Naipaul's India

The Indian Trilogy

Author: V S Naipaul

Publisher: Picador India

Price: Rs 1,299   Pages: 1079

When V S Naipaul died in London on 11 August 2018, obituaries poured in, praising his remarkable achievements as a writer. Comparing him with Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy, the New York Times described him as “a lightning rod for criticism”, who “exempted neither colonizer nor colonized from his scrutiny”. The Guardian described him as a “phenomenon and a spectacle, the ‘writer’ personified.” Writing for the Financial Times, Nilanjana S Roy pointed out: “Few writers have left behind such a vast and complicated legacy.” He was a writer who had mentored many and inspired more, but treated most women in his life — his wife Patricia Ann Hale, his mistress Margaret Gooding, and even his editor, the redoubtable Diana Athill — with contempt and casual carelessness.
 

With this knowledge, it is often difficult to approach Naipaul’s work. Roy also points out in her article how Naipaul travelled to India in 1961, along with his wife Pat, who supported his writing by taking notes and editing, but was written out of the final book — “a practice common among male travel writers of the time”. While reading An Area of Darkness (1964), the book that emerged from this journey, it is indeed difficult to imagine that Naipaul was possibly assisted in his research by fixers, companions, interpreters. From the very preface, the focus of the non-fiction narrative is on the author and his peculiar difficulties and challenges, such as anxiety about his writing career. It is a sort of performance, self-fashioning, that locates his ego at the centre of his work.
 

A similar self-fashioning is evident in the two other books he wrote on India — A Wounded Civilization (1977) and A Million Mutinies Now (1990). All three books, now republished in a collected edition, focus on his difficult relationship with the country of his ancestors. “My India was full of pain,” he writes in the preface to An Area of Darkness. “Sixty years or so before, my ancestors had made the very long journey to the Caribbean from India.”
 

They had come as indentured labourers and eventually gained some success as professionals. Naipaul’s father, Seepersad, was a journalist and writer who had moderate professional success and was married into the influential Capildeo family.

Naipaul writes that he was going to an India that did not belong to E M Forster (A Passage to India, 1924) or Rudyard Kipling. “I was travelling to an India that existed only in my head.” The books are perhaps an exercise in getting out of the head and getting to see the country. One is left wondering how successful he is in doing this.
 

In all three books, Naipaul arrives in India at difficult moments of the country’s post-Independence history. While he is travelling around the country and researching his book, An Area of Darkness, war breaks out between India and China. In the beginning, the news of the incursion is greeted with optimism of a successful defence. “Chinese launch massive, simultaneous attacks in Nefa and Ladakh. Newspaper headlines can appear to exult.” A little later, the news turns sour: “There were rumours of Gurkhas sent up to Ladakh armed only with their knives, and of men flown from the Assam plains to the mountains of NEFA clad only in singlets and tennis-shoes. …the humiliation of the Indian Army, India’s especial pride, was complete.”
 

Similarly, in A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul arrives in India soon after former prime minister Indira Gandhi declares Emergency on June 25, 1975, on a commission from his British and American publishers as well as the New York Review of Books. This is the shortest of the three books — barely 200 pages — because he found it difficult to interview people or gather information. “(T)he Emergency was real… and people soon became unwilling to talk to me or to be seen with me,” he writes in the preface. With interviews becoming impossible, Naipaul decided: “I should attempt an intellectual portrait of India. To do this, I used existing material: newspapers, magazines, books, and squeezed them for their meaning.” What emerges is an archival work with a searing consciousness of the difficult present moment. Perhaps Naipaul’s study also has some contemporary echoes.  
 

His final book on India, A Million Mutinies Now, one of his longest by his own admission, finds a country changing fast. On the eve of its economic liberalisation after decades of a planned economy, the country’s social fabric seems to be torn apart by multiple and conflicting interests — the “million mutinies” — of its people. On one hand, the Dalits are increasingly demanding a greater share of the national wealth, immediately after the Mandal Commission report, while the Hindu right wing is rising, buoyed by the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and other related events.
 

One of the key events in this book, at least for me, is Naipaul’s meeting with Marathi poet Namdeo Dhasal, who was also one of the founders of the Dalit Panthers movement. Interviews with Dhasal and his wife, the Marathi writer and current president of the Dalit Panthers Malika Amar Sheikh are filled with insights into Dalit politics and literature, and also somewhat humorous incidents, such as Naipaul being made the chief guest of a meeting of sex workers in the infamous Golpitha area of Bombay (Mumbai) where Dhasal lived. In the end, Naipaul concludes in his polished prose: “A greater understanding became possible of the long, patient line of dark men and women on one side of the road… not just the poor of India, but an expression of the old internal cruelty of that poverty: people at the bottom, full of emotion, with no politics at the moment, just rejecting rejection.”

It is possible to be seduced by Naipaul’s prose, but Dilip Chitre provides a clear-eyed critique in his obituary for Dhasal, published in Outlook: “Naipaul devotes a whole chapter to his meeting with Namdeo, but fails to comprehend its significance.” Chitre further says that Dhasal “makes good copy for journalists” because he is exotic. Is Naipaul also guilty of this exoticisation when he can see only the emotion and not the politics of the “people at the bottom”? Perhaps he is, and perhaps it is a result of the centred ego of his narratives.

The writer is a journalist and novelist. He teaches at O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat