TRAVELS AS SELF DISCOVERY: A STUDY OF DIASPORIC

DIALECTICS
DIALECTIC IN V S NAIPAUL’S TRAVEL

ACCOUNTS OF INDIA

A Thesis Submitted To

The University Department of English & Cultural Studies

Faculty of Humanities,

KOLHAN UNIVERSITY, CHAIBASA

For The Award of the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

2016

Submitted By

NARESH KUMAR

Asst. Prof. Dept. of English

Ghatsila College, Ghatsila

Under The Supervision of

Dr. SANJAI YADAV

Asst. Prof. Dept. of English

Jamshedpur Co
Co-operative College, Jamshedpur
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FOR MY PARENTS

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Once, Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee, in an informal chat, suggested that one should not do a

Ph. D. on a subject suggested by others. It should come up as a result of the resarcher’s own

reading and critical meditation. ‘Let the problem emerge and take a shape’ she would say. So

my first sense of gratitude goes to Dr. Keya Majumdar, formerly, Department of English,

Jamshedpur Women’s College for organizing an International Seminar on Diaspora and

inviting me to present a paper on V S Naipaul. It was while working on the paper for the

seminar that I saw a possibility for doing Ph.D. on the topic. This also saved me from being

negligent of the suggestion of my teacher, Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee.

My Supervisor for this thesis Dr. Sanjai Yadav has shown lots of patience with me and has

helped me in more than one way during long gestation period ofthe thesis. So my sincere

thanks to him. Mr. Manoj Kr. Pathak,an editor, poet and co-researcher, has done an extra-

ordinarily difficult work for me, that is, seeing the first proof of the thesis. Without him this

thesis wouldn’t have been completed. Prof. B.M. Mishra, Head Post-Graduate Department of

English and Cultural studies, K.U. and Dr. Rajiv S. Dayal have also been very affectionate

towards me. Without their indulgence it wouldn’t have been easy for me to finish the present

work.

I am also obliged to Dr. R. S. Gupta and Dr. Kapil Kapoor both formerly Professors at JNU

for giving me important suggestion while the work on the thesis was in progress. I have also

benefitted from discussions with Dr. Asif Zahri, Associate professor of Urdu at JNU, New

Delhi. I am deeply thankful to him.

While working on the thesis I got my right shoulder frozen rendering me almost incapacitated

for writing with my own hand. In such moment of crisis my wife came forward and took

4
dictation from me and this is how the thesis got written. So, I am indebted to her for her

timely helping hand. The kids in the family Gaurav, Nishu and Gudiya always kept their eyes

on me lest I go relaxed. Sometimes they scolded me also in an affectionate manner for my

laxity in the work. I am thankful to them from the bottom of my heart.

The thesis required several persons to type because of the special circumstances that

prevailed when this work was going on. Special mention must be made of Sri Samir Kumar

and Sri Subhas Das whose sincerity and perseverance ware so crucial for the final completion

of the thesis.

I am also thankful to some of my friends who have helped me in different ways when the

research work was in progress. I am deeply indebted to Prof. Subodh K Singh, Prof. Indal

Paswan, Dr. Sanjay K Singh and several others.

And finally my indebtedness goes to the Jawaharlal Nehru University Central Library, New

Delhi, where I found most of the references and research material for this thesis. My special

thanks to Mr. S N Mallik, JNU, New Delhi. In course ofwriting this thesis I had to visit

Sahitya Akademy Library several times and received valuable help from its fine collection of

books and other reference materials. My sincere thanks are due to them.

Naresh Kumar

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 PREFACE

A person is generally guided by two primary motives when he is conducting a research. The

first motive is the internal desire to understand and explain a phenomenon, and the second

motive is to fulfill the academic requirement. Both these motives may or may not be at work.

It may be either or both.

In the present case it has been both. The Doctoral research is no doubt an essential academic

exigency which prompted me to work for this thesis. But the topic which I decided to work

on was in response to an inner urge to explain and understand. The personality of V S

Naipaul, together with his writings and views on India has been an enigma for me as a

student of literature in English. And my bewilderment has no less been contributed to by the

sharp division among intellectuals and academics with respect to Naipaul. This division

actually has been sharper among the Indian intellectuals. So Naipaul and his relationship with

India has been an issue with me for a long time: why should an author be eulogized by one

and loathed by others? This simultaneous praise and condemnation for Naipaul constituted an

issue which required a systematic inquiry.

But the matter became an academic problem when I presented a paper on Naipaul in an

International Seminar on Diaspora. In that paper the focus of my inquiry was An Area

ofDarkness, but it gave me a realization that the domain of research can be extended, for

further and more definitive inquiry, to include India: a Wounded Civilization and India: A

MillionMutinies Now. Later I had consultation with my senior colleagues and supervisor on

this issue. And this is how it became the topic of my Ph. D. thesis.

While deciding upon the subject of my thesis, I have been guided also by a dictum of my

teacher the Late Prof Meenakshi Mukherjee who would insist that a person should work on

the topic of his interest and choice and not on a topic suggested by others. She was a firm

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believer that a researcher should allow the problem take a shape in his mind as a result of his

readings and critical thinking, and then decide to go a research on the topic.

I consider myself fortunate to have followed the prescription of my teacher in selecting the

topic for my Ph. D. However, I have been aided and helped by the faculties of Post-

graduation Department of English and Cultural Studies, KU and my supervisor Dr. Sanjai

Yadav in giving the final shape to the topic of my Ph. D thesis: Travels As Self Discovery:

A Study of DiasporicDialectics in V S Naipaul’s Travel Accounts of India.

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 CONTENTS

Acknowledgement 04

Preface 06

Chapter 01. Introduction 09

Chapter 02. Travel Writing and Diasporic Existence 21

Chapter 03. Wandering in an Area of Darkness 52

Chapter 04. Healing the Wounds 85

Chapter 05. Among the Mutineers 114

Chapter 06. The Pilgrim’s Progress 139

Chapter 07. Conclusion 189

Abbreviations 205

Bibliography 206

Web Resources 235

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 INTRODUCTION

Half a writer’s work is the discovery of his subject.

(V S Naipaul in Prologue to an Autobiography)

The topic of the present thesis emerged in course of a paper that I wrote for an

International seminar1 on Diaspora several years ago. While looking for a subject for the

paper I read several authors and the search came to an end when I came to V.S. Naipaul. In

Naipaul, I found several peculiarities which required investigation. For instance, even though

he was not an Indian migrant or exile, India dominates his thinking and imagination; he

writes so much on India and about the Indians and yet the Indian academia is so hostile to

him; he has ancestral root in India (his grandfather had gone to the West Indies during the last

quarter of the 19th century) and yet his attitude to India is said to be imperialistic and

highbrow. And most importantly his attitude to India has not been fixed and static. It has

shown signs of change and progress as can be seen in his three travel accounts of India. All

these things required inquiry and the present thesis is an attempt in that direction.

My paper for the seminar bore the title: ‘Searching for a House for Mr. Naipaul in an

Area of Darkness’. An Area of Darkness was used as portmanteau phrase indicating both a

country and Naipaul’s first travel account of India. In the paper, it was posited that Naipaul’s

An Area of Darkness was not an ordinary travel account of India; it was, actually, an inquiry

into Naipaul’s self and his complex relationship with India. It was an attempt on his part to

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position himself in relation to India. And the attitude that An Area of Darkness reflected

could be accounted for only through Naipaul’s peculiar diasporic existence.

It is true that Naipaul is not an India-born migrant. Even his father was born in

Trinidad. When Naipaul’s grandfather left India for Trinidad he was a small boy. It was his

maternal grandfather who had migrated as an indentured labourer to work on sugar plantation

farm in the West Indies in 1880s. So the gap between India and Naipaul was at least of three

generations. But his family was part of a small but strong Indian community in Trinidad to

which Naipaul was exposed from his early childhood. Apart from this mini-India, there was a

small India in his family which consisted of various household items related to daily use and

religious rituals. On the basis of life pattern in the local Indian community and his own joint

family, Naipaul had formed an image of India and Indian way of life. The conception of

Naipaul’s India was also being contributed to by the stories of his father. All these things

together had shaped up the image of India in his imagination.

The Indian community, of which the Naipauls were an essential part, was more or less

homogenous. So Naipaul could always feel at home in the community. But the moment he

went out of this enclosure, he always felt the distinction, to be different from other. Whether

in market-place or in school, the distinct Indian physical appearance was noticed by others

but the distinction was felt by Naipaul himself, giving him a feeling that perhaps he did not

belong to Trinidad or the place does not belong to him. Naturally it was a feeling of being a

stranger in home. Hence it is not surprising that Naipaul could never know the lives of non-

Indian communities with closeness and intimacy which would make him competent to write

about them. And it goes to his honesty that he rarely wrote about people and communities he

did not know well. As a result, non-Indian communities of the West Indian society register an

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almost total blank in his creative writing. And for this, he has been criticized also by the West

Indian scholars like George Lamming, and their criticism is not out of place.

Even Naipaul, who was a stranger in Trinidad, continued to be so in England where he has

been residing for the last 65 years since 1950. In college or on the streets, he found same gaze

among the people which is directed at ‘others’. If Trinidad was unimportant, uncreative and

cynical, Oxford too did not have anything much different to offer. So he did have dwelling

places in Trinidad and London, houses to live in, but he kept hankering after home. For home

is not a physical structure located in physical space. Home has to do with our sentiment,

feeling and psyche. The idea of home is as much related to location as it is related to

relocation or dislocation. As we get conscious of our tooth only when it aches or we lose it.

Thus, the loss of our tooth gives us not only a feeling of its present absence but also of its

past presence. Hence as long as we are in possession of home, we are seldom conscious of its

presence and significance in our life. So the loss of home gives one a sense of its value. Thus,

the physical loss of home gives it a psychological presence. And the psychological presence

but physical absence creates a mental hollowness with which all those who have been

dislocated and rendered diasporic suffer.

Actually the sense of being located is the sense of being both home and at home. In her

exciting book The future of Nostalgia (2001) Svetlana Boym2 puts this sense as follows:

To feel at home is to know that things are in their place and so are you; it is a state of

mind that doesn’t depend on an actual location. The object of longing then, is not

really a place called home but the sense of intimacy with the world; it is not the past

in general, but the imaginary moment when we had time and didn’t know the

temptation of nostalgia. ( 251)

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 Freud called the sense of being home and firmly located there heimlech and

contrasted this state with what he called the uncanny, the unheimlech. The notion of home

and homeliness is so strong and significant that Lucacs goes on to regard the novel as an

expression of transcendental homelessness.

If a sense of location and home produces ample space and abundant language, the

idea of dislocation throws up a host of positive and negative possibilities. Dislocation can

occur as a physical movement from home into alien territory out of variety of reasons

coercive or willing. And from ancient times, displacement and exile have enjoyed a special

privilege in literature. The Ramayana, The Mahabharata, The Odyssey etc. are replete with

such instances. Bereft of the soul estranged from the familiar, banished from the community,

expelled from the native country, lost in the diaspora – such tropes have formed constant

refrains of poetry and the novels for centuries.

The impact of dislocation has been beautifully described by German-Jewish

philosopher,Theodor Adorno in his Minima Moralia: “Every intellectual in emigration is

without exception mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to himself. His language has

been expropriated, and the historical dimension sapped. The isolation is made worse by the

formation of closed and politically controlled groups, mistrustful of their members, hostile to

those branded different.” (33)

It would be hard for anyone to urge against Adorno that a migrant intellectual is

emotionally and psychologically mutilated. But one who has turned to writing makes the

condition he is in favourable for his vocation. Thus, a writer who is in a state of real or

perceived homelessness, tends to discover home in the writing itself. As Adorno says of what

has often been known as literature of exile: ‘In his text, the writer sets up house. For a man

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who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. In it he inevitably, as his

family once did, refuges and lumbers.’

Thus one can say that the state of homelessness induces a process of what is often

called the sublimation of high creative output. V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai,

Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry etc. are good examples of this phenomenon. Thus, one can

say that the three travel accounts of India and fictional writings depicting India or Indian

diasporic life by Naipaul may or may not have found the author his home, but he did sense a

shelter, a refuge in the very act of writing.

II

It is a commonplace that the word diaspora has lost its Jewish connotation in its

contemporary use of postcolonial discourse. Today the word is used as an umbrella term to

include migrants, immigrants, colonialists, missionaries, anthropologists, soldiers and

castaways3. It is true that in its modern usage, the word diaspora has lost the intensity of the

original experience, and it stands extremely devalued.

Indian diaspora constitutes a very significant part in the body of world diaspora with a

population of around 30 million4 spread across a hundred and ten countries, they are serving

their host-notions with distinction as entrepreneurs, workers, teachers, researchers,

innovators, doctors, lawyers, engineers, managers, creative writers and even political leaders

what gives a common identity to all members of Indian diaspora is their Indian origin, their

consciousness of their cultural heritage and their deep attachment of India.

Throughout its history, India has received migrants from various parts of the world and has

absorbed them instinctively with their culture, language, economic and social status. This has

enabled Indians to interact with cultures and ethnicities abroad. Indians have carried this very

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rich legacy of adaptability with them to their host countries. This unique feature of Indian

diaspora is the most important factor in the success of the Indian diaspora across globe.

The story of the evolution of Indian diaspora5 starts way back in the nineteenth

century, and can be divided into three categories. Firstly, there were those whose journey

began during the colonial period. In most cases, they were the economically beleaguered

labour forces seeking their livelihood in distant lands. This was in response to the enormous

demand for cheap labour that arose immediately after the British abolished slavery in 1833-

34. Indentured system was, thus, largely a by-product of colonialism and the abolition of

slave.

Indentured labour was sent to Mauritius, Caribbean (Trinidad, Tobago and Guyana),

Fiji and South Africa by the British. French and Dutch followed Britain in abolishing slavery

resulting in migration of Indian plantation labour to their territories like Reunion Island,

Guadeloupe, Martinique and Suriname. Similarly, the Portuguese also took Indian workers

from its colonies in Goa, Daman and Diu to the colonies like Angola, Mozambique and

others. There was also free or passage emigration mostly to East Africa, South Africa, and in

smaller numbers to other British colonies where indentured labour had removed.

There were primarily two reasons behind migration under the colonial rule. The first

was the poor condition of employment that prevailed at that time in India because of killing

of the Indian village economy and cottage industry as a result of the exploitative colonial

policy. The West on the other hand was getting affluent because of industrial development

and colonial loot. Secondly all colonial masters found Indians skillful, hardworking and

useful, as a result of which, the British, the French, the Dutch, and the Portuguese all look

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Indian skilled labour for development of plantation and agricultural economics of their

territories.

The second wave of migration started in the 1960s and 70s in the wake of oil boom in

West Asia and Gulf. They ventured out into neighbouring countries as professionals, artisans,

traders and factory workers in search of opportunities and commerce. There was also some

outflow of entrepreneurs, store-owners, professionals, self-employed businessmen to the First

World countries like USA, UK. Organized commerce was introduced in Africa by Indian

emigrants as traders and shop-owners. These traders and businessmen by dint of their hard

work and business acumen turned adversity in to opportunity.

And finally, there is the current third ware consisting of professionals and educated

elite who seek economic and academic betterment in more advanced countries of the world.

The Indian community in the First World has done so well that in the US they are often

referred to as the ‘model minority’. Their industry, enterprise, knowledge, economic strength,

educational standards and professional skills are widely acknowledged. This period has also

coincided with India’s resurgence as a global player and country of stature in the comity of

nations.

The First World economies are technology based economics and India after

liberalization, in the 1990s has become a major source of knowledge for these countries.

Thus, it has become easy for an Indian to enter into the enabling environment of these

countries. This education and knowledge-based Indian emigration has made Indian diaspora

one of the most powerful diasporas in the world. No wonder, US is full of Indian doctors,,

engineers, and academicians.

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 The formation of Indian diaspora is one of the most significant demographic

dislocation which according to Sudesh Mishra can be classified as ‘sugar’ and ‘masala’

diaspora.

There is a distinction to be made between the old and the new diaspora. The

distinction is between, on the one hand, the semi-voluntary flight of indentured

peasants to the non-metropolitan plantation colonies such as Fiji, Trinidad, Mauritius,

South Africa, Malaysia, Surinam, and Guyana, roughly between the year 1830 and

1917; and on the other the late capital and postmodern dispersal of the migrants of

classes to thriving metropolitan centres such as Australia, the United States, Canada

and Britain6.

This classification is termed by other critics as ‘forced diaspora’ and ‘voluntary

diaspora’. Another critic and scholar, Vinay Lal, distinguishes them as ‘diaspora of labour’

and ‘diaspora of longing’. For most of the older diasporic writers, there is an unease of the

dislocated and the deracinated who either by choice or by compulsion have abandoned

house/home in the country of their birth for housing/lodging in their adopted country. For

instance, Naipaul, originally a third generation immigrant from a ‘Branch of Dubes’ of a

Brahmia village of Uttar Pradesh, who moved to Trinidad expresses a sense of unease on the

questions of inheritance. In A Way in theWorld(1994), the narrator comments on the ancestry

of the British immigrant mortician Leonard Sayed’s inheritance:

I might say that the ancestor of Leonard sayed’s came from the dancing groups of

Lucknow, the lewd men who painted their faces and tried to live like women. But that

would be only a fragment of the inheritance, a fragment of the truth. We cannot

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 understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to

ourselves.

The idea outlined above applies to all the first/second/third generation writers who

were migrants by compulsion, usually descendants of indentured labourers from India sent to

work in various British colonial plantations. For the migrants by choice, the situation is to be

by different. They usually are upper middle class and cosmopolitan. The first and second

generation writers lie in a kind of cosmopolitan, globalized world where the markers of the

borderless state have often to be invented. A good example of this is the Thamma’s confusion

about her going and coming home in Dhaka in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines.

The history of modern Indian diaspora is over a hundred years old. But the popularity

and currency of diaspora literature to a phenomenon that takes place in the middle of the

second half of the twentieth century. Hinting at the big impetus the postcolonial writing

received, Richard J. Lane in his The postcolonial Novel says: “The furore that erupted in the

wake of fatwa (death sentence) following the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic

Verses (1988) brought the postcolonial novel into the public consciousness in a way that no

other literary text had over previously achieved”. However the credit for brining Indian

diasporic literature in the main current of intellectual and critical discourse goes to V.S.

Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswasand Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. But inIndia,

Naipaul’s writings on India especially his travel accounts have played a major part in

disseminating postcolonial way of looking at literature. Naipaul’s criticism of India in An

Area of Darkness, India a Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now jolted the

Indians especially its intellectual class to reassess themselves and the writings of Naipaul. To

begin with Indians were bewildered to see the way India was projected in Naipaul’s travel

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accounts of India. Subsequently, it was realized the Naipaul’s depiction of India can be

understood only keeping in mind the author’s relation with India. Apart from this, it is also

important to note the colonial process through which India had undergone and it should be

taken into account. The impact of colonization was not only on Indian people but also on

Naipaul who was trying to understand India while he was busy travelling and depicting it --

its land, it people, its society, its politics, its religion, its superstition its industries, its villages

etc. But why should Naipaul put in so many effects and time to comprehend India, to know

India from close quarters? It is because he has diasporic link with India which is like an

umbilical cord. Even if it is cut off the relationship remains at the deepest level, no matter in

an invisible form.

III

The present thesis tries to understand the understanding of V.S. Naipaul, as it emerges

in his three travel accounts of India. For convenience of presentation it has seen organized

into seven chapters including Introduction plus Bibliography.

The second chapter titled ‘Travels and Diasporic Existence’ has two parts. The first

part deals with aspects of ‘travel’ and ‘travel writing’ and its significance in contemporary

world especially postcolonial discourse. Examining the various opinions and theories of

travel and travel writing it has been sought to accept and establish that travel is not merely a

phenomenon dealing the description of the external world that is, depiction of the people and

place visited. Travel, in real sense, is also a journey within, a discovery of the self, an

occasion for self-analysis. The second part of the chapter meditates on the question of

diasporic existence. It examines various views about diaspora, its classification, the idea of

home, homeland, host-land etc. It also tries to show that the notion of ‘home’ is not fixed; it

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is transient depending upon the personal growth of a diaspora and the growth of his

relationship with his homeland and host land. As long as a diaspora lives his mind remains

the battle ground for the dialectics of home and host-country, and it is this diasporic writer

through which the creative power of a diasporic writer like V.S. Naipaul grows, matures and

registers its achievement.

In chapter III titled ‘Wandering in An Area of Darkness’ an attempt has been made to

read through the book, and understand his negotiation with India. It has also been

endeavoured to understand a particular depiction of India in this book with respect to the

diasporic status of the author. The chapter IV ‘Healing the Wounds’ focuses on Naipaul’s

second travel account of India in India: A Wounded Civilization. It tries to make a brief

survey of the narrative of the book. It is also endeavoured to underline the change in tone and

temperament of the author by relating them to his especial diasporic position. The

suggestiveness of the title of the book is also indicated. A survey of India: A Million

MutiniesNow is presented in chapter V titled ‘Among theMutineers’: The Changes that

Naipaul had noted are discussed. The chapter also indicates perceptual change that has

occurred in the mind of Naipaul, and the same has been sought to be accounted for. And of

course the scale and depth of description of the book which is much broader and nuanced is

taken for consideration.

The chapter VI titled ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ surveys first, the achievement of his

creative vocation and second it tries to note how Naipaul has evolved as a diaspora with

respect to his ancestral homeland India. In the second part of the chapter the focus is more on

the three travel accounts of India. And finally in conclusion (chapter - VII) the argument of

the thesis is summarily presented with list of findings in the thesis.

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 Notes and References

1. The International seminar on Diaspora was organized by Jamshedpur Women’s

\College in 2009.

2. Quoted from M. L. Raina, ‘Home, Homelessness and the Artifice of Memory’. The

paper appears in Manjit Indar Singh (ed.) Contemporary Diasporic Literatures:

Writing History, Culture, Self.’ New Delhi: Pencraft International 2010

3. See Kapil Kpoor ‘Theorizing Diaspora and The Indian Experience’ in Adesh Pal (ed)

Theorizing and Critiquing: Indian Diaspora. New Delhi: Creative Books 2004

4. Online Wikipedia

5. For information of this section I am indebted to a paper Indian ‘Diaspora:

Responsibilities and Relationship, Strengths, Weaknesses and Contribution’ by J. C.

Sharma which appears in Adesh Pad (ed) Theorizing and Critiquing: Indian Diaspora:

Creative Books 2004.

6. Mishra, Sudesh,. ‘From Sugar to Masala: Writings by the Indian Diaspora’ in An

IllustratedHistory of Indian Literature in English. Ed. A. K. Mehrotra, Delhi

Permanent Black: 2003. 276-296

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 Chapter -2

TRAVEL WRITING AND DIASPORIC EXISTENCE

Nearly all my adult life had been spent in countries where I was a stranger. I couldn’t as a
writer go beyond that experience.

(V S Naipaul, ‘Reading and Writing’)

TRAVELS AS SELF DISCOVERY

Travelogue as a genre has an ancient ancestry. From the very early times of

civilization, travel accounts have been a significant mode of self-expression and at the same

time, a very reliable source of information of the ‘other’ land--its people, society culture etc.

It is through travel accounts that the disciplines like history, anthropology, sociology and

linguistics received their initial impetus to emerge as fully autonomous and respected subjects

of academic study.

It is a well-known and well-documented fact that Europe’s knowledge of India until

the early nineteenth century was based almost completely on travels accounts –

Megasthenese, Marco Polo, Alberuni, East India company officials etc. The once famous A

History of British India (1817) by James Mill, which was studied as a textbook by all

company officials before coming to India, had its foundation in travel accounts. Even James

Todd’s Annual and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1826, London) and Travels in Western India,

which are thought to be works of great historical significance, were in a sense travel writing.

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Thus, travel writing has been an important interpersonal activity with very deep social,

intellectual and political ramifications.

Travel Writing: What Is The Genre About?

Despite its long history and current vogue as a genre, ‘travel writing’ has received due

attention to it as a serious subject of enquiry only recently. Traditionally, travel accounts were

read and studied for the light that it threw on subjects like geography, sociology,

anthropology, linguistics, politics and above all history. It was rarely studied in its own right,

and for its own intrinsic value. It is probably due to the widening scope of post-colonialism

and postcolonial studies that travel writing has become an important field of exploration, and

is now recognized as a ‘genre’ in its own self. But what is this genre about?

Carl Thomson in his influential book Travel Writing (2011) provides a tentative

definition of ‘travel’ before latching on to ‘travel writing’.According to Thomson:

To travel is to make a journey, a movement through space. (But) to begin any journey

or, indeed, simply to set foot beyond one’s own front door, is quickly to difference

and otherness. All Journeys are in this way a confrontation with, or more

optimistically a negotiation of what is sometimes termed as alterity. Thus one

definition that we can give of travel is that it is the negotiation between self and other

that is brought by movement in space. (9)

The definition or description of travel provided by Thomson, like all such definitions

is reductive and begs several further questions. For example can all movements through space

be regarded as travel? What of a trip to local tailor? Or a quick visit to one’s neighbour? And

if some journeys are not to be classed as travel what are the criteria for it? Is there any

22
fundamental difference between the journeys undertaken by tourists, explorers and refugees?

If yes, what are they? Nagging questions such as these shall remain with any definition. But it

is a fact that travel does involve movement through space and it does involve a kind of

interaction between the traveller and the world he visits. Thus, a negotiation between the

‘self’ and the ‘other’ form an essential ingredient of any meaningful travel and thereby of any

travel writing.

If the above definition of travel is extended to travel writing, all travel writing is at

some level a record or product of this encounter [between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’] and of

the negotiation between similarity and difference that it entails (Travel Writing10). This

encounter generally takes two forms, direct and indirect. In direct encounter, the traveller

narrates the events explicitly with reasonable details whereas the indirect encounter ensures

its impact by modifying the narrative in an implicit way. It can be observed in the selection of

events to be reported in the travel writing, the length and prominence an event should get.

And even the mode of narrative -- comic, satirical, elegant and informative etc., is often the

outcome of indirect encounter in a travel writing.

In the postcolonial and globalized worlds we are in, the negotiation between

the self and the other has become a vital existential issue which is very difficult to

ignore. And, perhaps, it is because of this that travel writing has become so

fashionable.

“Travel writing”, writes Tim Youngs in the Cambridge Introduction to Travel

Writing, “is the most socially important of literary genres. It records our temporal and spatial

progress. It throws light on how we define ourselves and how we identify others. Its

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construction of our sense of ‘me’ and ‘you’ ‘us’ and ‘them’ operates on individual and

national levels and in the realms of psychology, society, and economics” (1). Thus the scope

of travel writing tends to become so extensive in its reach and impact that it encompasses a

bewildering diversity of forms, modes and itineraries. No wonder, Patrick Holland and

Graham Haggen consider the genre notoriously refractory to definition. According to Michael

Kowaleski it has a dauntingly heterogeneous character, and that it borrows freely from the

memoir, journalism, letters, guidebooks, confessional narrative, and most importantly, fiction

(1).

One can, thus safely infer that travel writing as a genre is not easily demarcated. Its

theme, content and style have a lot in common with other literary forms. But it is not unlikely

for a new genre which has emerged and is in the process of getting established. For we all

know that a genre is not merely a descriptive label but a way of making sense of the structure

by which we describe our surroundings and perceive meaning in them. As JohnFrow aptly

says, “genres actively generate and shape knowledge of the world, they create effect of reality

and truth, authority and plausibility, which are central to the different ways the world is

understood” (Genre 2). It is interesting however to note that there is no separate section on

Travel writing in Frow’s book on genre. The fact that John Frow himself neglects travel

writing as a genre proves our point that it is an emerging genre and the problem of

demarcation of its domain is the problem of an upcoming area of studies.

In his Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing Tim Youngs underlines the essence

of Travel writing in the following words:

Travel writing consists of predominantly factual, first person proseaccounts of travels

that have been undertaken by the author-narrator. It includes discussion of works that

some may regard as genres in their own right, such as ethnographies, maritime

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 narratives, memoires, road and aviation literature, travel journalism and war reporting

but it distinguishes these from other types of narrative in which travel is narrated by a

third party or imagined. (3)

The formulation provided by Tim Youngs seems to emphasize a) First person

narrative of the external world, that is, the area visited by the traveller / author. b) the factual

nature of travel writing. However, it is difficult to accept that Travel writing doesn’t go

beyond these limits. Travel writings are often found to be portraying not only the external

world, the author happens to visit but also, in a subtle way, his mental disposition which

determines his point of view to see the world. Similarly, the belief that travel accounts are

objective and discuss facts in a disinterested manner is actually a misnomer. More often than

not a true travel book has pronounced personal elements which are not merely functional or

practical. Actually these personal elements add to and facilitate the subjective foregrounding

of the author’s distinctive sensibility and style. And it is because of this subjectivity that

travel writing acquires aesthetic merit and is read for pleasure.

Hence it is understandable that Carl Thomson in his Travel Writing classifies the

genre under three sub-types:

a) Reporting the world

b) Revealing the self

c) Representing the other

Evidently, the basis of the above classification is the object of description or

foregrounding. For instance,journalistic travel writing or the travel accounts by a scientist can

be assigned the first category of reporting the world. Such writing aims at having the lowest

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interference of the subjectivity and personal bias. It also has the predominance of facts over

fiction or sentiment.

But in the second and third categories of travel writing the boundary between fact and

fiction, and self and other gets blurred. The author, even when depicting the external world, is

constantly peeping from behind and often the peeping becomes so prominent that it becomes

representation of the self. Even when the target is the representation of the ‘other’ it is done

with respect to the ‘self’. And it is the dialectics of the self and the other that finally shapes

up,the form and content of the travel writing. Very often the motive behind the portrayal of

the other,is consciously or unconsciously pejorative or patronizing. This attitude springs

from a complex mixture of emotions such as fear, envy, revulsion, incomprehension and a

mixed sentiment of love and hate.

The tone and tenor of travel writing is not always the same. It changes as per the traveller’s

relationship with the area under visit, for instance, the mood of the author on a trip to a

‘wonderland’ would be very different from that of the traveller on a diasporic trip-- the visit

to a place with which the author identifies his roots. Keeping in mind the bewildering variety

of travel writing, Paul Fussell introduces a typology on the basis of visitor’s attitude to the

place visited. Using the terminology of Northrop Frye, Fussell calls travel writing ‘displaced

romance’ and identifies two modes of travel writing:

1) Picaresque: In picaresque mode of travel writing the emphasis is simply on

relating a sequence of adventures or misadventures without any attempt to establishing a

narrative plot and well defined purpose.

2) Elegiac or pastoral: In elegiac or pastoral mode of travel writing, the author

generally visits a place which has had deep impact on the visitor because of its history or past

glory but the present is pitiable. The place sometimes is related to the visitor’s ancestral root,

and, therefore, has an aura of romance and nostalgia around it. Thus, in such travel writings

26
the emphasis is on seeking out the last vestiges of a vanishing way of life, or a culture

perceived as less complex and less stressful than the traveller’s own.

One can add a third type to this typology that is splenetic travel writing. The term

splenetic has been used as an adjective for V.S. Naipaul by Casey Blanton in his

TravelWriting: The Self and the World (2002). The instances of such writing are found

aplenty in Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness. I wish to extend this term to a particular mode of

travel accounts.

As in the elegiac / pastoral mode, the splenetic mode of travel writing also involves

the author’s personal attachment which may or may not carry a sentiment of love and

admiration. Because of some complex personal bond the author happens to display a mix of

fondness, revulsion, fear, disgust, envy, anger, incomprehension all together, as one can find

in the travel accounts of India provided by V.S. Naipaul.

V.S. Naipaul, a Trinidad born English author of international repute and a Nobel

Laureate, is ancestrally related to India. His grandfather had migrated to the Caribbean

islands in the late 19th century as an indentured labour to work on sugarcane plantations. Here

it is pertinent to add that though the grandfather of V.S. Naipaul was an Indian his (V S

Naipaul’s) great grandfather had come to India from Nepal which explains the surname of the

family. Thus the Naipaul’s family had their roots in India. For V.S. Naipaul the question of

‘root’ and ‘route’ is much more complex given his connection with Trinidad, England and

India. In other words, his visits to India which have produced three celebrated travel

accounts,An Area of Darkness (1964), India : A Wounded Civilization (1977) and India: A

Million Mutinies Now (1990) are always coloured by his diasporic existence.

His first visit to India produced a very dark and pessimistic view of India as he felt

himself dreaming in An Area of Darkness. The pessimism of this visit was actually the result

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of shock that he experienced in India for the real India was very different and unwholesome

from the idyllic India he had emotionally imagined.

Thus, when he was writing about India as a traveller, he was not writing entirely on

the basis of his observations and personal experiences. Actually, the India of his imagination

was constantly interfering and interacting with the actual encounters. So he was not just

recording what India was but also what India appeared to him or what India should have been

in his view. Thus, the wall between ‘fact and fiction’ vanishes in a subtle way in Naipaul’s

writing on India. Sometimes, Naipaul’s condemnation of Indian society, polities and

intellectual discourse is so severe that he is often seen as imperialistic in his outlook of India,

and is often compared with Rudyard Kipling.

The tone and temperament, with slight improvement and greater nuances, continues in

his later two works also. No wonder he was called a splenetic travel writer by C. Blanton. But

his travel accounts of India do demolish the walls that are often maintained about travel

writing-- the walls of objectivity and externality.

DIASPORIC EXISTENCE: DIALECTICS OF HOMELAND AND HOSTLAND

Movements and dislocation have been an inseparable part of human history. In Pre-

historic times, moving from one place to another, either for gathering food or securing safer

places for dwelling was a matter of almost every day affair. It was a period when the humans

led more or less a life of wanderers or nomads.

Gradually human history entered new phases, acquired certain stabilities in life

pattern, began a somewhat settled life and developed what we call civilizations in various

parts of the globe. However, the march of history had never the same pace everywhere nor

28
did it stop at any stage. Civilizations arose and vanished, kingdoms and empires rose in

prominence and lost in oblivion, and mighty nations came into being and got disintegrated

into pieces. The Great Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire are some

of the most outstanding instances of this phenomenon.

But one thing which has been going on unabated, because of and may be sometimes

in spite of various historical forces is the movement and dispersion of humans over various

parts of the world. For one reason or the other, the movement of humans has been going on.

There is hardly any portion of globe which can be called to be fully insulated from the

incursion of outsiders. It is because of this movement or migration of people from one region

to another at a very huge scale that all major cities of the world have acquired a cosmopolitan

character today. Thus a city like New York, London or Bombay has become a microcosm in

relation to the macrocosm of the whole world.

However, the study of migration pattern and its historical and socio-psychological

dimension did not catch the attention of the scholars until very recently, It is only in course of

the study of colonies, colonization and people’s resistance to this phenomenon that the study

of migration under colonial exigency was necessitated and today it is studied as diaspora

studies as part of post-colonialism or culture studies.

Diaspora and Diasporic Existence

Etymologically, the term ‘diaspora’, according to merriam-webster.com Online

Dictionary has its origin in Greek from diaspeirein ‘to scatter’, or from dia + speirein ‘to

sow’. Thus it combines the meaning of dispersion and sowing. The Dictionary organises the

definition / meaning of diaspora as under.

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I. a. The settlement of scattered colonies of Jews outside Palestine after the

Babylonian exile

b. The area outside Palestine settled by Jews

c. The Jews living outside Palestine or modern Israel

II a. The movement, migration or scattering of a people away from an established

or Ancestralhomeland (e.g. the black diaspora to (American) northern cities)

b. People settled for from their ancestral homeland e.g. African diaspora.

c. The place where these people line.

In the definition provided by Merriam Website Dictionary, what is noticeable is the

division of meaning of diaspora into two parts. Whereas the Section-I deals exclusively with

migration of the Jews from Palestine / Israel, the section-II tries to extend and generalize the

issue by including in it the migration of other group also, which is closer to the contemporary

sense in which the word is used.

And the dictionary, capturing the contemporary sense of the term summarizes the

definition of diaspora as “a group of people, who line outside the area in which they lived for

a long time or in which their ancestors lived”.

The above definitions and meanings of the term ‘diaspora’ as given in the Merriam- website

Dictionary though seem to capture the essence of idea, it lacks the understanding of the

nuances that diaspora studies have developed during the last 50 odd years.

In his seminal and immensely popular work Global Diasporas: An Introduction (2nd

2008) Robin Cohen presents a brief and succinct overview of the journey of diaspora studies.

According to Cohen, the study of diaspora has passed through four distinct phases.

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 First Phase:- In the classical sense the term usually capitalized as diaspora was used

exclusively to refer the Jewish experience. Occasionally Greek diaspora also came in

discussion. But in the 1960s and 1970s the classical meaning was systematically

extended, becoming more common as a description of the dispersion of Africans,

Armenians and Irish.

Second Phase:- In the 1980s the term diaspora was deployed as a metaphoric

designation to describe different categories of people--‘expatriates, expellees, political

refugees, alien residents, immigrants and ethnic and racial minorities tout court’. ¹

According to Safran, the term now began to designate a vast array of different people

who either applied the term to themselves or had the label conferred upon themselves.

Third Phase:- Starting from mid 1990s , this phase is marked by social

constructionist critiques of ‘second phase’ theorists. Influenced by postmodernist

readings, they sought to decor nose two of the major building blocks of the diasporic

idea viz. ‘homeland’ and ethnic / religious community. In the postmodern world, it

was further argued, identities have become territorialized and constructed and

deconstructed in a flexible and situational way. Accordingly, it was felt that the

concept of diaspora had to be radically reordered in response to this complexity.

Fourth Phase:- It refers to the current phase of diaspora studies which set in by the

turn of the 21st century. The new phase has tried to address to the critiques of diaspora

studies by the social constructionists. It also shows greater awareness of the

complexity of diasporic existence.

One of the most influential statements marking the beginning of contemporary diaspora

studies was Safran’s article in the opening issue of the then Journal Diaspora. Safran was

strongly influenced by cases of the Jewish diaspora, but correctly perceived that many other

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ethnic groups were experiencing analogous circumstances due perhaps to the different

circumstances surrounding their departure from their place of origin and / or as a result of

their limited acceptance in their place of settlement.

As suggested above, Safran’stheorization continues to be coloured by Jewish experience, and

hence his emphasis on ‘home’ in outlining the essential characteristics of diaspora. For him,

members of a diaspora:

a) Retained a collective memory of their original homeland.

b) They idealized their ancestral home

c) Were committed to the restoration of the original homeland and

d)Continued in various ways to relate to that homeland.

However, when we examine the migration patterns and their circumstances in modern

times, they don’t seem to be conforming to the ‘Jewish commitment to home’. For instance,

the Indian indentured labourers in the Caribbean islands, had all legal right to return, yet they

continued to stay on. So in this case though we do find a collective memory of home but

there was / is no commitment to return and re-establish home.

Thus keeping in view the bewilderingly varied circumstance of migration and the

living condition in the new land, and the fact that the process of migration is still on, the

social scientists generally adopt the following tools to decide upon who is diaspora.

1. Emic and Etic claims: - It requires us to make a distinction between emic

(participants view) claim and etic (observer’s view) claim on the issue, and take into account

the historical circumstance in order to arrive at the conclusion.

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 2. Time Dimension:- An individual or a group can’t claim to be part of a diaspora as

soon as he arrives at the airport of the new land. A reasonable period of time must pass for a

new social formation to emerge before the claim for diaspora status is made.

3. Important features:- It requires one to draw a list of important features of diaspora,

and then apply them to a case under consideration. We can represent the common features of

diaspora from table developed by Robin Cohen. (P. 17)

Common features of diaspora:-

1. Dispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically, to two or more

foreign regions.

2. Alternatively or additionally, the expansion from a homeland in search of

work, in pursuitof trade or to further colonial ambitions;
3. A collective memory and myth about the homeland, including its location,
history,suffering and achievements;
4. An idealization of the real or imagined ancestral home and a collective

commitment to its maintenance, restoration, safety and prosperity, even to its

creation.

5. The frequent development of a return movement to the homeland that gains

collective approbation even if many in the group are satisfied withonly a

vicarious relationship or intermittent visit to the homeland;

6. A strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time and based on a

sense of distinctiveness, a common history, the transmission of a common

cultural and religious heritage and the belief in a common fate;

7. A troubled relationship with host societies, suggesting a lack of acceptance

or the possibility that another calamity might befall the group;

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 8. A sense of empathy and co-responsibility with co-ethnic members in other

countries of settlement even where home has become more vestigial; and

9. The possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in host countries with a

tolerance for pluralism.

4. Typology:- It is an important tool to aid the delineation of a diaspora by using a

qualifying adjectives- victim, labour, imperial, trade and deterritorialized. Here what is

important to note is the fact that the typology is based, except for deterritorialized, on the

initial cause / motive of migration. The types of diaspora and their examples can be

represented as under.

Main type of Diaspora Chief Example Special Remarks

Victim Jews, Africans, Armenians

Labour Indentured Indians

Imperial British

Trade Lebanese, Chinese

Deterritorialized Caribbean Peoples, Sindhis, The expression, ‘hybrid,

Parsis cultural’ and post-colonial

are linked to the idea of

deterritorialization.

Unlike Robin Cohen’s typology on the basis of the cause of migration, Prof. Kapil

Kapoor ³ classifies diaspora on the following three bases-

A. Direction of Migration:- One can recognize two opposite direction of migration in the

formation of diaspora especially Indian Diaspora. I) into the country diaspora and

34
 II) out of the country diaspora. As diaspora is basically on experience of dislocation

and relocation, we must keep both the direction of dislocation and relocation separate.

B. Attitudes towards host / homeland:- All diaspora don’t have the same attitude to their

homeland and / or host land. If they are classified as per their attitude, some of their

types would be as under.

a) Firstly one who is nostalgic of the homeland but his attitude to the host

country is either negative or that of indifference.

b) Secondly, those who harbour a dream of return whether it is a mental return or

physical return.

c) Thirdly, the experience of strangeness shown by the immigrants because of

their inability to understand or accept the cultural customs and modes.

d) Fourthly, the desire to integrate with the native people and their culture.

e) Absence of belonging which gives rise to special kind of diasporic

consciousness.

