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December 16, 2005
Review of Naipaul's "India: A wounded civilization"
This is the middle of Naipaul’s three books series on India: 1) An Area of Darkness, A discovery of India (1964) 2) India: A wounded Civilization (1977) 3) India: A Million Mutinees Now (1990). In the past, I had a prejudice against Naipaul about him being pro-hindutva. But after reading "A wounded civilization", he dispelled my fears. I can say that this is the best book I have read about India in last 10 years.
The book is written around the time of emergency period. The emergency itself seems like a triggering point for lot of themes in the book.
Naipaul's style leaves me an inspiration to try a third person perspective of India's situation. The analytical power of most of native Indian writing is dulled because of subjective involvement. On the contrary the writings of western writers sway in two extreme angles: either too much adulation or too much of harshness and both of which are completely unrealistic. But the Naipaul's position is different. He is an outsider and an insider. Since he is an outsider, he is harsh as he can be in judging. He is still insider with a caring heart.
He dissects ruthlessly but has a heart to suggest diagnosis. His analysis of the situation itself presents as a bold diagnosis.
Nothing & nobody in India including Gandhi had survived Naipaul's criticism. His insight is sharp. His generalizations are sweeping and sometimes tend to be crude but I loved them all.
Naipaul seems to be intrigued by RK Narayan's statement that "India will go on". Naipaul is convinced that India will go on but is skeptical about where it is going.
Naipaul's central theme revolves around the psyche of the Indian religious experience, the self-absorption of Hinduism and the acceptance of karmic fate. He claims that it is not the Muslim invaders of middle ages or the later British who impoverished the spirit of India. What he says is that the Indian religious experience is inward looking. Whenever a foreign invader came to India, the India withdrew itself; it could find a place in a religious path which emphasized the way out through self-nirvana instead of fighting the world.
"It is religious response to worldly defeat"
And he claims that it is not we fought to get the freedom; the freedom movement itself was only a response to our religious experience tapped into by Mr. Gandhi. Naipaul says that Gandhi had well understood the Indian psyche. The tool of non-violence was specifically invented by Gandhi after having understood the Indian psyche.
Archaic emotions, nostalgic memories: when these were awakened by Gandhi, India became free. But the India created in this way had to stall. Gandhi took India of one kind of Kal Yug, one kind of Black Age; his successes inevitably pushed it back into another.
Naipaul is angry with Gandhi for not having left an ideology to follow.
Gandhi swept through India, but he has left it without any ideology. He awakened the holy land; his mahatmahood returned to archaism; he made his worshippers vain.
Out of multitude of Indian leaders Naipaul dissected, only person who could get some credit was Gandhi. Though Naipaul is bothered about inward looking focus of Indian mentality, he seems to be thrilled at Gandhi's achievement. He says that even though Gandhi drew his strength from inward looking self-introspection, Gandhi always stood for action.
Now, in Bengal, 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.Even though Naipaul claims to have understood the Indian psyche all by himself, he sometimes invokes Sudhir Kakkar to make some of his claims. Here is one of Kakkar's correspondence Naipaul quoted:
We Indians use outer reality to preserve the continuity of the self.
He expresses how the caste is surviving, how it strengthens the identity but how it spoils the bigger Indian cause. What spoiled India is not just the inward looking self-absorption offered by Hinduism but also myriad of mental blockages masquerading in India.
When caste and family simplify relationships, and the sanctity of the laws cannot be doubted, when magic buttresses the laws, and the epics and legends satisfy the imagination, and astrologers know the future anyway, men cannot easily begin to observe and analyze.
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.
While talking of poorer classes:
In complexion, features, and physique the poor are distinct from the well-to-do; they are like a race apart, a dwarf race, stunted and slow-witted and made ugly by generations of undernourishment; it will take generations to rehabilitate them.
Naipaul had no respect for communism either. While commenting on naxalism,
The best left the universities and went far away, to fight for the landless and the oppressed and for justice. They went to a battle they knew little about. They knew the solutions better than they knew the problems, better than they knew the country. India remains so little known to Indians. People just don't have the information. History and social inquiry, and the habits of analysis that go with these disciplines, are too far outside the Indian tradition. Naxalism was an intellectual tragedy, a tragedy of idealism, 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 inducted 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.
Naipaul is vary of sustainable-development-economists. The word he rather uses is "intermediate technology scientists". He says that the sustainable development is a romantic notion of the west being rubbed on third world. He is appalled by this one Indian scientist who is bent on increasing productivity of bullock cart and how retro-progressive idea it is as per Naipaul.
The man (the intermediate technology scientist who talks about the bullock cart improvements) himself was out of the country, lecturing; he was in demand abroad. Certain subjects, like poverty and intermediate technology, keep the experts busy. They are harassed by international seminars and conferences and foundation fellowships. The rich countries pay; they dictate the guiding ideas, which are the ideas of the rich about the poor, ideas sometimes about what is good for the poor, and sometimes no more than expressions of alarm. They, the rich countries, even manage now to export their romantic doubts about industrial civilization. These are the doubts that attend every kind of great success; and they are romantic because they contain no wish to undo that success or to lose the fruits of that success. But India interprets these doubts in its own debilitating way, and uses them to reconcile itself to its own failure.
Naipaul talks about an US educated computer engineer who keeps cribbing how India is not yet ready for his genius.
He belonged to old India; nothing had happened to shake him out of that security; he questioned nothing. From the outside world he had snatched no more than a skill in computers.... To match technology to the needs of a poor country calls for the highest skills, the clearest vision.
He has only disdain for all those politicians claiming as true Gandhians.
The Gandhian spinning wheel no longer a means of livelihood for dispossessed, or a symbol of labor and brotherhood with the poor, but a sacred too, an aid to thought or a yogic means of stilling the waves of the mind, and aid to mental vacuity.
He is perturbed by the Gandhi-cap clad politicians who are doing nothing but taking the country back.
Gandhianism expressed in the white homespun of the Congress politician, no longer the sign of service but the uniform of power....
His solution going forward is harsh:
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.
May be the interpretation of Naipaul is colored by my own prejudices; but don’t close your mind yet on Naipaul. Read him by yourself. He is worthy of reading by any audience who care for India.
Posted by nachiketa at December 16, 2005 09:58 PM