It is hard for anyone to speak conclusively of India without running into potholes and jams. The only true thing, I think, that can be said about it are the ones involving historical dates and facts (India gained political independence in August 1947, This movie was a box-office hit/flop, etc); anything slightly resembling opinion - however necessary it may be for discourse - can easily escalate into controversial status. This was my experience with Naipaul's essays. I told myself it would be wisdom beyond my years if I chose not to write about A Wounded Civilization (mostly because I don't know enough, nobody knows enough, and sometimes even while similar facts elicit vastly differing opinions, imagine what differing facts, upbringings and influences can do) but this afternoon, some sort of demonic impulse took over that begged a response to Naipaul's response to India. At least I had the good sense to place this disclaimer right here where you can read it. Clearly.
It has been 33 years since the book was published and plenty has changed, but I still had to put down Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization after a while (thirty pages from the end) because it became too much to stomach. While an argument can be made for its "stark honesty" (shouldn't it be stark misunderstanding or stark anti-Hinduism?), I think Naipaul's approach to India's post-Emergency problems are terribly myopic and negative. Granted, he is an excellent writer, which was probably the only thing that kept me reading despite the author's closed observations on Indian culture and society. The entire thing strikes me as a series of laments and wonderfully-worded complaints. 'India will go on', he keeps repeatedly quoting R.K. Narayan in a somewhat sing-song sarcastic manner, which began to grate on my nerves after a while, no thanks to the implication that India will go on partly because their religious influences make Indians simple-minded, self-contained, and blind to their own problems. He uses the analogy of Narayan's fictional town/village, Malgudi, to make a point:
"The small town he has staked out as his fictional territory was, I knew, a creation of art and therefore to some extent artificial, a simplification of reality. But the reality was cruel and overwhelming...To get down to Narayan's world, to perceive the order and continuity he saw in the dereliction and smallness of India, to enter into his ironic acceptance and relish his comedy, was to ignore too much of what could be seen, to shed too much of myself: my sense of history, and even the simplest idea of human possibility." (21)
What I first thought would have been a fair metaphor for the disparity between South Asian literature and India's reality turned out to be a fair metaphor for the disparity between South Asian literature and V.S. Naipaul's personal inability to come to terms with seeing through Narayan's eyes - only I don't think he realizes it. But that is precisely the joy of Narayan's fiction: he created, with his Malgudi, a small village emblematic of his South Indian experience; his characters are sincere and human; they are simple in the way a city-dweller comes upon a village and sees its lack of electricity as simple. According to Naipaul, it appears, to be true in fiction to India, one must not fictionalize India at all; include all the grit, dirt, disorder, mayhem and corruption. India, it seems, has to be chaotic, and anything less than that is an exercise in dishonesty. However, if his essays are a personal response to India and/or an attempt to negotiate with his ancestry, then I can understand why they turned out containing such bitter disappointment. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that this was written as an objective response to the problems India faced in the post-Emergency period.
In the midst of world change, India is unchanging, stagnating, unmoving; the stubborn cow in the middle of traffic has become emblematic of the stubborn Indian at the crossroads of change. Naipaul met a prince in Rajasthan who travelled outside of India. The prince's easy-going, bordering-on-nonchalance attitude, made Naipaul realize that "the world outside India was to be judged according to its own standards. India was not to be judged. India was only to be experienced in the Indian way". His observations are astute and sharp but I dislike the way he does not leave any room for growth or suggestion. Here is Naipaul, whose family two generations ago moved to Trinidad, who has come back to India to poke holes in the form of social inquiry on the fabric of Indian society. His anti-Hindu stance is only all too obvious; they are too involved in their myth, he says, they are hypocrites, instead of helping the poor they cripple them - I am unsure if his points hit the spot because they are true or because his sentences are craftily constructed but one thing is sure: his process of social inquiry borders on the insulting. Again, he says, 'India will go on', but it will only go on because it is removed from the forces inflicting change, because it is complacent, because the Hindu equilibrium maintains itself by absorbing itself in the past, in its mythos, by going back to the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the great epics of old. What is this karma and dharma, Naipaul asks, what is this simplicity and Gandhi's poverty? This is old-fashioned and we have to wake up, India, and move ahead!
What I do agree with (but only halfway, or even less) is one of his main concerns which is that India clings on so desperately to a past that inadvertently affects and resists its own growth, as though if they [the Indians] were to let it go, it might just disappear altogether along with whatever notions of identity that have come to be associated with it overtime. It is a notion a few decades outdated, though; the situation has changed with time; now, I think it foreign media that is more concerned with associating India with its epic past and mythology (after all, it is, to the rest of the world, still the mystical east), an attempt that has created a certain image of the Indian identity that has inevitably rubbed off on the people themselves. A large amount of identity is constructed, whether by perceptions, languages, social hierarchies, media, famous personalities, art or literature; it is hard, possibly damn near impossible, to come to a pure, unaffected and unaffecting identity; an identity without influences organically recreating itself, and then affecting the minds of hundreds of millions - something like the effect of Saleem Sinai's telepathic midnight conferences in Salman Rushdie's novel. It is an idealistic approach, and borders on - perhaps even crosses over to - magic (!), which is all very well in literature, but not otherwise.
This talk about Indian identity, about how in the Economic Times of India when a writer unconscious of irony expounded on the necessity to "develop an attitude of detachment even while remaining in the thick of terrestrial pleasures", it is summarised sarcastically by Naipaul as "but India is India" - as though everything India does can be explained self-referentially. But statements like "India is India" abound everywhere in the text, and are nothing, I think, but Naipaul's attempts at coming to understand the country on its own terms, and I wish he'd admit that instead of being mocking and flippant about it or passing it off with causticity. India gained independence in 1947; A Wounded Civilization was first published in 1975. His is a cynical response to a country that has struggled through hundreds of years of foreign rule, barely achieved self-rule, and is just beginning to regenerate itself. Give it some credit, Naipaul.
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