Prof. Kapoor pursues the matter further and takes into account the literary discourse of the

diaspora for their classification. Thus on the basis of their literary discourse, we can have

three types of diaspora:- a) enunciatory b) renunciatory and c) denunciatory.

a) Enunciatory:- It includes verbal discourse both creative as well as creative,

which enunciates or overstate the case of their own country.

b) Renunciatory:- It refers to the discourse in which, the diaspora romanticises the

home, comes back and sees the actual condition of home including all those slums

and takes a u-tern and goes back to the host land. But such people

remain linked with home.

c) Denunciatory:- The creative and critical output of such people strive hard toprove
that it was a good riddance. In their writing, India is painted as a dirtyand dust-
driven, slum-clustered, bad pond invested and cheats-inhabited etc.

35
 The framework provided by Kapil Kapoor has point of departure in the sense that it

takes multiple factors into account in order to arrive at the classification such as direction of

migration, the nature of diaspora discourse and their attitude to host / homeland.

The benefit with such approach is that it succeeds in addressing the issue of single

,double as well as multiple diaspora in terms of their discursive production and their attitude

to the host country and the homeland,

Unlike Kapil Kapoor, the tool that Vijay Mishra uses to tackle the problem of diasporic

existence is feature based. In an article contributed to the double issue of SPAN, Vijay

Mishra, the guest editor, quotes from the venerable OED (1989 edn.) to show how frozen in

time the definition of the diaspora is, Mishra wryly observes “It appears that there is a 100-

year gap of citations to fill to connect this word with the complex history of 20th century

capitalism. 4

As a corrective he offers the following definition of diaspora:-

1. Relatively homogenous, displaced communities brought to serve the Empire

(slave, contract, indentured etc.) co-existing with indigenous / other races with

the markedly ambivalent and contradictory relationship with the Motherland(s).

Hence the Indian diaspora of South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad,

Surinam, Malaysia. The Chinese diasporas of Malaysia, Indonesia, linked to high

(classical) capitalism.

2. Emerging new diasporas based on free migration and linked to late capitalism.

Post-over South Asian, Chinese, Arab, Korean communities in Britain, Europe,

America, Canada, Australia.

3. Any group of migrants that sees itself or the periphery of power, or excluded

from sharing power (Mishra SPAN-1).

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Although, the Mishra’s definitions do not address African diaspora, they are, according to

Paranjape very apt in describing the Indian owes. His (Mishra’s) there-tier definition is

crucial to our understanding of the texts of the Indian diaspora.

Makrand Paranjape makes Vijay Mishra’s text talk to Benedict Anderson’s classic

treatise Imagined Communities which distinguishes nations from two earlier types of polities,

religious empires and imperial dynasties. If colonial global empires are added along with the

resultant migrants/diasporic existence on margin across the globe we can have a slightly

modified representation of Anderson’s classification of polities.

Religious Empires Nations

Global Empires

Imperial Dynasties Diasporas

A word of caution is, however, required. The idea represented in the above schematic

diagram is not as neat as it appears to be. Here we must remember that nations, empires and

diaspora evolve simultaneously and their evolution process is quite complex. There is always

an overlap and slippage between there categories.

The work of Vijay Mishra, concedes Paranjape, is a considerable advance upon

William Safran’s model which he illustrates by listing the six features of diasporas: (a)

dispersal (b) collective memory (c) alienation (d) respect and longing for the homeland (e) a

belief in the restoration, and (f) self-definition in terms of this homeland. Safran’s model, as

suggested earlier also, was developed out of Jewish experience, and hence is more applicable

to the Jews than Asian especially Indian diasporas.

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 William Safran has also drawn out certain characteristic features of Indian diaspora

such as “middlemen role, long history, integrationist and particularist foci, which seen

actually an oversimplification of fact.

Actually diaspora doesn’t refer to a static existence. It involves a cross cultural and

cross civilizational passage. It is only such a passing that results in the unique consciousness

of the diasporic existence. If we think of the Indian who were thrown into diasporic

existence, we come to realize that the journey they undertook at the time of migration was not

only the journey from one country to another but also from one culture to another, from one

civilization to another. Even though they carried with them a memory of their culture and

civilization, certain portion of the same got lost in course of journey and in a new

surrounding of the host country. But the erasure of the memory is never total, and hence the

diaspora always feel linked to the homeland through an invisible umbilical cord.

It is no surprise, therefore, that Robin Cohen defines diaspora as communities living together

in one counting who acknowledge that the old country a notion -- often buried deep in

language, religion, custom or folklore -- always has some claim on their loyalty and emotions

[…] a member’s adherence to a diasporic community is demonstrated by an acceptance of an

inescapable link with their past migration history and a sense of co-ethnicity with others of a

similar background (2001: IX).

Diasporic communities, according to Avtar Brah, are created out of the merging of

narratives about journeys from the old county to the new. People from the first generation

tend to recall the ‘old’ country more than children born to the migrant people. 5Thus, it is

very important that generational differences are factored in while deciding upon the approach

to and attitude of a particular diaspora. Children born to migrant peoples in Britain may

automatically qualify for a British passport, but their sense of identity borne from living in a

38
diaspora community will be influenced by the past migration history of their parents or

grandparents. This is why it is more accurate to talk about diaspora identities rather than

migrant identities.

V.S.Naipaul was not the one who migrated as indentured labourer from India to

Trinidad. It was his grandparents and parents. But the migration history did percolate down to

him resulting ultimately in him what is can be called a strong diasporic sense.

Here one must note that diasporas are not monolithic entities. We should not forget

that all diasporas are differentiated, heterogeneous, contested spaces, even as they are

implicated in the construction of a common “we”. Differences of gender, race, class, religion

and language as well as generational gaps make diaspora spaces dynamic and shifting, open

to repeated construction. In the works of academics such as Homi K Bhabha, Avtar Brah,

Rey Chow, Carole Boyce Davies, Paul Gilory, Stuart Hall, Vijay Mishra, etc new

possibilities and problems engendered by the experience of migrancy and diaspora life have

been extensively explored. These possibilities include creating new ways of thinking about

individual and communal identities, critiquing established schools of critical thought, and

rethinking the relationship between literature, history and politics. 6

DIASPORIC DIALECTICS: HOMELAND- HOSTLAND –IN BETWEEN

As already suggested above that diasporic existence is not just an act and result of

migrancy in which the person rendered diaspora is always tied to his home at least in desire

and imagination. The complexity of this experience is illustrated by VS Naipaul by citing an

event in his famous Prologue to an Autobiography. 7 Naipaul, living in Britain now grew up

in the Caribbean island of Trinidad and came from a family descended from Indian migrants

to the Caribbean. He records on event which occurred in the summer 1932, when Indian

indentured labourers were promised the passage back to India from Trinidad by the

39
government once their contacts had expired. This had also happened in the previous year,

when the S.S. Ganges collected a number of Indian labourers in Trinidad and sailed for India.

The ship returned to Trinidad in 1932, collected more immigrant Indians and set off for

Calcutta once again.

Seven weeks later the Ganges reached Calcutta. And there, to the terror of the

passengers, the Ganges was stormed by hundreds of derelicts, previously repatriated,

who wanted now to be taken back to the other place. India for these people had been a

dream of home, a dream of continuity after the illusion of Trinidad. All the India they

had found was the area around the Calcutta docks. Our own past was, like our idea of

India, a dream. (53)

One can easily be drawn towards the repetition of the words ‘dream’ and ‘illusion’ and their

symbolism in the above excerpt. Here, Naipaul points out how migration alters the way

migrants think about their home and host countries.

Trinidad has been an illusion for the Indian migrants because it has not lived up to its

promises. When viewed from India, it seemed a place of opportunity and promise, but the

experience of the miserable working conditions meant it did not live up to the myth. But it is

also important to note that how, due to migrancy, India also becomes illusory like a dream.

When viewed from the poverty of Trinidad India can seem to be, to the migrants, a refuge

from their miserable conditions. Yet, their voyage home reveals that this view of India

similarly is more imaginary than true, as the return doesn’t alleviate their hardship.

The indentured labourers have in Trinidad have constructed a different, imaginary

India which is discontinuous with the real location. It exits primarily in the mind, and no act

of actual, physical return can facilitate it. The idea of the home country becomes split from

the experience of returning home.

40
Naipaul’s example helps us understand Avtar Brah’s statement that ‘home’ is a mythic place

of desire in the diasporic imagination. In this sense it is a place of no return, even if it is

possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of origin. 8

Here, it is important to note that the S.S. Ganges event doesn’t relate to his life

personally, neither he nor any member of his family was present on the ship. Then why does

Naipaul refer to this episode in his prologue to an Autobiography. Does this episode throw

any light on his personal experience? Does it bring out the dilemma of a diasporic existence?

Yes, the episode is significant in the sense that it brings out the truth which is true both at the

communal level and at the personal level.

Naipaul regards this episode as capturing the dream like view of India as somebody

born in Trinidad into an Indian family, and thus, strictly speaking, not an Indian migrant. For

him, India is also an illusory place from which he is fractured in both time and space, but

which retains an emotional influence over his life.

The above example begs us to think about migrancy as constructing certain ways of

seeing that impacts upon both migrants and their descendants in a number of ways even

though the response of different generations is not always the same. In other words, migrancy

has effects which last long after the act of migrating has been over. For some groups,

migration is not a mere interval between fixed points of departure and arrival, but a mode of

being in the world-migrancy.

HOME, HOMELAND, HOSTLAND

The word ‘home’ rings a gush of images and feelings which are very complex and

predominantly nostalgic. The concept of home often performs an important function in our

41
lives. It acts a valuable means of orientation by giving us a sense of our place in the world. It

tells us where we originated and where we belong. As an idea, it stands for shelter, stability,

security and comfort. To be ‘at home’ is to occupy a location where we are welcome, where

we can be with people very much like ourselves. But what happens to the idea of home for

migrants who live far from the lands of their (or their parents’) birth? How do their travels

impact the ways they lock at?

These questions beg serious considerations. Salman Rushdie takes up these questions

in his essay Imaginary Homelands (in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and criticism 1981-

1991, Grant 1991-PP-9-21). Born in 1947, Rushdie spent his childhood in India and went to

England for school as a young man. It is in England that he pursued his higher education and

thereafter settled there and established himself as an eminent fiction writer in English.

In the essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’ he records that on the wall of his London study

was a black and white photograph of his childhood home in Bombay. According to Rushdie,

one of the reasons which motivated his writing of the novel was an attempt to restore the

world of his childhood home, distant in both time and space, to the present. But it proved an

impossible task to ‘return home’ via the process of writing.

Actually in our pursuit of career, we all leave home at one time or another, and feel a

sense of loss for being so, but as Rushdie argues, the writer who is out of country and even

out of langrage may experience this loss in an intensified from. It is made more concrete for

him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his

past, of his being ‘elsewhere’ (P-12).

This disjunction between past and present, between here and there, makes ‘home’

seem far-removed in time and space, available for return only through an act of the

imagination. Speaking of Indian migrants, Rushdie writes that our physical alienation from

42
India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing

that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or village, but invisible

ones, imaginary homelands, India of the mind (P-10). In his formulation, home becomes

primarily a mental construct built from the incomplete bits and pieces of memory that survive

from the past. And even these bits and pieces are selectively organized according to the

mental disposition of the subject. It exits in a fractured, discontinuous relationship with the

present. If Rushdie’s remarks about Indian migrants are extended to include other acts of

migration, one can argue that the migrant occupies a displaced position. The imagination

becomes more and more the primary location of home but the mind is notorious unreliable

and capricious.

Further, Rushdie says that when thinking back to his Bombay childhood, he could

recall only fragmentary, partial memories, often of small, mundane occurrences. As a result,

Rushdie claims, his reflections were made in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have

been irretrievably lost. Thus migrants envision their home in fragments and fissures, full of

gaps and breaches. The transformations wrought by the experience of migrancy make

impossible the recovery of a platitudinous sense of home. Reflection of home seizes it in

pieces only a sense of displacement always remains thus no matter how much a diasporic

migrant tries to find and recreate home through imaginative writing, he is doomed to remain

outside it or be content with an incomplete and unfurnished home.

Now the question arises about the possibility of securing home in the host country. If

imagining home brings fragmentation, discontinuity and displacement for the migrant, can

new homes be secured in the host country? In migrating from one country to another,

migrants inevitably become involved in the process of setting up of home in a new land. This

can also add to the ways in which the concept of home is disturbed.

43
 If we look at closely the phenomenon of migration we find that migrants tend to

arrive in new places with, both in the physical sense of possessions or belongings as well as

in the abstract sense of carrying matters of belief, traditions, customs, behaviour and values.

This can have consequence for the ways in which other may or may not make migrants feel

‘at home’ on arrival in a new place. Migrants may well live in new places, but they can be

deemed not to belong there and disqualified from thinking of the new land as their home.

Instead their home is seen to exist elsewhere.

Rushdie’s essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’ speaks of the migrant as an adult who has

experienced enough of India as a child to have memories of home to explore it in retrospect,

But what of those who migrated to western country or to some other part of the world as

small children or those born in the new land to migrant parents who like the young Naipaul in

Trinidad, have little or no memories of a home oversees. How do they deal with the issue of

‘home’ and ‘belonging’? How do they form their identity? Is that identity ever formed at all?

The S.S. Ganges incident, referred to by V.S. Naipaul demonstrated an affinity

between two generations: Indian migrants to Trinidad and ‘Indian-born’ Trinidadians.

However it should be accepted without objection that the descendants of migrants are not

always in the same position. The migrants have childhood memories and the knowledge

about the interior of their country of origin, no matter how fragmentary and fissured it may

be. But to the children of migrants the ‘interior knowledge’ of a distant place is unavailable.

Thus, their reflections about these places in terms of home are often differently constructed.

These generational differences are not absolute. Sometimes migrants can share both

similarities and difference with their descendants, and the relationship between generations

can be complex and overlapping, rather than forming a neat contrast. In order to get a sense

of this complexity we can refer to the essay ‘The Rainbow sign’ by Hanif Kureishi, a writer

44
born to a Pakistani father and English mother. In this essay Kureishi narrates his experience

of a visit to Pakistan as a young man which makes him to compare between life in both

locations. His relationship with Pakistan was different from his fathers. Yet at school in

London he was mistakenly identified as Indian by his teacher. Thus he was not readily

permitted to belong to Britain like his classmates. On a visit to his relations in Karachi,

Kureishi found it difficult to think of this place in term of ‘home’. He admits to a little

identify crisis (P-17) when his uncle makes anti-British remarks, he tends to feel strangely

patriotic. Although he does not try to indulge in feeling Pakistani, his identity crisis is

outlined when an acquaintance declares to him, we are Pakistani, but you, you will always be

a Paki-emphasizing the slang derogatory name the English often use against Pakistani, and

therefore the fact that ‘I couldn’t rightfully lay claim to either place.’

Thus, the conventional ways to think about ideas such as belonging no longer work.

Conventional ideas of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ depend upon clearly defined, static notions of

being in place, firmly rooted in a community or a particular geographical location. We might

think of the discussion of nationalism, ethnicity or race as example of models of belonging

which attempt to root the individual within a clearly defined and homogenized group. But

these models or narratives of belonging no longer seem suited to a world where the

experience and legacy of migration are altering the ways in which individuals think of their

relation to place, and how they might lay claim to lands that are difficult to think of in terms

of ‘home’ or ‘belonging’.

Amidst the dynamic and shifting notion of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’, Salman Rushdie

makes a virtue out of loss of identity. He argues in his essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’ that the

displaced position of the migrant (and his descendant) is an entirely valuable one. In learning

to reflect reality in ‘broken mirrors’, he or she comes to treasure a partial plural view of the

world because it reveals that all representations of the world are incomplete. ‘Meaning is a

45
shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance

remarks, old feeling, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our

sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so

fiercely, even to the death(Imaginary Homelands P-12)

According to Rushdie, the migrant is in a better position than other to realise that all

systems of knowledge, all views of the world, are never totalising, whole or pure, but

incomplete, middle and hybrid. To line as a migrant may well evoke the pain of loss and not

being firmly rooted in to secure place, but it is also to line in a world of immense possibility

with the realization that new knowledge and ways of seeing can be constructed out of the

myriad combinations of the ‘scraps’ which Rushdie describes as knowledges which challenge

the authority of older ideas of rootedness and fixity.

Hanif Kureishi in his essay ‘The Rainbow sign’ testifies to Rushdie’s formulation

that the space of the ‘in between’ becomes a place of immense creativity and possibility.

Kureishi recalls seeing a photograph in his uncle’s house in Pakistan of his father as a young

boy. This fragment from the past, like the photograph in Rushdic’s case (Imaginary

Homelands), becomes a valuable ‘scrap’ which he can use which he can use when stitching

together new ways of thinking about his identity and his place in the world. He can never

think of his uncle’s house as his ‘home’, but it is a vital treasure house of many fold

possibilities. And if we were to borrow some phrases from Paul Gilory’s book. The Block

Atlantic (verso 1993). We can say that Kureishi does not have secure roots which fix him in a

place, in a nation or an ethnic group, rather, he must continually plot for himself itinerant

cultural routes which take him, imaginatively as well as physically, to many places and into

contact with many different peoples. This forges a relationship between past, present and

future but does not presume an even, continuous passage through time. And the grounded

certainties of roots are replaced with the transitional contingencies of routes.

46
 Some of the issues and ideas raised in the essays of Rushdie and Kureishi have also

been discussed in The Location of Culture by Homi K. Bhabha (Routledge 1994). The

introductory chapter ‘Locations of Culture’ addresses those who live ‘border lives’ on the

margins of different nations, in-between contrary homelands. For Bhabha, living at the

border, at the edge, requires a new ‘art of the present’. This requires often embracing the

contrary logic of the border and using it to rethink the dominant ways we represent things like

history, identity and community.

According to Bhabha, borders are important threshold, full of contradiction and

ambivalence. They both separate and join different places. They (borders) are intermediate

location where one contemplates moving beyond a barrier. In Bhabha’s formulation, ‘the

beyond is an in-between site of transition; the beyond is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving

behind of the past… we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to

produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside,

inclusion and exclusion (P-1). Thus, for Bhabha, the border is the place where conventional

patterns of thought are disturbed and can be disrupted by the possibility of crossing. The

space of ‘beyond’, therefore, is often described in terms which emphasize this transitory, in

between sense: such as ‘liminal’, interstitial or ‘hybrid’.

To summarize Bhabha’s formulations, three key points may be underlined:-

1. First, Bhabha opposes the idea of a sovereign or essential subject.

2. Second, as subjectivity is discursively produced, it is possible for it to be remade

and remodelled in new and innovative ways, and

3. Third, the new signs of identity which are possible impact upon both individuals

and groups. The idea of identity is not a solipsistic notion but is bound up in group

identity, group formation and group hostilities.

47
In addition, Bhabha also stresses the importance of performance as the means by which new,

hybrid identities are negotiated. 1

If performance becomes the bottom-line to earn, demonstrate and even to decide upon

whether one is ‘rooted’ or in-between or diasporic, the activities especially linguistic

expression becomes of crucial significance.

VS Naipaul was born to an Indian Migrant in Trinidad in 1932, and at the age of 18 in 1950

he went to England for his studies at Oxford. But it was a journey without a return ticket.

Even after his studies were over he continued to stay in England and went on establishing

himself as a broadcaster and a very significant author in the English language. It was because

of his valuable contribution to the English language and literature that he was conferred on

knighthood in 1989 and thereafter he is known as Sir V.S. Naipaul. Knighthood and Nobel

Prize (2001) were certainly the recognition of his value as an author.

But Naipaul, as an author, has been struggling to answer the question as whether he

belongs to Trinidad, to England or to India. It may not be a big legal problem because the

nationality of a person is a settled issue at least in passport. But a writer lives beyond the

bondage of legality. This experience and emotions cannot be checked by legal boundaries.

And hence search for ‘home’, ‘root’ and belonging becomes a constant refrain in his writings

be it fiction, travel writing or essays.

Naipaul’s search for root is very complicated because of multiple dislocations which

had taken place in life of his forefathers. Naipaul’s great grandfather had migrated from

Nepal to India in later part of the 19th century. In 1880’s his grandfather decided or was

compelled to migrate to Trinidad to work as indentured labourer in sugar plantation.

Naipaul’s father, Seeparsad Naipaul (1906-1953) remained in the Caribbean islands but

worked for a foreign company, the BBC as a reporter. The short stories that he wrote had the

48
nostalgia of a diasporic existence. And Naipaul himself dwelt in Trinidad only up to the age

of 18 when he secured a scholarship from Oxford University for higher studies. He kept a

vivid memory of the efforts he put in to prepare for the scholarship examination. But he

didn’t return to the Caribbean islands after finishing his studies. Instead he made or tried to

make England his home. He stayed back there, made a living out of broadcasting and writing.

The one resolve that he won’t do anything other than writing.

Thus having been in shifting mode for four generation from one country to another

and adapting to the conditions of new land and developing a sense of belonging and loyalty

for the same would not have been easy for the Naipauls. And in such circumstances, the

question of identity, belonging, rootedness etc. acquires paramount significance. The

relationship that the Naipauls bore to the new land (host land) and to the homeland was

complex and dynamic, that is, constantly changing over the time, It changed the way the

years passed, it changed the way the years passed, it changed the way the generation passed

and it changed the way the configuration of homeland and host land changed. And it kept

happening for over four generations.

For instance, when Naipaul’s great grandfather migrated from Nepal to India his

sense of belonging would have split between the Himalayan Kingdom and India. When his

grandfather’s family made Journey to the Caribbean islands, their sense of belonging and

loyalty would have been divided between Trinidad and India. The matter acquires relatively

greater complexity when it comes to Naipaul’s father Seeparsad Naipaul. He was born into a

migrant family which received all the nostalgic takes about India many of which did carry

romantic tinge in them, and the hostage romantic notions about ‘home’ (India). As regards

VS Naipaul, he knew about the migration of his grandfather from India, was aware of the fact

that he belonged to Indian community which was different from the other communities

around. He was also aware of the fact that he and his family members were different from the

49
local natives and the immigrants from other places. He had also formed certain opinion about

India on the basis of ritual activities in his home, the memories of his grandmother, and the

tales written by his father. As Naipaul couldn’t master the language used in the essentially

family affairs, his knowledge and understanding of India remained partial and insufficient,

which perhaps played a major part in kindling a desire to know more and more about India,

and hence his three travelogues on India.

And these three travel account of India by Naipaul An Area of Darkness (1964),

India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1989) are, as will

be shown in the following chapters, not only the records of India on the move, the inertia and

dynamism Indian society but also the dynamic nature of Naipaul’s own

diasporicconsciousness. It is not enough to call Naipaul a diaspora. It is more important to

see the complexity that his diasporic existence acquires as he moves out from Trinidad and

settles in England and thereafter acquires direct and indirect knowledge about India, the

original homeland of his ancestors.

References:
1. Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing: The Self and the World. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.

2. Frow, John. Genre. London: Routledge, 2006. Print.

3. Holland, Patrick and Graham Huggan. Tourists With Typewriters: Critical Reflections on

Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Print.

4. Naipaul, V S. An Area of Darkness. London: Andre Deutsch, 1964. Print.

5. - - - India: A Wounded Civilization. New Delhi: Penguin, 1977. Print.

6. - - - India: A Million Mutinies Now. London: Vintage, 1990. Print.

7. Thapar, Romila. A History of India. New Delhi: Penguin, 1966. Print.

50
8. Thomson, Carl. Travel Writing. London: Routledge, 2011. Print.

9. Youngs, Tim. The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing. Cambridge: CUP,

2013.Print.

51
 CHAPTER-3

WANDERING IN AN AREA OF DARKNESS

It was less an uprooting than it appears. They were taking India with them.

(V S Naipaul, ‘East Indian’)

According to Rajeev S. Patke, colonialism bred three kinds of voyagers: (a) willing voyagers

(b) partially willing voyagers (c) unwilling voyagers. Willing Voyagers consisted of

adventurers, explorers and colonists; partially willing voyagers included indentured labourers

and the unwilling type consisted primarily of slaves. Postcolonial history adds two more

types of to this motley (d) the migrant and (e) the exile (Postcolonial Poetry in English 207).

Seen through this typology and classification, VS Naipaul’s family can be seen as the

colonial partially willing voyager as they migrated from India to the Caribbean as indentured

labourers for sugar plantation. But Naipaul himself comes more under postcolonial migrant

given his willing flight from Trinidad to England. But, in either case, the idea of willingness

and unwillingness, and the notion of home and foreign land present complication given the

zigzag route through which Naipaul’s ancestors had to pass for the last 3-4 generations

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born on 17 August 1932 at Chaguanas in Trinidad

of Indian parents. Vidiadhar was his own name, Surajprasad his father’s and Naipaul the

family surname. V.S. Naipaul was the seventh son of seven children a large family of

orthodox Brahmins whose ancestral roots lay in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. It was his

grandfather who had migrated to Trinidad in 1880’s as an indentured labourer to work on the

fields of sugar plantation. Obviously, Naipaul’s father SeepersadNaipaul was born in

Trinidad, and thus he was a second generation Indian diaspora in Trinidad and Naipaul

himself being the third generation Indian diaspora.

52
 The migration under colonial compulsion was not the moving out of a certain

individual from his native place/land to a distant foreign land. More often than not it involved

the dislocation of entire family, and sometimes a community. So these people carried with

them not only their clothes and tickets but their household items which were essential for

their daily life including cultural and religious activities. In other words, they carried with

them their home and homeland. And the presence of home and homeland was visible not only

in their daily life in the new land but also in their imagination and emotional make up. And it

is because of them that the succeeding generations would become aware of their diasporic

status. The ancestral home and homeland always remained in the background of whatever

they did. As Naipaul writes in An Area of Darkness:

India had in a special way been the background of my childhood. It was the

country from which my grandfather had come, a country never physically described

and therefore never real, a country out in the void beyond the dot of Trinidad; and

from it our journey had been final; it was a country suspended in time; it could not be

related to the country discovered later which was the subject of the many books issued

by Mr Gollanez and Messrs Allen and Unwin; it remained a special, isolated area of

ground which had prodded me, my grandfather and others I knew who had been born

in India and had come to Trinidad as indentured labourers, though that past too had

fallen into the void into which India had fallen, for they carried no mark of indenture

no mark of even of having been labourers. (21-22)

Thus in the very beginning of An Area of Darkness, V.S. Naipaul records his

awareness of his Indian background as it was the birthplace of his grandfather and ancestors.

But at the same time the country could never become a real entity as it was never physically

described. As a result it was an amorphous entity, something between real and illusory and so

a void. He also underlines that the Indian community in Trinidad to which his family

53
belonged could not connect well and the disconnect between them was visible not only in

their separate residential settlement but also in their separate imaginative world.

With his awareness of Indian root, however, Naipaul had a very limited scope for

expanding his knowledge of India. As the means of communication in these days were very

limited, slow and quite infrequent, there was little scope for regular interaction with India. In

such a situation the possibility of frequent contacts with people from India was unthinkable.

Hence Naipaul’s early idea of India was based on things in his household which were said to

have been carried from India. As he delineates it in very evocative words:

More than in people, India lay about us in things: in a string bed or two, grimy

tattered, no longer serving any function, never repaired because there was no one with

this caste skill in Trinidad, yet still permitted to take up room; in straw mats in

innumerable brass vessels; in wooden printing blocks, never used because printed

cotton was abundant and cheap and because the secret of the dyes had been forgotten,

no dyer being at hand; in books, the sheets large, coarse and brittle, the ink thick and

oily; in drums and one ruined harmonium; in brightly coloured pictures of deities on

pink lotus or radiant against Himalayan snow; and in all the paraphernalia of the

prayer room; the arras bells and gongs and camphor burners like Roman lamps, the

slender handled spoon for the doling out of the consecrated nectar (peasant’s ‘nectar’:

on ordinary days brown sugar and water, with some shreds of the tulsi leaf, sweetened

milk on high days) the images, the smooth pebbles, the stick of sandalwood. (An Area

of Darkness 23-24)

The long list of items that the above quote supplies suggests the high retentive

memory of Naipaul and at the same time the very high value that the family attached to them

even when they had become useless. They are kept and preserved as heirlooms. One also gets

54
the impression that Naipaul himself is not involved in any activity which would require those

archaic Indian things so Naipaul had an eye on them only as a bystander, an observer.

Nevertheless, it is on these items that Naipaul forms his initial image in India.

Naipaul’s parents were orthodox Brahmins. But Naipaul himself was interested

neither in his Brahmin identity nor in his religious rituals. He had no liking for long and

boring religious ceremonies. He, in fact, was an unbeliever and these ceremonies were almost

similar and monotonous to him. The language of prayer was unknown to him, nobody

bothered to explain the meaning and significance of prayer or ritual to him. Thus the image

never interested him because he didn’t know their significance. Naipaul’s lack of faith and

distaste for ritual was a case of betrayal of heredity as his father’s appetite for Hindu rituals,

myths and speculation was great. Thus Naipaul , as a child and adolescent remained almost

entirely ignorant of Hinduism. But he received some consolation from his uncle that

Naipaul’s type is also admissible in the broad umbrella of Hinduism.

One of the handicaps that Naipaul could not or perhaps did not overcome was

language. The language which was mostly used by the older members of his family and

Indian community in Trinidad was Hindi. And he always remained either indifferent or

unwilling to learn Hindi. As a result he could not become a participant in events (ritual etc.)

which were essentially Indian at least in origin. On such occasions he was an onlooker and

indifferent observer. Actually his distaste for Hindi was so strong that the people of Indian

community in Trinidad who spoke only in Hindi are either depicted in poor light or are the

target of his sarcasms.

Naipaul may have been indifferent to India and Indians but his grandfather was not.

He was the opposite. He was too deeply tooted to his origin. That is why he made a difficult

55
and courageous Journey bock to India. Talking of his grandfather’s link with India and

Trinidad Naipaul writes:

When he built his house he ignored every colonial style he might have found

in Trinidad and put up a heavy, flat-roofed oddity, whose image I was to see again

and again in the small ramshackle town of Uttar Pradesh. He had abandoned India;

and, like Gold Teeth, he denied Trinidad. Yet he walked on solid earth. Nothing

beyond his village had stirred him; nothing had forced him out of himself; he carried

his village with him. A few reassuring relationships, a strip of land, and he could

satisfyingly recreate an eastern Uttar Pradesh Village in central Trinidad as if in the

vastness of India. (An Area of Darkness 24-25)

The strength of bond that kept his grandfather tied to India gradually became week

and loose. Even the loyalty that the first generation diaspora felt towards India was no longer

total and complete. By the time of Naipaul Trinidad stood in competition with India in

claiming authority over imagination, emotion and loyalty. For the new generation India may

have been in imagination but Trinidad was a reality. It is because of this that Naipaul admits:

We [Naipaul] who came after could not deny Trinidad. The house we lived in

was distinctive, but not more distinctive than mine. It was easy to accept that we lived

on an island where there were all sorts of people and all sorts of houses. Doubtless

they too had their own things. We ate certain food, performed certain ceremonies and

had certain taboos; we expected others to have their own. We did not wish to share

theirs; we did not export them to share ours. They were what they were; we were what

we were. (An Area of Darkness 25)

Thus unlike his grandfather Naipaul was at least aware of a distinctive existence of

the Indian Diaspora to which his family belonged from that of the local Trinidadians. He was

56
aware of the different ways of outlook and life style of the two communities. There was

criticism also from the locals but it never penetrated the walls of his house. The native

Trinidadians had the point that the diaspora in general and Indian diaspora in particular paid

less attention to their hostland as compared to their ancestral homeland. And Naipaul shows

his awareness to such criticisms, and he realizes that the allegations are not without

substance. And in this connection he refers to George Lamming’s condemnation:

I have been rebuked by writers from the West Indies, and notably by George

Lamming for not paying sufficient attention in my books to non-Indian groups. The

confrontation of different communities, he said, was the fundamental West Indian

experience. So indeed it is, and increasingly. But to see the attenuation of the culture

of my childhood as the result of a dramatic conformation of opposed worlds would be

to distort the reality. To me the worlds were juxtaposed and mutually exclusive. (An

Area of Darkness 30)

Here, Naipaul, instead of dismissing the charges of George Lamming, decides to

consider them seriously. He accepts his charge that non-Indian groups have not figured

prominently in his books. But he is not apologetic about it. He is forthright in his assertion

that he writes about the people he knows. If he has not known the non-Indian groups from the

West Indies well how can he write about them with authority but he dismisses the assertion

and even the possible implication that Naipaul’s personal make-up was the result of a

confrontation between Indian and non-Indian groups of the West Indies. The truth was, in

Naipaul’s view, he yielded ‘not to attack but a type of seepage from the other. He can speak

only out of his own experience’ (30) and his experience was more or less confined to the

Indian groups in the West Indies.

57
 The world of his grandfather had a lasting impact on Naipaul even if he never

participated with will and enthusiasm in the cultural and ritual activities of the family. Yet the

world of his family was so shut to external influence (non-Indian mix-up) that Naipaul’s

intimate knowledge of the West Indian society did not go much beyond the Indian diasporic

groups. And his knowledge of India was based, to a great extent, on his interaction with and

observation of people belonging to his own diaspora. To quote Naipaul:

In the world we existed as if in blinkers, as if seeing no more than my

grandfather’s village; outside, we were totally self-aware. And in India I was

to see that so many of the things which the newer and how perhaps now truer

side of my nature kicked against -- the smugness, as it seemed to me, the

imperviousness to criticism, to refuse to see the double-talk and double-think -

-had an answer in that side of myself which I had thought buried and which

India received as a faint memory. (AD 30-31)

In characterizing India, Naipaul doesn’t stop here. He goes ahead and says, ‘Indians

are old people, and it might be that they continue to belong to the old world. That Indians

[have] reverence for the established and ancient, however awkward, however indefensible

however little understood’ (AD 31).

But Naipaul received a shock when he discovered in Bombay that Indians used

candles and electric bulbs for the Diwali festival, and not the rustic clay lamps, of

immemorial design which in Trinidad people still used. The episode also brings to light the

fact that how the diaspora tends to remain caged and frozen in time and space whereas the

homeland moves forward to the shock and disbelief of the migrants.

Thus, Naipaul visits India with a mind-set and world view which had been shaped by

his diasporic existence in Trinidad and thereafter in England. And even his visit to India was

58
undertaken after receiving promptings in the form of a Phoenix Trust Award to enable him to

write a book on India. He began his journey to India in February 1962 the land from which

his father’s father had been brought to Trinidad as a baby and from which his maternal

grandfather had come as an indentured labourer Naipaul grew up surrounded by mementos of

India for in its artifacts India existed whole in Trinidad. This kept India alive in his mind.

And it was this India which was the background to his childhood was an area of the

imagination. His journey to India was undertaken as an exploration of this area of

imagination -- the area of darkness. And the result of this journey, the intimate knowledge

and experience that he got through this journey was shattering “It was a journey that ought

not to have been made as it had broken my life into two” (AD 265).

II

An Area of Darkness, though a travel account, is not a typical travelogue or travel

writing. It was not written during the journey nor was it penned faithfully according to the

diary maintained during the journey. It was written much later after the journey was over and

even when the book began to be written the author was not sure whether he was writing a

fiction or travel account. The book, naturally follows no chronology.

The book, An Area of Darkness is divided into three parts consisting of eleven

chapters plus a Traveller’s Prelude and the closing chapter Flight. The parts and sub-parts

(chapters) are closely linked patterns of his experiences and their examinations.

At the beginning of An Area of Darkness Naipaul describes the voyage from England

to India. The various parts, Greece, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, each one more Eastern

than the last, each one a preparation for the next. Naipaul notices the people and it is this that

inspires his fear, one separate from the fear at the quay in Trinidad, but producing a similar

response:

59
 From Athens to Bombay another idea of man had defined itself by degrees, a new

type of authority and subservience. The physique of Europe had melted away first into

that of Africa and then, through Semitic Arabia, into Aryan Asia. Man had been

diminished and deformed, they begged and whined. Hysteria had been my reaction,

and a brutality dictated by a new awareness of myself as a whole human being and a

determination, touched with fear, to remain what I was […] superficial impressions,

intemperate reactions. But one memory had stayed with me and I had tried to hold it

close during that day out in the stream at Bombay, when I had seen the sun set behind

the Taj Mahal Hotel and had wished that Bombay was only another part such as those

we had touched on the journey a part that the freighter passenger might explore or

reject. (An Area of Darkness 6)

Contrary to Naipaul’s expectation, the first encounter with India brought shock to him

even before he had a chance to land on the India soil. As the ship was waiting for quarantine

clearance, Naipaul happened to meet Coelho, a Goan sent for helping Naipaul by the travel

agency. Here the picture that Naipaul paints of Coelho who is looking for cheese, and how

his bottle of wine was seized by the excise department, and the extraordinary trouble he had

to take to recover them, is so vivid and realistic that the reader is immediately aware of the

Naipaul’s feeling. He is disgusted with the Indian ways of working, red tapism, and the

unprofessional behaviour. The shock that he received was much greater because Naipaul had

become used to the English work culture amidst which he had spent around 12 years. The

matter which shocks Naipaul more is not this snail’s pace at which the things move in

government but the lack of outrage among the Indians. Even after 15 years of independence

India had not woken up from the colonial stupor. The question that arises in his mind is –

should it be taken as the residue of colonial mind-set or a defining feature of India?

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 Part-one of An Area of Darkness has four chapters: 1. A Resting Place for the

Imagination. 2. Degree 3 .The Colonial and 4. Romancers. ‘A Resting Place for the

Imagination’ provides background for Naipaul’s understanding of India which has been so

frequently referred to in section-I of this chapter. Degree, the Romancers and the colonial are

three major aspects of India that he encounters.

In ‘A Resting Place for Imagination’, we come across two distinct persona of Naipaul.

One is the persona who is totally self-aware of his being non-believer with an actual distaste

for ritual. And this persona is also sure, to a certain extent, about his knowledge of India and

Indian people. The other is one who is outraged to hear that candles and electric bulbs had

replaced clay lamps for Diwali in Bombay, who quietly backs out of a science experiment at

school that required him to suck from a common siphon who could be angered by Beverly

Nicholas’s Verdict on India.

These two separate selves had stayed together as long as Naipaul was in Trinidad of

in England. There was a public life and a private family life. The direct experience of India

tore these two selves apart; his life was broken into two. An area of Darkness is actually a

friction between the two selves. To say that An Area of Darkness is about India is to miss the

point as it is the half-truth. It is actually a desperate attempt on the part of the author to

preserve the unity of a sensibility shattered beyond repair. However the method that Naipaul

employs to preserve the unity of sensibility is one of dismissal, rejection and flight. And the

realization of the inefficiency of this method produced India: A Million Mutinies Now.

‘Degree’, the second chapter of part-one of An Area of Darkness refers to the Indians’

understanding of himself. String-cots and wooden blocks had lain unused in his Trinidad

home for the lack of people of that caste skill. But that was not so in India. People, here, had

accepted work outside the realm of their caste-skill, and in doing so, they had not forgotten

61
their degrees. This double realization, instead of, of protecting the unity of his world worked

in a paradoxical manner and led to a split at a very interior level in the Indian psyche. This

Knowledge of degree which Naipaul finds in the bones of Indians makes it difficult for them

to combat the social confusion and disorder of east. (AD-55) Ramnath, the steno refused to

type because that was not his job. Malhotra with an English University Job doesn’t recognize

such job divisions. Ramnath’s humiliation arises not so much out of his submission to

Malhotra as out of the violation of his degrees-- the steno had been made to do the typist’s

job. Another example of keeping of degree is Jivan.

Jivan rose to an odd-job type boy in a printery to an office clerk with a side business

that earned him as much money as the English university educated Malhotra but Jivan

continued to sleep on pavements. Vasant began as a telegram agent and became an

established stock broker but he kept his habit of skipping lunch -- a habit that had its origin in

boys of austerity. The two Brahmin brothers in the south had risked their caste and started a

leather business but were anxious to protect their children against caste contamination. (p-55)

People like Malik and Malhotra who did not recognize this degree were exceptional and their

rejection of degree left them rejected which is at once, an Indian typicality as well as

typically Indian confusion that an outsider has to deal with. The chapter ‘Degree’ also refers

to, at one place, Premchand, the great Hindi novelist, while talking of poverty and beggary in

India:

[Poverty] releases sweetest of emotion. This is poverty, our special poverty, and how

sad it is! Poverty not as an urge to anger of improving caution, but poverty as an

inexhaustible source of tears, an exercise of the purest sensibility. Because they are so

poor that for years, the beloved Hindi novelist writes, that even the beggars left their

door empty handed’ that indeed is our poverty not the fact of beggary, but that

beggars should have to go from our doors empty handed this is our poverty, which in

62
 a hundred Indian short stories in all the Indian languages drives the pretty girl to

prostitution to pay the family’s medical bills.

India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an

observation of no value; a thousand new comers to be the country before you have

seen and said as you. (AD 61)

A passive and non-proactive attitude of Indians to their age-long problems is perhaps,

according to Naipaul, an important feature of India. This is why the time passes but the

fundamental problems conformed by the Indians remain as ever. Sometimes changes are

visible in a very striking manner but on closer examination the change is found illusory. A

highly educated scientist goes to assume his duty only after consulting an astrologer. What

can one say about it? The more Indian changes, the more she remains the same.

‘The colonial’ is the third chapter of An Area of Darkness. It takes up another view of

post-independence India. It records the split in the eastern and western mind-set through the

example of beggary in India. Naipaul hates that a foreigner in India which makes the act of

charity an “automatic reverence to God, like the offering of a candle or spin of the prayer

wheel”. Naipaul also records the phenomena of India defecation in great detail and this part

of the book had earned him scathing criticism from Indian media and intellectuals. However,

this is not a mere chronicling of facts; he offers analysis also. According to Naipaul,

defecation is unrepresented in novels, stories, films and in documentaries not because of a

prettifying intention on the part of the people of India but because “Indians do not see these

squatter’s”. Naipaul calls it a collective blindness that arises out of the Indian fear of

pollution. Indians refuse to see the existence of dirt.

