Naipaul and the Festering Indian Wound

India is not my home; it can not be my home. Yet I cannot reject it or remain indifferent to it.

These powerful words in the preface to India:A Wounded Civilization underscore the dilemma of the complex relationship that VS Naipaul had with India.

A relationship that had striking parallels with the writer’s own background – ‘at once exceedingly simple, and still exceedingly complex’.

A relationship that was multifaceted and had different phases : from India being the centre for the diaspora in the Caribbean, to being no more than an idealisation of the over-glorified past amidst squalor, debilitating traditions and a civilization in turmoil.

India, for Naipaul, was a society that was a pale shadow of its long forgotten accomplishments. It was a civilization at odds with itself and possessing an inherent contradiction as it tries to straddle the myth of the puritan past along with the promise of a new dawn.

The disillusionment is palpable. And it was more than a cultural shock. A disaster, as Naipaul terms it.

A country which was 'half made’, borrows everything wholesale from West and adapts it, often unthinkingly, in Indian scenarios and conditions. And yet vigorously retains the old pieties, hierarchies, sacrosanct rituals, and above all, the old ways of looking and observing. The confusion was at the very root of the Identity.

India of 1975, the year when Naipaul wrote India:A Wounded Civilization, after extensive travel, was a nation searching for a new idea of itself – a unifying idea that could reconcile all contradictions and give the nation a new meaning, purpose and identity.

“There always was a contradiction between the archaism of national pride and the promise of the new; the contradiction has at last cracked the civilization open” writes Naipaul.

An existential void had suddenly emerged after two decades of independence. And it had the potential to tear the nascent republic asunder. The constitution had been annulled and emergency had just been imposed by Indira Gandhi.

The future seemed bleak. India seemed to be on the verge of breakdown and collapse. Years of hard won progress appeared to be turning illusionary. The national pride of the middle class was beginning to fade. And the optimism of the 'tryst with destiny' moment had proved to be just a glimmer of hope that is everyday receding.

He attempts to analyze this contradiction through a glimpse into Indian religious philosophy to get at the root cause of this torpor.

Burdens of past

Historical and social analysis, Naipaul maintains, remain outside the Indian tradition.

And this has lead to the demise of a reasoned and intellectual awakening of India, stalled modernist regeneration and precipitated the tragedy of a nation descending into inaction, which is couched in the grammar of Gandhian pacifism, but is actually a bumptious parody of it.

Gandhianism, in its original tenor, meant self sacrifice and conscientious action when Gandhi succeeded in appealing to the Indian masses and turned Indian religious myth into an anti-imperialist clarion call.

Inverted Gandhianism,a fad in 1970s, epitomised inertia, withdrawal, resignation and inward looking. But this was not the renunciation of an ascetic, but rather of a person dependent on the material world — who has passed on his responsibilities to the outer world.

The outer world should change but the immortal land will remain immutable and harken for the lost glory and assuaging of the bruised ego.

The issues aren't of reconstruction or conceiving new ideas and institutions, but somehow going back to the pristine past or creating a new visualisation of that reimagination.

Eternal continuity

India is old and India continues, said the Indian novelist RK Narayan to VS Naipaul when the two met in London in the 1960s.

For Naipaul, this continuity was an attitude of defeatism, of isolation, of being indifferent to misery and wretchedness, of inaction, and taking recourse in spirituality and religious imagery.

The core Hindu doctrine of Karma, he rightly observed, is a double edged sword.

It can denote both constructive labor and endeavor for self realization and creativity, like what Balzac and Proust said about literary pursuits not for fame but because of a sense of duty; and succumbing to the preordained determinism of Karma –fatalism at its most extreme – whose only logical conclusion is being complacent about your station in life and existential nihilism.

The hallowed higher wisdom of spirituality invariably degenerates into nihilism, in the Indian situation, and for obvious reasons.

In a hideously unequal and stratified semi-feudal India of the 1970s where only the outer cloak was of parliamentary democracy and liberalism, but deep down, when the outer blandishments were shorn off, there were unimaginable atrocities in the hinterlands that had an eerie way of continuum and were in a statis since time immemorial.

Yet, this cruelty, the existence of bonded labor, horrific casteism, and other brutalities astonished most urban Indians because they were safely cloistered from it.

It was something that had been buried beneath the surface, something whose putrid stench couldn’t reach their nostrils.

And Naipaul isn’t wrong when he traces this pathology to the solipsism of Hindu spirituality. The self-centred individualism which negates social contact and solidarity and see’s everything in a weirdly utilitarian way – everything is to be seen in relation to the individual, or to its value for him, not for what it actually is. The outer world is merely a medium. The insular self is the culmination.

Being inured to corruption, torment, wretchedness, squalor, horrific barbarism, was the combined effect of self-centered spiritualism and Karma, which condemns a man based on his deeds in the past life.

Naipaul comes across as someone with a brilliant grasp of sociology when he says that the crisis in India isn't economic, not even political.

But something more profound and something which has been unacknowledged and would remain unaddressed – the problem of identity and of a grotesque religiosity that has blurred the distinction between voluntary spartan existence and abysmal poverty and misery.

When he says "India is to be returned to itself, to surrender to its inmost impulses; at the same time India is to be saved from itself", it illustrates the deep-seated Indian reverence for an imaginary past of unparalleled achievement and unrivaled triumph, of bounty and plenitude, of smug isolation and basking in glory, which dangerously coexists with the various goblins of intellectual lethargy, mimicry, and vainglorious contentment.

It also denotes a nihilism which, irrespective of all its impulses, cares for nothing other than what the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer termed 'instinct of self-preservation’.

Vernacular vantage

Drawing analogies with RK Narayan’s novels 'Mr Sampath' and 'Vendor of Sweets' and UR Anandmurthy’s Kannada novel 'Samskara’, Naipaul draws home the point of Indian rejection, blithe indifference, and viewing everything from a parochial rootedness, which has to be venerated and everything beyond it to be shunned.

With these novels, which have nothing common in the plot, background, literary structure, or nature of the ordeal of the protagonists, he strikes at the hitherto invisible ‘heart of darkness’ of Indian spiritualism.

Naipaul’s gaze is piercing; his observation trenchant and his analysis unsparing and scathing. But it gives us something to reflect upon, introspect and understand ideas as whole, for their own purpose, not for the benefit of a few men.

No man is an island. And silos in diverse, heterogeneous societies are usually of one’s own making, and an image of their mental isolation.

The French philosopher Albert Camus once said 'What is called a reason for living, is also an excellent reason for dying'.

There is no absurdism in Naipaul’s observation. But he is on the same page with Camus when he highlights and extols Gandhi’s role in the Indian independence movement, his genius of exhorting Indian masses, of becoming India’s first mass leader and infusing a fresh breath of life in the moribund politics of the age.

But, in the same vein, he holds Gandhi and his methods responsible for the Indian tendency of archaism, unnecessary abnegation, unthinking servility, false piety, exhibitionist austerity, Luddite methodology, fetish for an exasperating primitivism, and the political and social sterility that is inimical to the spirit of any nation.

In the 21st century India of rapid urbanization, mushrooming malls and multiplexes, glittering apartments in the big cities and the nouveau riche who are the children of liberalisation and globalisation, the relevance of 'A Wounded Civilization' as a reflection, as a food for thought, and primarily as a monumental work that can awaken us from our inward-looking and self-seeking stupor, is still as fresh as it was in mid 1970s.

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.