Sahitya Akademi

V.S. Naipaul's India Author(s): DENNIS WALDER Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 35, No. 3 (149) (May-June, 1992), pp. 83-100 Published by: Sahitya Akademi Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23338004 . Accessed: 28/01/2014 13:10
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V.S. Naipaul's
DENNIS WALDER

India

returned to his original 1960, V.S. Naipaul September IN country, Trinidad, after ten years in England. He was on a While he was there visit funded by the Trinidad Government. that he the premier, Eric Williams, an historian, proposed This should write a non-fiction book about the Caribbean. was to prove the beginning of his dual career as a writer of narratives non-fictional as well as fictional; and of his reputa

tion as an increasingly provocative and controversial figure, has those whose countries he written about. The latest, among of India: India: A Million Mutinies Now and longest account (1990), concludes ers of his earlier in terms which would Indian booksin have astonished read and terms of 'wholeness

humanism', 'growth' and 'restoration' (p. 518, Minerva edn.). Can this be the same author who has for so long dismissed India as a static, decaying society, lost in a double fantasy of of the West, and Oriental resignation? Apparently, And to a recent BBC radio interview (20 Sept. yes. according 1991), this is his last book on the subject. So it would seem a good moment to attempt record on India so far. at least a brief look at Naipaul's imitation

When Williams made his approach to the twenty-eight year old novelist, Naipaul was already widely known as an author, with two novels and a collection of short stories behind him. He had just completed what was to become a 'classic' and

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84/lndian his most

Literature popular work, A House for Mr. account a richly Biswas: of the impact of East Indian family from

humorous, semi-autobiographical traditional change upon an enclosed, For all the enjoyment rural Trinidadhis own background. of the of its account of its subject, and however, accuracy Biswas revealed a level this particular Caribbean sub-culture, of irony and disillusion which might have warned its Caribbean audience at least of what was to come. But The Middle shocked and (1962), Naipaul's 'impressions' the West Indies and South America, West thus: Indians at home and abroad Caribbean of five colonial for its acid Passage in countries dismayed dismissal of

culture, history and society, which he summed up 'Nothing was created in the West Indies' (The Middle was the Even more upsetting Passage, Penguin, p.29). reception praised it received its critical who from English and American and descriptive detachment in approaching Apart perhaps

enthusiastic critics,

power. This highlights the main problem involved Naipaul's writing, fictional or non-fictional. from the South African novelist and Nobel Nadine

prize-winner and most prolific he is the best-known Gordimer, with writer from the former colonial diaspora, Anglophone some twenty books, innumerable articles and most of the behind him. major English literary awards (and a knighthood) Far from making him a cultural hero, however, the nature and impact of his work have been such as to make him among the most controversial, if not actually disliked, of major writers in English today. But who dislikes him, and why, exactly? The Sri Lankan A. Sivanandan began a recent review (in Race and Class,
liked

July 1990):
I could never into read him without without out a sense being of self off that

I never betrayal, from fellow

Naipaul, was who

I could had

not enter just knew

his stories to come

turned

myself...l colonial

beginning

of the self-hate than I did,

colonialism

implanted

in me when my condition

I first encountered better

Naipaula described

May-June

1992

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V.S.
it with a fine and my subjugation acute understanding, of his own and then

Naipaul's
delivered (p.33)

India/85
me up to

in the pursuit

deliverance,

This is a developed early on. More observed

His may safely books be

version than

of critcism of Naipaui

evident from Lamming

thirty years ago, in The Pleasures of Exile (1960):

can't move alone. the small beyond When and satire refuge castrated no such satire; important

George

and

although ... can ashamed values to be

satire rest of are taken

a useful

element

in fiction,

work

on satire to

a writer is a colonial, to prove more wishes culture nothing who whose

his cultural promotion gravely And seriously,

background peaks then a

striving like mad 'superior' for a writer is for me

himself than

through a refuge.