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 This is followed by Naipaul’s much disputed hypothesis on Gandhi. It was Gandhi’s

‘colonial’ vision and his critical ‘South African eye’ that made him look at India as no Indian

was able to:

[Gandhi] He saw India so clearly because he was in part a colonial. He settled finally

in India when he was 46, after spending 20 years in South Africa. There he had seen

an Indian community removed from the setting of India; contrast made for clarity

criticism and discrimination for self-analysis. He emerged a colonial blend of east and

west, Hindu and Christian. Nehru is more Indian; he has a romantic feeling for the

country and its past; he takes it all to his heart, and the India he writes about cannot

easily be recognized. Gandhi never loses the critical, comparing South African eye; he

never rhapsodizes, except in the vague Indian way, about the glories of ancient India.

(AD 74)

Naipaul’s hypothesis about Gandhi and Nehru is difficult to be endorsed and accepted

by an Indian. For us Gandhi was more Indian and more rooted to its tradition and cultural

ethos. In contrast, Nehru is thought to be more modern carrying the best of western education

and Indian intellectual tradition. So, if anybody was thought to be a bridge between east and

west, it was Jawaharlal Nehru. It seems Naipaul’s view of Gandhi and Nehru are so

diametrically opposed to the consensus Indian views about the two great leaders that Naipaul

was bound to invite serious criticism for the views he expressed about them. But he does give

a new perspective to see and evaluate the two great leaders of India.

The next point of attack for Naipaul is sanitation of India. For Naipaul it was possible

to analyze the whole diseased society of India in terms of their attitude to it. ‘Sanitation in

India was linked to caste, caste to callousness, inefficiency and a hopelessly divided country.

64
Division to weakness, weakness to foreign rule. This was what Gandhi saw, and no one

purely of India could have seen it. It needed the straight simple vision of the west’ (AD 75).

In order to drive home his hypothesis of Gandhi, Naipaul draws our attention to the

fact that as soon as Gandhi returned from the west, he started in a tone and language which

was quite unlike an Indian:

It is revealing to find, just after his return from south Africa how Gandhi

speaks of Christian, western simplicities with a new discovering fervour:

‘Before the throne of the Almighty we shall be judged not by what we have

eaten nor by whom we have been touched but by whom we have served and

how. Inasmuch as we serve a single human being in distress, we shall find

favour in the sight of God.’ The New Testament tone is not inappropriate. It is

in India and with Gandhi, that one can begin to see now revolutionary the now

familiar once have been. Hindus might try to find in this ideal of service the

selfless action of the Gita but this is only Indian distortion, the eternal Indian

accept to incorporate and nullify. (AD 75)

Naipaul’s attempt to show that Gandhi in his social mission was inspired by Christian

ethic alone and that the Gita had no role in it is difficult to be accepted by any Indian who

knows Gandhi and his devotion to the Bhagvat Gita. It is on record that the Gita, was the last

refuge for Gandhi in moments of crisis. Faced with big question of moral dilemma, Gandhi

would approach the Gita and immerse himself in it till he had solution in his hand. So to call

every good things happening or being done in India to have western/Christian origin is the

perpetuation of colonial mind set and attitude to India. No wonder, Naipaul has been accused

of carrying colonial baggage even in the post-colonial age.

65
 However, whatever be Naipaul’s hypothesis about Gandhi and sanitation problem in

India, it is undeniable to concede that Gandhi saw the maladies of India and tried to dignify

labour. At the same time, Gandhi also made a serious effort to delink caste from a men’s

function in society. Thus he worked relentlessly for removing caste barrier by declaring

untouchability a sin and crime against humanity. But in the end he himself was absorbed into

the great Indian symbolism. He was deified but his message was lost. The India that he

sought to change placed him on a high pedestal and continued on its way.

‘Romancers’ is the fourth and concluding chapter of part-I of An Area of Darkness.

The chapter is about the dilution of the real to create the imaginary. Mrs. Mahindra with her

‘cage for foreign’ and Mrs. N. Mehta, Secretary of Women’s League, attempt to escape from

their traditional role. There is new money and the freedom that it brings. Naipaul is

sympathetic towards the plight of Mrs. Mahindra. But he is critical of her response to the

situation which, to use Naipaul’s phrase, is only a mimicry, a misplaced sense of romance,

Naipaul sees it as a malaise that arises out of an Individual’s absence of a sure sense of self

and as a poor substitute to fill up the gaps in one’s cultural make-up. Naipaul could not share

the romance of the Indian films or of the shikara boats because he was neither ‘English nor

Indian’; he was denied the advantage of both. With this painful realization the first part of An

Area of Darkness comes to an end. The first part is the body from which Naipaul’s responses

in the second part and the third part of the book emerge. It marks the first phase in Naipaul’s

search for a response to India. The result of this search was the discovery of his being as

outsider to the realm of responses that could only be either English or Indian.

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 III

The second part of An Area of Darkness has three chapters: A Doll’s House on the

Dol Lake, The Medieval City and Pilgrimage. This part of the book is filled with

conversation through which Naipaul attempts to experience India and carve out a picture of

India.

‘A Doll’s House on the Dol Lake’ is a make-believe world of Mr. Butt, Aziz and the

Khansamah. These men have no idea of themselves. They continually seek to make

commercial benefits. Their concern, hospitality and friendliness have theoretical dimensions.

They all want type-written certificates from Naipaul because they think these would add to

their credibility. Aziz is an expert in the art of pleasing. His foil is the Khansanah, who has

never learnt the art and as a result remains a tormented man. Naipaul’s interactions with

khansamah bring out a fine analysis of anger.

The khansamah’s anger and the almost simultaneous recognition of his own weakness

made him a tormented man. Naipaul felt himself to be as inadequate as the khansamah:“I

suffered with him and I was surprised by the rise within myself of that deep anger which

unhinges judgment and almost physically limits vision- the moment of anger is a moment of

exalted, shrinking lucidity from which recovery is slow and shattering” (AD 117) .

It was Naipaul’s observation that with the going of imperial rule, one type of glory

had gone’ and the other type hadn’t set in’ (AD 119). It was a period of blankness lived in the

shadow of the past. English taste was flaunted as superior and Indian taste was inferior (AD

119). Naipaul the foreigner could issue coveted certificate from his typewriter; he could be

used to obtain a tourist permit from the government. Here, it is to be underlined that how

Naipaul betrays his colonial slant when he suggests the imperial rule as a period of glory.

67
And when it comes to positioning himself he considers himself a foreigner and an English

man.

Naipaul also talks about the Hindu pilgrims who, in Naipaul’s view, are all orthodox.

Like the Trinidad Indians the orthodox Hindu pilgrims carried their worlds with them and

denied everything else. Even while they stayed at Liward and looked and washed on its lawn,

Mr. Butt, Aziz and the khansamah remained beyond their pure existence. Here it is very

important to note how Naipaul uses the phrase Trinidad Indians as if he were no part of the

community. By dissociating himself from Trinidad Indian and at the same time not becoming

fully English is the dilemma that Naipaul is perhaps condemned to live in.

‘The Medieval City’ (chapter-6) deals with the features of Srinagar. Here, Naipaul

comes across people who have forgotten their history and survived on legend. That is how

Akbar’s late 16th century fort in the Dal Lake came to be regarded as five thousand years old

(131). The details of the man who had brought the Hazratbal relic were not known. The

Muslim Medical student did not believe that the world was created in six days but was more

of a religious fanatic than Aziz. Naipaul studies the medieval mind’ which could casually

assess a building as five thousand years old. The same capacity facilitated other amnesias.

The medieval mind could easily forget last three to four hundred years of the past: “And it

was because it was without a sense of history that it was capable of so complete a conversion.

Many Kashmiri clan names like that of Mr. Butt himself were often still purely Hindu but of

their Hindu past the Kashmiris retained no memory” (AD 136).

Naipaul finds the valley was suffering from selective amnesia. The engineer, who was

showing the valley to Naipaul drove past the eighth century Awantipur ruins and showed no

interest in them. Naipaul observed that the history of the people in the valley began with the

history of their conquerors. For the common populace, Sheikh Abdullah had already passed

68
into legend. Their accounts of 1947 ignored the Congress, Gandhi, the British, and the

Pakistan invasion (AD 138).

Wandering in Kashmir Naipaul got restless to break out of the visitor mode and had

chance encounter with a family on his way back Awantipur helped him in his mission: ‘In

India I had so far felt myself a visitor. Its size, its temperatures, its crowds: I had prepared

myself for these, but in its very extremes, the country was alien. Looking for the familiar, I

had again in spite of myself become an islander: I was looking for the small and manageable’

(AD 148-49).

Naipaul’s attempt to feel Indian has not only psychological and geographical barrier.

He is faced with topographical hurdles also. Having spent the earlier part of his life on the

small islands of the West Indies, and later on in another island in England, Naipaul feels

unable to embrace India with its immensity. Nevertheless, his encounter with the family, its

observance of food related rules, the power patterns in the family all at once evoked a Port of

Spain memory and Naipaul found that the gap of three generations and of a lost language had

been bridged. For a fleeting second he was able to relate to his experience of India. But once

again he is overtaken by his diasporic status and sentiments.

Pilgrimage, the seventh chapter of the book An Area of Darkness begins with a

description of the five foot ice lingam of Amarnath: “It was a mystery, like Delphi of the

older world. It had survived because it was of India and Hinduism which without beginning ,

without end, scarcely a religion, continued as a repository and living record of men’s

religious consciousness .”(AD166).

The chapter is an account of Naipalul’s journey to the Amernath cave, his encounter

with Laraine –‘the seeker’, and a brief interlude of the missing ghora-wallah. About Laraine

Naipaul writes: “She had come to India, she said, for two weeks, and had already stayed six

69
months. She was attracted to Hindu philosophy when she left the yatra she was going to

spend sometimes in an ashram. She was a seeker.” (AD 173)

By referring to the case of Laraine, Naipaul tries to capture the mystical charm that

Hinduism has for the westerner. However, it is ironical that the same Hinduism fails to cast

the same spell on Naipaul himself. He continued to be in the mid-land, neither east nor west

and occasionally both.

Later on it is also shown that Laraine floated from one illusion to another. First she

was to join an ashram and Hindu philosophy. Then she converted to Islam and Married the

Muslim sitarist Rafique. Very soon she deserted him and went to an ashram and later left the

country. The seeker had been torn apart by her illusions. The reality always managed to elude

her.

The Himalayas had a very special place in Naipaul’s memory. He felt linked to them.

For him: “They [India and the Himalayas] went together. In so many of the brightly coloured

religious pictures in my grandmother’s house I had seen these mountains, cones of white

against simple, cold blue. They had become a part of the India of my fantasy.” (AD 174)

However when encountered the actual Himalayas, they seemed to him as the Indian symbol

of loss they were at once hear and far: hear in the imagination but almost inaccessible to the

vast populace which could see them only in pilgrimages, legends and pictures.

Naipaul reveals that he knew that there was no truth in the picture of Himalayas

which he had seen in Trinidad but in spite of this knowledge a part of his mind continued to

believe in the possibilities of the picture’s truth. ‘Pilgrimage’ thus establishes that India for

Naipaul is something which cannot be claimed. What he says of the Himalaya is also true for

70
his own experience of India. India will remain a symbol of loss for him; at once near and far:

near in the imagination and far away in reality.

IV

The third part of An Area of Darkness comprises of four chapters. The opening

chapter of the section is ‘Fantasy and Ruins’. And in this chapter Naipaul intends to have

direct confrontation with his imagination and his imagination of India. He goes back to his

roots and dissects his past experiences- his experiences as a colonial subject in Trinidad, his

experiences of England, his experience of Kipling and other writers in India and his idea of

India that he had formed in Trinidad.

In course of his visit, Naipaul not only comes across aspects in India but also certain

unknown aspects of England which he was not prepared to accept. He looks into himself and

wonders why the detachment he had cultivated during the prolonged isolation of his stay in

England deserted him in India. He sees in India’s acceptance of England, the typical Indian

ability to retreat, the ability genuinely not to see what were obvious. Ironically this is what

kept India together. In Naipaul’s analysis this ability to retreat, first leads to passivity then to

detachment and finally to acceptance. He realizes that he had seen very close to this pattern

of survival during his stay in England.

Naipaul compares and contrasts the British empires in the West Indies and in India in

an attempt to account for the difference in his response to the England he encountered in the

two countries. He sees India living with the Raj that was long dead. India thus becomes for

Naipaul a country that lived amongst incongruous ruins because in India ‘everything is

inherited nothing is abolished.’ (AD 206)

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Next, he goes on to present a detailed analysis of literature and its chronicling of the societies

of its times. Naipaul is of the view that the word ‘British’ is used very differently by the

Britishers and by Indians. For Indians it is a creation of fantasy. It is a concept of Englishness

that has outlived the empire. In India it exists in an unending mimicry of the Raj. The Raj

itself being a classical cage imitation of all that was thought to be ‘English’ the inheritors of

the Raj followed the same pattern. India goes on living with the ruins of the Empires.

There are other kinds of ruins also that lie across the length and the breadth of the

country: the ruins of Vijayanagar, the ravages of Muslim rules in the north, and the disjointed

idea of history in the mind of the people. The creation in India is built on destruction. There is

no continuity and plunder is the main predecessor of creation. With the coming of the British,

this continuity became more prominent. Art sought to imitate. The Raj sought to express an

idea of itself as ‘English’. Nationalist India accepted this as an established pattern. It too

sought to express an idea of itself. In the process, in Naipaul’s view, art was lost. Naipaul

cites the examples of the Indian memorial meeting at Luckhow and of the new temple at

Kurukshetra. In both the cases the beauty, the originality of art was lost. Somewhere

‘something has snapped’ says Naipaul. (AD 219) The British were responsible for the death

of Indian art. For the break in continuity.

For millennia, Hindu India has been attracting invaders and conquerors. But in the

past they had been absorbed into the main stream. This continuity was broken with the

coming of the British:

It is perhaps only now that we can see what a clean break with the past the Raj was.

The British refused to be absorbed into India; they did not proclaim, like the Moghul

that if there was a paradise on earth, it was this, and it was this, and it was this. While

dominating India they expressed their contempt for it, and projected England; and

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 Indians were forced into nationalism. […] It was an immense self-violation; […] a

flattering self-assessment could only be achieved with the help of Europeans like Max

Muller…. (AD 226)

The rejection of India and the projection of English created chaos. Indians found

themselves in a new world whose forms they could see but whose spirit eluded them. In the

process of acquiring an identity in their own land they became displaced. Naipaul cites

moving examples of the damage done to India’s idea of itself. Naipaul observes that

newspaper items on India were short statements of facts because they were Indian and hence

unimportant. Whereas a newspaper item relating to far off Belgium was big news and

required to be reported in detail. The incongruity was everywhere. It was routinely carried out

in courts whose proceedings and language were foreign to the people involved.

Unlike other languages bequeathed to India by its conquerors, English never became

an Indian language. It remained a foreign language and paradoxically, it continued to be used.

According to Naipaul ‘language’ is like a sense; and the psychological damage caused by the

continued official use of English, which can never be more than a second language, is

immense. He also observed that the creative use of English was also deficient and translators

could never do justice to the Indian language writers. English could never be the medium of

expression of Indian sentiments. Premchand naturally lost his edge in translation.

Throughout the chapter, V.S. Naipaul seems to be trying to lay bare the ultimate

damage caused to the Indian psyche during the colonial period. According to him Indian

sentimentality is India’s way of turning away of diluting the pain of its reality. It is the use of

selective amnesia to preserve an idea of unity that no longer exists. It is India’s defense

mechanism. “It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly for the distress

73
they would see would be able to read the history of his country for the last thousand years

without anger and pain, it is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism …” (AD 226)

In Naipaul’s view the fantasy and fatalism found in the novels of R.K. Narayan are

symptomatic of the same difference mechanism. One needs Indian eyes to be able to see

Narayan’s world. It has that inimitable synthesis of concern and total acceptance of the

predicament of India. Naipaul finds this missing in the younger generation of writers in

English. In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novels he finds an acceptable type of comment because

her vision, unlike Narayan’s is not rooted. For Naipaul, it is not the question of the validity of

Jhabvala’s vision or the validity of Narayan’s visions. It is the question of difference in

experience that creates difference in vision.

In Naipaul’s formulation India has been a victim of its capacity to endure, of its

acceptance of everything in order to maintain a sense of continuity which in reality, is just an

illusion. He is of the view that India survived the colonial experience only on account of its

ability to accept its predicament as an unexamined continuity. None of the conquerors before

the coming of the British had forced India into such a sterile state. Independent India moved

on the same pattern of non-existent continuity. Englishness was still affected in higher social

circles and the common man still listen to the proceeding in courts being conducted in

English in Independent India with the same bewilderment as he had done during imperial

rule.

At one place in this chapter Naipaul declares that India is not a fit place for the novel

to flourish. The novel arose in the west for their concern with condition of men at the present.

It was not a search for the timeless and the unseen:

Indian attempts at the novel further reveal the Indian confusion. The novel is of the

west. It is part of that western concern with the condition of men, a response to the

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 here and how. In India thoughtful men have preferred to turn their backs on the here

and now and to satisfy what president Radhakrishnan calls ‘the basic human hunger

for the unseen. It is not a good qualification for writing or reading of novels. (AD

230)

In Naipaul’s view R.K. Narayan presents in his writings the essence of Indians. And

therefore his failings are those of Indians. To put it in Naipaul’s words:

The virtues of R.K. Narayan are Indian failing magically transmitted. I say this

without disrespect: he is a writer whose work I admire and enjoy. He seems forever

headed for that aimlessness of Indian fiction which comes from a profound doubt

about the purpose and value of fiction. But he is forever rescued by his honesty. His

sense of human and above all by his attitude of total acceptance. He operates from

deep within his society. (AD 232)

Naipaul’s condemnation of Indian ways of thinking arises out of two sources: first his

belief in colonial superiority and second the feeling of inner hollowness because he belongs

to neither. He does not feel like an English does and he feels unable to claim India his own.

In the chapter ‘The Garland on my Pillow’ Naipaul records his meetings with various people.

And the picture that emerges out of these meeting is that of an India in conflict. It is a conflict

that arises out of ignorance. An Inspector of Forms and Stationary in the Northern Railway is

non-existent for a Railway officer busy with his presidential tour’. The cigarette smoking

Sikh has a violent hatred for Dravidians. He is proud of his Aryan lineage and regards non-

Aryans with contempt. The figure of the Sikh at the beginning of the chapter seems to emerge

an extension of Naipaul’s response to pain, squalor and poverty of India. Naipaul shuns the

hospitality of the sweet-shop owner and prefers the company of the Sikh. But later Naipaul is

able to see the difference in the Sikhs debunking of India and painful hysteria of his own

75
(Naipaul’s) response. While the Sikh was responding to an idea of himself, Naipaul saw

himself responding to India with a love insensibly turned into a self-lacerating hysteria.

Thereafter Naipaul went to sweet shop owner and let himself be overtaken by his

hospitality. He was grateful for the warmth and kindness of India. He wanted to remain as

such. He feared that this softness and warmth could be lost in the violence of our time. In the

end he returns to his hotel room to find a typically Indian show of appreciation by one of his

readers. His room was filled with incense smoke. There were flowers strewn all over his bed

and there was a garland on his pillow. The incense suffocated him, his eyes watered on

account of the smoke, his room was littered with ash but still, it touched his heart. It was

genuine. It soothed the rawness of his self-infected hysteria. It was India’s way of reaching

out.

It was the time when India witnessed the Chinese aggression and Naipaul happened to

observe the reaction of the Indians to this invasion. It was a time when a state of emergency

was called for and hence Naipaul deals with this theme in the chapter named ‘Emergency’.

The attack had caught India unawares and the emergency only meant more speech, more

statues of law. The common man and the politician both were feeding on words. The elite

casually discuss the war as if it were something totally remote from them and calmly return to

the routine of their dinner. It was also the time when the Theosophical Society organized

lectures in their normal course, and the lectures were monotonous and irrelevant to the

situation at hand. He also happened to see the Aurobindo Society in Pondicherry as a self-

content organization efficiently run by its members. Here too the world centred around Sri

Aurobindo, and after him around the Mother. Visiting the Aurobindro’s ashram, Naipaul

came across documentary evidence regarding Aurobindo’s warning of Chinese aggression:

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 In the year 1950, the year of his death, Aurobindo had warned Mr. Nehru of the

expansionist designs of a yellow race; he had prophesied the Chinese conquest of

Tibet and had seen this as the first step in the Chinese attempt to conquer India. It was

there in black and white in one of the Ashram’s numerous publications. (AD 257)

Naipaul also visited Calcutta and tried to understand the city which had been the

cradle of Indian renaissance. But he was disappointed to find the city degenerating. In

Naipaul’s words:

Here the Indian renaissance had begun: so many of the great names of Indian reform

are Bengali. But it was here too that the encounter [of east and west] had ended in

mutual recoil. The cross fertilization had not occurred and Indian energy had turned

sour. Once Bengal led India in ideas and idealism; now just forty years later, Calcutta,

even to Indians was a word of terror conveying crowds cholera and corruptions. (AD

265)

This is how Calcutta impressed him. No doubt Naipaul’s censure of Calcutta has its

origin in his greater expectation from the city which had been the intellectual and cultural

leader of his forefather’s Mother land. But the indication towards decay is not without

substance. The fact that his comment on and assessment of Calcutta life, is inconvenient and

hard to accept in toto, can be attributed to his diasporic position he is in. It is because of this

that he sometimes is able to see beauty and grace of Indian people. While going to Calcutta

by train in soothing winter sun, he meets some refined Bengali gentlemen who set him

meditate:

Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, Indian produced so

many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much

life, it denied the value of life. Yet it permitted a unique human development to so

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 many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; no where did

they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a

delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I didn’t want India to

sink; the mare thought was painful. (AD 263)

Thefinal chapter of part-III of the book is titled ‘The Village of the Dubes’ which

deals with Naipaul’s visit to the ancestral village of his maternal grandfather. Before coming

to the village he was apprehensive and afraid of what he might find there. He was afraid that

the final unity of his world in his grandmother’s house might be shattered. In the beginning

he was reassured to see the mango groves that surrounded the village giving it a pastoral

effect and at the same time differentiating from the dust engulfed villages, he had seen en

route. He was glad to see the spires of the shrines that his grandfather had built. On his trip to

the ancestral village Naipaul had been accompanied by an IAS officer. When he saw that the

women were unveiled, the IAS officer explained to Naipaul, ‘Brahmin women are very

fearless. He met Jussodra, the woman who had come with his grandfather from Trinidad.

From her Naipaul heard the story of his grandfather’s success in Trinidad. He heard how his

grandfather had re-established the family, he also saw the photographs taken in Trinidad. It

ought to have been a final homecoming for Naipaul. But it wasn’t. He says, ‘In a year I had

hot learned acceptance. I had learned my separateness from India, and was content to be a

colonial. Without a past without ancestor.’ (AD 285)

It is a very typical Indian response shown in a moment of frustration and emotional

outburst. In an attempt to escape the pain of his situation fearing the loss of unity of his

world, Naipaul was ready to flee. He was ready to reject his roots.

His meeting with Ramchandra, the head of his family leaves him impatient. Naipaul

found himself being pressed for money to pay for a litigation to preserve the Nineteen acres

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of his grandfather land. Naipaul didn’t offer any financial help. He wished to severe all

connection and to flee the village. And this is what he eventually does. He leaves the village,

refuses to take on a boy who wanted a lift. “So it ended, in futility and, impatience, a

gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.” (AD 286)

The epilogue of the book is little ‘Flight’. It involves symbolism. Naipaul’s distance

from India was too great to be bridged. He fled from India. In London he tried in vain, to

summon up a passive response to the city where I had lived and worked. In India Naipaul had

received an oblong cloth as a gift, a symbol of love and affection. But in his dream and

imagination the cloth was a mystery, it sought to be unraveled. Naipaul knew that the clues

unravel the cloth were there. But the cloth remained unraveled and so was his relationship

with India.

As soon as the book An Area of Darkness was published in 1964. It generated

criticism of extreme kind, inviting both extreme praise and extreme condemnation.

Immediately after its publication the then India Government imposed a ban on it. In the

western media and academia, it was hailed as a very bold and truthful portrayal of India. Paul

Theroux declared it a master piece of travel writing-wise and original. There were some who

called it the depiction of darkness […] people packed with a kind of life which is death, a

negation, distortion and degradation from which Naipaul is glad to escape.1 In reality An Area

of Darkness is to be red as a meeting ground for the homeland and the diaspora.

Unlike the west, the response of India to An Area of Darkness was vitriolic. In an

essay ‘Somewhere Something has Snapped’, C.D. Narasimhaiah writes that Naipaul’s

assessment of the failings of India cannot be disowned: ‘Our failings are so many and so

varied that the most patriotic of us cannot defend them. Our love of symbol […] rather than

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of action […] our neglect of our great unless approved by European scholars our endless

mimicry.’ 2

Narasimhaiah goes on to state that his essay is not intended to be a defenses of India

that “it is a sign of maturity in individuals as well as nation to see ourselves as other see us

[…]”. He credits Naipaul for a correct observation of all that is evident but accuses him of

being unable to explore the depth of the Indian mind. In his easy Narasimhaiah makes a very

correct observation of Naipaul’s misinterpretations and misrepresentation but ironically he is

unable to gauge the depth of the darkness or conflict. In the mind of the writer belonging to

diaspora Natwar Singh writes in New York Times:

It is Mr. Naipaul’s unique achievement to have passed that amount of time in India

without meeting a single worthwhile human being. He finds fault in almost everything

he sees: the people’s habits and their manners, the cities, villages, bureaucracy,

railways, army even the Taj Mahal is not spared.3

Naipaul’s proposal to transport the Taj to the United States is interpreted as his hatred

of the squalor of India. What Natwar Singh missed out in his otherwise impassioned response

is that Naipaul sought to delink the architectural beauty of the Taj Mahal from its

corresponding history, which is painful and cruel. Its beauty can be fully appreciated only

when it is cut off from its history. According to H.H. Anniah Gowda, ‘Naipaul is an

expatriate determined to lambast India. He finds that Naipaul, in his reminiscences has

chosen to shut his eyes to the India which is not defecating’.4 Indian criticism of Naipaul has

however been countered by the west with vigour. Helen Tiffin accuses C.D. Narasimhaiah of

being intolerant’ of any criticism of his country.5 For William Walsh An Area of Darkness is

a kind of metaphysical diary of the effort to shine a western novelist’s light into an interior

area of darkness.6

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 If we look at the arguments and counter arguments of the Indian and western scholars

on An Area of Darkness, we feel that perhaps there are no meeting points between them. But

what is missing from all this debates is a particular position that Naipaul holds vis-à-vis India,

a particular point of view he looks at India with. Ezekiel’s India can never be the India that

Naipaul sees.7 Gail Minault sees Naipaul as a novelist who has also developed the travel

account into a finely honed instrument of personal expression. His attitude sceptical, his

vision of human nature sardonic, he cultivates detachment. He is the perpetual, the

professional outsider.8 According to Sara Suleri An Area of Darkness is a fascinating record

of delusion. 9

But in order to understand Naipaul’s point of view in An Area of Darkness , we must

take into account the psycho-spatio coordinates on which he is located and happens to see

and appreciate India.

Engagement with India for Naipaul’s is not a one way process. It is a complicated

case of action and reaction being recorded against a background that is equally complicated.

He has recorded that he had been brought up in a double world the closed Hindu world of his

grandmother’s family and the outside world. Both these worlds were separate and different

from each other. In Naipaul’s two selves each self reacted differently to situations at hand.

C.D. Narasimaiah has recorded instances of this fracture in sensibility but dismissed these as

being willful constructions on the part of the author.

Attitudes like these have no meaning in the light of the dominant mood of the book by

the time the reader shuts his eye to take a good look at a flash and say to his neighbour

behold’ the jaws of darkness do devour it . It is almost a recurring pattern of the book. 10

The fact that this alternation in flashes of darkness and light falls into a pattern has

more to it than mere posturing. Had Naipaul contrived to block out one side of his response,

81
he would have either ended up a perfect insider overflowing with warmth or the perfect

Catherine Mayo who he has been so often wrongly compared with. But he did neither. He

must be credited for his honesty to his vision, however complicated, however blurred. In his

novel Enigma of Arrival Naipaul writes of this visit to India to work on An Area of Darkness:

This time I left from England. India was special to England; for two hundred years

there had been any number of English travellers’ accounts and, latterly, novels. I

could not be that kind of traveller. In travelling to India: I was travelling to an un-

English fantasy. And a fantasy unknown to Indians of India I was travelling to the

peasant of India that my Indian grandfathers had sought to re-create in Trinidad, the

India I had partly grown up in, the India that was like a loose end in my mind, where

our past suddenly stopped. There was no model for me to get anywhere in the writing,

I had first of all to define myself very clearly to myself. (EOA 140-41)

An Area of Darkness was a double struggle for Naipaul. It was a struggle to establish

a perspective to look at the meaning of India. It was also a struggle to discover a process

through which the meaning could be unraveled. The metaphor of an oblong piece of cloth

which was a gift from an Indian friend explains his inability to end his double struggle. The

book ends in ambivalence. There could have been no other possible ending. The area of

darkness is defined at the outset of the book itself by Naipaul. According to him the area of

darkness is that aspect of India or that aspect of Indian sensibility which remains

impenetrable for him. The area of light is the area of his experience in time and place. It is,

therefore, a division of experience into what is comprehensible and what is not. On his part,

Naipaul concludes his failure to be able to understand the essence of India and the philosophy

that is at the heart of India, “I felt it as something true which I could never adequately express

and never seize again” (AD 290).

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 It is also worth noting what Naipaul says on the same page, “my experience of India

defined itself more properly against my own homelessness” (AD 290). So, for Naipaul the

search of India was actually a search of his home in which he miserably failed, because over

the time India has changed, Naipaul has changed and so has been his notion of home.

Here it will be significant to see in what sense Naipaul’s India is different from the

India of other western critics. A number of writers had written about India before Naipaul

did, and not always sympathetically. However, one can dismiss Beverly Nicholas or a

Catherine Mayo as incapable of understanding India for they were foreigners. They were

emotionally and intellectually not capable of feeling the pulse of India. But with Naipaul,

Indians felt betrayed. He was expected to know and understand because he had the requisite

umbilical link with India. However, the Indians forgot the separation had occurred three

generation ago. Naipaul was virtually an outsider in India. Naipaul’s perception and portrayal

of India, if seen in this light, is a unique record of the division of sensibility. That has become

a permanent paradigm of our times.

An Area of Darkness is however a significant document on the understanding of India.

Its value lies in the fact that it documents the confusion and alienation that are the legacies of

the Empire. Never before was India presented through a diasporic vision. Never before had

the Indians in India been exposed to the pain and agony of such a vision, so much so, that

within India even the veracity of Naipaul’s experience was questioned. An Area of Darkness

stands today as a historical record of the first stage of a diasporic writer’s problematic

relation with the country of his origin. It abounds in confusion and contradiction; there is no

coherent thesis about India. But the writer frequently hints at his links with India and perhaps

because of that he returns India to understand India afresh.

83
References:

1. EzekielNissim. “Naipaul’s India and Mine”. New writing in India. Ed. Adil Jussawal.

Baltimore: Penguins, 1974. Print.

2. Narasimhaiah C.D. “Somewhere Something has Snapped”. Literary Criterion 6.4

(1965): 83-96.Print.

3. Singh K. Natwar. ‘Unhappy Pilgrim; New York Times Book Review 11 July 1965:

35.Print.

4. H.H. Anniah Gowda ‘Naipaul in India’. Literary Half Yearly 11.2 (1970): 163-

70.Print.

5. Tiffin Helen. “ The Lost Ones: A Study of the works of V.S. Naipaul” ( Ph.D. Diss.

Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, (1972)117. Print.

6. WalshWilliam. A Manifold Voice: Studies in Commonwealth Literature (London:

Chatto and Windus, 1970) 64.

7. Sudha Rai has discussed this at length in her book. V.S. Naipaul : A Study

inExpatriate Sensibility (New Delhi : Arnold Heinemann, 1982) 9-24

8. Gail Minault, “Through a Glass Darkly: Naipaul’s Post-Colonial Travel Accounts,”

Osmania Journal of English Studies (1982) 15.

9. Sara Suleri, “Naipaul’s Arrival,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, I (Fall 1988) : 159.

10. C.D. Narasimhaiah, “Somewhere Something has snapped”, Literacy Criterion 6, No.

4 (1965) : 95-96.

11. Patke, Rajeev S. Postcolonial Poetry in English. New York: Oxford University

Press.2009 Print.

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 CHAPTER -4

HEALING THE WOUNDS OF CIVILIZATION.

The novel is an expression of transcendental homelessness

(Lucacs)

In 1964 V.S. Naipaul finished An Area of Darkness with the following closing statement:

“My Experience of India defined itself more properly against my own homelessness,

that I saw how close in the best year I had been to the total Indian negation, how

much it had thought and feeling. […] I felt it as something true which I could never

adequately express and never siege again(AD 290)

But Naipaul was once again back in India after a gap of thirteen years in 1975 to

make a second attempt to understand India and explore the possibility of viewing it as his

home. The result of this visit was a slender but significant volume India: A Wounded

Civilization(1977). The task for Naipaul, however, was not easy, India, he had already

realized in his first visit, is a difficult land to comprehend. And this realization remains with

him in India: A WoundedCivilization also. In the Foreword itself he says: “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”.

(WC 8)

Here, Naipaul seems to have got to the root of his predicament: he cannot reject India,

he cannot accept India, and thus the dilemma before Naipaul is more complicated than

hamlet’s –‘to be or not to be’. Although Naipaul has been residing in England since 1950, he

is unable to forget that he has Indian blood in him; that his forefathers had migrated from

India. Even amidst the hustle and bustle of London and having spent several decades amongst

85
the Britishers, he feels alone and homeless in the English capital. Hence his desire to define

and comprehend India is an instinctive act of a human being to have and possess homes. But

the problem with Naipaul is that he is not only a seeker of home but he is also aware of the

complexity attached to his wish. He is aware of a huge gap between himself and his ancestral

homeland India. As Naipaul says:

My ancestors migrated from the Gangetic plan a hundred years ago; and the Indian

community they and others established in Trinidad, on the other side of the world, the

community in which I grew up, was more homogenous than the Indian community

Gandhi met in South Africa ….. [But] a hundred years had been enough to wash me

clean of many Indian religious attitudes; and without these attitudes a distress of India

was and is almost insupportable. It has taken me much time, to come to term with the

strangeness of India to define what separates me from the country (WC 9)

If India is so strange for Naipaul why does it keep a central place in his imaginative

world? If he is aware that the gap of hundred years and thousands of miles have rendered him

unfit why does he wish to inquire about India? Does his journey to India have to do anything

about the inquiry of his own inner self? Naipaul explains what an inquiry about Indian means

to him:

An inquiry about India -- even an inquiry about the emergency -- has quickly to go

beyond the political. It has to be an inquiry about Indianattitudes; it has to be an

inquiry about the civilization itself, as it is. And though in India I am a stranger, the

starting point of this inquiry, more than might appear in these pages, has been myself.

(WC 9)

But the inquiry about the personal self of the author begins with a conciseness thathe

is a Hindu, a Brahmin and his India is a Hindu India, and that Hindu India is eternal:

86
‘conquest and defilements are but instants in time.’ (WC-14) Hence, Naipaul’s concern about

India is indirectly a concern about Hindu India, the decay and fall of Hindu culture and

civilization. It is a matter of concern for Naipaul that the heyday of Hindu imperialism is over

and the process of its shrinking continues. To see the plight of India Naipaul’s sense of

homelessness intensifies:

India has shrunk since that Arab incursion. No civilization was so little equipped to

cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and

learned so little form its disasters. Five hundred years after the Arab conquest of Sind,

Moslem rule was established in Delhi as the rule of foreigners people apart; and

foreign rule -- Moslem for the first five hundred years, British for the last 150 --

ended in Delhi only in 1947. (WC 8-9)

It was Naipaul’s preoccupation with India civilization and Indian attitude to life which

stops Naipaul from inquiring into such a vital political issue like the ‘emergency’. The series

of attacks and invasions that India suffered and the wounds they inflicted upon Indian psyche

are too overwhelming for the Indians and Naipaul to come out of it. Howsoever he tries he

remains a member of a defeated race. But the Journey of India continues.

India: A Wounded Civilization marks the second stage of Naipaul’s endeavor to

comprehend India. It tries to gauge what is that something which has beenlost and snapped,

and where, and how, and why? In comparison to An Area of Darkness which was an

alternation between acceptance and rejection, India: A Wounded Civilization is more

analytical, it is an organized search through history, sociology politics and literature. But

there is one similarity between the two books. Similar to An Area of Darkness, Naipaul’s

second book on India also begins with author’s mental makeup. The Forward of India: A

Wounded Civilization is a testimony to it. A sincere reading of the Foreword brings out two

87
important points. First the author’s perspective in the book is going to be diasporic, and

second, the method of inquiry would centre round the author and his understanding of the

history society and literature of India. And the approach of the author to the subject would be

different from that of the rooted Indians.

The book India: A Wounded Civilization comprises of eight chapters organized into

three parts apart from the ‘Foreword’. Part one of the book titled India: A Wounded

Civilization has two chapters. The first chapter ‘An Old Equilibrium’ is an analysis of the

psychology behind the eternal continuity of India. Taking the example of the ancient

kingdom of Vijayanagar, Naipaul unravels the systematic destruction of the kingdom that led

to a permanent loss of human talent and intellectual capacity. This in turn also led to a loss of

historical sense. In this way the destruction was rendered complete and irreversible. A

flourishing civilization contracted with each conquest and in the end, having no more reality

to survive on, it drew on legend for sustenance. All the memories of terrible violence were

forgotten and the only memories that survived were the fabulous renderings of the glory of

the past before the coming of the conquerors. The remnants of the monuments survived:

irrigation canals, palaces, a temple with rows of musical stone columns that could be played,

a broken aqueduct, the ruins of a bridge. But the talent that had designed and built these had

been wiped out. The kingdom of Vijayanagar stood as an area officially declared ‘backward’,

with plans for its development underway. Life continued pilgrims still thronged the ancient

temple and in that, the continuity of India seemed to maintain itself. But this continuity was

just a facade, a covering for the terrible rupture that had occurred with the loss of history.

Naipaul can see this contradiction repeating itself throughout the country. Each time

India was attacked, it lost its intellectual life and survived on legends of the past. A repeated

occurrence of such incidents made India archaic because knowledge and talent was

continually lost. As in Vijayanagar, in the rest of India too, this resulted in a big gap between

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the talent behind its ancient monuments and cities and the deficiency of the people who

inhabitant these once flourishing areas.

Indian nationalism had evoked the Indian past but post-independence development

schemes were forward looking. National pride was directly linked to the glorious past. The

glory of the present was yet to be built. This ‘contradiction cracked the civilization open’.

(WC 18)The institutions for growth and development were borrowed ones and were therefore

not bringing about desired results. The past, one so revered, was unable to provide an

alternative for borrowed institutions and this was the crisis which precipitated in the

emergency:

The turbulence in India this time hasn’t come from foreign invasion or conquest; it

has been generated from within. India cannot respond in her old way, by a further

retreat into archaism. Her borrowed institutions have worked like borrowed

institutions; but archaic India can provide no substitutes for press, parliament, and

courts. The crisis of India is not only political and economic. The larger crisis is of a

wounded old civilization that has at last become aware of its inadequacies and is

without the intellectual means to move ahead. (WC 18)

In Naipaul’s understanding, the crisis of India lies in the beginning of the loss of an

old equilibrium, and this loss of old equilibrium might bring something positive as he

suggests in his next book to be discussed in the next chapter. Naipaul’s visit to India has also

involved his reading of R.K. Narayan. By doing so he, indirectly, suggests R.K. Narayan’s

writings to be most Indian in their essence. In Naipaul’s view Narayan’s unexamined sense of

continuity is a typically Hindu simplification of reality.

Naipaul was not reading R.K. Narayan for the first time. He had read his fictions

earlier also. But he had read them as social comedies. Now he sees Narayan’s works to be

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more akin to Hindu religious fables. In order to make his point he goes on to present the

analysis of Mr. Sampath. Here, Naipaul sees in the character of its hero Srinivas a

misinterpretation of the ideas of karma and non-violence. Srinivas, a reader of the

Upanishads has read the meaning into the Hindu idea of nishkamakarma as the equivalent of

‘non-doing’. The Hindu idea actually advocates that a person must perform his karma

without thinking of or yearning for benefits. It does not mean that a person should withdraw

from all action. As the dividing line between the two is thin, Srinivas conveniently sleeps into

non-action. The Gandhian idea of non-violence was not passivity; it was a form of action.

This too is misread by Srinivas as non-doing, non-interference, social indifference’ (WC-25).

He resorts to a form of cherishing which is totally dependent on the action of other. Naipaul

finds such an idea of religious surrender as being parasitic and degenerate. In the fate of

Srinivas, Naipaul sees the fate of the vast Indians populace. That had interpreted its religious

philosophy in such a way that the equilibrium of their idea of themselves was maintained.

They accepted distress as the divinely ordained predicament of humankind. Thus instead of

karma fate became supreme.

Naipaul, then, refers to the workers and labourers of North-Bihar and Rajasthan.

Bihar, which was once a cultural heartland of India remained filled with cruelty and poverty

more than two decades after Independence. The people did not question, they had a resigned

acceptance of suffering and poverty. Such a state of resignation left little ground of thoughts

for change.

Naipaul came across a different situation in Rajasthan. He saw dams and irrigation

schemes being worked on to remove the agricultural backwardness. In a model village he saw

peasantry involve in acquiring latest agricultural expertise. There was electricity in the village

apart from all other outward signs of development. But the women were excluded from all

this. They withdrew under their veils then the Commissioner started his important discussion.

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In Bundi, which was once a centre of art and had its own school of painting, Naipaul found

that all its vitality had vanished. The Bundi castle was in a state of decay. Naipaul found that

the people of Rajasthan were secure in their condition and the only passion that could move

them was a passion for honour. Apart from this they could not be moved for any action. This

was true.

The next chapter ‘The Shattering World’ begins with a quotation of R.K. Narayan-

“India will go on”. And Naipaul finds that even in the face of a crisis like emergency the

illusion of the old Hindu equilibrium still hailed. But there had been a change which Naipaul

identifies in R.K. Narayan’s journey from Mr. Sampath to The Vendor of Sweets. The sweet-

vendor Jagan is a Gandhian, a pious Hindu, who has worked for the independence of India.

