational efflorescence. It could be as if you were visiting England in the first year of the reign of Elizabeth I. Alternately, if you are not the sanguine type, maybe India resembles the France of Louis XVI just before the fall of the Bastille. Take your pick. Suddenly, all of us RIs are happy as we are doubtless convinced that our country verily is “shining”! This writer who got a knighthood from the Queen of England and a special prize from the King of Sweden is now one of us. He is not a mean foreign critic; he is very much an Indian worthy of being honoured by our government and feted in elegant (and hopefully clean!) hotels around the country.

In a seminal speech Naipaul warned Indians of today not to pursue strategies of mere economic success or military accomplishment. We need to build a “civilisation” with all its soft penumbras. We cannot but agree. While we owe you much for sensitising us to our own country if nothing else, and that too in impressive prose, we too may have a message for you Sir Vidia. When you write the fourth volume of the tetralogy which we are all looking forward to, we might just surprise you. We might just continue to trundle along “almost shining” in parts and “definitely in darkness” in other parts. The land of your ancestors might just retain the maddening trait of avoiding the binary descriptors so appropriate for Wiltshire and so completely ignored by Periyar/Shiv Sena/Dalit/ Hazratbal-relic /forgotten-Hampi/ garbage-choked cities and emerging positive energy, all of which you have so expertly described.

The writer divides his time between Mumbai and Bangalore

jerry.rao@expressindia.com