of a

in doubt,

it is too

(p.225)

himself from Barbados, in scare Lamming, places 'superior' this to emphasize that borrowed quotes superiority comes from a culture whose values are 'gravely in doubt'. His is And it continues to frame perspective. clearly a 'post-colonial' the predominant to work up to the present, response Naipaul's from those who perceive themselves to be outside the Anglo American, Western, this: 'one metropolitan centres Anglo-American of the finest living novelists of power. Meanwhile continues to sound response, the like

in English' (Patrick Swin den, The English Novel of History and Society, 1984); or this: 'our greatest novelist' (Melvyn Bragg, South Bank Show, ITN, 8 March What 1987, my italics). this reveals is, of course, that our responses depend our own situations, histories, ideologies. This is always But they should not merely be determined by our we should be able to take our contexts contexts;

upon the case.

particular into account,

and go beyond them; if we are to reach any kind of objectivity. in the As an ex-colonial myself, based I want to that metropolis, argue Naipaul's writings push all of or metropolitan us, from whatever ex-colonial background, towards becoming more aware of our contexts; they push us No. 149

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86/lndian

Literature

of our sharply and disturbingly towards an acknowledgement in as readers one or another, position caught up way according to different orders by the networks of power in the post-colonial That is the most important dispensation. reason why we should all attend to his voice, whether or not approve book. of, or like its tone and message, in of perception,

we find we can any particular The dislike, from those

ed', difficult to see why. But are the reasons still sufficient? Lam first two ming's remarks were made in response to Naipaul's The Masseur and The of Elvira (1957) novels, Mystic Suffrage (1958). Both works

the disapproval, has of course come mainly in what,Naipal calls the 'half-form provocatively decolonised societies he chooses to write about. It isn't

look at the took a comic but jaundiced in the Carib of democratic operation British-style processes with nationalist fervour and beana view which coincided in the West Indies and among West Indians rising expectations The focus of these first two novels such as Lamming abroad. their aim to show up was upon the rural Indian community; or the squalid of post-war politics in Trinidad, corruption Elvira, as it is called. When Naipaul returned to the Caribbean in response to William's and wrote The Middle Passage what was to become a characteristic he adopted request, procedurepicking up and sharpening what he'd already In Trinidad, he concluded : in his preceding books.
Nationalism he was was impossible every man he owed understand to Trinidad .. In the colonial had no to grasp loyalty society every and man

said

had

to be for himself; allowed; To that came adult to his group. politics universal tion

whatever

dignity and scarcely the squalor took

power any of the

to the island

this is to understand in 1946 when,

after no popular privilege

agitation, the popula p.78)

The suffrage was declared. Old attitudes persisted.... by surprise.

(Passage,

and cynical characteristically generalising, note is what most offends those who, like, Lamming, This May-June 1992

sarcastic have felt

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V. S. Naipaul's

India /87

of the post-war period part of the rising nationalist movements of decolonisation. It is as if Naipaul is stuck within what Frantz Fanon called the first stage of interaction between the metro cultures: successfully assimilating Euro of expression, but not going on to assert an iden Fanon's revolutionary 'awakener of tity, much less becoming the people' of the Earth, Penguin edn., p.179). (Wretched diffi However, asserting an identity is precisely Naipaul's in continuing to struggle with it in the that Fanon so devoutly wished for, post-colonial dispensation but did not live to see. If Fanon had lived on, perhaps he culty; would national sectarian have felt less enthusiastic has also awakening, violence on a world scale; for nationalism and violence was of its time and moreover which of prospects the awakening of but then Fanon's support meant about the nor is he alone politan and pean modes colonial

process That Naipaul is still worried about his identity may seem a banal thing to say: and no excuse for his incorporation of the and of of experiences perceptions others, especially Indians, within some monolithic quest of his own. Reviewing a collec tion of academic Literature over papers on Commonwealth of 'occa twenty years ago, he ruefully noted the appearance sional references to myself', and continued:
Things move so fast nowadays, writing as we even in the Literature it is so new, Schools. and already Com it is

place, and of its function in the historical part of a conviction culminating in the socialist idealinternationalism.