But he does not pay his sales tax , and cheats the Government for sake he had bravely taken

police beating during the British rule. His idea of the nation is limited to his idea of Gandhi.

R.K. Narayan jokes that if Gandhi had asked people to pay their sales tax, Jagan would have

surely done so. Naipaul sees in this double conciseness of Jagan a decadent idea of Hindu

morality:

Was Jagan then a freedom fighter, concerned about the political humiliation of his

country, or was he only the disciple of a holy man in the old Hindu tradition? Hindu

morality, centered on the self and self-realization, has its own social corruptions: how

many Jagans exist who, conscious only of their Gahdhian piety, their personal virtue

have mocked and undermined the independence for which they say they have worked!

But Narayan doesn’t raise the point. He only makes the joke about Gandhi and the

sales tax; he is on Jagan’s side. (WC 38-39)

Naipaul’s thesis here is that the old equilibrium has shattered with the world opening

up as a result of which enters Jagan’s son with his foreign girlfriends. Independent India

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needs a different kind of mindset in order to bring about progress. The old pastoral world

cannot be re-established. Jagan’s world and ideologies could only spell more Emergencies for

India.

V.S. Naipaul found in the Emergency an occasion to examine its moral aspect. In his

view the Emergency was also a symptom of the problem of the dismantling of the old world.

It was a proof that the society had broken down. Unfortunately, in India it was seen as a mere

political crisis which it was in during Mrs. Gandhi’s oppressive regime. However, the

emergency did not attempt to set things right. It showed off terror but “established no new

moral frame; […] it held out no promise for a better regulated feature. It reinforced, if

anything […] the need to hide and hoard” (WC 45)

The problem needed a deeper resolution. Naipaul traces the chaos of the emergency to

blunders that had followed be independence. The Jagans whose commitment to a kind of a

holy war under Gandhi had won India its Independence, they had no idea of responsibility to

the state and in the absence of any other means to include them in the process of growth, they

had returned to their old world which was self-centered. The people thought that the

government would function in some magical way with no contribution or involvement from

them. They had no idea of what democracy required of them. The very idea of responsible

and accountable citizenship was alien; they thought that as always, India would go on. But

when it didn’t they didn’t know what to do. However the shattering of the old equilibrium

was not to be seen as negative. In Naipaul’s assessment it was a positive beginning:

With independence and growth, chaos and a loss of faith, India was awakening to its

distress and the cruelties that had always lain below its apparent stability, its capacity

simply for going on […] the old equilibrium had gone […] But out of this chaos, out

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 of the crumbling of the old Hindu system, and the spirit of rejection, India was

learning new ways of seeing and feeling. (WC 48)

So, India was learning new ways of seeing and feeling with the spirit of rejection. The

last section of the chapter reflects on the spirit of rejection. Naipaul’s finds the plays of Vijay

Tendulkar dealing with this theme. The Vultures is about the end of all reverences. With the

new opportunity of making money, the ole values are lost and people become more

individualistic. There is “no pure past, and religion can provide no retreat” (49). Tendulkar’s

plays mark a change in the Indian sensibility. The hero of Sakharam Binder is a low caste

man who works as a binder for a living. He has rejected all those things which an Indian

society holds dear. He has rejected caste, religion, clan and family. He has not married but

lives with “other men’s discarded wives, whom he rescues from temples of streets” (50). His

only faith lies in honesty. At the end of the play he is destroyed but Tendulkar has portrayed

him as a hero. Sakharam Binder’s rebellion is thus a big leap from the rebellion of Jagan’s

son in The Vendor of Sweets. Naipaul describes his meeting with Tendulkar and in it he finds

another example of the fact that, for India, there could be no more retreats. Tendulkar, while

working on a book on violence in India had travelled to various parts of the country. In Bihar

he had seen things, which “he had never believed existed” (50). But in his conversation, he

talked of the beauty of the Ganga and did not refer to the tragic sights on its banks, in the

villages and towns through which it flowed. Even Tendulkar with his new sensibility wanted

to escape the horrors. He too yearned for retreat into the calmness of the old order in which

these horrors didn’t show up. This past couldn’t be claimed now. The past in itself hadn’t

been an egalitarian one. It enslaved one quarter of the population as low caste

asuntouchables. These fragmented parts were as directionless as rest of the people and India

was in a chaos. The first part of the book presents India as a land repeatedly wounded, now

facing a revolt from the very same forces that once held it together.

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 The second part of the book titled ‘A New Claim on Land’ has two chapters:‘The

Skyscrapers and the Chawls (ch-3) and ‘The House of Grain’(ch-4) in which Naipaul records

an undercurrent of movement in the middle and lower middle classes of India. In these two

chapters he notices the movement of the village population towards the metropolises and the

creation of the new working class. The Skyscrapers and the chawls draws a contrast between

the industrialized Bombay did the accommodated workforce that makes the industries run.

The workforce that comes from nearby the villages spills on the streets and pavements at

night. “The poor are needed as hands, as labour. But the city was not built of accommodate

them.” (WC 58)

The skyscrapers provide majestic sight at night. In their shadows live the chawl and

pavement dwellers. Chawls were originally meant to accommodate the workers in different

textile mills of Bombay. There were people who did not have even a chawl; they made their

own colonies. Over the years their settlements had grown into more organized residential

areas, and they attached themselves to Shiv Sena the army named after the Maratha leader

Shivaji. Here Naipaul notices a movement here. At the very gross root level there was an

attempt at a more organized community living in which the interests of the individual in

particular and the community in general were taken care of. Thus Naipaul observes a

gathering of some positive energy.

The Sena politics worked at different levels. Apart from political power, it inspired in

the people at the bottom of the social ladder a sense of self-respect and belonging. The Sena

committees, which were motley, run by enthusiastic young men, worked at improving the

quality of life of the chawl and settlement dwellers and thereby also consolidated their

political goodwill and loyalty. Amidst all this movement, Naipaul has noticed that the static

rigidity of the relation between caste and work had remained as such. Although the

settlements were provided with municipal washing areas and lavatories, the task of cleaning

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up was left to the municipal sweeper. When the sweeper did not turn up , people just closed

that eyes to the fifth and continued with their life.

According to Naipaul, Shiv Sena was ‘xenophobic’ (WC 62) and its agenda was a

Maharashtra only for those born of Maharashtrian parents. The slogan Maharashtra for

Maharashtrian was very appealing to the ordinary masses. On account of its great popularity

with the masses, the sena wielded tremendous political power. Its leader revived the cult of

Shivaji and then evoked in the masses, feelings of self-respect and power. The Sena had built

for itself a very large base because it aligned itself with the cause of the vast masses of the

urban poor which doubled and redoubled in short time. Naipaul observed that although the

major movement in Bombay seemed to be urbanization the coming up of skyscrapers and

industries. The actual movement was taking place at a lower level. The dimensions of this

grass root movement were tremendous because it had begun to give the people an idea of

themselves:

For the Sena man, and the people they led, the world was new; they saw themselves at

the beginning of things: unaccommodated men making a claim on their land for the

first time, and out of chaos evolving their own philosophy of community and self-

help. For them, the past was dead; they had left it behind in the villages. (WC 72)

This chapter makes a sharp shift in Naipaul’s earlier observation of Bombay that he

had made in An Area of Darkness. In the character of the engineer who had taken in to the

squatters, settlements. He saw a genuine vision, foresight and dedication. Naipaul’s

experience of Bombay continued to be positive in the next chapter ‘The house of Grain’. (Ch-

4). The positive movement was visible in the development of Puna and in the cooperative

irrigation scheme being laid down in a nearby village. The positive energy was evident in the

graduate draught-in-law, in the Patel’s house and in the co-operative digging of the lift-canal.

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Visiting a village and having a meeting with the village sarpanch helped him understand the

development dynamics of the rural areas in a better way. Here he was explained the reason

behind the unequal development of India. He takes a closer look at the social mechanism of

the rural. The Patel, the biggest land owner in the village continued to be the traditional

symbol of power. The elected sarpanch, who ought to have been the head of the village, was

a mere puppet. The traditional loyalty to the Patel continued. He was the actual master.

Independence had not changed much. His house had all amenities -- electric light, ready

mater, an outhouse. The Patel was the only man in the village to possess them all […] (WC

86)

The village, however, had a different picture also. The facilities available in the

Patel’s house did not tell story of the entire village. Of them Naipaul writes:

Sixty percent of the village was without electricity, and village life as a whole still

took its rhythm from the even length of the tropical day twelve hours of darkness

followed twelve hours of light; people rise at dawn and retired at desk; every day, as

from time immemorial, darkness fell on the village like a kind of stultification”. (WC

85-86)

The Patel, on the other hand, was progressive as well as affluent. He owned land and

he nearly owned labourers that he implied to work on his land. Villagers were resigned to the

fate that ‘what was for the Patel could not be for them’. (WC 85) Being progressive, Patel

was not opposed to co-operative projects such as the irrigation scheme which was a bonus to

the villagers, and a mark of charitable and benign nature of the Patel for which the villagers

were thankful to him. Independence had brought development but that development had

touched people unequally. The old pattern of the landed masters and landless labourers

continued. Democracy and Panchayati Raj became toys in the hands of traditional power

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wielders. Officials, politicians and administrators were sucked into the pattern of the ruler

and the ruled. What was worse was that the instruments of democracy could easily be turned

into instruments of more organized oppression. Naipaul relates these phenomena to the

continuous flow a people towards cities. The people coming to cities were ‘fleeing not only

from landlessness but also from tyranny, the rule in a thousand villages of men like the Patel

and the sarpanch’. (WC 89)

Fleeing from villages to cities was just one form of escape from the oppression.

Another form of escape was to be found in the origin of communities of dacoits in central and

North-western India. Without going into depth of this form of escape Naipaul moves on to, in

his view, yet another form of escape from oppression the Naxalbari movement in Bengal and

Andhra. He calls it a “tragic attempt at revolution”. (WC 89) Let’s have the details in

Naipaul’s words themselves:

This was the Naxalite movement. The name comes from Naxalbari, the district in the

far north of Bengal where, in 1968, it all began. It wasn’t a spontaneous uprising and

it wasn’t locally led; it was organized by communists from outside. Land was seized

and landowners were killed. The shaky, semi-populist government of the state was

slow to act; the police might even have been ambivalent; and ‘Naxalism’ spread,

catching fire especially in large areas of Andhra in the south. Then the government

acted. The areas of revolt were surrounded and severely policed; and the movement

crumbled. (WC 89)

It would be very difficult to summarize the Naxalbari event more succinctly. But why

did Naipaul call the movement a tragic attempt at revolution? Naipaul doesn’t give a straight

answer. But he does give hints in the para that follows:

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 […] The movement lasted long enough to engage the sympathies of young people at

the universities. Many gave up their studies and became Naxalites, to the despair of

their parents. Many were killed; many are still in jail. And now the movement is dead,

it is mainly in cities that people remember it […] in the Naxalite movement, India lost

the best of a whole generation, the most educated and idealistic of its young people.

(WC 90)

Naipaul, it appears, liked the outburst of energy. He had become fed up to see the

India of fixity and stasis in An Area of Darkness. So whenever he happens to see an urge to

change, to become better he begins to like it. But it was tragic because it consumed one

whole generation of high ideals and potential without leaving any substantial change on the

ground. As Naipaul says: ‘In Naxalbari, nothing shows and little is remembered. Life

continues as before in the green, rich looking countryside that in places […] recalls the

tropical lushness of the West Indies.’ (WC 90)

So the net result is ‘life continues as before’ and that too at a very heavy cost. A

whole generation of bright and promising students left the universities and went far away to

fight for the landless and the oppressed and for justice. But did they know where were they

going? What was the problem? In Naipaul’s view, they were sucked into the movement.

There was no serious thinking before joining the movement, which according to Naipaul, is a

characteristic feature of the Indians:

They went to a battle they knew little about. They knew the solution better then they

knew the problems, better than they knew the country. India remains so little known

to Indian. History and social inquiry and the habits of analysis that go with these

disciplines are too far outside of the Indian tradition. (WC 93)

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 It was comments like the above which infuriated the Indian intellectuals. They may be

plain statements as per Naipaul’s habit of calling a spade a spade. But it seems to be an over

generalization which involves a bit exaggeration also. No intellectuals, Indian or western,

who have known India and Indian intellectual tradition would opine that the habit of analysis

and inquiry is alien to India. With regard to the failure of the Naxabari movement, Naipaul

says that it could not explain its ideology to a people so used to reverencing a Master and

used for centuries to the idea of ‘karma’. The ideology inevitably degenerated into the “idea

of the enemy” and was lost:

Naxalism was an intellectual tragedy, a tragedy of idealish, ignorance and mimicry:

middle class India after the Gandhian upheaval, incapable of generating ideas and

institutions of its own, needing constantly in the modern world to be induced into the

art, science, and ideas of other civilizations, not always understanding the

consequences, and this time borrowing something deadly, somebody else’s idea of

revolution. (WC 93)

In short part II of India: A Wounded Civilization titled ‘A New claim on the Land’

portrays India on the move. The movements are the result of the growth of cities and

industries because they provided the people an alternative to escape the system of oppression

in the villages. According to Naipaul any study of India that does not take into account this

movement at the grass roots is worthless. This movement marked a great shift from the idea

that ruled the country immediately after Independence. “The poor are no longer the occasion

for sentiment of holy almsgiving; land reform is no longer a matter for the religious

conscience. (WC 93)

The four chapters in the last section titled ‘Not ideas, but Obsessions’ deals with

conflicting ideas. The common thread that holds these four chapters together is the idea of

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India as a people struggling amidst their ambivalences, as victims of mimicry. As people

incapacitated by borrowed institutions for so long that any original action could not be

possible. Naipaul begins with Gandhi. He furthers the analysis of Gandhi that he had made in

An Area of Darkness. Naipaul presents an original interpretation of the victories and failures

of Gandhi. He attempts to find out the reason behind Gandhi’s great success in pre-

independence times, his shattering failure immediately afterwards and subsequent

degeneration of his ideas and ideals. Naipaul’s quarrel with Gandhi is that he energized a

people in an unprecedented manner and created a form of struggle to which the Indian psyche

could easily relate. But having done that, he had left the energized nation to itself. He had

shaken up a sleeping civilization but had not taught it to observe, analyze and understand

itself. He had built a nation of followers with no leadership. All that remained in the name of

leadership was endless mimicry.

Gandhi’s inward looking philosophy sustained him, but it could not sustain India.

What would happen to a nation of inward looking people to whom the outer world mattered

only up to that extent to which it affected the inner? This, says Naipaul, was Gandhi’s defect

of vision. Naipaul traces the seeds of this short-sightedness in Gandhi’s selective “blindness”

to those external incidents of landscapes, which were not directly connected to his inner

sphere of experience, understanding or development: ‘Gandhi’s self-absorption was part of

his strength. Without it he would have done nothing and might even have been destroyed. But

with this self-absorption there was, as always, a kind of blindness.’ (WC 100)

Naipaul concludes that the relationship of Indians to their outside world is more akin

to a childhood stage when the person relates to the world through the mother. Similarly,

Indians always turn inwards, seeking the security of a life ordered by society. Left on his

own, the individual is lost because he has no idea of himself. He can project himself only

through the security of an ordered society with its lists of rules and rituals. Gandhi harnessed

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this unquestioning faith in truth and religion and baffled the British. But he did not know how

to carry on. Independence was won, the enemy was defeated and the nation sat itself down in

anticipation of a Ramrajya-- a rule by Ram. To a people so used to being governed, the idea

of swaraj, self-government did not strike home. So, post-independence India withdrew into

itself waiting for things to take care of themselves, waiting for Ramrajya to descend on the

country. Taking the example of the character of the acharya from U.R. Anantamurti’s novel

Samskara, Naipaul explains the great Indian reliance on non-action. The Acharya, a learned

man, had not learnt to analyse situations and offer solutions. He was content to scan books for

answers; he had a greater belief in God’s decision that would, through the mystical falling of

the flower, make itself known to him. Meeting failure in both cases, the Acharya is lost.

People like the Acharya lead “instinctive lives, crippled by rules […] they make up a society

without a head” (WC 109)

Had Naipaul been content to dismiss Gandhi and critique the Acharya, he could have

been written off as a casual observer who had no knowledge or understanding of India or of

Gandhi. But Naipaul attempts a study and an analysis of what differentiated Gandih from the

teeming millions that he led. ‘But there is an important difference. The Acharya is imprisoned

in his dead civilization; he can only define himself within it. He has not, like Gandhi in

England, had to work out his faith and decide where-- in the wider world-- he stands’. (WC

110)

Unlike the Acharya, Gandhi believed in action, Amidst the chaotic turbulence of

energies released by him, that he is no longer able to control, Gandhi in Noakhail realizes that

he has “nothing to offer except his presence” (111). He realizes that his philosophy was not

equipped to deal with this new turn of events. But unlike the Acharya, Gandhi did not seek

escape in non-action, in passivity:

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 […] Noakhail. Sad last pilgrimage: embittered people scatter broken glass on the

roads he is to walk […] he has nothing to offer except his presence, and he knows it.

Yet he is heard to say to himself again and again, ‘Kya Karun? Kya Karun? What

shall I do? At this terrible moment his thoughts are of action, and he is magnificent.

(WC 111)

In Naipaul’s view Gandhi, on account of his sensitivity to external experience, saw

India very objectively. He knew how the Indian qualities of complacency, tolerance and faith

in religion could be positively used. It spelt immediate success. But Gandhi could not foresee

the shortcomings of his method. He had taken people out of their traditional decadent world

of caste, class, clan and religion, and had shown them a goal: independence. People followed

in his wake and substituted their old-world unity with ‘Gandhianism’ Newer ones like the

spinning-wheel replaced their old rituals. The pattern continued, the symbols changed.

Gandhi’s defeat of vision was that he took the people out of their world but did not teach

them to look at themselves as individuals:

When men cannot observe, they don’t have ideas: they have obsessions. When people

live instinctive lives, something like a collective amnesia steadily blurs the past. (WC

112) One man’s short-sightedness led a nation astray because it was this one man’s

vision that had set it in motion. Emergency was the logical fallout of rampant

confusion, of “individual obsessions” turning into “political movements”. (WC 114)

The next chapter ‘Synthesis and Mimicry’ interrogates the classic Indian claim that

India, over the years, has always successfully assimilated diverse influences. Naipaul’s first

attack is in ‘intermediate technology,’ which was supposed to provide a link between the

advanced scientific methods and the conventional agrarian methods employed in India. This

‘intermediate technology’ had turned itself into futile experiments edging on absurdity -- the

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wired up bull, the harvesting shoes, foot operated harvesting shears and so on. It was a

needless complication of otherwise simple agricultural tools and served no productive

purpose. It was not synthesis but an intellectual confusion and that too in an institution that

was meant to contribute to national development. The only direct evidence of cultural

synthesis was to be found in the pre-Britsh schools of painting.

What the coming of the British, the break with the past was final. Old wisdom, old

knowledge, traditional craftsmanship and architecture died out. There was no synthesis. No

assimilation but a complete incongruous replacement. The proof is there in the climatically

ill-suited tourist guesthouse of Jaisalmer, in the thoughtlessly designed roof of the modern

airport building in Ahmedabad. The East-West encounter that occurred after the coming of

the British was superficial because there was no Indian tradition to receive the new

influences. The Indian tradition, the basic medium to accept new influences, did not exist and

the influences themselves stuck out absurdly. Synthesis was reduced to mimicry:

The Indian past can no longer provide inspiration for the Indian present […] the West

is too dominant, and too varied; And India continues imitative and insecure […]

India, without its own living tradition, has lost the ability to incorporate and adapt;

what it borrows it seeks to swallow whole. For all its arts of dance, music, and

cinemas, India is incomplete: a whole creative side has died. It is the price India has

had to pay for its British period. (WC 126)

Naipaul sees India functioning on borrowed institutions. The press, the education

system, the judiciary are all borrowed and stand as obstacles in the people’s perception of

themselves and their idea of India. The Indian press did not seek to put India “in touch with

itself,” the India Judicial system designed by the British could not perform “the law’s

constant reassessing, reforming role”. (WC 132) The law steers clear of the numerous

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misinterpretations of dharma that are in circulation: ‘The law avoids the collision with

dharma. Yet it is this dharma that the law must grapple with if the law is to have a dynamic

role’. (WC 134)

India needs to step out of its comfort zone of explaining its incongruities and

contradictions as “synthesis.” It has to abandon its imported ideas and ideologies, it has to

question and arrive at an understanding of itself. And for that, Indian needs to shed its policy

of total acceptance and complacency. ‘Paradise lost’ records people’s reaction to the

emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi. it also records the confused agenda of the opposition

and it’s even more confused line of action. Political sterility was complete. There was neither

swaraj nor Ramrajya. Gandhianism was reduced to a show of Khadiand long impassioned

speeches and the people, simply waited for things to take care of themselves.

The last chapter has interrogative tone. Titled ‘Renaissance or Continuity,’ it once

again examines the reasons behind the failure of Gandhianism and its caricatured version

being upheld through a series of acts of mimicry. In Vinoba Bhave, Naipaul sees a “mimic

mahatma” whose actions had not served India in any way. The living evidence of the futility

of such mimicry is Bihar where Bhave had performed much of his land-gift walk schemes:

‘Once, on the march, he said that untouchables did work human beings shouldn’t do; for that

reason they should be given land, to become tillers…. The whole point of Gandhi’s message

was lost’. (WC 166)

Brave’s life was, thus, a parody of Gandhi without actual involvement or vision for

the causes at hand. Bhave believed that walks and fasts would solve all problems. He did not

know the practical reason behind Gandhi’s walks and marches. Gandhi’s marches connected

people to ideas at a time when communication and commutation were both difficult. Bhave’s

marches overlooked that. The concept of dharma degenerated. Through years of conquest

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and oppression, it came to be associated with unquestioning servitude and patient suffering.

The only way to claim past glory was to be found in intellectual development. India must

shed its longing for a past that it hardly understands. The past is just a glorious abstraction

because with the amnesias that followed each conquest, India lost touch with itself:

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. (WC 174)

Like An Area of Darkness, Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization is also a sincere

attempt to experience and understand India. But as Naipaul has undergone emotional and

intellectual change over thirteen years then India too has not remained fixed and static in

those years. Governments planning individual efforts and social support have brought about

significant changes at least the changes which are visible from the outside. But Naipaul is not

content to see the external and cosmetic changes alone. He is more concerned about the

change in attitude and motivation of the Indians; he is more interested in getting to know the

relationship between past and present, between tradition and modernity in contemporary

India. And in doing so he was trying to know the scope of his own tie with India, at least to

understand the nature of relationship between himself and India. But unlike his impression of

a passive India in An Area ofDarkness, the India in India: A Wounded Civilization is at least

conscious of her wound and is making serious attempts to get out of the problem. So some

activity, vitality and will to change is visible here and there, and the Naxalbari movement was

one such example.

But once again the book, as soon as it comes out, very similar to An Area of Darkness

stirred up a hornet’s nest. India: A Wounded Civilization also evoked reaction of the known

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pattern. Indian media and scholars slammed the book and the author and the western

reviewers showered praise on the originality of planning and execution of the book. So it is

important to have a racy look at the responses that the book evoked in western and Eastern

academia and what was the reason behind such contradictory reactions?

It is true that Naipaul does not write like a historian in an objective manner. Nor does

he aim at becoming an expert commentator on contemporary events. From beginning till the

end he remains a creative writes who has enough faith in his personal judgment, the judgment

which does not go beyond the realm of the subjective. It is because of this that Srinivas

Iyenger calls him a man of ‘coloured imagination’1 and Professor M.K. Nair counts him

among the ‘India baiters’.2 Naipaul has been so pre-occupied with Hinduism -- Hindu ideas

and practices that H. Chaudhary, suggested that Naipaul could have named his book ‘Hindu

India: A Wounded Civilization’.3 The fact that the Hindu’s were dominated and were forced

into mass conversion, and the consequent rupture of the social fabric seems to have been

forgotten by Chaudhary in the above statement. Indians, whether they are Hindus, Muslims or

Christians, they share a common pain of rupture. Naipaul in his account of India has

concentrated on that point of rupture rather than on the difference in sensibilities of Hindu

Indians and Muslim Indians.

The fact that Naipaul’s comment about India and the Indian people are received with

objection and anger, has been analysed by Fawzia Mustafa in her consideration of India: A

Wounded Civilization. Mustafa holds that Naipaul’s habit of evaluation still rely upon the

historically unreliable synecdochal narrative techniques of reporting random interviews

[…]clipping from newspapers accounts [… ] local novels […] political biographies. 4

The validity of Naipaul’s evidence can be questioned on the basis of truth of historical

fact but the question here is not of the truth or validity of a fact or an ideology. Naipaul is

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recording contemporary India and is therefore using as his base material the contemporary

versions of facts. The speeches of politicians, the articles in newspaper are all contemporary

versions of facts and can lay bare the gap between the original idea and the currency it has

come to acquire. For example, Naipaul quotes from the ‘Times of India,’ a speech by the then

prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandih in which she equates law with dharma and urges the

people to uphold the dharma. Naipaul, here, uses the current connotation of the term dharma

and not its original vedantic meaning. Naipaul’s reliance on what Mustafa terms as

historically unreliable sources serves his purpose of marking out areas where original

knowledge has been disfigured and is in a state of decay.

Of the Indian critics of Naipaul, Dilip Chitre seems to be much more

dispassionate.5However, the forces that are at work within Naipaul in his account of India are

also at work in Chitre’s account of Naipaul. His objection is that the likes of Naipaul treat

India as an aesthetic object. On one hand Chitre finds that Naipaul’s “enterprise is not wholly

in the wrong direction; only his methods are questionable and his information too thin” (wc-

186). On the other hand he questions the very validity of Naipaul’s “enterprise” by

commenting that Naipaul’s failure lies in his decision to attempt an accurate and factual

portrayal of a civilization. “Naipaul’s failure, I think, stems from a fallacy most creative

writers are prone to commit. They treat nations, civilization […] not as the fictional bodies

and myths that they are but as if they had a being of their own.” (WC 186) Dilip Chitre’s

argument spares Dr. Sudhir Kakar’s theory of the “Underdeveloped ego” because it would

not be fair to Dr. Kakar if his hypotheses were discussed on the basis of Naipaul’s accounts.

Chitre easily evades the issue and falls into the stereotypical India response to Naipaul:

“Theobvious banalities of Indian Public life do not need an exalted visiting mind like

Naipaul’s for a detailed savaging.” (WC186)

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 There have been critics who were suspicious of Naipaul’s intention and damned as a

‘despicable lackey of neo-colonialism.’6But the critic who has done one of the most

consistent and detailed studies on Naipaul’s engagement with India has been Sudha Rai. She

has analyzed in great detail Naipaul’s understanding of Gandhi and Gandhianism as the

interaction of “a Hindu self and a Western self in Naipaul.7 However, even Rai begins her

analysis of Naipaul’s perception of Gandhi thus: “what astounds us is Naipaul’s near-total

lack of self-consciousness in the comments on Gandhi”(50). This mild annoyance with a lack

of proper self-consciousness, of proper awe on Naipaul’s part, coming from a critic, is

equally astounding. Self-consciousness, of all things is certainly the least desirable element in

an analysis. Rai’s statement in a way vindicates Naipaul’s stand that Gandih in India is meant

to be analyzed and consequently, never to be understood. Naipaul has been wrongly

implicated for advocating a break from the past.

This is a misreading of his statement that “The past has to be seen to be dead; or the

past will kill” (WC 174, italics mine). It is not an advocacy of a clean break from the past. It

is an advocacy of the acceptance of the fact that the inadequacy and blunders of the past have

to be recognized and the present has to be safeguarded against those. The past has to be seen.

A blind reversal to glorious abstractions of the past can in no way help India establish itself in

the present. “Intellectual discipline” can revive old knowledge, old art, in a way “spiritual

discipline” cannot. In 1986 Naipaul wrote, “Men need history; it helps them to have an idea

of who they are” (EOA 318). But history has to be seen and not to be blindly accepted and

eulogized to abstraction. The past has to be continuously monitored, it has to be regularly

weeded and the weeds of the past -- the errors, the degenerations, need to be extracted and

displayed for public scorn. The past, if allowed to grow un-weeded would choke the present.

Like An Area of Darkness,India: A Wounded Civilization was also over estimated in

the west. Naipaul was hailed for having a very clear perception of the problems of India. The

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blurb on the book says it all. For Gordon Rohler, Naipaul’s irony enabled him to examine his

past without any sentimental self-indulgences.8 William Walsh found Naipaul’s irony to be

“the agent of mediation between experience and vision” and he placed Naipaul in the great

tradition of the English novel. 9 The misunderstanding is not only colossal but also typical of

the First World’s condescending attitudes. India: A Wounded Civilization marks the second

stage in the diasporic writer’s engagement with the land of his origin. The vision is diasporic

because Naipaul brings to India those very ideas of India that he was already familiar with :

R.K. Narayan, Gandhi, dharam and karma. Once in India he builds upon these ideas. This is

the reason why India: A Wounded Civilization can neither be like Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea

of India nor like Sashi Tharoor’s India: From Midnight to the Millennium. Naipaul’s main

concern is with caste and class obsessions. He sees history as dead and sterile, incapable of

generating any kind of revival. These attributes are directly linked to Naipaul’s experience of

the Indian society in Trinidad. The people there had blocked out all connections with their

indentured past. Rural indebtedness and landlessness had landed them up in Trinidad. The

caste and class obsessions survived all amnesia. They lost their sense of history but did not

lose their sense of caste. It was their ultimate defense.

Thus Naipaul’s concerns in India: A Wounded Civilization is primarily based on his

personal and inherited experiences as a member of the diaspora. Sudha Rai wrote in 1982 that

India will beckon to Naipaul, again and again, until “the whole trick was undone” (AD266).

That is exactly what has happened. In India: A Wounded Civilization Naipaul observed a

number of ideas, ideologies, plans and schemes but the only observation that struck home and

remained with him was his idea of “The Millions […] on the move” (WC 93). Amidst his

despair for the nullity of the current brand of Gandhianism and dharma he saw regenerative

hope in the positive movement of the common people. In this way, the foundation for India:

A Million Mutinies Now was laid.

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 Naipaul’s concerns with the identity crisis and degeneration caused by the stalling of

Hindu India under Mughal conquests are not limited to India: A Wounded Civilization. He is

intellectually committed to his cause, which is to analyze various aspects of maladies that

have reduced India’s ones glorious past to its dismal present. Naipaul holds that Hindu India

invited conquests and finds that this drawing upon the Hindu past in the present times has led

to the creation of a new sense of identity:

Individual obsessions coalesce into political movements: and in the last ten years or

so these movements of protest have become wilder. Many of these movements look

back to the past, which they reinterpret to suit their needs. Some, like the Shiv Sena in

Bombay (looking back two and a half centuries to the period of Maratha glory) and

the Dravidian movement in the south (seeking to revenge itself, after three thousand

years, on the Aryan north) have positive regenerating effects. (WC 114)

After the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Naipaul declared that his observation in

India. A Wounded Civilization remained valid. He saw the demolition as a very small part of

the vast change in the Hindus idea of themselves and as an attempt to retrieve their identity of

the pre-Islamic period. He saw in it the seed for a greater “Intellectual transformation “of

India provided it was kept safe from the hands of the fanatics:

The people who say that there was no temple there are missing the point. Babar , you

must understand, had contempt for the country he had conquered. And his building

that mosque was an act of contempt. In Ayodhya, the construction of a mosque on a

spot regarded as sacred by the conquered population was meant as an insult to an

ancient idea, the idea of Ram which was two or three thousand years old. One needs

to understand the passion that took (the kar-sevaks) on top of the domes. The jeans

and tee-shirts are superficial. The passion alone is real. You can’t dismiss it. You have

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 to try and harness it. Hitherto in India the thinking has come from the top. What is

happening now is different. The movement is from below.

What is happening in India is a new, historical awakening. It seems to me that Indians

are becoming alive to their history. Romila Thapar’s book on Indian History is a

Marxist attitude which in substance says: there is a higher truth behind the invasions,

feudalism and all that. The correct truth is the way the invaders looked at their (own)

actions. They were conquering, they were subjugating. And they were in a country

where people never understood this. Only now are the people beginning to understand

that there has been a great vandalizing of India. Because of the nature of the conquest

and the nature of Hindu society such understanding had eluded Indians before. What

is happening in India is a highly creative process. Indian intellectuals, who want to be

secure in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is going on, […] But every

other Indian knows precisely what is happening: deep down he knows that a larger

response is emerging even if at times this response appears in his eyes to be

threatening. I don’t see the Hindu reaction purely in terms of one fundamentalism

pitted against another. The sense of history that the Hindus are now developing is a

new thing (To prevent emotions from spilling over and creating fresh tensions), it is

not enough to use that fashionable world from Europe: fascism. Wise men should

understand (the historical) and ensure that it does not remain in the hands of fanatics.

Rather they should use it for the intellectual transformation of India.10

Naipaul’s comments could have been the beginning of an intellectual debate on the

role of religion in the formation of individual and collective identity in India. However they

were grabbed by political groups, circulated out of context, flashed on banners and robbed of

their content. Naipaul rightly says, “you say that India has a secular character, which is

historically unsound.” Fortunately or unfortunately, religion is a part and parcel of every

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Indian’s identity. And this is not a recent development. Right from the earliest years of

independence, our election campaigns have been won or lost on issues as diverse as cow

slaughter, Muslim personal law and building of temples. The time has come for Indian

intellectuals to accept the un-secular character of secular India. Naipaul’s stand could have

been the beginning of an intellectual debate in India and could have kept the new born sense

of the self from passing into the hands of fanatics. Unfortunately, the movement was left to

be twisted and turned to suit vested political interests. Naipaul’s works and his commitment

to India called for the opening up of those debates which have so far been forced under the

garb of secularism. This calls for action on the part of the intellectuals, in the absence of

which such movements degenerate into fanaticism.

In my view Naipaul desperately wants the motherland of his ancestors to become a re-

invigorated Hindu land full of energy and a will to reclaim its past glory. But he is not a

return to the Veda type. He doesn’t want India to go back to ancient times. Instead he is a

votary for an assertive, confident and advancing India.

References:
1. Iyengar, K R Srinivas. Indian Writing in English, New Delhi : Sterling Publications,

1977 P-470

2. Nair , M K, A History of Indian English Literature, New Delhi : Sahitya Akademi,

1982 (reprnt 2009) P-4

3. Helga Chaudhary, “V.S. Naipaul’s Changing Vision of India: a study of An Area of

Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization,” Literary Half Yearly 23, No. 1

(January 1982):111.

4. Fawzia Mustafa, V.S. Naipaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1995) : 133.

112
5. Dilip Chitre, “Naipaul and India 2: For him a Difficult Country,” New Quest 9 ( May-

June 1978): 175-86.

6. H. B. Singh, “V.S. Naipaul: A Spokesman for Neo-colonialism,” Literature and

Ideology 2 (Summer 1969):71-85.

7. Sudha Rai, V.S. Naipaul: A study in Expatriate sensibility (New Delhi: Arnold

Heinemann. 1982).

8. Gordon Rohler, “The Ironic Approach: The Novels of V.S. Naipaul.” The Islands in

Between. Ed. Louis James (London: Oxford University Press, 1968):139.

9. William Walsh, V.S. Naipaul (Edinburgh:Oliver and Boyd, 1973):76.

10. V.S. Naipaul. “V.S. Naipaul in Los Angeles Times- The Times of India,” Online.

Posted by ashokvc@giasbm01.vsnl.net.in (Sun, 23 June 1996 17:26:16 PDT)

http://www.freeindia.rog/ack (italics mine).]

11. V.S. Naipaul, “Christianity didn’t damage India like Islam,” Interview with Tarun J.

Tejpal, Outlook 15 November 1999:59.

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 Chapter -5

AMONG THE MUTINEERS

In his acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize for literature, V.S. Naipaul made the

following observations in 2001:

“[…]That everything of value about me is in my books […] I am the sum of my

books. Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out

stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my

literary carrier it could have been said that the last book contained all others”.

(Literary Occasion 182-83)

If the above statement of Naipaul is seen with respect to his three travel accounts of

India, then one comes to the conclusions that India: A Million Mutinies Now is the most

considered and final view of Naipaul on India. It also entails that India : A Million Mutinies

Now presupposes and improves upon his enquiry of India during his last two visits that

produced An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization. And it is true that the

third book on India shows much greater depth, understanding and appreciation for India

which endured him many friends. Naturally, the opinions expressed in the reviews were

encouraging and heartening for Naipaul, because this time he was getting appreciation from

both the eastern and western media. Paul Theroux, in his review opined that India: A Million

Mutinies Now was literally the last word in India today, witness within witness, a chain of

voices […] from the so called untouchable, the Dalit, to the maharaja. Admiring the book in

the Financial Times, K. Natwar Singh wrote that by authoring this book Naipaul “may well

have written his own enduring monument.”1 In New York Times Janette Turner observed of

Naipaul’s capacity for finer details, “No sensory detail, no sign or symbol, is too small for

Mr. Naipaul’s attention.”2 But she also felt that Naipaul had neglected to interview enough

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women. Comparing India: A Million Mutinies Now with An Area of Darkness and India: A

Wounded Civilization, Auberon Waugh found that in the latest book the cruelty had

disappeared from Naipaul’s wit: he has become gentler, kinder, infinitely more tolerant

person. His sympathies extend to everyone, the religious and anti-religious, and even to the

Muslims. In the New York review, Ian Buruma found the book extraordinary: “the

extraordinary achievement of Naipaul’s latest book is that we can see his characters; more

than that, we can see how they see, and how they, in turn, are seen by the author whatever his

literary form Naipaul is a master.”3 A different prospective of the book was revealed by T.G.

Vaidynathan. According to him the book was “an ostensible paean to the triumph of subaltern

India over the centuries old might of the unpinned India. It was in fact a respectful elegy to

Brahminism”, T,G.Vaidyhathan had no doubt which community V.S. Naipaul admired most :

“The Brahmin, then, is the real hero of the book.”

Patrick French, the author of Naipaul’s authorized biography The World Is What It Is,

writes of India: A Million Mutinies Now in glowing terms:

During his months of travel for India: A Million Mutinies Now, Vidia opened himself

to a new vision of the country. To the surprise of corruption and violence to

something original and redemptive. It was a personal homecoming, as he continued to

seek an ancestral past, trying to link himself to a nation that was, in his imagination,

his own source. (WWI 452)

But before having the feeling of homecoming (if we believe Patrick French’s

assessment to be true) Naipaul had to wander a lot in India. French himself gives an outline

of his travels:

He travelled to Kashmir and met Mr. Butt and Aziz from the Liward Hotel; He went

to the south to find another memory of 1962, a pilgrim from Amarnath named V.C.

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 Chakravarthy, whom he renamed ‘sugar’ in the book. Often, Vidia, was lionized.

When he went to the Panjab to a site of recent, terrible slaughter, a police chief who

was suppressing the separatist militancy was so delighted by his eminent visitor that

he flew him back to Delhi by helicopter. (WWI 453)

The fact that India: A Million Mutinies Now is a book of different plane is evident

from the very way the book begins. Unlike An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded

Civilization, this book begins on a positive note. The author seems to be hinting at something

sanguine to follow. Naipaul begins the book as under: “Bombay is a crowd but I begin to feel

when I was some way into the city from the airport that morning, that the crowd on the

pavement and the road was very great, and that something unusual might be happening”

(MMN-1).

Something was really happening. It was the celebration of the Dalit leader Dr. B. R.

Ambedkar. India was at the beginning of a social, political and economic upheaval that would

lead to the nation’s triumphant rise at the end of the century, a million mutinies leading to a

new phase of creativity and progress. Independence had come to India like a kind of

revolution; now there were many revolutions within that revolution.

Here it is important to note that the people on the Bombay pavements have drawn

Naipaul’s attention but this time they don’t seem to be a reflection of the poverty and

backwardness of India. Instead, the author discovers the kind of greatness in the crowd. The

activity, movement and restlessness of the people are seen as people’s resolve to move

forward for progress and prosperity.

In comparison to An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization, India: A

Million Mutinies Now is a voluminous work. Its six hundreds plus pages are more than the

previous two books put together. At the time when he was working on this book he was in his

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mid-fifties and yet he displayed extraordinary capacities for research and hard work required

to complete the monumental work:

Aged fifty-six , he would spend five months travelling in India, braving the heat and

noise and the bureaucracy and the dust and the poverty, beginning in Bombay”

looking south through Goa, Bangalore, Mysore and Madras before heading north to

Calcutta and working his way west to Delhi, interloping in Lucknow, the Punjab and

Kashmir. Old helpers like Adil Jussawalla and Rahul Singh were asked to provide

introductions and information. (WWI-446)

V.S. Naipaul began his research while staying in style in one of the country’s finest

hotels, the Taj in Bombay, overlooking the Gateway of India. Binod Mehta, the editor of The

Indian Post, had the responsibility of helping Naipaul in finding right kind of people for

Naipaul to interview. Thus Mehta was expected, with the help of his reporters, to locate

gangsters, poets, extremists, corporates, slum dwellers and feudal Muslims from the north.

On the face of it, India: A Million Mutinies Now is a book about India. But Naipaul’s

five months extensive tour of India and meeting with hundreds of people was not just aimed

at knowing India alone. Actually by way of knowing India he was trying to know himself. It

was a dialectical process so while he was writing about India he was also writing about

himself. However, a line of demarcation between the two subjects that Naipaul the writer

deals with is very thin and one cannot entirely agree with Ahniah Gowda that Naipaul is only

‘writing about himself not India.’5India: A Million Mutinies Now is a book in which Naipaul

has been able to create a pattern out of his double vision external and internal. The book

strikes a wonderful balance between the interiority of Naipaul’s experience and the external

experiences that he encounters and observes. The book has been symmetrically planned in

nine chapters. Incidentally the chapters have not been organized under parts as we saw in the

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case of An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization. It suggests that the author’s

vision of India is no longer split as it was in previous books. It has acquired some degree of

unity and wholeness.