monwealth ...

understand

being picked to pieces ... it all seems to have been codified

already Here the Then there is the West deep. write my Indian with his search alreadyhow engaged (New for identity. disquiet get for is a phrase impression How that has gone theses, from is it going? Students, I am

ing!preparing identity.

or even that

telephone

to say that they in a search

books

At times like this I am glad to be only a name. Statesman, 1965)

Glad

metropolis

to be only a name? Hardly: when as a young colonial, Naipaul

he first came felt 'lost',

to the

'misled', No. 149

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88/Indian

Literature

finally reduced to just 'my flat, my desk, my name' (An Area of Darkness, 1964, p.42) The question of the search for 'identity' is unavoidable in any discussion to understand of post-colonial writing, and we cannot begin what Naipaul is about, in both fiction and non its centrality. The point has been fiction, without appreciating well made Exile (Boyars, by Gareth Griffiths in A Double London,
the force identity invention nuous Indian

1978),

where

he remarked
and but an

that
social myths reality groups of borrowed ... is not the and within conti West

with which have of tortured

the educational Indian intellectuals

split the West experienced

from his own and

overwhelming

pressure society.

by all classes

(p. 106) There West Edward shown are radically different ways Indian writers as disparate to this split. of responding as George and Lamming

Braithwaite, Grace Nichols and Derek Walcott have a struggle to accept their fractured inheritance, to redis cover their history, their society, their placeeven look ahead, as Walcott genous But Naipaul's writings display a different response, pervaded an sense of personal dislocation which de by overwhelming feats any potential reconstruction in some future Caribbean culture; cultural locus, he can only, even of the personality, the self, and without any other firm does, to a fusion of the fragments local culture of the future. into a hetero

in England, the country he has lived in longest, repeatedly, arrive: the word itself reap pears in the title of his last novel, The Enigma of Arrival, (1987), a finely-wrought, resonant document rather than a fiction, himself in a gently decaying estate in the discovering of the English countryside. What does he discover? to his concluding words: 'the adventure of writ According heart ingcuriosity and knowledge feeding off one another commit one not ting only to travel but also to different explorations of the past' (Penguin, p. 314). And so it is all part of an internal May-June 1992 about

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V.S.

Naipaul's

India/89

process, self-feeding, self-reflexive, intertwined; yet, produc its own remarkable ing imaginative insightsslanted, per sonal, but potent. Each of documentary cover or establish narrativeswhether Naipaul's or fictionrepresents another the sense of self which autobiography, attempt to dis eludes him and

which, he provocatively insists, eludes the colonial subject if not all colonial from the Caribbean, and former colonial peoples, 'Living in a borrowed culture, the West Indian, more than most, needs writers to tell him who is and where he in 1962 (The Middle he observed stands', Passage, p.73). Hence for Naipaul, writing itself takes on a peculiar, quasi-re source of an identity. If demptive authority, as the unique

anything is constant about him, it is this view of his profession: again, in The Enigma of Arrival he asserts that what matters most is 'my journey, my writer's journey, the writer defined his ways of seeing', (p.309). by his writing discoveries, As everybody first persuasive knows, Naipaul's attempt to affirm this was embodied in A House for Mr. Biswas the central of which was based on his journalist father, who aspires towards the secure identity that a house of his own would give him; but it ends with Biswas dying in a jerrybuilt wreck. His failure suggests that all such attempts at redefinition are illusory; although the presence of that failure in a successful novel goes some way towards con describes tradicting the message. Again and again Naipaul the societies quently, of the Caribbean he then projects upon those all formerly under the sway of the Western imperial powers or, in the case of A Turn in the South (1989), internally colonised. back exactly is the nature of the 'lack' in Naipaul's that he has to elaborate to in his non-fic ground upon, project tion? The Trinidad of his childhood, 'too unimportant' and What peripheral slavery, a history, and with a society and crass materialism, left exploitation to have based upon in terms of lack; a lack which societies he encounters subse in the colonial context character

No.

149

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90/Indian

Literature

for his place in the community. Everyone (as) an individual, fighting

Yet small dence. was no there was cliques, There was our no community. and we had bound We were of various found there races, religions, resi There our us any sets and somehow ourselves could on the same

island.

Nothing

us together feeling; feeling;

except indeed, Empire,

this common be none. it was which

no nationalist anti-imperialist

profound

only

Britishness,

belonging

to the British

gave

identity.

(The Middle Passage, p.45)

writer's position is increasingly Naipaul paradoxical: uncover the on to and non-existent history supposedly goes try he of his place, his culture. In The Loss of El Dorado (1969) records 'two moments when Trinidad was touched by "his tory", the two 'forgotten stories' of Raleigh's failed search for El Dorado which began with his raid on Trinidad in 1595 and, nearly two hundered years later, the British occupation trade for their own slave-based of the island as a springboard The author's reliance upon public docu in South America. ments in London colonisation of the New The Middle the West histories of for these rewritten, reclaimed not an does imaginative understanding preclude he appears to deny. And in World perspective

The

insists that we find that while Naipaul Passage, a creation of Empire that Indies 'are so completely of Empire is almost without meaning, he also the withdrawal admits that in such a situation ing force.' 'nationalism is the only revitaliz in which troops were that is British Guianato But, the radical nationalism of the early fifties; to destroy dispatched assertion turned to riot, and when in Notting Hill, London, energy which, towards an ordered pated in racial 'the ought to have already gathered, and overdue social revolution was strife and simple gone dissi

Middle Passage, p. 153).

And so we end communal, constant;

rivalry, factional up where

fear' (The

we were

before.

political action, no matter how of an individual and Naipaul simply cannot conceive from the common a sense of history, the com identity gaining May-June 1992

The futility of seems necessary,

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V.S. Naipaul's India/91

Again and again we are left with the isolated without a community, circling back upon himself; individual, and this is the repeated theme of the Indian booksapart from the last. has to do with Naipaul's own rural the Hindu Vidiadhar 'race', religion, clique, Community. Surajprasad Naipaul was born 17 August 1932 in Chaguanas, Why in the heart of the sugarcane area of the trace left of the Arawak Trinidad, only original inhabitants of the island, as he later acknowledged (in Finding the Centre, 1984). He was the grandson of indentured labour ers of Brahmin descent. As revealed in An Area of Darkness, its name as a young man he could understand, but not speak, Hindi; and he developed a Brahmin delicacy about cooking and per sonal habits while resisting Hindu belief and ritualas his father Seepersad did before him, despite having been thought of by his family as a potential pundit, thereby winning from them an education denied to his brother, Naipual's uncle. from the start, than, to a young Naipaul belonged particular subculture within the multicultural, multiracial, mul tilayered society of his island colony, a subculture permeated with a sense of difference. At first this sounds offers a refuge:
Everything strength. He was plicated gave him which His rules made the Indian alien in the society him from the black-white person what on the island: was unclean. he with values

mor cause.

India?

This of course

a small

market

town

The

as though

it

gave

him com

alienness about and

insulated as no other food and were

struggle. His religion lost

taboo-ridden values which

he had

about him

not the white from

of the rest of the never

community, zation, and

pride in his origins. More importantthatreligionwas his familyorgani

an enclosing to escape. self-sufficient It protected world and absorbed its quarrels of world, jealousies, as difficult for the outsider to penetrate imprisoned, as for one a static

preserved

self-contempt;

its members

awaiting decay.