In his previous works on India Naipaul had been accused of being selective,

arbitrative and subjective in his selection and presentation of facts and ideas. In the case of

India: A Million Mutinies Now, Naipaul has tried to tap this loop hole in his methodology.

Hence each of the nine chapters has a profusion of characters and voices which speak for

themselves. One would be tempted to characterize the book with multiple voices that is

‘polyphony’. The first chapters ‘Bombay Theater’ discusses the lives of as many as eleven

people from different walks of life , their families and their acquaintances are also presented

and so are their loyalties and prejudice but before doing that Naipaul records the factors that

had governed his reactions to India, in 1962. Thus, it provides a prelude to entirely different

way in which he records his experiences and responses in the book under consideration. Papu

is a twenty nine year old Jain stock broker, a mild mannered and God fearing person. He has

been doing very well professionally. He had made more money in the last five years than his

father had made all his working life. Unlike his father he had received formal education. He

recognized his lack of killer instinct in business and had thus moved to those business areas

to which he was temperamentally more suited so that he could harness his ability and talent in

a best possible manner. He suffered periods of anxiety regarding the predicament of the mild

race of Jain businessmen in the face of aggressive business tactics adopted by others.

He was also deeply concerned about social welfare and wanted to devote most of his

time to it. However, he was also aware that he could invest more money in social welfare by

working harder in his profession rather than by working in the slums. Papu has devised his

own programme of striking a balance between his job and his devotion to social work, his

idea of social work was also very different from that of the older generation of Jains. Instead

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of building marble temples, he believed in building orphanages and hospitals. He used the

latest expertise in his work but was very deeply rooted in his religious beliefs. Papu is thus

presented as a representative of positive growth in the conventional Indian business world.

Through Papu, one also gets a glimpse of the ways of functioning of other business houses

like Tata, Birla, Bajaj and Ambani.

Naipaul also looks in to the working of Shiv Sena through Mr. Patil who is a Shiv

Sena ‘area leader.’ His father had worked for forty years in the tool-room of a factory and

was so weighed down by family responsibilities that he had no idea of the activities of the

Shiv Sena. Mr. Patil was brought up comfortably and this gave him security and an idea of

his social concerns. He joined the Shiv Sena and steadily worked for the people in his ‘area.’

But there was a paradox in the way Mr. Patil looked at things: he was deeply concerned about

the deprivation of Maharashtrians brought about by non-Maharashtrians but he had

absolutely no sympathy for the Dalit organizations. He believed that they hadn’t suffered

much and their activism was mainly political. His antipathy towards Muslims verged on

hatred but he had no qualms about “exporting man power to Dubai and the Middle East” for a

living (22).

Although Mr. Patil’s atma-vishwas (self-confidence) was his cherished gift from

Ganpati, he was reluctant to recognize the same atma-vishwas (self-confidence) in Dalits. In

Mr. Patil, one finds the earliest beginnings of the recognition of the ‘self.; his idea of ‘self’

and self-confidence is muddled up and biased but it is a kind of beginning. This was absent in

his father’s generation when the main concern was the day-to-day needs of the family. In Mr.

Patil’s generation, the concerns had broadened from the personal to the social sphere but this

had also brought with it a lot of confusion typical to societies passing through change.

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 Unlike Papu and Mr. Patil, Anwar is an educated and sensitive young man caught

between his Muslim faith and its degeneration into violence. He had absolute faith in Islam

and its concept of brotherhood. He believed that the world could be set right through the

teachings of Islam and lack of education was the main cause behind young Muslims slipping

into crime and violence. He recognized the hopeless situation of the crime-infested area

where he lived but could not ever think of leaving that area for a better life elsewhere. His

thoughts were not of personal progress but of the progress of the community. The very fact

that he had been able to preserve his sensitivity and his reason in spite of living amidst group

fights and murders was a sign of change. Anwar’s grandfather had died at forty, his father

was happy to have crossed sixty-four. This too, spoke of the better life that had come to the

people.

Mr. Raote had been one of the first eighteen recruits of the Shiv Sena and was now

the chairman of the standing committee of the Bombay Corporation. His father had worked

as a mechanic in All India Radio and had educated all his children. Mr. Raote’s first ambition

was to join the military. He couldn’t get into the military; he couldn’t do a course in

engineering, as his father couldn’t afford the expense. So he took up a job as a clerk in the

Corporation while his father worked as a carpenter in a film studio to enable his sister to

become a doctor. His marriage was a “love-match” and thus was followed by more financial

burdens. He found an opening in furniture work and his designs found favour all over

Bombay. From furniture, he moved to the building business and had been doing very well

ever since. His dedication to the Sena and its work had continued all along. In his business he

had worked “to accommodate the middle-class Maharashrtian”(MMI 52). His front door had

no latch, it was always open. He was deeply religious and his religion was an extension of his

courage and confidence which branched off into his social concerns: “The worldly man who

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wanted to be an officer and an engineer, the Sena worker, the devout Hindu: there were three

layers to him, making for a chain of belief and action”. (MMI 53)

Papu worked in Dharavi, feeding around five hundred people every Sunday. But his

idea of service was to help people help themselves. Charity for the sake of charity had no

value. It was no longer the old Hindu idea of charity as an automatic act to earn divine

goodwill for oneself. It was now strongly linked to social concern.

Mr. Ghate was also a Sena official. His father had been a millworker and his family

“had never owned a book” till he went to college (MMI 62). In contrast to Mr. Patil and Mr.

Raote, Mr. Ghate was not at all religious. Although he could afford better accommodation, he

continued to live in a chawl because both he and his wife were used to the chawl life. His

wife had had serious problems coping with the solitude of the staff quarters. “Absence of

Civic sense” was the most difficult problem and he believed that one had to start with the

children to rectify this malady among the chawl dwellers (MMI 65). Mr. Ghate had

progressed much as compared to his mill-worker father. This progress much as compared to

his mill-worker father. This progress had given him new ideas, about himself and about

others. These ideas were sometimes in conflict with each other but Mr. Ghate carried on,

anchored by Sena pride.

On the other side of Sena monopoly was the criminal world of Bombay. The

businessmen and politicians used professional criminals to get their work done, “To deter

political defections, to encourage political donations; to enforce payment of a debt, to compel

adherence to an unwritten ‘black-money’ contract” (MMI 69).

Having turned criminals, these people had fallen out of the mainstream and now there

was no hope of return. With criminal records against their names they were doomed to spend

the rest of their lives in the underworld. Here too, the religious faith had somehow survived.

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How they explained their actions in the light of their deep faith in religion was a paradox.

Living in the shadow of death, cut off from society, these people held on whatever faith their

deities inspired in them in spite of knowing that they were doomed. “The gangsters at the top

[…] the dons […] could be courted by political parties and film people […] But the men

below, the men in the middle […] were doomed.” (MMI 75)

Religion had a special place in society that was passing through the stress and strain

of change and pujaris were much in demand. In Bombay, with its paradoxes and its divisions

of faith, the pujaris were as much in demand as the Sena men.

The “Electric Pujari” customized religious ceremonies and offered recorded pujas on

tape; the other pujari who has been dealt in detail in the text was satisfied with whatever he

earned and conducted pujas in the traditional way. This variety appealed to the people of

Bombay for whom the very concept of religion and Puja was undergoing change. Nandini

worked as a Journalist and did not believe in ritualistic puja, but the pujari was called by her

family on auspicious occasions. The pujari had a much more comfortable life in Bombay than

what he could have had in his native village.

Subroto had come to Bombay form Calcutta. He was lucky to have adjusted to his

work in the art department of an advertising agency. His friend, the film writer, had not been

so lucky. His story was a story of defeat. He could not work in accordance with the current

demands of the film directors. His loyalty to his art made him pay a very heavy price. He not

only lost his work, but lost out on goodwill as well. He continued with whatever screen-

writing he was offered and kept on drifting back to Calcutta, “Calcutta is where I studied. I

keep on drifting back. It’s my home town, mentally. It’s where I feel comfortable. That’s

where I feel things are happening all the time, and that’s where I acquired the ambition of

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being a film writer” (MMI 85).The Bengali film writer was one of those millions who drifted

across the metropolis, those who could not be rooted.

Namdeo Dhasal and his wife Mallika represent another layer of society where there

has been considerable movement. Namdeo Dhasal was the founder of the Dalit Panthers and

was also known for the poetry that he wrote. His political career had seen many ups and

downs but he was not much bothered about that. Initially, his political failure had caused him

to fall ill but he recovered. His poetry spoke of raw pain. His wife Mallika was the daughter

of communist folk singers. Her mother was a high caste Hindu and father a Muslim. Mallika

and Namdeo’s marriage was a marriage of the minds which faltered on ground realities. The

outcome was Mallika’s autobiography, ‘I want to Destroy Myself.’ Namdeo had come a long

way from being an outcaste Dalit in his native village. He drew inspiration from Ambedkar

and thus created an identity for himself and for others. He worked for the prostitutes and

other oppressed classes of people. He had himself lived through much oppression as a young

Mahar castes boy in his village, as a taxi driver in Bombay, and as a resident of the “Dhor

slum.” Therefore he was full of anger. It was his exposure to Ambedkar’s movement that

made him channelize his anger into a positive political force. This assertion of the self was

the beginning of the dismantling of old prejudices that required some men to be lower than

others. It was a way of growth for thousands of marginalized people.

With the coming of education and equal job opportunities a beginning had been made,

but it was a political movement like Namdeo’s that gave people an identity which they could

be comfortable with, and even proud of. The first section ‘Bombay Theater’ ends with

Namdeo’s story. Naipaul has presented a cross-section of life in metropolitan Bombay. Each

nook and corner, each one-roomed chawl is closely observed. The chapter depicts a

metropolis undergoing great change. The movement shows in occasional ruptures of the

social fabric and in the somewhat paradoxical values of people.

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 The the story of Rajan, his father and his grandfather is told in ‘The Secretary’s Tale.’

It is a story of how people’s idea of themselves changes with the passage of time. Rajan’s

grandfather was a petty official in one of the law courts near Tanjore. He got into a fight with

a British officer and had no option but to leave. He came to Calcutta with his family. There

he trained his son to be a stenographer. The stenographer’s son rose to great heights and lived

in style. In the 1946 Hindu-Muslim riots in Calcutta he lost everything. Young Rajan was

brought up by his step-sister. He too, began his career as a typist but struggled all along for a

more creative job. After a number of jobs with various firms in different capacities, Rajan too

became a secretary with a firm in Bombay. He felt he had lot more talent and creativity that

could have been put to better use but he lived with a sense of fulfillment at having been able

to take care of all his responsibilities: “I haven’t risen beyond what my father and grandfather

could rise to, at the beginning of the century. The only consolation is that, even as a secretary,

I am not as badly off as most other secretaries are. And perhaps, even, I no longer believe I

am just a secretary.” (MMI 135)

Now Naipaul’s focus is turning towards south. In the chapter‘Breaking Out’ observes

the layers of change that had come to the southern parts of India over a period of three

generations. It begins with observation on Goa; its Portuguese past had nearly wiped out the

old India. With the Portuguese occupation of Goa, the conquest of Vijaynagar and the rise of

Mughal power in the North, Hindu India had very slim chances of survival. But Hindu India

survived: “Through all the twists and turns of History, though all the imperial venturing in

this part of the world, which that Portuguese arrival in India portended, and finally through

the unlikely British presence in India, a Hindu India had grown again, more complete and

unified than any India in the past.” (MMI 143)

This chapter is mainly about how the old Hindu-Brahmin India survived and turned

itself into an agent of growth and development in new India. Deviah, a science reporter for a

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newspaper, went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Ayappa every year. He was also well versed

in the story of Ayappa and the mythological details it contained.

The next person he interviews is highly qualified. He is a scientist and an

administrator. Dr. Srinivasan, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission came from a

family of priests. His grandfather had been a purohit and was only a matriculate. He wanted

his son to pass the university examination and so the son went to the university. However,

Sanskrit lessons continued at home and the son was taught all the religious rituals. In 1925,

the son, Dr. Srinivasan’s father, joined the education department and became a teacher. The

new education and the Brahmin training stayed together in him. These were the forces that

created Dr. Srinivasan. Naipaul sees this as a kind of continuity of old learning, “The old

Hindu-Sanskrit learning-which a late 18th century scholar-administrator like Sir William

Jones had seen as archaic… that old learning had, 200 years later, in the most roundabout

way, seeded the new.” (MMI 152)

Another scientist Subramaniam came from a similar Hindu-Brahmin background. His

grandfather understood that knowledge of English was essential. He could not do much about

his own education but he sent his son to an English medium school. This son went to the

university and later worked with a leading scientist of those times. With knowledge of

modern science, there occurred a change in sensibility. There was a conflict between science

and the rituals he practiced at home. He rejected caste prejudices and rituals. The concept of

puja also changed. He started writing books on science in the local language. Into this family

was born Subramaniam. Subramaniam could look at a century of change within his family in

a very analytical manner. He saw the predominance of Brahmins on the Indian science scene

as a “development of history” and although he credited the old Hindu Brahmin tradition of

pursuit of knowledge for this development, he was also aware that Brahmins were

“responsible still for many things on our social landscape” (MMI 160-61)

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 Pravas came from a priestly family of the East. His grandfather was a priest. His

father had retired as a government clerk. His grandfather had lived in a secure world as

purohit to a royal family; his religion was his profession. For Pravas’s father the security of

the old world was replaced. His job with the government gave him his livelihood. The puja,

the rituals and the chanting of mantras became a part of his personal world. He read religious

texts and tried to interpret them. He also read modern philosophical works in English,

Devnagri and Bengali. He had received the Gandhian philosophy. All this brought about a

change in him. His attitude towards rituals, food and dress-related rules changed. In his, son,

Pravas, these were further modified:

I have made one more level of transformation than my father did from his father’s

time. I am more liberal in outlook than my father. I’ve probably become more

questioning […] My father got a part of what his father had, and I have only a part of

the rituals my father had. (MMI 167-68)

Kala’s story is also one of progress. She “did the publicity for a big organization.”

(MMI 171) She was in her twenties and single. Her grandfather had started from nothing and

had gone on to become an administrator in a princely-state. Her mother studied up to class

ten and was married. This marriage distorted her life and neither she nor her parents could do

anything about it. That is why she brought up Kala to be financially independent. Thus ideas

and ideologies changed over a period of three generation and the potential what was

neglected in Kala’s mother came to be recognized and valued in Kala.

Prakash hailed from an agricultural family of Bellary and was a minister in the non-

congress state government of Karnataka. He was a lawyer before he entered politics. He

spoke of the power that the politicians wielded and the chaos created due to the transition

caused by industrialization and the green revolution. “During this transition period, we are

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slowly cutting from the moral ethos of our grandfathers, and at the same time, we don’t have

the westerner’s idea of discipline and social justice. At the moment things are chaotic here”

(MMI 189).

The pundit who worked as mukhthesar for the maharaja of Mysore had his own

history. His grandfather worked as a cook in the place and this grandfather sent him to the

Sanskrit College in Mysore city where he studied for twenty years. At the end of his

education, he was appointed mukhthesar by the Maharaja. He served the Maharaja even after

he lost his privy purse. After the death of the maharaja he took up a job as the manager of a

marriage hall. He was now no longer the Maharaja’s mukhthesar but a man in his own right.

“Four times a year now he went to the palace, to make offerings to the head of the royal

family […] But, now he doesn’t go as an employee or palace servant. He went as a man in his

own right.” (MMI 202)

The chapter ‘Breaking Out’ portrays people from different walks of life who had

come out of the old Hindu world of their parents and grandparents and were working towards

new goals, and building up a new concept of selfhood. They were thus ushering into the

Indian scene a new growth and development. Working alongside were ‘Little Wars.’ These

were movements in South India that sought to break the old order not in a gradual way but as

a direct and immediate goal. It was a war between south and north, between the Brahmins

and the non-brahmin.

The movement in the south had begun with Periyar. It had given people an idea of

themselves. The DMK victory in the elections was a great cause of celebration for the non-

Brahmins. Periyar, the man behind the cause was iconized. As years passed, breaks occurred

even within the DMk. Periyar, began as an atheist and a rationalist, offered the vision of a

world governed by science, free of caste and religion. His war was against caste prejudice

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and he rejected everything that created caste distinction – be it temple or tanks. But his

movement was indifferent to the “looting” of temples and to the “replacement of temple icons

by fakes” (MMI 224). The chapter gives a detailed account of Periyar’s life and ideologies

and how these came to be imbibed by his followers. Entire passages are narrated by Sadanand

Menon and the figure of the writer hardily surfaces. It is through Menon that the reader

comes to know how the Periyar movement in the end came to stand for those very things that

it had opposed in the first place. “The anti-Brahmin movement was not a movement of all the

non-Brahmin castes. It was a movement mainly of the middle castes […] when their

government came to power, they became the oppressors.” (MMI 226)

However, the Periyar movement had touched people in various ways. Gopalakrishna

turned into a rationalist at a very young age. At school he was made to realize his middle

caste status that was thought fit only for “grazing cattle” (226). Gradually, Gopalakrishnan

moved away from religion and found confidence in Periyar’s movement and literature. He

entered publishing business and published school textbooks and books about Periyar’s

movement.

The passion of Palani was stronger than that of Gopalakrishnan. The seed of this

passion was sown when his brother was scouted at for taking water from a Brahmin hotel.

This sense of injustice kept building up, and when Palani came across Periyar, he found his

father was a government clerk but Palani could become an engineer because of the seats that

were reserved for students from non-Brahmin casts. He had Periyar to thank for this

concession. From a weaver to a clerk to an engineer-the story of his family had been one of

progress. This was the way in which Periyar’s movement had touched so many lives, so

many families.

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 Passion breeds passion. Kakushthan’s passion was to be a pure and perfect Brahmin.

This passion had come to him at a very late stage in life. As a school going child he had to

suffer for his Brahmin dress, for the caste-mark on his forehead and for his churki. He had

long and heated discussions with his father but he was not allowed to adopt modern ways. He

tried to run away, he tried to break away from this Brahmin past but in the end he came back.

His only passion in life now was to live the pure life of a Brahmin. This he had done by

beginning to make minor and major changes in the old Brahmin lifestyle. That was the way

the community could be preserved.

Veeramani was Periyar’s successor, his “philosophical heir.” His consistent loyalty to

Periyar had earned him his position. His marriage was also arranged by Periyar to a girl from

an established family so that he could take care of the party without having to worry about his

livelihood. He carried on the self-Respect movement and his own life was a story of success-

financial as well as social. His father had been a tailor and now his children were all studying

abroad. The anti – Brahmin movement had catapulted him into glory and fame.

There was another kind of revolution that, for a short period of time, broke out like a

war. This was a Maoist style revolution started by peasants belonging to the lower castes.

They wanted to overthrow the government and kill the landowners. The rebellion was soon

controlled by police intervention but it uncovered the failure of the Periyar movement

“Periyar had struggled against caste alone; he hadn’t thought of class.” (MMI 227) The

people at the lowest level had been left out and the rebellion was an assertion of their

existence and their need to be included in the mainstream.

The chapter records revolutions and rebellions at personal as well as public level. This

unrest was the way of new beginning for the non-Brahmin middle castes and the lower castes.

For people like Kukusthan and ‘sugar’, it was a struggle to maintain the purity and continuity

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of the old world. The struggle was on both sides, it was between the old world and the new.

Both worlds changed, both adapted and continued. Only this time the continuity also spoke of

a new identity among people-an assertion of their newly acquired idea of the self.

The fifth chapter ‘After the Battle’ focuses on eastern India and on Calcutta in

particular. Like the British architecture in Calcutta, Chidananda Das Gupta was also a

product of British times: “a boxwallah.” Chidananda worked for ITC and had a comfortable

lifestyle. But he was not comfortable with the two sides of his existence: his status and work

at the ITC required him to be someone he was not and his yearning for intellectual and

creative life called for a different kind of life. His association with Shantiniketan was his life

force. In the end he left his job at ITC and become a film-maker and writer. Rabindranath

Tagore and Satyajit Ray formed an important part of his mental makeup.

Ashok was a South Indian Brahmin whose father had settled in Calcutta. He was into

the marketing business. He had got into this profession with great difficulty. His generation

was passing through an era of change where old values had to be weighed against new

values. He rejected the traditional “bride-seeing” and opted for a self-choice marriage. His

professional life was example of regeneration on the Indian business scene. The quiet world

of the boxwallah had given way to cutthroat competition and marketing had begun to make

tough demands on people. The Marwari businessmen had been gaining a monopoly over the

major business houses, while at the other end the Bengalis were content to display their trade

unionism and criticize the Marwaris. The Marwari success story in Calcutta had been fuelled

by the Bengali mindset: “[…] he is indolent, he doesn’t want to work and he must protect his

dignity at all costs. He will publicly despise the Marwari trader, but he wouldn’t do the same

job himself.” (MMI 346)

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 Dipanjan and his wife Arati both taught in colleges. Both had been associated with the

Naxalite movement in Calcutta during their college days. Their marriage had cut across caste

barriers evoking much opposition from Arati’s parents. They came from families that had

modern education. Arati’s father was a scientist and an IES officer whereas Dipanjan’s father

was a Ph.D. in biochemistry and a communist. The Naxalite movement had been the passion

of Dipanjan’s life and when the movement met its end Dipanjan withdrew and started

pondering over what had gone wrong. What had seemed to be a wonderful beginning for

millions of people in the villages seemed to have gone astray midway. Dipanjan’s years in

jail with other Naxalite prisoners, mainly those accused of urban violence including murders

disillusioned him about the movement. He was released by the Government and he went to

London to study Physics. On his return, he chose to teach in an obscure college and avoided

meeting his friends from earlier days. The story of Dipanjan and Arati is that of a generation

led astray by ideas. It was a generation whose ideas for reform were its undoing.

Debu, who held a high position as an executive, had been associated with the Naxalite

movement in its earliest stages but had later, developed ideological differences with the

leadership. He had his own clear-cut idea about the reason behind the failure of the

movement. Debu had been closely involved with the beginnings of the Naxalite movement

and had actually believed in its success. He had even tried to reason out Charu Mazumdar’s

policy of individual killing. Later he fell out with Charu Mazumdar and went underground in

April 1970.

Debu’s major concern was with the idea of development in India. He was pained by

the intellectual decay and the economic crisis of India, especially the sufferings of the poor.

He still believed in the revolution and was convinced that a revolution could set things right

here and now. Earlier Debu had been pained when, during his lectures on India in America,

he had been asked-“ How come you’re starving and begging for food, if you’re so great?”

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(MMI 334) This has led to this joining the radical communist wing. Years after the failure of

the Naxalite movement, he still believed in revolution: “The only change-- a big change-

between then and now is that at that time, in the late 60s, I thought I could be a part of the

revolution, and now I know that I shall be a witness to it. A supportive witness. I don’t think

the need for revolution has changed”. (MMI 333)

The chapter ends with Naipaul’s comments on Calcutta. With the going away of the

British he sees the Anglo-Bengali intellectual life coming to an end. In the poverty of the

urban poor he sees Calcutta in a state of decay. However, amidst the decay, he observes

certain spots of regeneration in the cinema of Satyajit Ray and in the optimism of people like

Debu. ‘After the Battle’ is Naipaul’s documentation of the movement in the Indian social

fabric that occurred in the 1960s and ‘70s. This movement marks intellectual confusion of the

times when the old ideologies were set aside and a search was on for a new set of ideologies

to live by. This coupled with economic crisis accentuated the confusion of those times.

The sixth chapter ‘The End of the Lion’ contains the response of a historical heart. It

is like a graveyard from the days of the Nawabs of Owadh, full of the ruins of war. The city

was shelled and fought over during the Mutiny; afterwards the British preserved the ruins as a

memorial, and passed them on to independent India. (MMI 351-52)

Naipaul meets Rashid, who, even after one hundred and thirty years, carries the scar

of defeat at the hands of the British. Many middle-class Muslims had left for Pakistan and all

that remained in Lucknow, once known as the epitome of Muslim culture, were people who

were “vulnerable, withdrawn and highly strung.” (MMI 354) With rushed, Naipaul walks

down the market and finds the practitioners of ancient crafts in a state of decadence. The

embroiderers, the silver-foil makers, lived a life of squalor. “All the jobs here have this soul-

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destroying quality. They are doing it only because their fathers did it before them.” (MMI

360)

Rashid came from an old Shia Muslim family. His father had a successful

photography business. His shops sold cameras and photographic equipment. This was in

1911. After independence, in 1947, Rashid’s father wanted to shift to Pakistan along with his

business. His own nephew who transferred the shop in his own name cheated him. Rashid’s

father stayed in India but decided to marry his daughter to a Pakistani Muslim. Rashid got his

education at La Martiniere and grew up with two cultures: the secular culture at school and

the religious culture at home. After his father’s death, Rashid drifted in various ways. He

went to England and worked in a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop. He went to Pakistan. But

even Pakistan was disillusionment. Rashid could not belong to the aggressive business

minded world of Indian Muslims in Pakistan. He felt stifled by the Islamic laws that had total

monopoly over an individual’s life. He returned to India for the scant sense of belonging it

still bad to offer.

Amir came from an aristocratic Muslim family. His father was a Raja. He wished to

instill in his son the truest values of Islam. At the same time he wanted his son to have a

modern education. Like Rashid, Amir also grew up with two cultures. His father’s

oscillations between India, Pakistan, Iran and England kept him from being rooted. When his

father declared his intention of accepting Pakistani citizenship the family suffered hardship in

India. His father’s failure to be integrated into the mainstream in Pakistan caused deeper

confusion in Amir. His cultural upbringing and his study of astronomy complicated this

confusion:

His political and religious passions had bequeathed many languages, many cultures,

many modes of thought and emotion to his son. He had his son’s ears pierced, to

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 pledge him to the service of the faith… But with that- his academic work in

Cambridge and London had been in astronomy – Amir had also developed religious

doubts. (MMI 380)

Naipaul notes the violence caused to the Muslim psyche as a result of the partition of

India. The Muslims, so far rooted in India were doubly displaced. In India, they strove to get

away to a place that promised to reinstate their pride and position as rulers. In Pakistan they

could not be integrated into the mainstream and were marginalized as mohajirs. This double

exclusion is crystallized in Rashid’s concluding remark:

That sense of belonging, which I had in India, I knew I couldn’t find anywhere else.

Yet I also know that I can never be a complete person now. I can’t ignore partition.

It’s a part of me. I fell rudderless.[…] The creation and existence of Pakistan has

damaged a part of my psyche. I simply cannot pretend it doesn’t exit. I can’t pretend

that life goes on […] (MMI 387)

Amidst the grim darkness of the worlds of Rashid and Amir, Naipaul discovers a

small ray of hope. This ray of hope is Parveen, who represents those Muslims who have been

integrated into the Indian social fabric, those Muslims who cherish no religious or cultural

yearnings for Pakistan. Parveen came from a family of landlords and lawyers and blamed the

Muslim unrest in India to ignorance and a lack of proper education and ignorance.

The chapter on one hand discusses, in finest details, the genesis and nature of the

problem of alienation of Muslims in India. On the other hand, it also discussed the ways in

which integration can be made possible. Naipaul’s scale tilts heavily towards the gloomy

despair of Rashid and Amir. But Parveen stands as a ray of hope. And with her stands the

hope of the millions. Naipaul leaves the possibility open to Parveen. The chapter carries no

concluding remarks from Naipaul.

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 The seventh chapter, ‘Women’s Era’ shows the change that had come to the Indian

woman’s idea of herself and the role played by Vishwa Nath. Naipaul begins with his own

difficulties with Russell’s Diary. Through his own example and Rashid’s, Naipaul lays the

groundwork for individual responses to literary work. On this groundwork he builds the

Indian women’s response to the women’s magazines in India. He sees these magazines as

being structured around the psychological needs of a changing population. Vishwa Nath the

editor of Women’s Era was as iconoclast and a conventional man rolled into one. Through

Women’s Era, Femina,Savvy and Eve’s Weekly Naipaul sees different kinds of women, with

different sets of priorities and values. The paradox of Vishwa Nath’s mind was the paradox of

a vast majority of Indian women who were just entering the outside world for the first time.

Therefore Vishwa Nath’s became the most popular women’s magazine.

The striking note in the chapter is the gradual change in Naipaul’s opinion of

Women’s Era. He lays out the whole process. Initially, he found Women’s Era to be dull. The

articles were in fact general instruction on the desired code of behavior on social occasion or

on health and fitness of the family. Later, Naipaul looks at its target audience and tries to

place the magazine in the indispensable informative role it played for its target audience. In

this way Naipaul learns to look at the magazine with a new sense of admiration. Naipaul, in

India: A Million Mutinies Now,adopts this method throughout. The chapter ‘Women’s Era’

shows the clearest working of Naipaul’s new Method. The chapter in a way summarizes the

change in Naipaul’s perspective from An Area of Darkness to India: A Million Mutinies Now.

He begins with a rejection of Women’s Era, goes on to analyze the magazine, its editor, and

its target readers. He, then, arrives at a newfound admiration for the work being done by this

magazine. The pattern of his coming to terms with India is replicated in his treatment of

‘Women’s Era’.

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 The second last chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Guru’ is a detailed analysis of the

psychology of Sikh insurgency in India. He sees the Sikh militancy as a part of a larger

process of awakening in India:

To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself

and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage

[…] There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own

group or community […] every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of

others. (MMI 420)

Gurtej Singh is the main narrator in this chapter and it is through him that Naipaul

explains how a realization of the Sikh identity mutated into insurgency. The origins of the

Sikh faith were in militant action against Muslim oppression. This militant streak surfaced

and got lost. In an earlier chapter Naipaul had described how the Naxalite movement had

gone astray from its ideals and was lost. He repeats the same about Sikh insurgency in this

chapter. The reader sees the movement in its various stages through the eyes of the people

involved in it. The chapter alternates such accounts with the stories of the Sikh Gurus that

form a part of the collective consciousness of the people who narrate their stories.

Naipaul does not reject insurgency but sees it as a part of a larger process of change in

the people’s idea of themselves. Religious identity is the first step in people’s idea of

themselves and therefore the insurgency in Punjab started at the religious level. Naipaul has

also exposed the break in the unified idea of religion that came to people like Buta Singh. The

picture that emerges is that of strife as an outlet for pent up emotions of the past; militancy as

a step towards the restoration of the past Sikh glory.

The last chapter is a return to India for Naipaul. In this chapter he discusses candidly

the psychology behind his first impassioned rage in An Area of Darkness. Naipaul visits

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Kashmir, the hotel Liward and its inhabitants: Aziz and Mr. Butt. Naipaul sees how India has

changed and how his eye had changed over the past twenty-seven years. In place where

Naipaul earlier observed decay of tradition, he now saw new creative beginnings. In the

confusion of the immediate period after independence, he found a new sense of organization

and he saw India on the move. He saw the socio-political disturbances and the failed attempts

at revolution as a part of India’s growth:

What the mutinies were also helping to define was the strength of the general

intellectual life, and the wholeness and humanism of the values to which all Indians

now felt they could appeal. And strange irony the mutinies were not to be wished

away. They were a part of the beginning of a new way for many millions, part of

India’s growth, and part of its restoration. (MMI 518)

“In 1960 I was still a colonial, travelling to far-off places.” It was around this time

that Naipaul was travelling in India for An Area of Darkness. His views on India were

therefore the views of a colonial. By the time he came to India: A Million Mutinies Now, he

had ceased to be a colonial. He had arrived at the multiple perspectives offered by the post-

colonial vision. He had learnt to see India as India saw itself. This brought with it a sense of

healing and a sense of homecoming for Naipaul.

After An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded civilization, Naipaul’s India: A

Million Mutinies Now was the third and final attempt to understand and unravel the mystery

of India to himself and to the world. The three books together record twenty seven years of

Naipaul’s meditation and engagement with India. And if we keep in our mind Naipaul’s

dictum that the last book contained all the others, then we can assume that India : A Million

Mutinies Now includes and grows out of the previous two travel accounts of India. Thus it is

a significant record of the vital changes taking place in India and the experiential and

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intellectual changes he himself under went during the three decades of Naipaul’s engagement

with India. India in those three decades has not been static; it has been undergoing changes.

The progress in the circumstances of people which Naipaul witnessed in India: A Million

Mutinies Nowis closely linked with his coming to terms with his diasporic status and the

process coming to terms with India.

India: A Million Mutinies Now attempts a revision of his earlier judgments on India.

In a way India: A Million Mutinies Now shares a similar structure with An Area of Darkness.

Both begin with a description of the crowds of Bombay, but the difference in tone set them

apart. We find that An Area of Darkness ends in ‘Flight’, an escape from the painful reality of

India, whereas India: A Million Mutinies Now concludes with a call for Return to India.

References:

1. Singh, K Natwar. Financial Times 1990: 3. Print.

2. Turner, Janette. New York Times 1990: 6. Print.

3. Buruma, Ian. New York Review 1991: 7. Print.

4. Naipaul, V S. India: A Million Mutinies Now. London: Viking, 1990. Print.

5. H.H. Annia Gowda, “Naipaul in India”Literary Half Yearly. 11.2 (1970): 170. Print.

6. William Walsh, V.S. Naipaul. Edinburgh : Oliver and Boyd, (1973) : 75. Print.

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 Chapter-6

THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

The great English prose writer of the seventeenth century John Bunyan (1628-88)

after having spent eleven years in jail produced a classic of the English prose The Pilgrim’s

Progress (1678). The book is an allegorical narrative which describes the journey (or

progress) of every Christian soul, with its aspirations, its struggles, its weaknesses, and its

recoveries along the path of life. The second part of the book was published in 1684. Both

these two books together depict the journey of life and discovery of meaning and value in it.

The Pilgrim’s Progress was a great success and has become a classic of English fiction

writings.

The life of Naipaul has actually been that of a pilgrim. It has been a relentless pursuit

of the self and a constant searchfor home no matter real or ideal. Whether it is his fiction or

non-fictional writings, Naipaul’s goal remains the same the reach of self. So,in a way,all his

writings together constitute a mega autobiography. No wonder, he has not yet written a

separate full-length autobiography. He did make one attempt at it which resulted in ‘Prologue

to an Autobiography’ but not full-length narrative about his life. The only thing which

explains it is thatwhenever he is writing, whatever he writing he is writing he is writing the

story of himself – the form may be hidden or manifest. But what he is doing is nothing but

writing his autobiography. And travel accounts are in no way different

But, here before, taking into account the continuity and change in his three travel

accounts of India we shall have aracy account of a journey of Naipaul as author.

Before proceeding further in analyzing the multi-dimensional and multi-pronged

spectrum of post-colonialism, diaspora and hybridity, cultural and national discourse and

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interaction leading to Pluralism in the novels of Naipaul, we should have a brief expiation of

the novels of the writer so as to make a fair and square assessment of the philosophy and

central vision of his life found running through his world of fiction.

The Mystic Masseur (1957) was the first published work of significance by Naipaul.

This novel is Naipaul’s version of the Indian theme in Narayan’s The Guidethat won John

Llewellyn Rhys memorial prize. The book reveals a live Indian society, rather Hindu society

which, while it is part of Trinidad society is struggling to preserve its Indian identity.

Naipaul’s struggle to discover his identity begins in this book. The fictional world of this

book is certainly India in miniature. The fictional world of this book is certainly India in

miniature. The theme of this fiction is both enduring and richly funny. V.S. Naipaul

describes the metamorphosis of Ganesh, from failed primary school teacher and a clumsy

masseur into a healing mystic. In this novel it is a power which enables Naipaul to see not

only Ganesh but minor character in all their contradictory complexity and depth.

In 1958 came The Suffrage of Elvira. It is a fiction showing an expansion of technique

from the episodic structure of The Mystic Masseur. The novel is organized around one main

character and an observer to the presentation of a large cast of characters involved in a

situation of the second election in Elvira. The contrast between the ideal of democratic

elections and its reality in such a community is treated as satiric comedy. Religion, the

equivalent of ethnic group and party is not a matter of spirit. Money – the main value of

society makes people applaud cunning and cleverness applied as wrong means to make it.

Naipaul is found extremely sensitive to language and he makes excellent use of local speech

expressions in this book. It is a perfect work of Naipaul who portrays character like

Chittaranjan, Lorkhoor, Baksh and Harbans. The target in his novel is the representative

machinery of an abstract democracy without a sanction in tradition or understanding.

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 Muguel Street (1959): In this book the past is blank ‘a thing without a name’. The

impersonal elements of a civilization may be missing but the people like Laura, Bogart the

bigamist, B. Wordsworth, the poet, Popo the carpenter, Morgan the pyrotechnicist, and mad

man possess an extraordinary vitality and the mastery of a supple and poetic language. In this

book it is the place, public graceless, huddled but brilliant with human oddity, which is both

the ground and background of the people. The street is a permanent relationship uniting them

all. Their other relationships are intense and transient. The book has won Somerset

Maugham Award. William Walsh has very rightly contended that the peculiar flavour of the

book comes from the application of a severe and sophisticated intelligence to conduct of the

utmost naivety, and from the further paradox that the crazily ingenuous activity of the people

one realizes it gradually is embedded in a set inarticulate but profound convictions about the

nature of human existence.

In A House for Mr. Biswas (1967), V.S. Naipaul traces the life and death of Mohun

Biswas. It is the masterpiece which established V.S. Naipaul among the handful of living

writers the English language can be proud of. Before the publication of this novel, the West

Indian East Indian was without form, features or voice. The life represented at Hanuman

House no longer exists in Trinidad. The novel, though not an autobiography has

autobiographical elements in it. It is also historical novel.

Mohan Biswas is Naipaul’s father and Anand – Naipaul himself and the Hanuman

house is the same Lion House in Port of Spain. In the character of Anand, we have a rough

account of Naipaul’s own childhood. This novel is also suggested to be the West Indian novel

of rootlessness par excellence. The book is an imaginative response to social phenomena. It

can be seen as the struggle of a man not naturally rebellious. It has the Dickensian largeness

and luxuriance. A house for Mr. Biswas is a subtle and comprehensive analysis of the colonial

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situation as anything in imaginative literature. It has been hailed as a work of great comic

power qualified with firm and unsentimental compassion.” It revolves round the notion of

home and homelessness which is a central consideration for anyone who is displaced and

pushed in a disporice state.

Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion (1963): Set entirely in England, it is an English

novel with entirely English characters. It is a novel sustaining the theme of slavery in a

delicately subdued, fanatic manner. The novel is largely about removal and alienation. The

solid and palpable English setting is genuine in feeling and authentic in detail. But the vision

is so idiosyncratic, wry and curious that the reader feels himself moving in a dream with

objects and events having an unnatural prominence and clarity. The novel is the story of Mr.

Stone with dreamlike fantasies, seeing himself gliding up and down on his private moving

strip. It narrates Mr. Stone’s last months before retirement from his librarian’s post in large

commercial firm. Mr. Stone with well-regulated life to the point of eccentricity becomes so

rattled by intimations of mortality, gets married at sixty two, with all his joyful existence as a

bachelor. And as if that were not astonishing enough, he goes on having an inspiration

changing the tenor of his life. Having seized by the creative spirit, he conceives an idea

embodied in a plan to turn into fact which is proved a success and Mr. Stone incredulously

tastes the joys of achievement. The novel has often been called ‘original’ […] a brilliant

manipulation of the serious the macabre and the comic by V.S. Pritchett. The book has won

the Hawthornden Prize.

Mimic Men (1967): It is probably Naipaul’s second most important novel clearly

making the end of a second phase the end of a absorption with his personal homelessness, a

final release from what his narrator Kripalsingh calls ‘a barren cycle of events.’ Here is the

observation, report and vision of life through spectacles. Raiph Kripalsingh – just forty, a

disgraced colonial minister exiled from the Caribbean Island of his birth – writes his

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biography in a genteel hotel in London suburb. Kripalsingh the main character represents a

generation gaining power at independence and the authenticity of selfhood. The structure is

an advancement of Naipaul’s previous novel. With supreme confidence Kripalsingh turning

to politics, finds himself caught up in the upheaval of empire in the turmoil of too large evens

moving too fast. The book won W.H. Smith award of 1968.

A Flag on the Island (1967): It is a collection of short stories by Naipaul. The earliest

story ‘The Mourners’ is dated 1950. The stories range from portraits of Trinidad street life to

early attempts at recording English social behaviour. There is usually a good writing in the

stories. The main interest is the long title story, written in a crude American style appropriate

to the narrator. The novelist shows the shift in mimicry from British to American

expectations. His formal attempt was to write romantically about lords and ladies. After

independence, supported by American foundations, he writes stories of inter–racial marriages

with such title as I have you we came across Ganesh in the story “My Aunt Gold Teeth”

written in 1954 and collected in the volume of a ‘A Flag on the Island’. Gold Teeth is the rich

but childless wife of Pundit Ramprasad and Ganesh is called in when Ramprasad falls ill and

the district medical officer calls it diabetes. The collection is written fine English prose.

The Loss of El Dorado (1969): The content of the book is historical but the treatment

is both imaginative and analytical. The myth of El Dorado is the myth of an ancient gold–

working civilisation which haunted the Spanish imagination. There had been a golden man,

Eldorado, the gilded one, in what is now Columbia; a chief who once a year rolled in

turpentine was covered with gold dust and then dived into the lake. The book is a description

of the struggle between the Spanish Antonio de Berrio and the English Sir Walter Raleigh for

procession of Trinidad as a base for El Dorado explorations, and secondly the attempt to open

up Spanish American to British commercial interest organizing revolution from Trinidad.

Naipaul’s stripped narrative follows with meticulous fidelity and urbane restraint. The

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complications are reflected in Naipaul’s presentation of the material. It has been said to be

one of the most brilliant account of the grassroots of imperialism. It presents several layers of

mimicry growing out of colonialism.

In a Free State (1971): The prologue and the epilogue of this book relate incidents

during Naipaul’s travels in Egypt. Naipaul’s concern is the individual and his milieu, the

manner in which his successes and failures weave the fabric of a social existence. He has

moved on towards a new posture in relation to the human condition. The book explores the

ways in which the conscious individual in a given society establishes models of meditation

between himself and his experience. It is not at all obvious that the novel can be discussed as

a single work. At first sight it seems to be made up of odds and ends – a short novel, two

short stories and two extracts from Naipaul’s journals. He admits that the book has not

worked out as planned originally.