(The Middle Passage, p. 88) system of values, this commun No. 149

By its religion, its alternative

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92/lndian

Literature

wholesale to the dominant, ity is protected from succumbing the of white and hence from values, colonial, 'self-contempt' alternatives to had such those who have, according Naipaul, erased of the middle passage. by the historic experience But if his community protects, it also imprisons; and Naipaul it. On the other admits his own overwhelming urge to escape hand, members of the community retain an identity: 'he never lost pride in his origins'. If Indian and African alike have been left in a void by the processes of history, the Indian can at least grasp the root of an earlier, identifiable culture. Or can first time at 18, on an he? Naipaul Trinidadthe escapes to Oxford; he returns on visitsthe first 'island scholarship' time at 24, after graduation, marriage and a job at the BBC; but he also goes to India for a year, to the very village in Uttar Pradesh from which his grandfather migrated to Trinidad; and he returns, again and again, to India. What does he seek? His identity. What does he find? The titles of the books he has written about the country and its attitudes suggest what he thinks he finds: An Area of Dark Mutinies Now (1990). As he confesses

ness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) and India:

A Million early in the first account
even now, though time has widened, though space has contracted in those no longer p. 30)

and I have travelled lucidly ovr that area which was to me (as a
child) mine. (An Area of Darkness, the area those of darkness, ways something and of darkness seeing, remains, are attitudes, of thinking which

It is a darkness
but increasingly

he continues
I understand

to explore:
memories, the memories

of that India which lived on into my childhood in Trinidad, are like

trapdoors into a bottomless past.

that my Indian

(India: A Wounded Civilization, p. 10) threatening. Even when, in the

The identity is unreachable, May-June 1992

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V.S. Naipaul's India/93

third Indian book, he sets out to introduce 'people (who) have ideas now about who they are and what they owe themselves' he cannot relate to them, he withdraws. (p.517), Early on in that book he reiterates (the writer going over and over what own idea he has written before, like a spider spinning himself into his emotions which first set him in web) the dual childhood towards

but an India, an idea rather than a place, both and a offering refuge neurosis, imprisonmentlike the neurosis of the colonial:
I grew to go out up with two into too had ideas ... of India. about Migration ways The the first ideanot kind of country World, India, one I wanted us

motion

closelywas come

from which shaking had made

my ancestors of the

to the New of peasant

immemorial there and were ...

us ambitious; but in colonial and agricultural Trinidad, during the

Depression, around India India, There the names. classical the ... us, few opportunities to rise. a most have With this poverty of prison place was India of the and of our ... ... This like a was great of our with this sense about of the world we as a kind fearful come

accepting

became

in my imagination where

or this anxiety was India second of the It was past. also It was we

from, second India

neurosis. India. the It balanced India of the the first. This the

independence the India we more

movement, great by which, It was developed, had

civilization an

the great

in all the difficulties aspect which,

circumstances, community had Trinidad,

felt supported.

identity become

identity, in multi-racial

like a racial

(India: A Million Mutinies Now, pp. 7-8) In the revealing perspective thrown by this self-analysis, the entangling thread which winds around the India Naipaul meets own in later life is evidently spun out of his childhood sense of his environment as a Trinidadian Indian. And so his failure brought with it from the start a realisation he foundinstead of a land of achievement based

identity.

to settle in India that what

on a whole, traditional culture was living and long-standing another fractured, or at least 'wounded' culture, lost in a 'double resignation fantasy', a mixture of mimicry of the West and oriental (An Area of Darkness, pp. 216-7). No. 149

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94/Indian

Literature

went on his first long visit, Naipaul seemed Everywherehe to see only filth and stagnation; the empty echo of Western ideas, alongside corruption and caste. And yet, on occasion, another
Out India rate yet know

note can
of all

also

be heard:
human too take a ... much decay, of grace its eruptions and beauty, to as of butchery, ruled so by elabo of life; ... To

its squalor

and

produced courtesy. it permitted Indians was

so many Producing a was unique to

people

life, it denied development in people

the value many

human

delight (p. 243)

people;

every

encounter

an adventure

these adventures sustain the last book, encounters, a massive to allow the finally attempt people of India to speak in exact reversal of what he did at the begin for themselves, ning. Having first found an echo of his own views wherever he went, he now tries to listen to what is said. Not that he ever completely ignored most in the first two becomes for Naipaul
looked visitor