One out of many, the first of the three thematically related short stories in the book

alludes to the usual slogan of multiracial-Third World nations. Santosh, a servant from

Bombay is taken by an Indian diplomat to America. Leaving his employer, he becomes an

illegal immigrant and marries a black woman to obtain citizenship. Thus, the book takes as

one of its theme the problem of migration and settlement in a new place. The book has won

the 1971 Booker prize.

Guerrillas (1975): The lasting effect of colonialism on the modern world is illustrated

by the relationships among Jane, Peter and Jimmy in this novel. Jane actually belongs to a

class once enriched by the empire but now of diminished status in post-colonial England. Her

upper-class breeding having turned into nihilistic rage at the pettiness of life, Jane seeks

drama and meaning through vivacious involvement with the Third World. She follows Peter

and mistakes him to be political activist. Jimmy had a reputation as a radical black leader.

The political chaos on the island reflects the cultural breakdown. There is a lack of sense of

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community; each character is isolated and alone. The texture of the novel is both open, with

spaces between scenes and yet detailed on its descriptions. Guerrillas is a narrative of

unfailing fascination. The Caribbean island that appears in Guerrillas is scarcely recognizable

as the Caribbean islands Naipaul had written before. The expatriate Hindu Trinidadian

consciousness which was manifest in most of the earlier books is carefully removed. Instead,

the island of Guerrillas has been through the expatriate South African Roche.

The Middle Passage (1962): It is a significant travel book, a return to the Caribbean.

Naipaul is moving, sometimes crawlingly painfully, up through the obscure bending tunnels

of the self. He has a vivid awareness of place as a part of experience. In this book, the key

figure is Naipaul himself. The subject is the social and physical character of the several West

Indian territories. The book records his impressions of colonial society in the West Indies and

South America. Naipaul unfolds the picture with irony and pity in this book. V.S. Naipaul

writes here of him impressions of five societies – Trinidad, British Guiana, Surinam,

Martinique and Jamaica. V.S. Naipaul’s comments are of enduring value, and the originality

of his insights has made the book centre of considerable controversy. It is put in the category

of travel writing like those of Lawrence, Greene and Pritchett respectively on Italy, West

Africa and Spain.

An Area of Darkness (1964): It is a reflective and semiautobiographical account of a

year in India. It is a book which tries to search for the roots of Naipaul and his ancestors. It

has been considered the most compelling and vivid book about India to have appeared for a

long time. Some consider it tender, lyrical, explosive and excellent. It has also been branded

as patchy, inadequate and superficial. It means the book met with mixed reception. Having

arrived Bombay, he travelled north to Kashmir, East to Calcutta, and South to Madras, also

had a holy pilgrimage to Amaranth in the Himalayas. He describes places, people and

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incidents. He expresses his feelings, describes him experiences in India and gives the reader

deep insight into a country and a writer’s strange split sensibility.

The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972): It is a selection of his longer essays. Some of

them are on India. It is the most political of Naipaul’s books. The book proves that the act of

writing is not merely a matter of self-expression, but also an instrument of an awareness

seeking to modify social reality. Two major articles on Norman Mailer, speak on the actual

conduct of elections; the piece on St. Kitts, Anguilla, British Honduras and Mauritius are

built around political analysis and the remaining articles are chosen for further enlightening

the problems of colonial and ex-colonial territories.

India: A Wounded Civilizations (1977): It is an extended study of the one conducted

in An Area of Darkness which was prompted by the 1975 Emergency of Indian attitudes. He

wrote this book after thirteen years of the year of publication of An Area of Darkness. It is a

brilliant travel book. Naipaul says that India is his greatest obsession. According to him the

India that is wounded on account of the foreign rule has not found, as yet, an ideology to

regenerate. He believes that India has nothing to offer the world except its Gandhian concept

of holy poverty and the recurring comedy of its holy men.

A Bend in the River (1979): This book – a novel, paints not a very hopeful picture,

either of African nations or any other country. It is called Naipaul’s least hopeful book.

Reviewers draw parallels between A Bend in the River and Heart of Darkness. Both the

writers express deep pessimism about the human condition.

Salim’s story as a trader reveals his lack of instinct. As a businessman, Salim allows

himself to be nothing. He realizes that the world as it is, is a changing world. Salim is an

intriguing figure. The novel seems to suggest a slightly mellower note in that Salim has

chances of finding a place somewhere in the world. The novel raises important questions of

survival, with dignity and culture particularly for rootless people in realistic Third World

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Contexts. This makes the book demanding and difficult fiction. The novel is astonishing

because of its superb characterization and dramatic invention. In this book, V.S. Naipaul uses

Africa as a text to preach magnificently upon the sickness of a world losing touch with its

past.

Return of Eva Peron with the Killings in Trinidad (1980): The pieces included in the

book were written between 1972 and 1975. They bridged a creative gap. These pieces have

the intensity of obsessional nature. The theme is often repeated and the author has no claim

for unity among the pieces. Out of these journeys and writings, there did emerge novels, out

of which “The killings in Trinidad was published after many delays for legal reasons.

Naipaulian areas of darkness, ‘Michael X in Trinidad’, ‘Peronism in Argentina’, ‘the Cult of

kingship in Mobutu’s Zaire’ – find exploration in his book. The book concludes with a piece

on Conard – a great writer whose integrity was nourished like that of Naipaul, by the creative

refusal to take anything for granted.

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1982): It is a recent account of his trip to

Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. Naipaul is most successful in portraying the dilemma

of Pakistan who shares the Indian parentage in spite of rejection of that part of their identity

implied in their choice of partition. Rootlessness – the base of Naipaul’s identity is his subject

matter. The mixed feeling aroused in the reader reflects his own ambivalence. He presents

post-colonial dilemmas. In Pakistan, past is neither interpreted not denied but the attempt is to

recreate it. So, the Islamic enterprise -- stupendous deliberate creation, Koran as a guide of a

state mechanism would function and would be a high intellectual enterprise. There was not

much intellectual life in Pakistan, the great Islamic enterprise existed only as an ideal

expression of highest faith and of the political insecurity – Muslims lived in Muslim

homeland. As his travel accounts of India, Among the Believers also generated heated

response in the Islamic countries and the champions of secularism.

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 The Enigma of Arrival (1987): It is also an autobiographical novel of V.S. Naipaul,

the elusive genius. The painting entitled ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ caught Naipaul’s attention,

from a dozen of the facile paintings of Giorgio de Chirico from a booklet of the little Library

of Art Naipaul felt an indirect poetical reference from his own experience. What was striking

and interesting about the paining The Enigma of Arrival was perhaps the title itself which set

him on thinking about his own existential condition. The original was always a surprise, the

classical, serene Mediterranean, ancient Roman or so he saw it. A wharf in the background,

beyond walls and gateways there was the top of the mast of an antique vessel, in the fore

ground two figures, one arrived, the other native of the port. The scene of desolation and

mystery of arrival, it spoke to him, gave the idea – floating lightly above the book he was

writing on – came to him a story he might write about that scene in Chirico picture. The

quayside ship story suggested by The Enigma of Arrival had come to the writer. The Enigma

of Arrival confirms again the truth that he is one of the finest and most penetrating novelists

among us. The Enigma of Arrivalhas been scrupulously subtitled as A Novel. But it is

unambiguously presented as an autobiographical narrative: descriptions of the writer’s period

of residence in a village near Salisbury, an isolated pensive time, intermittently give way to

reflections on the writer’s past and creative efforts. The juxtaposition of the form of the novel

with barely fictionalized autobiography is deliberate. For, Naipaul, both are made and

apprehended in a continuous manner.

Finding the Centre(1984) consists of two personal narratives are both about the

process of writing. Both seek differently to admit the reader to that process. The first

‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ is an important landmark in the writer’s work. It provides us

with authentic material about his life and influences on him. The second piece, ‘The

Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro’ demonstrates rather than describes. Here is the writer whose

making we have just seen, travelling and adding to his knowledge of the world and exposing

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himself to the new people and new relationships. These pieces unfold with a charming

lightness, and touch the heart as often as they engage the mind.

A Turn in the South (1989): This book came in serialised for in the prestigious

American magazine The New Yorker prior to its publication. The book speaks about the

southern part of the USA and to research it and to have a ‘feel’ of the subject the author spent

six months in the southern states of the USA. It is believed that perhaps that is what he might

end up doing in India once again. It is also felt that something of great literary value will

come out of it. And really it has happened. The next book to follow soon was on India.

India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990): V.S. Naipaul ranks among the world’s greatest

travel writers. India: A Million Mutinies Now is his third travel book on India. It is less

mordant and more compassionate in tone than the earlier ones. He describes a civilization in

flux, a country quite different from the one he encountered on his first visit in 1962. The book

is seen as the most important of his travel books Naipaul has written, comparable, in its

warmth and humanity, with the finest of his novel, A House for Mr. Biswas. Twenty seven

years later, Naipaul finds a country that has changed enormously. People are richer, the stock

market is booming, new buildings are springing up. It is a civilization on the turn – a

civilization where the powerful hold of religion is altering.

As Naipaul travels East, West, North and South his carefully planned and designed

journey begins to read like a novel, each character has his story and each story reveals

another aspect of India. There is the ferociously successful businessman with a shrine in his

office, the old friend, who has become a recluse and a saint, the Sikh farm visited hours after

massacre. Everywhere among the multitude of discovered lives, there are mutinies against the

British, against the governments, against the Brahmins. And everywhere there is a tradition of

self-sacrifice which is quite alien and surprising to the West.

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 India: A Million Mutinies Now is as rich, as vivid and a sympathetic as anything

Naipaul has written. His compassionate ear, and the dignity of the individuals who fill his

pages, make this book his definitive statement on India, the most mysterious and fascinating

of countries for the author. This is a masterpiece of travel writing. Here, Naipaul portrays the

modern Indian scene -- social, political, religious, economic and cultural. He deeply

concentrates on the present political issues on Kashmir, Punjab terrorism and Ram

Janmabhoomi Babri masjid. He analyses the socio-cultural aspects of all the present political

issues. His observations show his deep knowledge and understanding of the Indian mind and

people. His essays and travel writings are often negative, unsentimental explorations of West

Indian society as in The Middle Passage (1962) which is, however, is not the case with India

A Million Mutinies Now.

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) was accused by Muslim readers of narrow

and selective vision of, Islam. In this book, Naipaul tries to search for the sources of the new

Islam and its ideological rage. According to Naipaul, Islam sanctified rage – rage about the

faith, political rage. Naipaul’s last travel book on Islamic countries includes Beyond Belief:

Islamic Excursions among the Converted People (1998) which gives us an intimate portrait

from his journeys to the non-Arab Islamic countries of Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and

Malaysia. Naipaul tries to understand the fundamentalist fervor that has marked the Western

image of the region. “There probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the

Arabs”, he writes. In Iran he meets war veterans, who express their disillusionment and their

sense of being manipulated by the mullahs, and in Indonesia he meets his former friend, who

opposed the Suharto regime, and later became an establishment figure, an advocate of an

Islamicist future. On his first visit to India since he was awarded the Nobel Prize Naipaul

said: “We are not here to celebrate the antiquity of literature in India, but to celebrate modern

writing.”

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 After, Beyond Belief came Letter between a Father and Son which was followed by

his novel Half A life. For this book V.S. Naipaul was nominated for Booker Prize. In name,

fame and literary prestige, Naipaul has replaced Salman Rushdie. It reached a new height

when Naipaul was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1990. Naipaul thinks himself grateful to

England, his home and to India, home of his ancestors. He acknowledged that the Nobel Prize

for literature for 2001 is a tribute to both the countries.

In 1994 came A Way in the World which is a collection of fictionalized and

autobiographical pieces addressing three areas: (1) Naipaul’s overarching perception of the

Caribbean and post-colonial history, (2) further autobiographical reflections in the light of his

changing views and (3) his thoughts regarding idealistic and revolutionary politics. A Way in

the Worldrecords the history of the island from the unrecorded and entirely erased pre-

colonial period to the recorded phase of colonialism

In 2007, Naipaul comes up with A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling

(2007). This book has five chapters: first chapter is devoted to the life and attitude of the

Caribbean, the second chapter analyses the attitude of the British and the remaining three

chapters deal with the attitude and outlook of the Indians. The book has essays with very

suggestive titles: the first essay which deals with the Caribbean life has been titled as “The

Worm in the Bud” indicating its closed and small world, the second essay that deals with the

English attitude is titled as “An English Way of Looking”, and the third essay which takes up

Indian outlook has been titled as “Looking Not Seeing: the Indian Way”. The essays of the

book make important distinction between the Caribbean, English and Indian ways of looking

at things.

Incidentally V.S. Naipaul’s first travel account of India, An Area of Darkness contains

a chaplet ‘Pilgrimage’. The word pilgrimage does not appear as a chapter in his next two

travel accounts of India, but the echo of pilgrimage remains. The idea of pilgrimage seems

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significant even in the organization of the chapters in the three travel accounts Naipaul has

produced of India. It may be a coincidence but it is significant that the first chapter of An

Area of Darkness (1964) is ‘A Resting Place for the Imagination’ and the concluding chapter

of India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) is ‘The House on the Lake: A Return to India’. Thus

from the first chapter of the first book to the last chapter of the third book there seems to be a

movement, a significant movement towards a desired goal. And this movement seems very

similar to the outcome of the journey undertaken by a Christian in the Pilgrim’s Progress.

Now the question that arises is: Does Naipaul really make progress in his journey? What is

the substance of the progress? Does he undergo substantial changes over the years on account

of his three study-visits to India?

A sincere look at his visits to India and a review of his travel accounts answer the

above questions in the affirmative. The Naipaul of An area of Darkness (1964), India: A

Wounded Civilization (1977) and India: A Million Mutinies Now is not the same. The target

of vituperative attack of 1964 becomes an object of cool appreciation in 1990. How does it

happen?

It was in February 1962 that Naipaul began his first journey to India – The land from

which his father’s father had been brought to Trinidad as a baby and from which his maternal

grandfather had come as an indentured labourer. Though, he had come to know and

comprehend India, the country was not entirely unknown to him. From his very childhood he

had seen experience and imagined India through various household artifacts and items of

rituals including images of various deities. He had also observed closely the life pattern of

other Indians living in Trinidad. Subsequently, Naipaul read a number of books on India,

which served him as an important source of information on Indian history, society, politics

and culture. But the primary material for the construction of India in his imagination

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remained the typical domestic items and rituals which Naipaul had seen in the house of his

grandmother and in his neighborhood.

But, since Naipaul was a bit indifferent to these rituals and the language in which the

rituals were conducted, he could never become an involved participant in these activities. But

he had photographic memory and a powerful retention because of which he carries with him

a very vivid image of things and events he witnessed in his childhood. In a way his family

and other Indian families in Trinidad carried enough Indian tradition on the basis of which

Naipaul would form an image of India. But this image of India was fixed, static and frozen in

time. It was the image that his forefathers had carried with them which was transferred to

Naipaul through traditional Indian artifacts and ritual and religious practices common among

the Indian community in Trinidad. The India in Naipaul’s imagination was that of vague

Hinduism, elaborate mystical rituals, caste differentiation, and abstruse mantras. And at the

same time it was an image of simple agriculturalists as of simple pastoral life. It was also an

image of a land where poverty was rampant, and it was because of this that his forefathers

had left India their homeland for the West Indies in the late 19th century in hope of

transforming their lives.

But ‘home’ has several connotations in India. As they are mostly religious minded,

they believe God’s house to be their original home. We are here, in this life, for a certain

period of time. And after death we will go back to Good’s abode, our real home once again.

So going back home has a spiritual dimension to it as well. Naipaul’s visits to India carries

the sense of a home coming and a sense of a pilgrimage. But the point is: does the pilgrim,

VS Naipaul, undergo same spiritual elevation and enlightenment? In other words, do these

visits lead to a better understanding of ‘home’, i.e. India?

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 As a member of India diaspora, Naipaul had observed the style of the Indian migrants

in Trinidad very closely. He had also seen the pattern of other diasporic communities in

Trinidad and elsewhere. He had found among them all a tendency to copy, to imitate and to

mimic the people exercising colonial power. This mimicry gets reflected in day- today

practices of the colorized people. It has been rightly said that the colonization is not only

about territory, it is also about the mind, rather it is more about the mind and that is why

whenever a country acquires independence from colonial power; it continues to mimic the

practices of its old master. Naipaul in An Area of Darkness delineates the author’s first visit

to and engagement with India in terms of the modes of cultural analysis he had developed

already. By this time he had sorted out his view of the New World. The idea of the New

World consisted of the fictionalized reminiscences of the Hindu Trinidad of his childhood.

Speculation on his encounter with England and Englishness, and the South American

countries had thrown up for him a consistent idea of the New World.

Caught up in a cultural vacuum, that it was bound to a fantasy play-acting which

denies itself; that the West- the former colonizers and neo-colonists images and aspiration

which constantly mimicked in the new World. The new world, in short, is a mimic culture,

and the west is mimicked. It is this critical apparatus that Naipaul brings with him in his first

encounter with India. In An Area of Darkness Naipaul finds evidence of play-acting and

mimicry pretty much everywhere in India too: in the complex bureaucratic procedures which

overtake the writer in search of a liquor license; in the westernized business executives (with

nicknames like Bunty, Andy, Freddy, Jimmy, etc.) and lifestyles; in the bourgeois Mrs.

Mahindra in Delhi who confesses, ‘I am crazy for foreign, just crazy for foreign’, in the

manner in which he is treated and the relationships he forms with people during a longish

sojourn in Kashmir; in the alienated and lonely and occasionally violent Sikh he meets in the

train.

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 But in An Area of Darkness Naipaul is also struck from the beginning by the

difference from the kind of mimicry he had encountered in Trinidad and New World

generally:

The outer and inner worlds do not have the physical separateness which they had for

us in Trinidad. They coexist; the [Indian] society also pretends to be colonial; and for

this reason its absurdities are at once apparent. Its mimicry is both less and more than

a colonial mimicry. It is the special mimicry of an old country which has been without

a native aristocracy for a thousand years and learned to make room for outsiders, but

only at the top. The mimicry changes, the inner world remains constant: this is secret

of survival. […] Yesterday the mimicry was Moghul; tomorrow it might be Russian

or American; today it is English. (AD 56)

The difference is the difference between the aftermath of colonization in the old world

and the New World. According to Naipaul, in India mimicry is a purely nihilistic

phenomenon -- it tries to negate something that is essentially Indian, that is linked to a pre-

colonial period (and colonialism in India, according to Naipaul, goes back a thousand years).

The mimicry has more of an air of artificiality about it because even as it tries to supersede

that essentially Indian past, it in fact fails: the essential Indian quality survives at the bottom

(‘outsiders’ at the top), enclosed in an ‘inner world [that] remains constant’. So the Indian

colonial mimicry is somehow more false, a twice-removed mimicry, a make-belief which

stretches across the tendentious attempt at negating what is indelibly Indian in favour of that

which is inappropriately English. It is twice removed: not merely a mimicking of the West,

but a mimicking of colonialism itself. The New Would on the other hand is seen by Naipaul

to be more comfortably colonial: its mimicry is only at one remove, it simply mimics the

West. It is this uncomplicated vacuousness behind the make-belief which makes the New

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World simply and innocently colonial. When Naipaul compares Trinidad to India in the latter

part of the book, Trinidad appears in a comparatively simple and happy light:

Colonial India I could not link with colonial Trinidad. Trinidad was a British colony;

but every child knew that we were only a dot on the map of the world. And it was

therefore important to be British: that at least anchored us within a wider system. It

was a system which we did not find oppressive; and though British, in institutions and

education as well as in political fact, we were few and kept themselves to themselves,

and England was as a result only one of the countries of which we were aware. (AD

188)

This difference is a running motif in the book, and An Area of Darkness is largely

about that – the difference between colonial India and colonial Trinidad. This doesn’t mean

that Naipaul sets out in the book to discern what that essential and indelible Indian quality

consists in – that, predictably and significantly, came later. In An Area of Darkness he is

concerned primarily with describing the nuances of the unique kind of colonial mimicry he

found in India, and with charting its (largely adverse) effects. That is the importance of this

book: in his first encounter with India Naipaul doesn’t try to delve into its essentially Indian

depths, he is content to examine its peculiar old world variety of colonial mimicry and to

observe the effects. The exercise is no more than an Indian version of The Middle Passage.

The difference in the quality of the mimicry is examined at length in the chapter entitled

‘Fantasy and Ruins’. Here Naipaul outlines nuances of Englishness, inferred largely from

literary works in English set in India (the unavoidable Kipling and Forster). His sentiments

about the impact of England on India (the mimicked manifestations) are probably most

pointedly made there in his observations on architecture, and his observations on these speak

for themselves. He notes that the typically English architecture in India (Fort St George in

Madras, Clive’s house in Calcutta) is simply an incongruous imposition’ – ‘This is one aspect

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of Indian England; it belonged to the history of India; it was dead’ (AD 190). The more

hybridized and alive architecture of the Raj (which, he observes, is distinct from the typically

English architecture) also makes a negative impression:

With one part of myself I felt the coming together of England and India as a violation,

with the other I saw it as ridiculous, resulting in a comic mixture of costumes and the

widespread use of an imperfectly understood language. But there was something else,

something at which the architecture of the Raj hinted: those collectorates, in which

vaults lay the fruits of an immense endeavour, those clubs, those circuit houses, those

inspections houses, those first class railway waiting rooms. Their grounds were a

little too spacious; their ceilings a little too high, their columns and arches and

pediments a little too rhetorical; they were neither of England nor India; they were a

little too grand for their purpose, too grand for the puniness, poverty and defeat in

which they were set. (AD 190-191)

Naipaul’s observations on English-Indian architecture could be taken as symptomatic

of the old world’s accommodation of colonialism, its twice removed mimicry, in general.

The idea is that, however one looks at it, the English impact on India and India’s reception of

it is uncreative and retrogressive (a view that, Naipaul was to modify later in comparison to

Islamic ‘imperialism’) – it is either dead, or incongruous and self-defeating. Naipaul

characteristically does not think much of the potential for hybridization. The Raj architecture

merely underlines the sense of defeat in India; the mixture of costumes is simply ridiculous;

the Indian’s attempt to adopt the English language is always perverse and ‘imperfectly

understood.

The larger part of An Area of Darkness falls into place once one grasps Naipaul’s

appraisal of the twice removed old world mimicry of the colonial/post-colonial India. The

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sensitivity to visions of disease and decrepitude, which take on an almost symbolic quality in

Naipaul’s view, makes sense: they are visible manifestations of the sense of defeat which

pervades the post-colonial India. The inability of Indians to understand their Indianness as a

whole, their penchant for seeing themselves in the smallest regional or communal alignments,

is a part of the defeat of the old world. Naipaul devotes some interesting passages to

analyzing the nation-building role of Gandhi and Nehru: both of whom, he asserts, had

acquired their sense of the wholeness of India by dint of an exposure to the outer world, by

cultivating an exterior perspective. Naipaul reiterates the notion of a lack of historical sense

amongst Indians (a commonplace in early Western historiographical thinking, to be found in

Hegel, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee and other) as another effect of his sense of defeat. However,

such views are vehemently countered by mainstream Indian historians, but Naipaul

continues:

It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they

would see would drive them mad. And it is well that they have no sense of history, for

how would they be able to squat amid the ruins, and which Indian would be able to

read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger and pain? It is

better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism […] (AD 20-21)

With these sentiments Naipaul proceeds to (literally and cruelly) dissociate himself

from his family connections in India, and concludes with a feeling of relief at having enjoyed

a colonial Trinidadian past, and a sense of comfort (rather like Forster’s character Fielding in

A Passage to India) in finding a place within the order of Europe.

An Area of Darkness is however an incomplete book. It does, as I have observed

above, analyze what Naipaul sees as the twice removed old world mimicry of India and its

effects. But implied in that argument is the notion of an essential old world India which,

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though defeated and self-negating, underlines all that mimicry; which survives despite, and

perhaps because of, its experiences of colonization. An Area of Darkness gestures towards

this alleged essential India often but does not describe it in a coherent fashion. Clearly, after

writing An Area of Darkness Naipaul felt the need to go into this a greater length. By 1967 he

begins to find in India a need to turn to something that is not mimicry; and though he doesn’t

state this explicitly it may be inferred that this need could be answered by an apprehension of

the allegedly essential India. In an essay entitled ‘A Second Visit’ he states:

Every discipline, skill and proclaimed ideal of the modern Indian state is a copy of

something which is known to exist in the true form somewhere else. The students of

cabinet government lookto Westminster as to the answers at the back of a book. The

journals of protest look, even for their typography, to the New Statesman. So Indians,

the holy men included, have continually to look outside India for approval.

Fragmentation and dependence are complete. Local judgement is valueless. It is

even as it, without the foreign chit, Indians can have no confirmation of their own

reality. But India, though not a country, is unique. To its problems imported ideas no

longer answer. They result is frenzy (OB 94)

Arguably, it is with a view to dealing with the notion of an essential India that

Naipaul wrote India: A Wounded Civilization.

The agenda of India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) – that is to say, exploring the

essential India underlying the mimicry – falls in neatly with Naipaul’s broader cultural

essentialist thinking of the seventies. He already had his formulations about the Black Power

movement and Guerrillas behind him; his thoughts about Africa were clear to him (In a Free

State was already published, and A Bend in the River was to appear a couple of years later);

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and India: AWounded Civilization was probably the formative point of the presumptions he

took on when he set off to explore Islamic countries in 1979.

The thesis of India: AWounded Civilization is twofold: that the essential India, the old

world India, is purely Hindu and that a typically Hindu psyche and Hindu attitudes to life are

pervasive in modern India; and that integral and purely Hindu India was conquered and

dominated first by Islam and later by the British, which had resulted in stultification of the

intellectual development and creativity of the essentially Hindu India. There is a sort of sub-

thesis attached to these: that the longer period of Islamic domination (finally established with

the fall of the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar in 1565, he says) has been particularly

retrogressive and damaging for an essentially Hindu India (in this he looks forward to his

books on Islam); and that ‘the British time, a period of bitter subjection […] was yet for India

a period of intellectual recruitment.’ (WC 18) However, the latter has been inadequate,

Naipaul finds, to the needs of modern India (no more than a self –defeating mimicry, in fact):

the book sets out to demonstrate the ubiquitousness of the Hindu psyche and attitude of life in

every possible aspect of uncreative, passive, and intellectually poor after centuries of colonial

(particularly Islamic) domination.

Naipaul sees Hinduism, in a stultified but indelible fashion, looming large behind all

the mimicry and disappointment of India. Its existence, together with its alleged sense of

defeat and despair, explain everything that Naipaul encounters of India. These give meaning

to the twice removed old world mimicry he had described in An Area of Darkness. These

explain the novelist R.K. Narayan’s novels, especially Mr. Sampath; these render the

passiveness of the peasants, as Naipaul sees it, understandable; These elucidate the

peculiarities (with some help from the psychologist Sudhir Kakar’) of Indian sexual attitudes;

these explain the paucity of the arts and architecture, of technology and the science

(described with the gleefulness of Swift describing the Royal Academy in Gulliver’s Travels)

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of intellectual culture’ generally; these illuminate the success, and deification, and failure of

Gandhi (which had been seen in a more affirmative fashion in Among the Believers) and

Gandhism and of his disciple Vinoba Bhave; and these clarify the political debacle of Mrs.

Indira Gandhi’s Emergency period, wherein the book is set to find for India a discrete and

essential Hindu identity, lingering in a continuous fashion from ancient times put upon and

savaged by permanently external religion like Islam, but retaining through everything its

marred but still essentially Indian character – that is, briefly, the problematic and disturbing

cultural essentialist project of A Wounded Civilization.

The problems with the asseverations of A Wounded Civilization are numerous. It

suffers from various degrees of misinformation: its summary of the views of the Naxalites

and of their ideological distance from the (in an essentially Hindu fashion) passive and

ritualistic peasants was simply wrong when it was written – and continues to be so now;

Naipaul’s view of developments is Indian technology and the arts (especially the fine arts) in

the seventies reveals deep ignorance. Naipaul’s readings of events in Indian politics –

especially the most immediate one when was written, the Emergency – terms only some sort

of Hindu psyche seems at times to be no more than an evasion of the more easily explicable

vested interests and political imperatives that were involved; in fact the evocation of Hindu

psyche in that context is a redundancy.

Naipaul’s readings of Indian history are also superficial: informed by no more than a

visit to some historical sites, some textbook material, and his skepticism about popular

myths; and uninformed by any attention to historical detail or historiographical

understanding. The positing of the cultural essentialist notion of pure old world Hinduism,

which may be trampled underfoot, rendered passive, stultified, but which is impervious to

mixture, miscegenation, hybridity – which moreover preserves itself in some shape and

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determines the intellectual quality of a nation – is tenuous at so many levels as a cultural and

social formulation that one hardly needs to dwell on it.

The idea of Hinduism is a priori in Naipaul’s thinking: the word is thrown in

wherever a pattern is discerned, and the word is not defined in theological cultural or

psychological terms with any rigour (though it appears to be efficacious in all these ways).

This sort of essentialist and determinative reading is particularly problematic in as

heterogeneous a context as India. The complexities of caste, class, religion community,

linguistic, regional, historical economic, political etc. alignments in India need a more

complex and sociologically rigorous approach – Naipaul faithfully observes problems and

schisms that arise from these and willfully offers a simplistic and superficial explanation for

them.

However,A Wounded Civilization is not merely problematic in various ways. It has

disturbing political antipathies and sympathies worked into it. Naipaul’s dubious history

places the Islamic influx as simple a very long imperialist phenomenon, vandalizing

indigenous culture, and claiming allegiance to foreign authority – and in that sense,

comparable to British imperialism (only rather worse). It dwells on the distant facts of

Islamic conquest and the fall of Hindu Vijayanagar with all the nostalgia of someone who

comes from an insular expatriate Hindu community in Trinidad, and who has predesignated

India as Hindu. Naipaul refuses to see the creative impact of Islam on India, which is much

more pervasive than the distant hints of conquest and war that Naipaul talks about. Naipaul

fails to note that despite communal tension. Hindu-Muslim cultural miscegenation and

constructive economic coexistence has been incomparably more fruitful in its time than any

analogous element in Indo-British contact during the British colonial period.

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 Naipaul suggests that the Partition, and the formation of Pakistan, and the fraught

exodus of Hindus and Muslims across the borders, is further proof of the foreignness of

Islam, and a further betrayal of the essential Indian heritage: many would argue that this

statement is itself a betrayal of the larger number of Muslims who continued to live in India,

and within their established heritage in that country. Naipaul’s, on the whole, Islamophobic

views are particularly insensitive when expressed in the context of India, where communal

tensions can run high, even though it is generally agreed (except by ultra-right political

alignments) that both communities in question are Indian and have been so for a very long

time.

Naipaul’s diasporic existence seems to have hardened his sense of Hindu identity

even he claims to be an unbeliever. Logically, but alarmingly, Naipaul’s political sympathies

in A Wounded Civilization do turn to the rightist organization with cultural essentialist

agendas. This is what Naipaul has to say about the Shiv Sena (a regional party in the state of

Maharashtra) – I give a long quotation the necessity for which is, I hope, self-evident:

The Sena ‘army’ is xenophobic. It says that Maharashtra the land of the Marathas, is

for the Maharashtrians. It was a concession from the government that eighty per cent

of jobs shall be held by Maharashtrians. The government feels that anyone who has

lived in Bombay or Maharashtra for fifteen years ought to be considered a

Maharastrian. But the Sena says no; a Maharashtrian to someone born a

Maharashtrian parents. Because of its xenophobic, its persecution in its early days of

South Indian setties in Bombay, and because of the theatricality of its leader, a failed

cartoonist who is said to admire Hitler, the Sena is often described as fascist.

But this is an easy, imported word. The Shiv Sena has its own Indian antecedents. In

this part of India, in the early pre- Gandhi days of the Independence movement, there

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 was a cult of Shivaji.After Independence among the untouchables, there was mass

conversions to Buddhism. The assertion of pride, a contracting out and regrouping- it

is the pattern of such movements among the dispossessed or humiliated.

The Shiv Sena, as it is today, is of India and it is of industrial Bombay. The Sena like

the recent movements in India, though more positive than most – infinitely more

positive for instance, than the Anand Marg, The Way of peace, now banned, which

preached caste, Hindu spirituality, and power through violence, all this mingled with

ritual murder and mutilation and with homosexually (desirable recruits were

sometimes persuaded that they had been girls in previous lives) – the Sena is a great

contracting out, not from India, but from a Hindu system, which in the conditions of

today, in the conditions of industrial Bombay, has at last been felt to be inadequate. It

is in part a reworking of the Hindu system. Men do not accept chaos; they ceaselessly

work to remake their world, they reach out for such ideas as are accessible and fit

their need (WC 62-3).

Similar sentiments appear intermittently in A Wounded Civilization. One can see that

the above quotation presents, to begin with, a confusing argument. Naipaul indicates a link

between the Shivaji cult and the Shiv Sena, but doesn’t explain the former – Shivaji was a

Maharashtrian Hindu chieftain who is popularly remembered for his resistance to the

Mughals. Naipaul implies that there is some link between the untouchable Buddhists and the

Shiv Sena, but doesn’t elucidate – it is one of antipathy, Naipaul says that the Sena is a great

contracting out, not from India, but from the Hindu system’ – but the described xenophobia is

anti-India or anti-national, and the Sena is largely conservative Hindu in character. Naipaul

sees the Sena as ‘infinitely more positive than the Anand Margis – and yet the Sena is

responsible for perpetrating an incomparable larger scale of violence. (From Naipaul’s point

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of view the Anand Margis seem to be condemned more for their alleged homosexual

practices than anything else).

And Naipaul asserts that ‘fascism is an ‘easy, imported word’ which presumably

doesn’t apply – but ‘fascism’ is not a word fixed for perpetuity in the context of Mussolini’s

Italy or Nazi Germany. Fascism is a political concept: briefly and simplistically, it

incorporates any attempt to define a nation or state in terms of racial, communal and cultural

purity and in that sense the Shiv Sena can be designated ‘fascist’. It can be seen as positive

only from a fascist (or semi-fascist) point of view. Naipaul’s statement is ultimately an

ideologically tilted statement he associates the Shiv Sena with the dispossessed and the

humiliated (including the untouchables or ‘dalits’), with industrial Bombay, with independent

India, and sees this as positive. The Shiv Sena has been (and is) uninterested in the

dispossessed and humiliated and industrial workers unless these are Hindu Maharashtrians, is

distant from the dalits, is implicitly anti-national in its xenophobic commitment, it probably

appears to be ‘positive’ to Naipaul only because it perversely falls into some sort of

consonance with his tenuous cultural essentialist reading of India.

Naipaul’s sentiments are not the result of a flair for quixotic statement. They express

real political sympathies and are the logical result of particular development in Naipaul’s

thinking I have charted out this development to some extent in this study. That Naipaul’s

disturbing political sympathies and antipathies in the Indian context are seriously offered is

underlined by the consistency with which he has repeated them since, and by the alacrity with

which these have been accepted by Hindu right wing organizations in India. Before going

into that, however, it is necessary to turn to his third and more voluminous book on India,

India: A Million Mutinies Now.

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 India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) is the work of a writer who looks back and

reassesses his past formulations. It has an air of retrospection about it, not dissimilar to A

Turn to the South (1985), or The Enigma of Arrival (1987), or, for that matter, A Way in the

World which was to appear four years later. And as in these books, this retrospection assumes

the form of a more philosophical and universalized apprehension of his experiences and of

the various cultures he had observed and written about. These mature writings are an attempt

to synthesize his observations about England, the Caribbean, Africa, Islamic countries,

America, and India – and indeed of his personal growth through these encounters – to reach

some sort of final resolution. All these books tend to be (as has been indicated earlier in this

study) less culture-specific and specifically judgmental and more attuned to the broader

concerns of mankind: the issue of faith, the nature of historical determinism, the spiritual

needs of people, and the modes of intellectual development. What devolves from these is (I

repeat) a basically conservative and anti-revolutionary ideology.

More importantly, the retrospection and expansion of preoccupation do not imply any

withdrawal of his earlier modes of cultural appraisal and evaluation. What occurs is an

attempt to present clearly a frame of thinking within which all his specific formulations

(about the mimic-mimicked counter point in the New World, about slavery and faith in the

Bible Belt of the USA, about blackness and African primitivism and violence, about the

dogmatism and regressiveness of Islam, about the essential Hindusim and twice removed

mimicry of India) can be coherently accommodated. A Million Mutinies Now falls squarely

within this endeavour. It brings an ostensibly broader and more universal frame of

understanding to India, which would confirm rather than invalidate any of his earlier cultural

essentialist formulations.

In keeping with this approach, A Million Mutinies Now has a more open-ended air

about it. It also has an unexpectedly reconciliatory tone: but this is clearly not actually a

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withdrawal of already expressed cultural essentialist view and political sympathies, rather a

renewed affirmation of these. It reasserts his already familiar understanding of India in a less

immediately abrasive and contentious fashion:

There was a paradox. My continental idea of an Indian identify, with the nerves if

continually exposed, would have made it hard for me to do worthwhile work in India.

The caste or group stability, the more focused view, enabled them, while remaining

whole in themselves to do work – modest improving things – rather than

revolutionary things in condition which to other might have seemed hopeless

[…]Many thousands of people had worked like that over the years, without any sense

of a personal drama, many millions, it had added up in the 40 years since

independence to an immense national effort. The results of that effort were now

noticeable. What looked sudden had been long prepared: the increased wealth

showed; the new confidence of people once poor showed. One aspect of that

confidence was a freeing of new particularities, new identities, which were as

unsettling to Indians as identities of caste and clan and region had been to me in 1962,

when I had gone to India only as an ‘Indian.’ (MMN 8-9)

It is, of course, comforting to know that Naipaul sees definite signs of increased

prosperity and confidence of India and appreciates the ‘modest, improving’ (rather than

revolutionary) efforts of millions of people. That these efforts and their results depend

ultimately on ‘caste or group’ stability – a stability which doesn’t derive, in other words,

from any nation-building effort or any dynamics of a secular community (a ‘continental idea

of an Indian identify’) – is more or less in keeping with Naipaul’s earlier reading of India’s

old world rootedness. Naipaul also mentions the ‘freeing of new particularities, new

identities’ with approbation. A Million Mutinies Now is largely a survey of ‘caste and group’

stability and ‘new particularities, new identities’ One finds that Naipaul’s perception of ‘caste

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and group stability’ and ‘new identities’ is not unlinked: the latter are ‘new’ only in the sense

that they reinvigorate (in a positive fashion, Naipaul evidently believes) what had previously

been seen as stultified old world (mostly Hindu) values.

On the whole A Million Mutinies Now reads as an objectively presented collection of

stories, more so than most of his other efforts in a similar mold. It does, however

systematically and persistently frame questions and organizes the stories around notions of

caste or group or particular identity. The result is better informed and more coherent than

both his earlier books on India. A Million Mutinies Now seems to have been designed to

rectify and elaborate on details in his earlier books (especially A Wounded Civilization).

Naipaul’s visit on this occasion takes him along a zigzagging route to some of the important

cities from the south to the north: from Bombay and Goa, to Bangalore and Mysore

(Karnataka), to Madras (Tamil Nadu) to Calcutta (West Bengal) to Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh),

to Delhi (at that time a Union Territory), to Chandigarh (also a Union Territory) to Amritsar

(Punjab), and finally to Srinagar (Kashmir).

By and large the people Naipaul meets in each city represent some sort of local

movement of group or are identified by Naipaul as such. So the visit to Bombay marked

primarily by stories of Shiv Sena leaders and activists, a Dalit (Untouchable) leader and

writer, people on the fringe of the Bombay film industry, Hindu and Muslim gangsters and

entrepreneurs. The former Portuguese colony of Goa recalls the New World for Naipaul. In

Bangalore Naipaul meets some progressive Brahmins, particularly scientists, politicians,

executives. In Mysore his most memorable encounter is with a Hindu priest connected to the

erstwhile Hindu royal household of Mysore. The visit of Madras centres primarily around

those who are involved in the anti-Brahminical and anti-religious but caste-based politics of

the Dravidian movement. In Calcutta he goes into the history of the ultra-left Naxalite

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movement with former Naxalites and their sympathizers. In Lucknow he talks to a range of

Muslims, commoners and ex-royalty.

In Delhi, he interviews certain conservative and liberal editors and publishers of

women’s magazines, which allows Naipaul to dwell on the situation of Indian women. In

Chandigarh and Amritsar Naipaul investigates the phenomenon of the. Sikh secessionist

movement and terrorism – he meets associates of the Sikh secessionist and terrorist leader

Bhindarwale (who died during the military Operation Blue star, which flushed out the

terrorists from the Golden Temple), and also some victims of terrorist violence. And finally,

in Srinagar, Naipaul associates with Kashmiri Muslims – this final section has more of a

personal and nostalgic touch to it, since it describes meetings with persons he had with during

his first visit to India in 1962.