These

Indian Indian

views. books

The voice

referred to Gandhi :
and the the

is Gandhi'swhich nonetheless
was exactly He sees

a touchstone

for much

of his own criticism.

is the 'failed
as no was, he does filth ... Indian not

reformer' who
was able to;

at India

his vision He sees ...

direct, what and

this directness sees; shameless callousness,

and

is, revolutionary. ignore the obvious sanitary to see.

.. the beggars

the atrocious refusal

habits (p.73)

the Indian

the Indian

Why did Gandhi edged, done, too: and

double colonial'like Naipaul. This makes Naipaul's criticism

he attacks the Western powers

see so clearly?

Because

'he was

in part of a

individual foreigners (especially Yet does he ever hippy trail) generally emerge as ridiculous. the West's cultural authority? At certain crucial challenge moments, yes: if the British gave India what sense of history it has (not much), for Naipaul the Raj was also a kind of huge power at play, leaving fantasy, the fantasy of an immense

for what they have Americans on the

May-June

1992

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V.S. Naipaul's behind 'confusion', a confusion

lnda/95

is part (pp. 198-9, 213-4).

of which the English language

It is hard not to feel that at times, it is Naipaul himself who is the most confused: or perhaps neurotic? It takes him the before he best part of a year in the country of his ancestors, born. was the of where his to Dubes, village grandfather goes This where he might come to terms with his past: but it is, No a failure, inducing shame and withdrawal. An Area of the dream on the of last wonder, page for an in which he compares his search identity Darkness, to trace the figures, with a piece of patterned cloth unwoven inevitably, then yet which ends up a heap of tangled threads (p.266). of personal frustration at The image is doubly suggestive: of his search for a common the inevitable outcome identity; of the tangle of differing narrative forms or ways of wri In ting, in which he represents that frustration, that search. one of his books above all, In a Free State (1971), that tangle and becomes part of the very texture of the narrative, a sequence in fictional and non-fictional, of radically different voices, which Trinidad and India feature as points of contact, and of rather than as either home or destination. In these questioning, of Naipaul's whole search senses, it can stand as emblematic for identity; and in particular the first story after the prologue, out of Many', which takes the reader from Bombay bears closer attention in this context. Washington, 'One its title is a play on the motto of the USA, E pluribus unum, and the familiar American notion that everyone can an American; it also reminds us of US hegemony in the world, hinted at in the prologue; and it anticipates Western individualism and the ironic contrast between become runs through the story. Unlike detached and ironic tone, usual sophisticated, Naipaul's mode. he offers here a simpler, confessional Hindu communalism which
I am done now well. an American people, (p.21) citizen both and here I live and the world. Many But. in India, in Washington, of capital will feel that I have

to

No.

149

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96/lndian That 'But'

Literature alerts us to the potential for undermining, ironic heart what follows. We are at the of typifies

reversal

which

the new empire, aspired to by many; and, significantly, in the own struggle to light of what we now know about Naipaul's identity, the Indian central is character's an uncanny reversal of his own: predicament and insecure former colonial from instead of the Westernised come to terms with the New coming to ancient India, here is an Indian of in his own culture and beliefs, part of the crowd India, on a Bombay street, coming to the New World. Furthermore, as we soon realise, it is satire. This is the key World secure his Indian