Thus, as Naipaul moves from west to east to west and form south to north in A Million

Mutinies, Now, India seems to fragment into different groups and identities, according to,

religious community (Hindu, Muslim, Jain Sikh Buddhist); region (Maharashtrain, Tamil,

Bengali, Punjabi, etc.); religion overlapping with region (Lucknavi Muslim, Kashmiri

Muslim; Maharashtrian Hindu, Tamil Hindu, Mysore Hinndu, etc.); caste (upper, middle,

lower); ideological persuasion (Shiv Sena, Dravidian, Congress, Naxalite, etc.); caste

overlapping with ideological persuasion overlapping with religion (dalit Maharashtrian

Buddhist, lower caste Tamil Dravidian, etc.); occupation overlapping with all these

(Karnataki Brahmin scientist, Naxalite lecturer, Tamil Brahmin executive, Maharashtrian Jain

entrepreneur etc.); and all overlapping with class and economic standing (poor, prosperous,

holding a certain social status, etc.); and finally, all these are fraught with gender issues. The

picture is complex; and the complexity is authentic to the essentialist thinking comes through,

with a penchant for seeing old world values as playing a determinative regenerative role with

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regard to modern development and preoccupation. As a case in point, his comments on the

Brahmin scientists he met in Bangalore may be cited. His discussion with two of them led,

for instance, to reflections such as these:

[…] my thoughts, as I had driven down from Goa, through the untidy but energetic

towns, full of the signs of growth, and then through the well-tilled fields at harvest

time, had been of the Indian and, more specifically, Hindu awakening. If

Subramanian was right, there was a hidden irony in the awakening: that the group of

cast who had contributed so much to that awakening should now find itself under

threat. (MMN 161)

One would not be surprised to find here that, for Naipaul Indian ‘awakening’ (in this

context the development of science and technology) is equivalent to Hindu awakening. The

fact that he met scientists of Brahmin backgrounds doesn’t immediately suggest that such a

background was uniquely and perhaps unfairly well-situated to pursue education and a certain

kind of intellectual development; to Naipaul this appears to be to the particular credit of

Brahmins. He doesn’t consider the cultivation of science as a supersession and leveling out of

conservative Brahminical values; he sees this as a development and regeneration of Bhrhmins

as such. And to him the ‘threat’ to Brahmins doesn’t appear to be a natural condition of any

awakening, it seems to be ironical. Many other such observations can be cited from A Million

Mutinies Now.

Having covered his field, as it were, and demonstrated in an impressive fashion the

variegated colours and enormity of Indian society and culture. In other words, having

apprehended the fragmentations and fissures in India he tries in the final chapter to

comprehend it all in all overarching formulation:

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 In the 130 years or so since the Mutiny […] the idea of freedom has gone everywhere

in India. Independence was worked for by people more or less all the top; the

freedom it brought has worked its way down. People everywhere have ideas now of

who they are and what they owe themselves. That perhaps was only in a state of

becoming, has become clearer. The liberation of spirit that has come to India could

not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty,

it had to come as disturbance. It had to come as rage and revolt. India was now a

country of a million little mutinies.

A million mutinies, supported by twenty kinds of group excess, sectarian excess,

religious excess, regional excess: the beginnings of self-awareness, it would seem, the

beginnings of an intellectual life, already negated by old anarchy and disorder. But

there was in India now what didn’t exist 200 years before: a central will, a central

intellect and a national idea. The Indian Union was greater than the sum of its parts;

and many of the movements of excess strengthened the Indian state, defining it as the

source of law and civility and reasonableness. (MMN 317-18)

Apparently the idea is not too far from Jawaharlal Nehru’s understanding of India’s

‘unity in diversity’. But it is different; it essentially maintains (as it must if Naipaul is to

adhere to his cultural essentialist perception of India) that all the excess and violence is a

necessary part of India’s unity and development that some of these are indeed necessary for

India’s ‘awakening’ -- that, in fact, in the current condition of India anything goes. It does

not seem to occur to him that what he sees as a ‘million little mutinies’ could coalesce into

something larger which might (if not assessed adequately and in time) distort and pervert the

delicate balance of the ‘Indian Union.’ Naipaul’s notion of a million mutinies in India could

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be seen as another way of continuing to accommodate what had been most disturbing and

unwelcome in A Wounded Civilization.

Though A Million Mutinies Now admittedly differs from A Wounded Civilization in

assuming a more affirmative tone about India’s present and future, in its basic approach to

India it is as essentialist and politically worrying as the earlier book. The more disturbing

aspects of A Wounded Civilization outlined above have been consistently maintained by

Naipaul in his various articles and interviews about India which have appeared since he wrote

A Million Mutinies Now. The nineties in India have been witness to particularly strong wave

of Hindu communal politics. It could be seen to have taken off with the destruction of Babri

Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1990 to establish a temple to the Hindu god Rama,

ostensibly because the latter was born there; there had allegedly been a temple there before

which was destroyed and replaced by the mosque by Emperor Babar (the first Mughal

emperor).

The historical basis for the mythological claim to that land is flimsy and tenuous; the

historical circumstances of the latter claim are also far from clear. Several excellent historical

and sociological works about the dubiousness of the Hindu fundamentalists’ claims and

evidence’ (which Naipaul is clearly unaware of) have been available from shortly after the

incident. The initiation, build-up and culmination of what is now known as the Ayodhya

movement was largely sponsored and organized by a political party, the Bharatiya Janta Party

(BJP) (whose members hoped to fulfill political aspirations by playing the Hindu communal

card and espousing a Hindu communalist agenda) and certain ultra-Hindu organizations

which are affiliated to this party, like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Rashtriya

Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

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 The destruction of Babri Masjid led to communal violence between Hindus and

Muslims on a nationwide scale unprecedented since the partition. Throughout the nineties

the relationship between the two religious communities has deteriorated, jingoism and Hindu

communalism have flourished. The BJP has gradually and steadily consolidated its position

(with some assistance from the corrupt practices and incompetence of the other national

parties) – and it has recently culminated in the BJP leading a coalition to form the

government. Naipaul has been a constant supporter of the rise of Hindu communal politics in

India, which is seen by many as (despite Naipaul’s objections) a semi-fascist and

fundamentalist. But Naipaul call it assertion of the Hindus.

Naipaul has reiterated his superficial and schematic view of Indian History (an

Islamic invasion from approximately AD 1000 which has vandalized a self-contained

essentially Hindu India followed by an intellectually debilitating Muslim imperialist and an

intellectually regenerative British imperialism, the main victims in all of which have been

Hindu Indians), and his vision of progress through a constant rediscovery of this ‘true’

history (wherein the ‘million mutinies’ uncomplicatedly become to Naipaul a positive Hindu

movement). These views have been reasserted in a controversial interview with Dileep

Padgaonkar which appeared in The Times of India (18 July 1993), in an article entitled ‘A

Million Mutinies’ which appeared in India Today (1 August 1997) on the occasion of fifty

years of India’s independence, and most recently in another interview with Rahul Singh in

The Times of India (23/24 January 1998). In all of these, he had restated his simplistic views

of history, with as little attention to detail, current research, and historiographical thinking as

was evident in A Wounded Civilization. His references to Indian historians is unthinkingly

dismissive – he absurdly believes that they are all Marxist (and therefore must be flawed),

and usually cites Romila Thapar’s book as a good example (the book in question is the

Pelican History of India, vol. 1,(1966) -- itself a sketchy and popular historical account by an

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eminent historian). Apart from an unwarranted conviction in the ‘truth’ of his view of Indian

history, the only significant aspect of this view is that it is very close to that of pioneers of

modern Hindu communalism. It is, for example, very similar to the view of Indian history to

be found in V.D. Savarkar’s Hindutva (1942) (literally ‘Hinduness’), in which Savarkar, one

of the founders of the VHP, called for a racially, culturally, and nationally pure Hindu India.

Naipaul’s views coincide with those of fundamentalist and semi-fascist Hindu

communalists beyond this. Naipaul has actively expressed his support of Hindu communalist

movements and organizations which have resulted in or caused large-scale violence and

bloodshed. In the 18 July 1993 Times of India interview with Padgaonkar, Naipaul came out

in favour of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, and described the communal violence as the

symptom of the regeneration of a historically slighted Hindu India which has remained

insulted and humiliated for a thousand years – ‘a movement from below’, ‘a mighty creative

process’. When the Shiv Sena and the BJP won the elections in Maharashtra in 1995,

Naipaul described this as a ‘good sign’ and reportedly said ‘you must be sympathetic to a

movement that is laying claim to the land. You cannot dismiss it as fascist’ – according to a

report in the Indian Express (2 April 1995). In the 23/24 January 1998 Times of India

interview with Rahul Singh, he makes similar points again about the Ayodhya issue and the

rise of the BJP, albeit in a more circumspect fashion:

I don’t think the people of India have been able to come to terms with that wrecking

of the Islamic invasion around AD 1000. I don’t think they understand what really

happened. It’s too painful. And I think this BJP movement and that masjid business

is part of a new sense of history, a new idea of what happened. It might be

misguided. It might be wrong to misuse it politically, but I think it is part of a

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 historical process. And to abuse it as Fascist is to fail to understand why it finds an

answer in a so many hearts in India.

This coincidence of view with Hindu communalists has also meant that Naipaul has

constantly exacerbated the Indian Muslim’s sense of insecurity, and aired anti-Islamic

sentiments. That also is all too coherent with this writings about Islam – but I have gone into

that already.

On the whole, Naipaul’s writings on India have some merits. They demonstrate a

certain dedication on the part of the writer, who persistently tries to delve deeper into an

unwieldy social and cultural formation. In them, Naipaul characteristically displays his talent

for close observation and ability to assimilate carefully what he sees before him. And in

bringing these qualities to bear on India over a sufficient period of time and with patience he

does convey something of the complexities and diversities of India in an impressive fashion –

especially in A Million Mutinies Now. On the other hand, Naipaul’s writings on India also

demonstrate that the kind of observed surface truth that he leans towards can lead to deeply

tenuous and unstudied perceptions. His penchant for cultural essentialist analysis and

evaluation results in particularly disturbing political connotation in the Indian context. To

summarize simplistically:

(a) Naipaul has offered theoretical support (in the shape of distorted view of history, a

tenuous notion of India as essentially Hindu, and certain abstract platitudes about

historical process) to fundamentalist and semi-fascist Hindu communal ideologies in

India, and has seen as positive that which is patently detrimental to the happiness and

security of the Indian people now and in the future. He protests that he is interested

only in cultural ideas and historical progression – if that is so, his failure to see the

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 pragmatic implications of expressing sympathy for xenophobia and communalist

organizations is irresponsible.

(b) He has consequently condoned the large-scale violence perpetrated at the behest of

Hindu communalist organizations and directed primarily against Muslims. He has

contributed thereby to the sense of insecurity of more than 110 million legitimate and

rooted citizens of India – the Muslims. By implication, this sense of insecurity could

extend to other smaller minorities too.

Naipaul’s writings on India have appeared at regular intervals throughout a long and

accomplished career, and this survey does, I hope, convey not only his specific views on

India but also the general tenor of his preoccupations and reflection. Naipaul has engaged

with a wide variety of interlinked issues and contexts. The issues range from personal history

to the historical determination of culture and society; from colonization to the constitution of

post-colonial states; from the complexities of specific racial groups, religious communities,

and nationalities, to the broader concerns of human spiritual needs, intellectual life political

ideology; from fiction to reality and from fantasy to truth.

Most of Naipaul’s critics1 have maintained that what ultimately underlines this broad

canvas and even transcends it is his quality as a writer; that irrespective of whether one agrees

or disagrees with his cultural evaluations and asseverations, whether one sympathizes with

his view about the world or with his attempts to find his place in the world, the literary art of

Naipaul has been of an unvaryingly high quality and renders everything he has written

worthy of note. Naipaul is ultimately memorable not merely for his thoughts and ideas (these

are often questionable), his critics maintain, but because he is a good, perhaps great, writer of

books. This brings us back to the point with which I began the present study: Naipaul’s self-

consciousness as a writer of book, his sense of the physical tangibility of the book, and of the

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closure of the book. Arguably Naipaul has always maintained this. His attention to language,

form, style of his book displays a consistent attention to completion. Naipaul has always

worried about the perfection of the book, irrespective of what it may state, and the results are

aesthetically pleasing and satisfying and invariably readable, as his critics have customarily

maintained.

The separation between evaluations of how well Naipaul has written and what he has

written implicit in such critical sentiments, however, need not be accepted. Judging from his

critical view (expressed in so many of his books, essays and interview), Naipaul himself

would be reluctant to go along with such a separation. It could justifiably be maintained, for

instance, that if Naipaul himself would be reluctant to go along with such a separation. It

could justifiably be maintained, for instance, that if Naipaul has used predominantly realistic

narratives in his novel it is because he is persuaded that there is always a reality to be

authenticated, a truth to be discerned, and there are universal human criteria to be employed

in engaging with different societies and contexts. His use of distancing techniques, his

attempts at placing himself objectively, his endeavour occasionally to efface the writer and all

the formal nuances consequent on these – are part of this project to discern and express

human truths, authentic features and universal evaluative criteria. The very motivation

behind his self-exposure to different cultures and contexts, and the confidence with which he

does this, is grounded in this conviction. Ideological commitments (such as being

antirevolutionary, being a cultural essentialist, being a seeker after authenticity, being

conservative, and even being spiritually attuned) derive from his convictions, and the stylistic

nuances of his writings are conditional upon these – they permit him to be lyrical, angry,

scathing, jokey, and so forth. If to evaluate Naipaul’s writings aesthetically is to mean

anything more than commending him for his indubitably sound grasp of the English

language, it would have to explore the conjunction of what he has written and how he has

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written about it. The critical industry which has grown around Naipaul’s writings will, I

expect, continue to do that.

On the title page of the novel Half ALife (2001), Naipaul uses the soliloquy of a

character of the book itself as an epigraph:

The air was hot and stale inside. Looking out from the bedroom window, through

wire netting and dead insects, […] Willie thought, ‘I don't know where 1 am, I don't

think I can pick my way back. I don't ever want this view to become familiar. I must

not unpack. I must never behave as though I am staying. (HAL 1)

The admission or confession of Willie Somerset Ramchandran that he doesn't know

where he is, and he doesn't think he can pick his way back, clearly dramatizes the dilemma

and predicament with which Naipaul has been living all his life. In fact, it would hardly be

an exaggeration to suggest that the entire literary endeavours of Naipaul are directed

primarily at overcoming the fate of Willie Ramachandran. Unlike Willie Ramachandran,

however, Naipaul wants to know for sure as to who he is and where he should be. Born to a

family of Indian immigrant in Trinidad, Naipaul could never identify himself with the place.

Even though he loved the natural beauty of the place, he always felt a sort of distance

between himself and the local life. Talking of his interaction or the lack of it with the locals,

when he was in his grandmother's house in Port of Spain, Naipaul says:

To stand beside the banisters on the steps gave a perfect view of the street and the

people. I got to know the people well, though I never spoke to them and they never

spoke to me. I got to know their clothes and style and voices.(AWP 1)

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 Hence, Naipaul's knowledge of the people on the street remained detached, and

without personal touch. He never had an urge to be intimate with them. So his knowledge is

that of an outsider, an onlooker.

Naipaul's inability to identify himself with the place of his birth is hardly helped by

his being misfit in his family. As they were Brahmins from the then United Province, India,

they were quite orthodox in their religious belief, and the household atmosphere was

elaborately ritualistic. Young Naipaul neither knew the language of the ritual nor had the

inclination to understand its symbolism. As he says that, ‘though growing up in an orthodox

family, I remained almost totally ignorant of Hinduism.’ (AD 27)

Moreover, the language that was spoken in his family and the Indian community he

belonged to was Hindi, which, though, he could understand but could not speak. It must have

proved a kind handicap in his personal communication, as he acknowledges “when older

people in our joint family spoke to me in Hindi I replied in English” (AWP 1).Incidentally, it

was the English language in which he had set his goal of realizing his writing ambition. But

what he comes to understand much early in his life was that, being in Trinidad, a small

island, it was not possible to produce a great literature. Elaborating on this Naipaul says:

It was something we, with literary ambitions from these islands, all had to face:

small places with simple economies bred small people with simple destinies. Their

literary possibilities, like their economic possibilities were as narrow as their human

possibilities. They didn't give a fiction writer or a poet much to write about; they

cramped and quickly exhausted a talent which in a larger and more varied space

might have spread its wing and done unsuspected things. (AWP 16)

Thus, Naipaul was convinced that small places would give rise in all probability, to a

narrow creative vision. It is with this handicap that many of the eminent names like Derek

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Walcott, Edgar Mittelholzer, Samuel Selvon etc. in Caribbean literature, in Naipaul's view,

had to work under. (AWP 26)

Naipaul, who claims to be a born unbeliever, amidst the orthodoxy of his family and a

quite bleak prospect for a writer takes in Trinidad a vow at the age of 12 to leave the place

Trinidad in 5 years, which he did in 1950, when he came to London. Here he tried

simultaneously to move in two directions: (a) pursuing his studies and (b) shaping up his

career as a writer. But very soon he realizes that though London can provide him with a

house it cannot be his home. To quote Naipaul:

“I come to London. It had become the centre of my world and I had worked hard to

come to it. And I was lost. London was centre of my world. 1 had been misled […]

It was a good place for getting lost in a city no one ever knew. (AD 18)

And he goes on further,

Here I became no more than an inhabitant of a big city robbed of loyalties, time

passing taking me away from what I was, thrown more and more into myself […].

All mythical Lands faded in the big city. I was confined to a smaller world than I

had ever known. I become my flat, my desk, my name. (AD 38)

Thus, his wish to escape confining effects of the small and confined world of the

Caribbean islands and to become part of a larger world remains unrealized even in London.

Very soon, he realizes that the European or English life is far too away from his experience

to enable him to make it a subject of his writing. Naturally he falls back on his childhood

memory and experience of the Indian immigrants of Trinidad. This decision to focus on the

Caribbean Indian life was also helped by his belief that fiction writing was a serious

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business, and hence, be done with all sincerity. ‘The novel’, according to Naipaul, ‘is not an

individual fantasy, it is a form of social inquiry’. (IAWC 8)

It was his sincerity that he mostly kept himself confined to the limited world of the

Caribbean Indian, even though he was criticized and rebuked by writers from the West

Indies, notably by George Lamming, for not paying sufficient attention in his books to non-

Indian groups. (AD 30)

Thus, with experience of the small world of a small Indian diaspora community in

Trinidad, he undertakes travels primarily to connect himself to his roots and enlarge his

world of experience, as it was essential, in his view, for a writer of the small place like him.

In A Writer's People he says, “every writer of the region has to find a way of going on or off

not drying up, of overcoming the limitations of the place.” (AD 26)

But travels, while providing opportunities to know the world and its people, are also a

means to know the self. As Naipaul says, “I cannot travel only for the sight” (IAWC 8).In

reality, the starting point of his travels, especially those of India, has been an inquiry into

his self.

Naipaul’s search for his self, his root and identity in India has resulted in three travel

accounts acclaimed as Indian Trilogy: An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded

Civilization (1977) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). These three books are a

sincere enquiry into Indian's outlook of life and the world, Indian psyche and attitudes,

movements of history and the role of intellectuals, individual and society, religion and

politics, patriotism and propaganda. All these books of Naipaul’s have done very well in

India in terms of sales but not in terms of appreciation. An Area of Darkness was found

cantankerous with lapidary grace and piety, whereas India: A Wounded Civilization was said

to contain vitriolic bite and numbing pessimism. However, India: A Million Mutinies Now

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has been appreciated by many as a serene and sincere consideration of situations in India.

Some Indian scholars have even concluded that Naipaul lacks sympathy and understanding

of India. According to Prof M.K. Naik, “V.S. Naipaul's Indian ancestry is indisputable, but

he is so much of an outsider when he writes about India and Indians, and so much of an

insider while dealing with Caribbean life and character.” (4)

Edward Said attributes fault finding attitude in Naipaul to Joseph Conrad's bad

influence on him. According to him:

In one important respect, latter writers like Graham Greene and V.S. Naipaul

have followed Conrad's unfortunate example: when there is something

indigenous to be described it is, following Conrad, unutterably corrupt,

degenerate and irredeemable. (Cedric 168)

But one does not feel inclined to easily agree with either Prof. Naik or Edward Said.

Naipaul may have had spent his childhood in the Caribbean island, but he has studied India

and studied a lot about India. Moreover, there is no basis for having doubts about Naipaul's

sincerity in having the desire to know India from close quarters.

Having discussed the question why Naipaul takes travels especially travels to India so

seriously - because it enlarges his creative vision, adds to his experience of life, and helps

him to define who or what he is - there remain broadly two issues to consider:

(i) Why does Naipaul write about India and Indians the way he does?

(ii) Why do Indians respond to his writings the way they do?

As a child Naipaul was a keen observer of things around him. Yet his knowledge of

the Caribbean life remained limited to that of the Indian immigrants which subsequently

became basis for the creative vision of his novels. The urge to know this Indian world - its

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beliefs, doubts, psyche, religion etc. - in depth was bound to drive him to see and feel India

as it was in reality and not as it was in scholarly books or in his father's stories. Recalling the

childhood notion of India, Naipaul says:

India had, in a special way, been the country from which my grandfather came, a

country never physically described and therefore never real, a country out in the void

beyond the dot of Trinidad; from it our journey was final. It was a country suspended

in time. (AD 21)

Naipaul's urge to be intimate with India in concrete terms was whetted by his

realization of the existence of a very complex kind of relationship between himself and India.

As he says: “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 am at once too close and too far.” (AD

42)

So whatever Geography and Politics may say, Naipaul is constantly aware of the

Indian blood in him. With such awareness he cannot be expected to be anything but sincere

in matters dealing with India.

Naipaul's criticisms of India, which have mostly been pathological, can also, be seen

as an attempt to draw attention towards himself. Incidentally, it is Naipaul himself who

provides basis for such an assumption when he declares:

In Trinidad to be Indian was to be distinctive. To be anything there was distinctive,

difference was each man's attribute. To be an Indian in England was distinctive, in

Egypt it was more so. Now in Bombay I entered a shop or a restaurant and awaited a

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 special quality of response. And there was nothing. It was like being divided part of

my reality. (AD 39)

This quotation might appear to support the above hypothesis, that is, Naipaul’s

design to seek attention towards himself. But we also know that Naipaul, in the past, has

been known for his forthright, often unpleasant remarks, and not for saying things to elicit a

particular response. However, it is true that he never hesitated saying things even if

unpleasant, when he had the hunch of its truth. A case in point is his long friendship (1957-

1994) with the British author Anthony Powell. It came to an abrupt end in 1994 when

Naipaul had to review his book. It made him remark that “it may be that the friendship lasted

all this time because I had not examined his work.” (AWP 41)

Thus Naipaul’s criticism of India and the Indians grows out perhaps of his deep

rooted attachment with the country and its culture and civilization. He doesn't seem to be

taking a sadistic pleasure at its plight but nudging the Indians to rebuild the nation and take

it to the peak.

One of the reasons that Naipaul's account of India is thought to be that of a colonialist,

outsider and high-brow, is his childhood conception of India, the conception of an idyllic

and perfect India. But the real encounter with India (1962-1964) found the country not an

area of hope and light but An Area of Darkness. The note of dissatisfaction grows into

pessimism and despondency in his second visit to India in which under emergency it

appears to him A Wounded Civilization (1975-1976). Further on, in his third visit to India

(Dec. 1988-90) the situation reaches a pass where there remains a hope in only A Million

Mutinies Now.

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 In reality, Naipaul's shockingly ironic comments are perhaps aimed at breaking the

inertia of the Indian masses so that they can regain their force and dynamism. Therefore he

targets those aspects of Indian life which are either too sacrosanct like religion, Gandhi,

nationalism, or too commonplace to draw attention like hypocrisy, corruption, callousness,

sanitationetc. Discussing the caste-ridden Indian society and its consequent degeneration,

Naipaul observes:

Class is a system of rewards. Caste imprisons a man in his function. From it follows,

since there are no rewards, the duties and responsibilities become irrelevant to

position. A man is his proclaimed function. There is little subtlety to India. The poor

are thin; the rich fat. (AD 76)

The importance of Gandhi to modern India is unquestionable. Like a novelist who

splits himself into his characters, the many sided Gandhi permeates modern India. He is

hidden and unknown but the drama that is being played out in India today is the drama he

set up sixty years ago when he returned to India after the racial battles of South Africa.

(IWAC 172)

But Gandhi for him was not a man with complete system of ideology. He was the

summation of so many parts never making a whole. To quote Naipaul:

In fact there was no completeness to him (Gandhi). He was full of bits and pieces he

had picked up here and there; his mother's love of fasting and austerities, the

English common law, Ruskin's idea of labour, Tolstoy’s Russian religious dream, the

South African Jail Code, the Manchester No Breakfast Association. (AWP 168)

And these pieces, even if put together, would not fit well. Naipaul calls him an

epitome of intellectual confusion and hence it is not easy to enter the culturally denuded

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mind of Gandhi. Here it is important to remember that although the influence of Gandhi on

Modern Indian society is undeniable, the nature of this influence is certainly a matter of

debate. But Naipaul is very clear about Gandhi's influence on symbolic acts, “Symbolic

action was the curse of India yet Gandhi was Indian enough to deal in symbols. The spinning

wheel did not dignify labour; it was only absorbed into the great Indian symbolism.” (AD

83)

In Naipaul's view Gandhi used Hindu revivalism to strengthen nationalism, which

ultimately undid the whole endeavour of Gandhi in the form of partition following which he

was assassinated and he himself became a symbol, a very useful symbol for the Indian

hypocrites. Today “Nothing remains of Gandhi in India but his name and the worship of his

image” (AWP 129)

If Gandhi seems to be a bad influence on India, his disciple Vinoba Bhave becomes a

laughing stock, ‘a foolish man’ to Naipaul. Even Neerad C. Chaudhury doesn’t fare well in

his assessment even though his Autobiography is praised with certain reservations.

In a land where shabda pramana (verbal testimony) is recognized as a valid

epistemological category, Naipaul probably tries to impart among Indians an impulse of

questioning which is so missing in modem India. His attack on Gandhi, Vinoba and Nirad C

Chaudhury is a case in point. One of the most considered criticisms of Naipaul’s regarding

India is a lack of critical tradition at the moment:

India has no means of judging. India is hard and materialist. What it knows best

about Indian writers and books are their advances and their prizes. There is little

discussion about the substance of a book or its writer […]. Literary criticism is still

hardly known as an art. The most important judgments of an Indian book continue to

be imported. (AWP 193)

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 It is this lack of proper critical atmosphere and an autonomous intellectual life which

explains the denial of international recognition to Indian literature. How can there emerge a

national literature, observes Naipaul, where the books are published by people outside,

judged by people outside and to a large extent bought by people outside.

As Naipaul hardly subscribes to any established isms, his views about Communism

and the Marxist Scholars in India have been far from appreciative. And it explains a great

deal why he generates so much reaction against his comments and writings in India.

Summing up the relationship between Bengal and Communism he holds that Communism

was what, inevitably, the Bengal renaissance led to in the mid-twentieth century; that was

where the new learning ran finally into the sand. (AWP 180)

The Indian Trilogy of Naipaul shows in a very compelling manner not only India on

the move but also the author on the move. Staring from An Area of Darkness, Naipaul’s

knowledge about India has acquired greater intimacy and completeness. And, moreover, the

shock that he felt in his first two visits gave him deeper awareness and understanding of the

fact. As a result the bitterness and shock of the first and disappointment and pessimism of the

second give way to a sanguine hope in the third. And hence Naipaul has the realization that in

course of freedom movement India has achieved the truest kind of liberty, which in due

course after independence has gone down to the lowest sections of Indian society. But this

process is still on and it may not be completely a peaceful process. As Naipaul says, “In

India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to come as disturbance. It had

to come as rage and revolt. India was now a million little mutinies.” (MMN 603)

To conclude why Naipaul's Indian travels - the search for his self-identify and root

was so tumultuous? The answer is quite simple. He misunderstood Indians' taste buds.

Indians had no problems with bitter pills of criticism that he supplied in his An Area of

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Darkness and India: A wounded Civilization, provided they had been coated with sugar.

And Naipaul should have known it for he knew much about sugarcane plantation.

References:

Naipaul, V.S. Half a Life. Picador, 2001. Print.

Naipaul, V.S. A Writer's People : Ways of Looking and Feeling. Picador, 2007. Print.

Naipaul, V.S. An Area of Darkness. Picador, 1964. Print.

Naipaul, V.S. India a Wounded Civilization. Reprint. 2002. Print.

Vaidyanathan, T.G. Naipaul's mea culpa, The Hindu, 4 Nov, 1990

---- Mr. Naipaul's Round Trip, Hindu, 1 Nov, 1998.

-----Naipaul’s mea culpa, Hindu 4 Nov. 1990

Naik, M. K.. A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademy, New

Delhi. 1982 Print.

Watts, Cedric. A Preface to Conrad Pearson. Delhi: Education. 1993 Print.

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 Chapter-7

CONCLUSION

…. Travelers never did lie

Though fools at home condemn these.

Tempest, Act – III, Scene – III

Over four hundred years ago William Shakespeare underlined the significance of the

comments and observations of a traveller, and he also hinted at anger and consternation they

cause amongst the natives of the visited lands, incidentally V.S. Naipaul, a Trinidad born

English author whose forefathers were of Indian origin, produced travel accounts of India

which ‘fools at home’ were compelled to ‘condemn’. They were aggrieved and dismayed at

the way India was presented in his travel accounts of India. In a span of twenty seven years

Naipaul undertook three planned visits to India which were extensive and purposeful. The

outcome of these visits comes before us in the form of An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A

Wounded Civilization (1977) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). All these books had

a professed purpose. Naipaul wanted to have a first-hand experience of the home land of his

forefathers. He wanted to know Indian people and society in order to be able to configure

India in his own identity.

But Naipaul’s account of India in his three books is not similar and uniform. To him

India was a land immersed in darkness, with no more energy, vitality and even history in

1964. But the same India becomes a land of possibility, vitality and happenings and a land of

million mutinies now. He notices positive energy in the air. However Naipaul’s hatred for

Indian practice of sanitation and defecation remained unchanged. The present study tried to

understand first:

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 1. The nature of travel writing as a genre and Naipaul’s use of it.

2. The diaspora and its dialectic nature in which there is always a tension along with

pulls and pushes between home land and the dwelling land, and the resultant problem

of personal bonding, loyalty and identity.

3. The role of the dialectical existence in shaping up the form and content of the three

travel accounts of India.

II

1. Travel writing as a means to know the ‘other’, has been in existence from ancient

times. But in modern times it has emerged as a very significant component of post-

colonial discourse. The establishment of colonies by imperial powers set off a process

of mass migration of people from one region to another, from one country to another,

and from one continent to another. It was a period which witnessed the beginning of

colonial discourse and at the same time the rise of the same to such a dominant

discourse of the day. But the colonial discourse also produced a resistance and

opposition to it which ultimately came before us in the form of post-colonial

discursive practices. And travel account is an important tool to comprehend and

communicate this process as part of post-colonial discourse.

‘To travel’, according to Carl Thomson (2011) ‘is to make a journey, a movement

through space. […] it is the negotiation between self and other that is brought by movement

in space.’ (P-9) Obviously, visiting an unknown place or a new community will involve an

interaction or negotiation between the traveller and the ‘other’. As a visitor wants to know

more and more about the place and the people he is visiting, he has to open himself up. He

tends to place himself in a receptive state of mind. In doing so, he brings in life-long

experience and emotional make up. And in this way travel account acquires a wider social

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significance. Travel writing, according to Tim Youngs, is the most socially important literary

genre. It records our temporal and spatial progress. It throws light on how we define

ourselves and how we identify others. Its construction of our sense of ‘me’ and ‘you’, ‘us’

and ‘them’ operates on individual and national level and in the realms of psychology, society

and economics. Thus the scope of travel writing tends to become very extensive in its reach

and impact.

Travel writing, as a genre, is often contrasted with creative writing on the ground of

the fact fiction opposition. Travel writing is thought to be predominantly factual first person

prose accounts of travels that have been undertaken by the author-narrator. It imphasize two

things:-

(a) First person narrative of the external world, that is , the area visited by the

traveller, and

(b) The factual nature of travel writing. The traveller/author has to weave his

narrative on the basis of observation and not imagination.

But travel writing does not always conform to the above formulations. Specially the

requirement that travel writing should deal with facts objectively following the principle of

verifiability has not been met very often. Authors have also been seen passing on over-

generalized opinions instead of objective and calm description of what they observed. Travel

writings of V.S. Naipaul display significant elements of speculation, imagination and

unsubstantiated generalization. While writing of travels, Naipaul is not dependent on his

observation. He frequently uses his memory, childhood experience and his imagination. The

interference of his personal liking and bias is not infrequent. This is why his books have

generated so much anger, disagreement and vituperative criticism.

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 Travel writing, as a genre, has been classified by Carl Thompson on the basis of the

mode of depiction:

(a) Reporting the World

(b) Revealing the Self and

(c) Representing the Other.

The travel writings of V.S. Naipaul pertaining to India which we have studied for this

dissertation, contain in them the elements of all the three types enumerated above.

Manifestly, V.S. Naipaul aims at depicting India, Indian people and the Indian world –view,

but in doing so he tends to reveal his own self also. As a result his three books on India are as

much about Naipaul as they are about India. The three books may be helpful in understanding

India but they are indispensable for understanding Naipaul’s diasporic existence of Naipaul

and his bond with India.

III

2. A Significant part of the present study has been the examination of the nature of

diasporic existence. Hence, an attempt has been made to understand diaspora and

discuss some of the chief theoretical interventions in the study of diaspora. In this

regard theoretical perspectives of William Safran (1991), Vijay Mishra (1994), Robin

Cohen (2008), Avtar Brah (1996) John Mcleod (2010) Kapil Kapoor (2004) Makrand

Paranjape (2004) etc. have been taken into account.

Etymologically a term ‘diaspora’ means dispersion, scattering orsowing.

Traditionally, the term has been associated with dispersion of the Jesus. However, its usage in

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modern times is extended to any individual or community who has migrated from their

original homeland under compulsion or for certain economic or political gain.

William Safran (1991) has characterized the diaspora asunder:

1. They or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific original ‘centre’ to

two or more peripheral regions;

2. They retain a collective memory, vision or myth about their original homeland

its physical location, history and achievements;

3. They believe that they are not and perhaps cannot be fully accepted by the

hostsociety and therefore feel partly alienated and insulated for it;

4. They regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as theplace

which they or their descendants would eventually return-whenconditions are

appropriate;

5. They believe that they should collectively be committed to themaintenance or

restoration of their homeland and to its safety and prosperity, and

6. They continue to relate personally or vicariously to that homeland in one way or

theother, and their ethno-communal consciousness and solidarity are

importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship.

This characterization has been disputed by several scholars on the basis that Safran’s

formulation is too deeply rooted in the Judaic experience. Vijay Mishra argues that Safran

takes for granted the existence of an exclusive and pure community whereas Diasporas are

the result of confluence with the host society and it is the creation of its own political myths

rather than the real possibilities of a return to homeland. According to Vijay Mishra,

diasporas are:

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 (i) Relatively homogenous, displaced communities brought to serve the

Empire (slave, contract, indentured, labourers) co-existing with

indigenous/other races with the markedly ambivalent and contradictory

relationship with the motherland(s). Linked to high (classical)

capitalism.

(ii) Emerging new diasporas based on free migration linked to late

capitalism.

(iii) Any group of migrants that sees itself or the periphery of power, or

excluded from sharing power (Mishra 1994).

The framework provided by Vijay Mishra is much broader which accounts for the

contemporary migration of people also. However, the definition provided by Robin Cohen

(1997) is much more cogent. He describes diaspora as communities:

living together in one country who acknowledge that the old country – a notion often

buried deep in language, religion, custom or folklore -- always has some claim on

their loyalty and emotions. […] a member’s adherence to a diasporic community is

demonstrated by an acceptance of an inescapable link with their part migration history

and sense of co-ethnicity with others of a similar background.

The beauty of Cohen’s is that it takes into a account even those who themselves have

not migrated; it was their forefathers who hand left their homelands.

Whatever may be the situation, a person’s place in a diasporic existence is a divided

self between the homeland and the host land. He may depend for physical and economic

support but naturally and emotionally he always feels linked with his homeland. And the idea

of homeland and host land is not static. With the change in existential condition and other

concomitant changes, the notion of home and host also undergo significant change. And this

194
process continues all the time. Thus a diasporic person gets trapped in the dialectics of

homeland and host land, and it is this pull and push from both sides that make the views of

diasporas skewed, prejudiced in one way or the other. Some scholars have raised the question

of diaspora’s restlessness and agony for his homeland. Makrand Paranjape (2004) has

referred Vijay Mishra comparing diaspora with someone (foetus) who has been rejected by

the womb. Now no matter how much he tries he cannot get back into the womb again. So a

diasporic existence involves a loss which can never be recovered, and the sufferer is

supposed to be constantly on the run and restless in search of a utopia.

The case of Naipaul is even more complex. His grandfather went to Trinidad as a

small boy along with his maternal grandfather. Naipaul’s father and he himself were born in

Trinidad itself. And at the age of 18 he left for England in 1950 and since then he has been

residing in England. And thus he has been a resident of England for over sixty five years. So

for him, technically his homeland would be Trinidad, whereas his forefather was of Indian

origin. But Naipaul does carry an image of India as his ancestral homeland. On the other hand

England, which has given him bread and butter, name, fame and recognition, also has a claim

on him. As are result, Naipaul’s personality and emotional make-up becomes hybrid in nature

which reflects in his love - hate approach to India in his travel accounts.

IV

V.S. Naipaul’s three extended visits to India in search of his umbilical cord resulted in

three significant account of India by him: An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded

Civilization (1977), and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). These three accounts of India

are not the same. They display changes and they are not the same. They display changes

taking place in India and changes in the author’s outlook of India because of his diasporic

195
position. He can see India only in a particular way. The story starts from An Area of

Darkness.

Naipaul’s writings are inextricably merged with his personal experience and no

study on Naipaul can be conducted without taking into account the formative forces behind

his literary talent. One such major force was the Hindu-India of the Caribbean in which he

was born and brought up. His grandmother’s house provided the first link with his Hindu self

and with the India of his ancestors. Naipaul grew up with a highly eulogized idea of India.

Although he did not understand much about the Hindu rules and rituals of his grandmother’s

house, there was always something sacred in the very idea of India. He was next introduced

to the Hindu India of his father’s stories, which epitomized for him the unity of the old world.

As he grew, Naipaul observed a chasm between the two worlds that he inhabited. One was

the colonial world of Trinidad and the other was the old Hindu world. At the beginning of his

career, Naipaul attempted to block out his experience of his own society. However, he

realized that it was out of his experience that his writings would evolve and so he returned to

draw on his experience. The same pattern emerges in Naipaul’s engagement with India in his

books.

Naipaul’s first book on India, An Area of Darkness was the outcome of his first

face-to-face encounter with India. India so far had been to him only an idea which he had

inherited in Trinidad. When faced with the actuality of India, its distress and pain affected

Naipaul more strongly than its newly won independence. He could not catch the dominant

nationalistic spirit of those times and, instead, wrote a very personal account of his

experiences and disappointments. The India of his dreams, the India of his grandfather was

lost forever. The diasporic insecurities began to work and soon transformed into an urge for

escape and flight. The book represents the first stage in Naipaul’s growth as a diasporic writer

with a multinational vision because, in this book, Naipaul has marked the areas that created

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unrest in him. Naipaul’s second book on India, India: A Wounded Civilization marks the

second stage in his expansion of his vision and progression of his engagement with India. The

book is Naipaul’s exposition of the problems of India Here, the areas that Naipaul had

marked in An Area of Darkness are subjected to extensive scrutiny and the causes behind the

pain and squalor and deficiencies of India are found. Naipaul identifies one major cause that

is at the root of all maladies of India: a deep rupture was caused in the people’s idea of

themselves by repeated invasions and conquests. The traditional knowledge and talent was

systematically destroyed and with the coming of the British, there occurred the final rupture

in the sensibilities of the people. Traditional skills and craftsmanship died out. Alien

institutions were forced on the people and traditional institutions were so completely

destroyed that even after independence, India could not produce even a fragment of the talent,

knowledge and expertise that it had possessed in the past. The concept of nationhood was

totally alien to India as India had so far only known a series of rulers in the past. Gandhi

mobilized the people of India to an idea of unity by invoking the aged-old Indian concept of

dharma. He infused new meaning in the ideals of service and sacrifice in such a way that the

struggle for independence cut across caste and class barriers. Independence was won but the

idea of self-governance did not reach the masses. The nameless millions, who had walked

behind Gandhi now returned to their individual worlds and personal interests. Gandhi was

thus absorbed into Indian symbolism. Gandhism became ritualized and lost its ideological

content. Indian leadership continued to work on the old British patterns; the British

institutions continued to function. However, Naipaul does record development at those

places, where he observes a change in the people at the grass-root level. He also sees

development in the change that the creation of industries brought about in the lives of the

people. By giving the landless poor an alternative to their unending indebtedness and poverty,

197
the industries created people who had a new sense of the self and a new morality. In this

movement at the bottom of the social ladder lay Naipaul’s hope for the regeneration of India.

Naipaul’s third book on India, India: A Million Mutinies Now marks the third stage in

Naipaul’s engagement with India. In this book Naipaul has analyzed and explained the

constructions of his own first response to India. Naipaul has also traced a steady growth in

the lives of Indian women. Throughout the book, Naipaul has observed womanhood in

various forms and also the subtle ways in which it has begun to assert itself. Naipaul also

observes the double burden of the home and the workplace that the new Indian woman has to

carry. In India: A Million Mutinies Now, Naipaul has recorded a chain of voices that proclaim

that India is on the move. Naipaul’s own voice is mainly restricted to the first and last few

pages of the book.

His encounter with India, the land of his ancestors, can, therefore, be interpreted on

the paradigm of the Ramayana: exile, suffering, struggle and return. His narratives on India

follow the structure of its master text. An Area of Darkness may therefore be called the book

of exile,India: A Wounded Civilization the book of suffering and India: A Million Mutinies

Now the book of struggle. Naipaul claims that he has made a return journey: India: A Million

Mutinies Now and has rejected the colonial gaze. His opinions and observations recorded in

An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization are the result of his identity as a

British expatriate. In India, individuality or individual freedom are not very important. As

stated in the Mahabharata the individual sacrifices for the sake of a family, the family for the

sake of the village, the village for the sake of the country and country for the sake of the

world and the world for the sake of humanity. In the West on the other hand, especially since

the renaissance, a greater importance has been given to the assertion of the individuality.

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 Naipaul criticizes Gandhi for not describing the landscape of London. But Gandhi

was not a creative writer. So, this remark seems a generalized observation. Gandhi does not

care for things which Naipaul and the market place seem to value most today. Naipaul’s

claim regarding the Indian sculpture and architecture is coming without analysis and it is

hurried and lopsided, as he seems to be no more equipped than a casual tourist.

Naipaul seems partial at times. He praises Taj Mahal as exquisite […]. “But in India it is a

building wasteful without a function”. He called it a despot’s monument to a woman.

However, to a larger extent Naipaul’s observations are sincere and comprehensive.

His remarks on poverty and the defecating child waited by a mangy dog to eat excrement are

very true. His observations are very minute in his India: A Million Mutinies Now. His

statement that the Jains are an ancient, pre-Buddhist offshoot of Hinduism is true. Similarly,

his observation on Ambani and Bajaj are true. In India, there is a man called Ambani. He is

going to become the largest industrialist in India in a couple of years. He is a good

administrator and a good manipulator. He has got the foresight and finally he has got the

aggression. He makes and breaks politics for himself.

In conclusion, it may be said that a civilization, in pursuit of the aim of man may

be prominently material like modern European culture, predominantly mental and intellectual

and like the old Graeco- Roman or predominantly spiritual like the still persistent culture of

India. India, as Shri Aurobindo and T.S. Eliot have admitted has perennial message to give to

the world. And that is the message of peace, perfection and self-fulfillment. Indian culture, of

course has suffered from the widespread practice of superstition due to the foreign invasion

but her spirit is still alive.

V.S. Naipaul’s perception has changed from India’s darkness to that of India’s

green revolution. By opening a debate on the way we perceive our history and politics,

199
Naipaul has sent across waves of shock among our politicians and journalists who hold a

monopoly over political opinion. Pre-independence times are replete with examples of what

intellectual commitment can do for a society. Ironically, post-independence times reverberate

with the deafening silence of the intellectuals. It is unfortunate that Naipaul’s debate is left to

the journalists to report and to the politicians who distort it to suit their election propaganda.

This is substantiated by the mutilation of Naipaul’s comments subsequent to the demolition

of the Babri Masjid; calling it an act of balancing of history.

Those who are aware of Naipaul’s thesis for the marginalized and subjugated

people will immediately establish a link between Naipaul’s patience with the resurgence

among the marginalized in the form of dalit rebellions. Naipaul sees this kind of violence as

by – product of the marginalized people’s coming to the centre. People who have been

cheated and oppressed by established institutions for hundreds of years cannot believe in

these institutions all of a sudden. So they strike out, hold on to whatever they can lay their

hands on. Following the same pattern the act of demolition, when seen in isolation as a

compulsive act on the part of a people whose culture was systematically destroyed was

termed “an act of balancing of history” by Naipaul.

However, Naipaul is suspicious of Hindu militancy as a systematized form of

political ideology and finds it to be mimicry of Islamic fundamentalism. His books on India

should be accepted as diasporic chronicles that attempt to link the past to the present ways

that lead to a progression in his diasporic concern for India and also for his multination

canvas as whole

From An Area of Darkness to India: A Million mutinies Now, Naipaul has come a long

way: firstly, because he has admitted the other narrator in the narrative; secondly, because his

comment for social situation is more valid, accurate and nuanced; thirdly, because he

200
contemplates and reflects on the problem from the pain to view of the other and then

comments. It can therefore be argued that India: A Million Mutinies Now has recovered the

generosity that he had lost since he wrote A House for Mr. Biswas. In short it can be proposed

that

(i) V.S. Naipaul writes because he loves writing, he loves books written by him.

From the very childhood, it was his dream to become a writer. And he directed all

his efforts to realize this aim from his school day. Even his planning to leave

Trinidad and go to Oxford for higher studies was guided by his belief that it would

enhance his chance to become a better writer. The education at Oxford was

expected to provide him with requisite training and apprenticeship for writing.

The desire for writing was so intense in Naipaul that he did no other job except for

writing even for his subsistence when his study was over and he left Oxford. He

continued to stay in London and earn his living out of writing news reports, book

reviews and broadcasting in BBC

(ii) Naipaul was convinced even when he was in his school that small places are not

good for producing great literature and for sustained literary practice. A small

island like Trinidad with its simple life pattern and uncomplicated economy had

little complexity to engage a creative writer for any considerable period of time.

There was always a danger that the author’s experience of life would show sign of

exhaustion. He was of the belief that only big place and its complex economy

could produce literature which was great reflecting the unfathomable complexity

of life. Naipaul’s flights from Trinidad to England and his visits to India were

aimed at widening, deepening and enriching his experiences to help him as author.

In this regard he has cited the example of Derek Walcott who became, in his

201
 assessment,saturated in short time because he failed to go beyond his West Indian

experiences.

(iii) Naipaul’s travel accounts of India are also the result of the demand of the

publishers.His travels to the West Indies, India and Islamic countries were all

conducted under the suggestion of one publication house or another. So while

visiting he is always a conscious man that his encounter with the people and

places he was visiting had to give out a book. As a result he is unable to come out

of his personal bias and prejudice. More-or-less he picks up things for close

examination which supported his thinking and existing stereotypes. So he looks at

things which he wanted to see. As a result, it is rare that his travel accounts are

revealing and startling. And in case one is startled, at all, at Naipaul’s account of

India, it is because of his centralization of the marginal and the marginalization of

the central. For instance, defecation in the open may be a significant spectacle to

many especially Naipaul, but it doesn’t require the space and treatment that he

provides. Similar are the cases in the treatment of Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba

Bhave and the role of Muslim invasion.

(iv) But, at the core of all this is Naipaul’s inner desire to see India, to experience

India and comprehend India in order to compare and contrast the actual India with

the India that existed in his imagination from his childhood. Naipaul had known

from his family members about his ancestral root in India. This awareness formed

a shadow of India at the back of his mind. The distinction of look and outlook that

he experienced between himself and the other children in school and public places

in Trinidad, kept him reminding that he was not West Indian. He belonged to a

different community. Even when he went to London and became its resident he

never felt like a British. Even though he had a house, he did not consider London

202
 his home. So once again his desire to be close to his root at least emotionally

andintellectually gets stronger. His travel accounts, thus, are the result of his

desireto connect to the root.

(v) Naipaul’s changing outlook of India can be traced in his greater awareness and

experience of India which helped him shed the colonial/ imperial way of looking

at things.If one looks closely at the three travel accounts of India by V.S. Naipaul

viz,An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million

Mutinies Now, the one consistent change which is immediately noticeable is the

author’s attitude to the land he is visiting, and the tone of description of the book.

The India of An Area of Darkness in devitalized, fatalist, without energy and

promise for a future. A strong inertia seemed to have gripped the entire country.

Andthat is why darkness becomes its defining feature. Even the enthusiasm of

Independence has vanished. The condition of the country changes by 1976-77

when the people show some sign of energy and initiative to change their fate. But

this sign of activity was sought to be contained by declaring Emergency by Mrs.

Indira Gandhi. During his third visit which resulted in India: A Million

MutiniesNow, Naipaul is happy to notice elements of rebelliousness among the

people of India. The Indians,especially the Hindus are coming out of shells in

which they had been hiding for a thousand years under various foreign rules, and

asserting their rights.The Indian sub-continent seemed to him a place where

millions of outbursts of positive and creative energy shall take place. The

Ramajanma Bhumi movement which led to the demolition the Babri Masjid was a

sign of the beginning of awakening in India.A Million Mutinies Now also

underlines innumerable activities and enterprises of the Indians that suggest that

India is finally on themove.

203
(vi) V. S. Naipaul was primarily an essentialist, a cultural essentialist, which is

perhaps a feature of diasporic existence. Having been rendered locationally

incapacitated to see the homeland in totality, he has been trying since his

childhood to form an opinion or image of India on the basis of little bit India his

family was carrying with them. Thus, it becomes his habit and style to pick up a

thing or two and generalize them in a manner as if they are applicable for the

whole of India.An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India:

AMillion MutiniesNowarefull of such over generalizations. It is his cultural

essentialism which prompts him make statements which are shocking to many

Indians. It also makes him speak like a historian and social scientist which he is

not.Naipaul’s criticism of India has its root in his tendency to speak like a

historian without being one, to speak like a sociologist without having requisite

qualification for it. He is frequently found indulging in generalizations without

examining facts for that purpose. He is done in by his habit of making sweeping

statements.

(vii) Whatever may be the charge against Naipaul, no matter what he writes or what he

has written about India, his love for India and Indian culture and civilization is

beyond question. It is this attachment that brings him again and again to India.

India is not confined in his travel accounts; even his creative writings like fiction

have a shadow of India upon them for they mostly touch upon Indian life themes.

As we all know that except for a few novels Naipaul has kept himself focused on

Indians settled in Trinidad.

204
 ABBREVIATION

AD : An Area of Darkness

AWP : A Writer’s people: Ways of looking and Feeling

EOA : The Enigma of Arrival

FC : Finding the Centre

HAL : Half A Life

MMN : India: A Million Mutinies Now

OB : The Overcrowded Barracoon

WC : India: A Wounded Civilization

WWI : The World is What It Is: An Authorized Biography of V S Naipaul

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Primary Sources:
Fiction
Naipaul, V.S. ABend in the River1979. London: Andre Deutsch. Penguin Edition,

1980. Print.

---. A Flag on the Island 1969. London: Andre Deutsch, 1971 Print.

---. A House for Mr. Biswas 1961. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin Edition, 1969.

Print.

---. A Way in the World. London: Heinemann, 1994. Print.

---. Guerrillas 1975. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin Edition, 1976. Print.

---. Half A Life. London: Picador, 2001. Print.

---. In a Free State 1971. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin Edition, 1973. Print.

---. Miguel Street 1959. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin Edition, 1971. Print.

---. Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion1963. London: Andre Deutschm, Penguin

Edition, 1973. Print.

---. The Enigma of Arrival. London: Viking, 1987. Print.

---. The Mimic Men 1967. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin Edition, 1969. Print.

---. The Suffrage of Elvira1958. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin Edition, 1969.

Print.

---. The Mystic Masseur 1957. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin Edition, 1964. Print.

206
Non-Fiction

Naipaul, V.S. A Turn in the South. London: Andre Deutsch, 1989. Print.

---. A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling. London: Picador,

2007. Print.

---. Among the Believers 1981. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin Edition

1982. Print.

---. An Area of Darkness 1964. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin Edition

1968. Print.

---. Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursion Among the Converted People.

London: Little, Brown and Company, Penguin Edition, 1998. Print.

---. Finding the Centre1984. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin Edition,

1985. Print.

---. India: A Million Mutinies Now1990. London: William Heinemann,

Vintage Edition, 1998. Print.

---. India: A Wounded Civilization 1977. London: Andre Deutsch. Penguin

Edition, 1979. Print.

---. Letters between a Father and Son 1999. London: Little, Brown and

Company, Abacus Edition, 2000. Print.

---. Literary Occasions, London: Picador, 2003. Print.

---. The Loss of El Dorado 1969. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin

Edition, 1973. Print.

207
 ---. The Middle Passage 1962. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin Edition,

1969. Print.

---. The Overcrowded Bar Raccoon. London: Andre Deutsch, 1972. Print.

---. The Return of Eva Peron 1980. London: Andre Deutsch, Penguin

Edition, 1981. Print.

Select Interviews

Naipaul, V.S. “A Conversation With V.S. Naipaul: Interview with Bharati

Mukherjee and Robert Boyers”. Salmagundi 54 (Fall 1981): 4-22. Print.

---. “A Trip with V.S. Naipaul: Interview with James Apple White”.

Raritan 10, No. 1 (Summer 1990): 48-54. Print.

---. “The Novelist V.S. Naipaul talks about his Childhood.” Listener 7

September 1972: 306. Print.

---. “V.S. Naipaul, Novelist as Thinker.” Interview with Alfred Kazin. New

York Times Book Review I May 1977:7, 20-21. Print.

---. “The Dark vision of V.S. Naipaul: Interview with Charles Michener”.

Newsweek16 November 1981: 104-17. Print.

---. “Christianity didn’t damage India like Islam: Interview with Tarun J.

Tejpal”. Outlook. 15 November 1999: 48-56. Print.

---. “Hindu revivalists are mimicking Islamic fundamentalists: In

conversation with Khushwant Singh”. Outlook 8 may 2000: 56-59.

Print.

---. “I always had to force myself upon the world: Interview with Mohini

Kent”. First Quarter (1997): 59-63. Print.

208
---. “Interview with Adrian Rowe-Evans.”Transition 40 (1971): 56-

62.Rpt. in Quest78 (Sept.-Oct. 1972): 47-55. Print.

---. “Interview with Derek Walcott”.The Sunday Guardian (Trinidad) 7

March 1965: 5, 7. Print.

---. “Meting V.S. Naipaul: Interview with Elizabeth Hardwick”.New York

Times Book Review. 13 May 1979: I, 36. Print.

---. “Naipaul at Wesleyan: Interview with M. Banning Eyre”. South

Carolina Review 14 (Spring 1982): 34-47. Print.

---. “Religion is often a smokescreen for political oppression: Interview

with L.K. Sharma”. Times of India. I May 1998: 13. Print.

---. “Without a Place: Interview with lan Hamilton”. Times Literary

Supplement. 30 July 1971: 897-98. Rpt. In Critical perspectives. Print.

Select Articles

Naipaul, V.S. “India’s Cast- Off Revolution”. Sunday Times (London). 25 August

---. “Critics and Criticism”.Bim 10, No. 38 (Jan- June 1964): 74-77. Print.

---. “Without a Dog’s Chance”.New York Review of Books. 18 May 1972:

29-31. Print.

---. “The Corpse at the Iron Gate”.New York Review of Books. 10 August

1972: 3-7. Print.

---. “A Country Dying on Its Feet”.New York Review of Books. 4 April

1974:21-33. Print.

---. “Foreword”.The Adventures of Gurudeva by Seepersad Naipaul.

London: Andre Deutsch, 1976. 7-23. Print.

209
 ---. “Introduction”.East Indians in the Caribbean: Colonialism and the

Struggle for Identity. New York: Kraus International Publishers, 1982.

Print.

---. “A Note on a Borrowing by Conrad”.New York Review of Books. 16

December 1982: 37-38. Print.

---..“Writing ‘A House for Mr. Biswas’”.New York Review of Books. 24

November 1983:22-23. Print.

---. “It is out of this violence I’ve always written”. New York Review of

Books. 16

---. “Among the Republicans”.New York Review of Books. 25 October

1984:5. Print.

---. “On Being a Writer”.New York Review of Books. 23 April 1987:7.

Print.

---. “A Letter to Maria”.NewStatesman. 56 (July 1958): 14. Print.

---. “Caribbean Medley.”Vogue. 15 November 1959: 90, 92-93. Print.

---. “Images”.New Statesman. 24 September 1965: 452-53. Print.

---. “A Million Mutinies”.India Today. 18 August 1997: 36-39. Print.

---. “How Writing Changes a Writer”. Tapia. 2 December 1973: 1-12.

Print.

---. “Trollope in the West Indies”.The Listener. 15 March 1962:461. Print.

---. “Tea with an Author”.Bim. 9, No. 34 (Jan.- June 1962): 79-81. Print.

II. CRITICISM ON V.S. NAIPAUL: BOOKS

Albertazzi, Silvia. Translating India: Travel and Cross-Cultural Transference in

Post-Colonial Fiction In English. Bologna: Editrice Bologna, 1993. Print.

210
Amrithanayagam, Guy. Writers in East-West Encounters: New Cultural Bearings.

London: Macmillan, 1982. Print.

Amur, G.S. and S.K. Desai. Eds. Colonial Consciousness in Commonwealth

Literature. Bombay: Somaya Publications, 1984. Print.

Ashri, Sumita. V.S. Naipaul’s Dilemma of Diaspora Existence. Jaipur: Aadi

Publication. 2011. Print.

Bala, Sumen. Ed. V.S. Naipaul: A Literary Response to the Nobel Laureate. New

Delhi: Khosla Publishing House, 2003. Print.

Baugh, Edward. Ed. Critics on Caribbean Literature. London: George Allen and

Unwin, 1978. Print.

Boxhill, Anthony. V.S. Naipaul’s Fiction: In Quest of the Enemy. Fredrickton, N.B.:

York Press, 1983. Print.

Braithwaite, E. Other Exiles. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Print.

Corra, Michael. After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1997. Print.

Cudjoe, Selwyn R. V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading. Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 1988. Print.

Dhawan, R.K. Ed. Commonwealth Fiction. 3 Vols. New Delhi: Classical Publishing

Company, 1988. Print.

---. Ed. Recent Commonwealth Literature. 2 Vols. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1989.

211
 Print.

---. and L.S.R. Krishna Sastry Eds. Commonwealth Writing: A Study in Expatriate

Experience. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1994. Print.

Dooley, Gillian, V.S. Naipaul: Man and Writer. Columbia, SC: University of South

Caroline Press, 2002. Print.

Feder, Lillian. Naipaul’sTruth. New Delhi: Indialog Publications Pvt.. Ltd., 2001.

Print.

French, Patrick, The World is What It is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul.

London: Picador, 2008. Print.

Gowda, H.H. Anniah. The Colonial and Neo-Colonial Encounters in Commonwealth

Literature. Mysore: Mysore University Press, 1973. Print.

Griffiths, Gareth. A Double Exile: African and West Indian Writing Between Two

Cultures. London: Marian Boyars, 1988. Print.

Gupta, Sumen, V.S. Naipaul. British Council: Northolt, 1999. Print.

Hammer, Robert D. and Harris, Wilson. Eds. The Womb of Space: The Cross-

Cultural Imagination. Westport G.T.: Greenwood Press, 1983. Print.

Hammer, Robert D. Ed. Critical Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul. London: Heinemann,

1977. Print.

212
---. Ed. The Tradition, the Writer and Society. Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1967.

Print.

Hammer, Robert D. V. S. Naipaul. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973. Print.

Hughes, Peter. V.S. Naipaul. London: Routledge, 1988. Print.

Jain, Jasbir. Problems of Post-Colonial Literatures and Other Essay. Jaipur:

Printwell, 1991. Print.

James, Louis Ed. The Islands in Between: Essays on West Indian Literature. London:

Oxford University Press, 1968. Print.

Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.

London: Methuen, 1981. Print.

Joshi, Chandra B. V. S. Naipaul: The Voice of Exile. New Delhi: Sterling, 1994. Print.

Jussawala, Adil. Ed. New Writing in India. Baltimore: Penguin, 1974. Print.

Kelley, Richard. V.S. Naipaul. New York: 1989. Print.

King, Bruce. Ed. Literatures of the World in English. London: Routledge, 1974. Print.

---. Ed. West Indian Literature. London: Macmillan, 1979. Print.

---. The New English Literatures-Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World. New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Print.

Kirpal, Vinay. The Third World Novel of Expatriation. New Delhi: Sterling, 1989.

Print.

Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph, 1960. Print.

213
Mahanta,NamrataRathore. The Indian Trilogy. New Delhi: Atlentiz Publishers, 2004.

Print.

Mason, Nondita. The Fiction of V.S. Naipaul. Calcutta: The World Press Pvt. Ltd.,

1986. Print.

Mc Leod, A.L. Ed. Subjects Worthy Fame: Essays on Commonwealth Literature.

New Delhi: Sterling, 1989. Print.

Mc Sweeney, Kerry. Four Contemporary Novelists: Angus Wilson, Brian Moore,

John Fowles, V.S. Naipaul. Montreal: Mc Gill Queen’s University Press,

1983. Print.

Morris, Robert K. Paradoxes of Order: Some Perspectives on the Fiction of V.S.

Naipaul. Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1975. Print.

Mustafa, Fawzia. V.S. Naipaul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.

Narasimhaiah, C.D. Ed. Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature.

New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978. Print.

Narasimhaiah, C.D. Ed. Commonwealth Literature: A Handbook of Select Reading

Lists. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976. Print.

Narasimhaiah, C.D. Ed. Commonwealth Literature: Problems of Response. Madras:

Macmillan, 1981. Print.

Nelson, Emmanuel Ed. Rewording: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora. New

York: Greenwood, 1992. Print.

214
Newman, Judie. The Ballistic Bard: Post-Colonial Fiction. London: Arnold, 1995.

Print.

Nightingale, Peggy. Journey through Darkness: The Writing of V.S. Naipaul. St.

Lucia: 1987. Print.

Niven, Atastair Ed. The Commonwealth Writer Overseas: Themes of Exile and

Expatriation. Brussels: Didier, 1976. Print.

Nixon, Rob. London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1992. Print.

Pratt, Mary Louis. ImperialEyes: Travel Writing and Trans- Culturation. London:

Routledge, 1992. Print.

Rai, SudhaV.S. Naipaul: A Study in Expatriate Sensibility. New Delhi: Arnold

Heinemann, 1982. Print.

Rai, Sudha. An Introduction to the study of West Indian Literature. London: Faber and

Faber, 1976. Print

Rai, Sudha. Homeless by Choice: Naipaul, Rushdie, Jhabvala. Jaipur: Printwell,

1992. Print.

Ramchand, Kenneth. The West Indian Novel and its Background. New York: Barnes

and Noble Inc., 1970. Print.

Siedel, Michael. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New haven: Yale University

Press, 1986. Print.

215
 Singh, ManjitInder. V.S. Naipaul. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 1998. Print.

---. V.S. Naipaul. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2002. Print.

Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1992. Print.

Theroux, Paul. V.S. Naipaul: An Introduction to his Work. London: Andre Deutsch,

1972. Print.

Thorpe, Michale. V.S. Naipaul. London: Longman, 1976. Print.

Weiss, Timothy. On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S. Naipaul. Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Print.

White, Landeg. V.S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction. London: Macmillan Press,

1975. Print.

William, Walsh. V.S. Naipaul. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1973. Print.

III. CRITICISM ON V.S. NAIPAUL: ARTICLES

Amis , Martin. “More Bones”. New Statesman. 4 July 1980: 19-20. Print.

Anderson, Linda R. “Ideas of Identity and Freedom in V.S. Naipaul and Joseph

Conrad”. English Studies. 59 (1978): 510-17. Print.

Angrosino, M.B. “V.S. Naipaul and the Colonial Image”. Caribbean Quarterly.

21, Vol. 3 (1975). Print.

Argyle, Barry. “A West Indian Epic”. Caribbean Quarterly. 16, No. 4 (December

1970). 61-69. Print.

216
 Bhabha, Homi. “Dissemi Nation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern

Nation”. Nation and Narration. Ed. HomiBhabha. London: Routledge, 1990.

Print.

Bhatia, Shyam. “India needs to come to terms with its past. Says Naipaul”. Times

of India. 30 October 2000. Print.

Bhatia, V.P. “Naipaul’s Defence of Hindutva”. Organizer. 49, No. 5 (31 August

1997): 13. Print.

Blaise, Clark. “The Commonwealth Writer and His Material”. Awakened

Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature. Ed. C.D. Narasimhaiah.

New Delhi: Sterling, 1978. Print.

Boxill, Anthony, “V.S. Naipaul’s Starting Point”. Journal of Commonwealth

Literature. 10. No. 1 (9August 1975): 1-9. Print.

Boyers, Robert. “Confronting the Present”. Salmagundi. 54 (Fall 1981): 77-97.

Boyers, Robert. “V.S. Naipaul”. American Scholar. (Summer 1981): 359-67.

Brown, John L. “V.S. Naipaul: A Wager on the Triumph of Darkness”. World

Literature. 57. No. 2 (Spring 1983): 223-27. Print.

Brown, Wayne. “On Exile and the Dialect of the Tribe”. Sunday Guardian

(Trinidad), November 8, 1970:19. Print.

Brown, Wayne. “On West Indian Critics and Historians”. Sunday Guardian

(Trinidad), August 23, 1970: 17. Print.

Calder, Angus. “World’s End: V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men”. The Commonwealth

Writer Overseas. Ed. Alastair Niven. Brussels: Didier, 1976: 271-82. Print.

217
 Campbell, Elaine. “A Refinement of Rage : V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River”.

World Literature Written in English. 18, No. 2 (November 1979) : 36-94-406.

Print.

Campbell, Elaine. “Beyond Controversy: Vidia Naipaul and Salman Rushdie”.

Literary Half-Yearly. 27, No. 2 (1986):42-49. Print.

Chaudhary, Helga. “V.S. Naipaul’s Changing Vision of India: A study of An Area

ofDarkness and India: Wounded Civilization”. Literary Half Yearly. 23, No. 1

(January 1982) 98-114. Print.

Chitre, Dilip. “Naipaul and India 2”. New Quest. 9 (May-June 1978):174-86.

Chulthard, G.R “The Literature of the West Indies”. The Commonwealth Pen. Ed.

Alan L. McLeod, New York: Cornell University Press, 1961. Print.

Dangwal, Surekha. “An Area of Darkness: The Document of Diaspora Experiences of

V.S. Naipaul”. V.S. Naipaul. SumanBala. Ed. New Delhiu: Khosla, 2003. Print.

Derrick, A.C. “Naipaul’s Technique as a Novelist”. Journal of Commonwealth

Literature. 7 July 1969: 32-44. Print.

Deshpande, Charulata. “Naipaul at Work”. Gentleman. 31 May 1989: 92-106..

Devi, Rama. “Naipaul and his Dialectic on India”. V.S. Naipaul. SumanBala. Ed. New

Delhi: Khosla, 2003. Print.

Dhondy, Farrukh. “The Great Indian Diaspora is More Indian than Great”. Outlook.

November 15, 1999: 100-03. Print

Dulai, Surjit S. “The Ganges flows through Africa: V.S. Naipaul’s India and A bend

in the River”. Journal of South Asian Literature. 26 (1991): 303-21. Print.

218
Enright, D.J. “The Sensibility of V.S. Naipaul : Who is India?”. Man Is an Onion.

Ed. D.J. Enright. Illinois: Library Press, 1973. Print.

Ezekiel, Nissim. “Naipaul’s India and Mine”. Ed. AdilJussawala. Baltimore:

Penguin, 1974. Print.

---. “Wounded and Doomed?”.Debonair. VII, No. 15 (May 1978). Print.

Ghosh, Amitav. “The Diaspora in Indian Culture”. Public Culture. 2, No. 1

(1989): 73-78. Print.

Goodheart, Eugene. “V.S. Naipaul’s Mandarin Sensibility”. Partisan Review. 50.2

(1983):244-56. Print.

Gordimer, Nadine. “White Expatriates and Black Mimics: In a Free State”. New

York Times Book Review. 17 October 1971:5, 20.

Gowda, H.H. Anniah. “India in Naipaul’s Artistic Consciousness”. The Literary

Half-Yearly. 16, No. 1 (January 1975): 27-39. Print.

Gowda, H.H. Anniah. “Naipaul in India”. Literary Half-Yearly. 11, No.2 (1970):

163-70. Print.

Gurnah, Abdulrazak. “V.S. Naipaul and the Nihilism of Primitive People”. Times

Literary Supplement. May 20, 1994. Print.

Gurr, A.J. “Third World Novels: Naipaul and After”. Journal of Commonwealth

Literature. 7, No. 1 (June 1972): 6-13. Print.

Gussow, Mel. “Writer Without Roots”. New York Times Magazine. 26 December

1976: 8-9, 18-19, 22. Print.

Jacinto, Leela. “Such a long Journey”. Sunday Times of India Review. 20 February

219
 2000:1. Print.

Jain, Jasbir. “Cultural Relativism and Perspective: Naipaul, Chaudhari and

Forester”. Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature. 28(1989-90): 17-26.

Jha, J.C. “Indian Heritage in Trinidad, West Indies”. Caribbean Quarterly. 19,

No. 2 (1973): 32-33. Print.

Johnstone, Richard. “Politics and V.S. Naipaul”. Journal of Commonwealth

Literature. 14 No.1 (August 1979): 100-08. Print.

Kapadia Novy. “In Search of Order: A Study of V.S. Naipaul and AttiaHosain”.

Commonwealth Writing: A Study in Expatriate Experience. Ed. R.K.

Dhawanand L.S.R. Krishna Sastry. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1994. Print.

King, Bruce. “Ethnicity as Response: Richler, Achebe and Naipaul”.

Commonwealth Literature: Themes and Techniques. Ed. P.K. Rajan et al.

Delhi: Ajanta, 1993

King, Bruce. “Recent Commonwealth Fiction”. Sewanee Review. 85, 1977. Print.

---. “V.S. Naipaul”. West Indian Literature. Ed. Bruce King. London: Macmillan,

1979: 161-78. Print.

King, Lloyd. “The Trauma of Naipauland”. Trinidad Guardian. September 24,

1967: 16-19. Print.

Kirkler, Bernard. “V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas”. The Listener.

February 13, 1964: 270-71. Print.

Kothandaraman, Bala. “The Writer in Quest of a History: The Case of V.S.

Naipaul”. Literary Half-Yearly. 31,No. 1 ( 1990):37-48. Print.

Kutty, K. Narayan. “Naipaul and India 1”. New Quest. 9. May-June1978: 167-73.

Lal, H.S. “Naipaul’s Vision of Indian Diaspora and Trinity of India Novels”. V.S.

Naipaul. SumanBala. Ed. New Delhi: Khosla, 2003. Print.

220
Lelyveld, Joseph. “For Naipaul a Difficult Country”. New York Times Book

Review. 12 June 1977: 10, 44. Print.

MacDonald, Bruce. “Symbolic Action in Three of V.S. Naipaul Novels”. Journal

of Commonwealth Literature. 9. No. 3. April 1975. 41-52. Print.

Mace-Jelinek, Hena. “The Myth of El Dorado in the Caribbean Novel”. Journal of

Commonwealth Literature. 6, No.1. June 1971. 113-28. Print.

---. “V.S. Naipaul: A Commonwealth Writer?”.Revue de LanguesVivantes. 33.

1967. 499-513. Print.

Miller, Karl. “Naipaul’s Emergent Country”. The Listener. 28 September 1967:

402-03. Print.

---. “V.S. Naipaul and the New Order”. Kenyon Review. 29 November 1967. 685-

98. Print.

Minault, Gail. “Through a Glass Darkly: Naipaul’s Post-Colonial Travel

Accounts”. Osmania Journal of English Studies. 1982. Print.

Mishra, Vijay. “New Lamps for Old: Diasporas Migrancy Border”.

Commonwealth Writing: A Study in Expatriate Experience. Eds. R.K. Dhawan

and L.S.R. Krishna Sastry. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1994. Print.

Nahal, Chaman. “E.M. Forster and Ruth Jhabvala”. The New Literatures in

English. New Delhi: Allied, 1985. Print.

Naik, M.K. “Two Uses of Irony: V.S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur and R.K.

Narayan’s The Guide”. World Literature Written in English. 17, No. 2.

November 1978: 646-55. Print.

Nandkumar, Prema. “V.S. Naipaul”. The Glory and the Good. New Delhi: Asia

Publishing House, 1965. Print.

Nazareth, Peter. “Out of Darkness: Conrad and other Third World Writers”.

221
 Conradians. 14, No. 3. 1982. Print.

Neil, Michael. “Guerrillas and Gangs: Frantz Fanon and V.S. Naipaul”. Ariel. 13,

No. 4. October 1982. 21-61. Print.

Niven, Alastair. “Crossing the Black Waters: Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s A passage to

England and V.S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness”. Ariel 9, No. 3. July 1978.

21-36. Print.

---. “V.S. Naipaul’s Free Statement”. Commonwealth Literature and the Modern

World. Ed. HenaMaes-Jelinek. Brussels: Didier, 1975. Print.

Nunez- Harrell, Elizabeth. “Lamming and Naipaul: Some Criteria for Evaluating

the Third World Novel”. Contemporary Literature. 19, No. 1. 1978. 26-47.

Parrinder, Patrick. “V.S. Naipaul and the Uses of Literacy”. Critical Quarterly.

21, No. 2. Summer 1979. 5-13. Print.

Patterson, John. “Challenging CLR and the Naipaul’s”. Sunday Guardian

(Trinidad), October 18, 1970. Print.

Raghvacharyulu, D.V.K. “Naipaul and Narayan: The Sense of Life”. Awakened

Conscience. Ed. C.D. Narasimhaiah. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978:

216-25. Print.

Ramchand, Kenneth. “A House for Mr. Biswas”. An Introduction to the Study of

West Indian Literature. Kingston, Jamaica: Nelson Caribbean: 1976. Print.

Ramraj, Victor J. “Diminishing Satire: A Study of V.S. Naipaul and Mordecai

Richler”. Awakened Conscience. Ed. C.D. Narasimhaiah. New Jersey:

Humanities Press, 1978. Print.

---. “The All-Embracing Christ-like Vision: Tone and Attitude in The Mimic

Men”. Critical Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul. Ed. Robert D. Hamner. London:

Heinemann, 1977. Print.

222
Rao, K.l. Madhusudana. “V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas: A Fable of Political

Innocence and Experience”. Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 14, No. 1.

August 1979. 90-99. Print.

Rao, Susheela N. “Darkness Visible: The Emerging Portrait of India in Naipaul’s

Updated Travelogue”. Literary Half- Yearly. 38, No. 1 Jan. 1997.28-41. Print.

Rathore, Namrata. “Perspectives of Indian Women in India: A Million Mutinies

Now”. V.S. Naipaul. SumanBala. Ed. New Delhi: Khosla, 2003. Print.

Robinson, Andrew. “The Elusive Genius”. Illustrated Weekly of India. 5 July

1987: 9-15. Print.

Rohlehr, Gordon. “The Ironic Approach: The Novels of V.S. Naipaul”. The

Islands in Between. Ed. Louis James. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Russel, John. “No Guides Need Apply: Locating the Non-fiction Novel”.

University of Toronto Quarterly. 59, No. 3 (Spring 1999).

Sharma, T.R.S. “Chinua Achebe and V.S. Naipaul: One Version and Two

Postures on Post-Colonial Societies”. The Colonial and Neo-Colonial

Encounters in Commonwealth Literature. Ed. H.H. Anniah Gowda. Mysore:

Prasaranga, 1983. Print.

Shenker, Israel. “V.S. Naipaul, Man without a Society”. New York Times Book

Review. October 17, 1971: 4. Print.

Singh H.B. “V.S. Naipaul: A Spokesman for Neo-Colonialism”. Literature and

Ideology2. Summer. 1969. 71-85. Print.

Srinath, C.N. “Crisis of Identity: Assertion and Withdrawal in Naipaul and Arun

Joshi”. Literary Criterion 14, No. 1. 1979. 31-41. Print.

Stokes, Eric. “Images of India”. The Times Literary Supplement. 3 February 1978.

223
---. “The High Caste Defector”. The Times Literary Supplement. 21 October 1977.

Subrahmanian, N. “Gandhi-An Intellectual Assessment”. Quest (Nov./Dec.1975).

Sudama, Trevor. “Defending GLR and the Naipauls”. Sunday Guardian

(Trinidad) November 1, 1970: 5. Print.

Suleri, Sara. “Naipaul’s Arrival”. Yale Journal of Criticism 2, 1 (Fall 1988). Print.

Tharoor, Shashi. “Introduction”. India: From Midnight to the Millennium. New

Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1998. Print.

Thieme, John. “Apparitions of Disaster: Brontean Parallels in Wide Sargasso Sea

and Guerrillas”. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 14, No. 1. August 1979.

116-32. Print.

---. “V.S. Naipaul’s Third Word: A Not so Free State”. Journal of Commonwealth

Literature 10, No. 1 (August 1975): 10-22. Print.

Tiffin, Helen. “The Lost Ones: A Study of the Works of V.S. Naipaul”. Ph.D.

Diss. Kingston, Ontario: Queens University, 1972. Print.

---. “V.S. Naipaul’s Outposts of Progress”. World Literature Writing In English

22, No. 2 Autumn. 1983. Print.

Towers, Robert. “India’s Long Night”. The New York Review of Books XXIV, No.

12 July 14. 1977. Print.

Wade, C. Alan. “The Novelist as Historian”. The Literary Half-Yearly 11, No. 2

1970. 179-84. Print.

Walcott, Derek. “Is V.S. Naipaul an Angry Young man?”.Trinidad Guardian.

August 6, 1967. Print.

---. “The Achievement of V.S. Naipaul”. Sunday Guardian (Trinidad) April 12,

1964: 15. Print.

Walsh, William. “V.S. Naipaul”. The Literary Criterion. 109 Summer 1972. Print.

224
Weiss, Timothy. “V.S. Naipaul’s “Fin de Siècle”: The Enigma of Arrival and A

Way in the World ”. Ariel 27, No. 3. July 1996. Print.

Woodcock, George. “V.S. Naipaul and the Politics of Fiction”. Queen’s Quarterly

87, No. 4 Winter 1980. Print.

---. “Two Great Commonwealth Novelists: R.K Narayan and V.S. Naipaul”.

Sewanee Review 87. 1979. Print.

---. “Writing is Magic”. Trinidad Guardian. November 15, 1968. Print.

Wyndham Francis. “V.S. Naipaul”. The Listener. October 7, 1971. Print.

IV.GENERAL BOOKS AND ARTICLES

Achebe, Chinua. Morning yet on Creation Day. New York: Doubleday, 1975.

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. Bombay: Oxford

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Ananthmurthy, U.R. Samskara. Trans. A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: Oxford

University Press 1979. Print.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Print.

Anderson, Linda Ed. Plotting Change: Contemporary Women’s Fiction. London:

Edward Arnold, 1999. Print.

Ashcroft, Bill. Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Eds. The Empire Writes Back:

Theory and Practice in Post- Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. .

Bakhtinm M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallenstein.Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous

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Berthoff, Warner. Fictions and Events. New York: Dutten, 1979. Print.

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Bhabha, Homi K. Ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Print.

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Boechmer, Elleke. Colonial and Post Colonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.

Bondurant, Joan V. Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict.

London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Print.

Bran linger, P. The Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-

1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959. Print.

Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third-World. London: Macmillan,

1989. Print.

Brown, Judith. M. Gandhi’s Rise to Power. London: Cambridge University Press,

1972. Print.

Byron, Robert. The Road to Oxiana. 1937. New York: Oxford University Press,

1982. Print.

Chaudhary, Nirad C. Autobiography of an UnknownIndian. 1951. Bombay: Jaico

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Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales.1902. Ed. Cedric Watts:

Oxford University Press, World’s Classics. 1990. Print.

Coulthard, G.R. Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature. London: Oxford

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Dabydeen, David. The Black Presence in English Literature. Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1985. Print.

Dange, S.A., Hiren Mukherjee, S.G. Sardesai and Mohit Sen. The Mahatma.

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Dhondy, Farrukh. “The Great Indian Diaspora is More Indian than Great”.

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Docherry, Thomas. Postmodernism: A Reader. Harvester: Hemel Hampstead,

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Donald James and Ali Rattansi. Eds. Race, Culture and Difference. London: Open

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Eagleton, Terry, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. Nationalism, Colonialism and

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Eagleton, Terry. Exiles and Emigres. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970. Print.

Erikson, Erik H. Gandhi’s Truth. 1969. London: Faber and Faber, 1970. Print.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. 1952. London: Pluto Press, 1980. Print.

---. Studies in a Dying Colonialism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Print.

---. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove

Press, 1963. Print.

Fogel, Robert William and G.R. Elton. Which Road to the Past? Two Views of

History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York:

Pantheon, 1975. Print.

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---. The Order of Things. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1970.

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

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Gilkes, Michael. The West Indian Novel. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Print.

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Gillion, K.L. Fiji’s Indian Migrants. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1962. Print.

Goldberg, David Theo. Ed. Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader. London:

Blackwell, 1994. Print.

Goonatilake, Susantha. Crippled Minds: An Exploration into Colonial Culture.

Bombay: Vikas, 1982. Print.

Guha, Ranajit. Ed. Subaltern Studies. Vol. I and II- Writings on South Asian

History and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982 and 1983. Print.

Gurr, Andrew. Writers in Exile: The Creative use of Home in Modern Literature.

Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1981. Print.

Gutting, Gary. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge

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Haley, Alex. Roots. London: Picador, 1976. Print.

Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalisms since 1780: Programme, Myth,

Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print.

---. The Age of Empire. London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1987. Print.

---. The Age of Extremes: A history of the World 1914-1991. New York: Pantheon

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Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel. Paris: Menton, 1967. Print.

Hulme, Peter. Ed. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-

1797. London: Methuen, 1986. Print.

---. Ed. Post-colonial Theory and Colonial Discourse. Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1993. Print.

Huttenback, Robert A. Gandhi in South Africa. Cornell University Press, 1971.

James, C.L.R. Spheres of Existence. London: Allison and Busby, 1980. Print.

Kakar, Sudhir. The Inner World. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978. Print.

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Kumar, Nita. Ed. Women as Subjects. New Delhi: Stree, 1994. Print.

Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel (1988). Delhi: Rupa, 1995. Print.

La Gueree, John. Ed. Calcutta to Caroni: The East Indians of Trinidad. London:

Longman Caribbean, 1974. Print.

Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin (1953). London: Longman, 1979.

---. Natives of My Person (1972). London: Picador, 1974. Print.

Lannoy, Richard. The Speaking Tree. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois.The Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1979. Print.

Mackenzie John. Propaganda and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University

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Malganokar, Manohar. The Prince. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1970. Print.

Malik, Yogendra, K. East Indians in Trinidad. London: Oxford University Press,

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Mannoni, O. Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. New York:

Praeger, 1964. Print.

Mehta, Ved. Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles. New Delhi: Indian Book

Company, 1977. Print.

Melwani, Lavina. “Home Is Where The Heart Is”. The Hindustan Times. 9

January 2000. Print.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. New York: Orion Press, 1965.

Mills, Sara, Discourses of Difference. London: Routledge, 1991. Print.

Mohamood, M.M. The Colonial Encounter. London: Rex Collins, 1977. Print.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen,

1987. Print.

229
Mukherjee, Hiren. Gandhiji. 1958. New Delhi. People’s Publishing House, 1960.

Naipaul, Seepersad. The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories. London:

Andre Deutsch, 1976. Print.

Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism.

New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. Print.

Narasimhaiah, C.D. The Function of Criticism in India. Mysore: Central Institute

of Indian Languages, 1986. Print.

Narayan, R.K. Mr. Sampath. Mysore: Indian Thought Publications, 1973. Print.

---. The Vendor of Sweets. Mysore: Indian Thought Publications, 1976. Print.

Narayan, Shriman. Ed. The Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Ahmedabad:

Navjivan Publishing House. 1968. Print.

Ngugi, WaThiong’O. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African

Literature. London: James Curry, 1986. Print.

---. Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and

Politics. London: Heinemann, 1972. Print.

---. Writers in Politics. London: Heinemann, 1981. Print.

Parekh, Bhikhu. “Some Reflections on the Indian Diaspora”. Journal of

Contemporary Thought. 3. 1993. Print.

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