and effects. The satirist to understanding purposes Naipaul's requires an object of disgust, of hatred, to exercise his art, to that distorted mirror in which, as Swift said, we are produce face but our own. liable to see everyone's attempts to apply the simple values of his on the Air India flight to America go farci background the betel juice he isn't allowed cally wrong, as he swallows and ends up vomiting to spit, unknowingly sips champagne And so Santosh's Hindu figure, the simpleton who fails to come to grips with reality and suffers show up his moral, if not but whose adventures accordingly, over his bundles. He is that familiar he encounters. Naipaul repea of casual at the evidence ubiquitous disgust tedly expresses in India. Here it is the hysterical airhostess who is excretion spiritual superiority made to look absurd physical habits; himself in the 'tiny hissing room' at the back of the aircraft. of the 'civilised', The humour is light, and at the expense whether Indian or American:
'He's 'Does a cook' my employer carry said. (Penguin, p.26)

satirical

to those

when she is disgusted by her compatriot's not the frightened man who cannot control

he always

his condiments?'

An exchange realise Santosh 1992

even more amusing when we analeptically has carried into the USA 'the poor country

May-June

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V.S. Naipaul's weed

India/97

I smoked' His simplicity helps him to survive; (p.34). the freedom to stroll on the Bombay streets, at the cost of yet the and 'respect security' .shed upon him by the enjoying now he finds himself in a place of his employer: importance where a 'wild race' roams the streets, while block. he is a prisoner apartment As we proceed with Santosh's journey of self-discovery, the his development more complex: irony of his position becomes he desiresleaving domestic employ towards the 'freedom' work, marrying to legalise ment, finding more independent himself as a US citizenis marked by a series of telling little moments, sometimes comic, sometimes pathetic, but all ten that his freedom (the word itself is kept ding to the conclusion in play throughout), is an illusion. But it is an illusion of which he is aware, unlike those he meets. The added irony develops as we are brought to realise that this is 60s Americathe time of hippies, black urban riots, and a popular youth culture of the Orient, with different groups aspiring towards their idea of freedom, all set in the critical perspective Santosh's condition as a colonial immigrant. implied by in his master's

To begin with, this means that it is others who are shown to be living an illusion. The hippies and their specious seem, with their bad Sanskrit and odd dancing, that should be kin but turns out not to be, turns 'something out to be degraded, like a deformed man, or like a leper, who from a distance is like a disease looks whole' to Santosh, (p. 30). Their lack of identity in his own insecurity. It's been Orientalism

suggested (by Selwyn Cudjoe, V.S. Naipaul: A Materialist

1988, p. 146) that this is an intensely Reading, Massachusetts, racist story, in that Santosh's 'liberation' is sketched against a of black Yet it is their background stereotyped people. exhilaration enables found power in the streets which to escape from his employer. It's of course true that black power has been expressed But destructively. not only does Santosh acknowledge a kinship with the oppres Santosh sion of black Americans, a colonial people within No. the 149 at their new

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98/lndian

Literature

metropolitan state also struggling to achieve a sense of identity; but it is through the interest shown by a black American woman, achieves he is. It is arguable that the presentation of the black servant he to obtain Her is racistand sexist. citizenship otherness is stressed, and the narrator's attempt to naturalise marries it only demeans her further: she is large and threatening,, the incarnation of Kali, the black Hindu goddess of destruction in 'It is written our books, both holy furthermore, (pp. 33,53); and our blood not so holy, that it is indecent and wrong for a man of to embrace the hubshi woman. To be dishonoured and not by his fellow Indian expatriates, that he even the dubious status that allows him to stay where

in this life, to be born a cat or a monkey or a hubshi in the next!' (pp. 34-5). But Kali's other aspect is of creation, and there is ironic humour in the presentation of Santosh's Hindu as he succumbs to the hubshi's vitality, and fastidiousness, her difference ness which 'freedom' from himself. enables leaves She helps create the self-aware him to break out of his servitude. Yet that

him finally with 'the knowledge that I have a face and a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over' (p. 58). From an author who claims to have left Hinduism behind in childhood, in India dubious and finds its manifestations and constricting, this engagement with its discourse comes as something of a surprise. In his ferocious piece on the country under Indira Gandhi's state of emergencey, that Western India: A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul attempts to enter argues 'Hindu equilibrium' may be possible for scholars, at the level of 'intellectual but to try to enter it as a comprehension'; is another matter. 'The 'reality' hippies of Western Europe and give the illusion of having done so; but 'they break just at the point where the Hindu begins: the knowledge of the abyss, the acceptance of of distress as the condition men' State Is this the knowledge (p.27). is tending? 1992 towards which In a Free United States'

May-June

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V.S. Naipaul's If so, it is all the more remarkable

India/99

from an author who went

on, six years later, to castigate yet again and so severely, the old civilization that has at last become aware of its 'wounded (that is some inadequacies out the intellectual means we note) and is with improvement, to move ahead' of (p. 18) because its half-digested Westernisms,

its static religious attitudesand leaving India

without together. beyond the racial a racial an ideologyand have an idea: that was no idea

the failure and notion

of Gandhi none of the past,

and

India

Its people the tenuous excesses sense, (pp.

of the state, of Hindu period,

of the attitudes no identity in spite of of

that go with such

no historical

ecumenicism of the British 168-9)

beliefs,

and,

not even

the beginnings

Whether

or not there is any truth in these massive generalisa based on little more than the odd anecdote and fragment tions, of readingand it may well be that the political crisis had its roots in a crisis of Indian historical identitywhat they reveal is Naipaul's neurotic inability to see things self-confessed, whole: otherwise, why should a 'racial sense' matter so much? confronted by the intolerable uncertainties and ten Because, of the Emergency, the writer retreats, again, into that of 'difference' as crucial to his personal perception fragile sense of self. childhood For Naipaul, the sense of a threatened identity which can only recover itself through a proper relationship with the past of the need to implies a larger truth for all former colonials: establish history to claim, which of the many histories, before, during and after the imperial histories are truly theirs. For a country with so many histories, present or felt in so many of its cultures and at so many levels, this is surely an which sions

important focus? It is striking that one of the groups which fascinate and to whom he Naipaul during the Emergency, returns to interview at length in the last book, are the Shiv of Bombay. For all their chauvinist Hinduism, 'identity was what (they) were reaching out to ... (for them) the world No. 149 Sena

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100/lndian was new'

Literature (Wounded Civilization, even acceptance, p. 71). This becomes part of the last book:

of the broader in which

optimism which would the religious and sectarian excesses of the have brought down the thundering denunciations earlier Naipaul are now understood as the 'million mutinies' of the title, because these excess are 'now felt to be excesses' in India, and so can become part of its'restoration' (pp. 517-8). The danger now, of course, is to see this view as any less of Naipaul's own writerly concerns: feeling more secure in his own identity as a postcolonial subject, he has set out to defuse his continuing neurosis by finding in his other a reflection

forces which, despite all its stresses and strains, were there all along; if not always visible to the same extent. His three Indian books represent three different, yet home the restorative stages of his lifelong struggle with himself and his in isolation, identity; a struggle which cannot be understood as if he hadn't also produced all those other narratives of related memory, fictional and One of the peculiar alive and active non-fictional. dangers of talking about writers still is that of treating what they have already as if it were complete, the end of their career, as if

produced they were already safely dead. Perhaps this is a habit acade mics in particular fall into, through such long acquaintance with the dead. Whereas of course we should admit that any judgements sional, and we should about should writers still active are premature, provi be offered with that in mind. Arguably, to the works of dead writers in the same

respond way, as if their next work had still to arrive. In any case, the last arrival of Naipaul's latest book, his third and possibly the that his view of to write about India, suggests attempt and that is far from fixed or decided; country and its people of his both the Western assumption of the truthful accuracy earlier accounts, and the Caribbean-Indian their biased fictionality, bear revising. assumption of

May-June

1992

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