Chapter 1
V. S. NAIPAUL AND SWACHH BHARATâŚ
Gollamudi Radha Krishna Murty1
In memory of Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, a Nobel Laureate in Literature of Indian descent, who, as an astute observer of the human condition, having written thirty-odd books that indeed caused many storms in readersâ minds, died peacefully in bed on 11 August 2018 in England.
Today, as I was flipping through the morning newspapers, there came a message in the name of our Prime Minister stating, âAaiye swachha Bharat kaa nirman kare, 15th September se swachhtaa hi seva se judenâ (Letâs strive to create a Swachh Bharat). It at once reminded me that I have over-delayed paying my tributes to one of the twentieth centuryâs most admired and contentious storytellers, V. S. Naipaul, who died at his home in London, aged eighty-five. And hence the following linesâŚ.
Naipaul was the grandson of a Brahman from the Banaras region who went to Trinidad in the nineteenth century as an indentured labourer. He was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, in 1932 and later his family moved to the islandâs capital, Port-of-Spain. He claims this shift transformed him from a child who knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what he picked up in his grandmotherâs house, into an acute observer of the life of the streetâthe outside world. No wonder if Port-of-Spain then became the setting for his Miguel Streetâa collection of stories that won him the Somerset Maugham Award in 1959. Much has been written about this book which establishes it as one of the most important produced in the twentieth century.
In 1950, after winning a government scholarship, Naipaul went to study at Oxford. Later, after Oxford, it is at BBC World Service where he analysed West Indian Literature that he found his footing as a writer. His breakthrough as a writer came with his first published novel, The Mystic Masseur, in 1957. In it, he presented a dialogic intercourse between two cultures: conservative Indian culture and European liberal capitalist culture. This novel, therefore, treats the reader to an authentic history through stories of the powerless people of a Trinidad ghetto. It is through caricature and irony that he presents the aspirations, energy, vulgarities, inconsistencies and corruption of characters who belong to a rapidly changing society in which there are few stable values.
Ganesh Ramsumair, the protagonist of the novel, is presented as a bundle of all the controversies of the colonial society as he, oscillating between traditional Indian values and the lure of modern consumer capitalism, rises from a teacher to a masseur, from a masseur to a mystic, from a mystic to an MLC (Member of the Legislative Council) quite spectacularly. As the novel comes to an end, this struggling Pandit Ganesh Ramsumair becomes G. Ramsay Muirâa complete transformation into a colonial puppet who even defends British colonial rule. Interestingly, while narrating these two cultures, their institutions, processes and products, Naipaul can never be said to be siding wholly with either the Trinidadian Indian or the European ways of life.
Drawing upon his real experiences among Indians in Trinidad, Naipaul went on to write all of his earlier novelsâThe Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959) and A House for Mr Biswas (1961)âin which he narrates the struggle of charlatans, braggarts and dreamers to eke out a life with social respectability in their new worlds of settlement. However, it is his fourth novel, A House for Mr Biswasâa treatise on the pangs of exilesâthat won him major recognition. Drawing from the experiences of his father, Naipaul narrated the struggle of the protagonist of the novel, Mohan Biswas, a Trinidadian Indian, to free himself from the predicaments of family, custom and religion.
Being the son of a poor labourer and having lived as a guest in one inhospitable house after another following his fatherâs death and his marriage into a powerful family, Biswas vows to get a job on his own. And he vows to get his own house too. And, finally, by journeying through a variety of jobs, from sign painter to journalist, Biswas acquires a house of his own, which, in his view, is the signpost of his independence. But under the stress of getting the house repaired and the burden of repaying the debt, he suffers a heart attack and dies soon afterwards. Nonetheless, he leaves a house behind for sheltering his family for generations to come, and subsequently the literature of Trinidad and Tobago. Naipaul, while narrating the struggle of Biswas for dignity and independence, successfully explored the themes of family, poverty and the impact of colonialism on the economy of the vanquished colonial world from a postcolonial perspective. The novel has succeeded in making an entry into Time magazineâs 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 as a result of all of this.
Moving back and forth from Trinidad to other areas of the world, Naipaul used other national settings in his subsequent novelsâIn a Free State (1971), Guerrillas (1975), A Bend in the River (1979) and A Way in the World (1994)âbut continued to explore the relationship between violence, contingency and politics and the emerging personal and collective alienation experienced by the victims in the new milieux emerging out of the struggle between native and Western-colonial heritages. In a Free State (1971), a novella with two supporting narratives, each set in different countries, which won him Britainâs Booker Prize, was hailed by Neel Mukherjee as a âremarkable, clear-eyed, truthful and brutal meditation on exile and displacementâ.2
He accomplished this task by resorting to two techniques: in âOne Out of Manyâ, he resorted to first-person narratives through the voice of Santosh, an Indian servant in Washington and, in âTell Me Who to Killâ, it is the poor Trinidadian Indian who narrates the story in London; but in âIn a Free Stateâ, he adopts a third-person narrative perspective to tell about a long car journey undertaken by two English persons, Bobby and Linda, across an unnamed African country.
In his other novels, such as The Enigma of Arrival (1987), A Way in the World (1994) or Half a Life (2001), he examined carefully his own inner demands and analysed even his deceptions through the protagonists. In fact, some critics consider The Enigma of Arrival, written eight years after his previous publication, as his masterpiece because of its structure as a long meditation on a work by the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. In this novel, the narrator, who is perhaps no other than Naipaul himself with his own melancholy sense of rootlessness, takes many journeys, starting from colonial Trinidad, both imaginary and real, to the English countryside to become a writer. Interestingly, the narrator-migrator, choosing to inhabit a pastoral England, invents the earth below his feet and in the process feels as though the new piece of land has given him a second chance, a new life, richer and fuller than any he had had anywhere else, in which he can practise his writerâs trade. However, later, in the second part of the book, the narrator, under the spell of sickness, observing the world around him from the perspective of an outsider, perhaps more as an anthropologist, describes in a sad, melancholic tone the collapse of an old coloniser.
It is his non-fiction works that are large-sized narratives of his travels to different countries over different periods of timeâThe Middle Passage: Five Societies in the West Indies (1963), An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1976), Among the Believers (1981), India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) and Beyond Belief (1998)âthat attracted for him immense critical hostility and anger, particularly from the postcolonial world. But first things first: let us examine what he wrote under these titles.
At the time of publishing his first book on India, An Area of Darknessâa chronicle of his first visit to his ancestral homelandâIndia was indeed passing through darkness; it was just limping back from the humiliation inflicted by Chinese aggression. Owing to the widespread drought and the resulting shortage of food grains, we were then living off the American wheat supplied under the PL480 programme. And it was this despairing and hungry India that confounded him when he landed at the Bombay airport. Naipaulâs declared state of mind as a result was: âI am profoundly Indian in my feeling, profoundly Indian in my sensibility ⌠but not in my observationâ (C. D. Narasimhaiah, The Function of Criticism in India 117). He recognised, however, that from his observatory, âfrom the railway train and from the dusty roads, India appeared to require only pity. It was an easy emotion, and perhaps the Indians were right: it was compassion like mine, so strenuously maintained, that denied humanity to manyâ (Area of Darkness 263).
At the very outset of this travelogue as he landed at the Bombay airport, he encountered the bitterest experience: despite having a permit for the two bottles of liquor that he had brought with him, they were confiscated by custom authorities who declared that a âtransport permitâ was needed. In search of this increasingly elusive item, he had to run from office to office, table to table facing every official behaving either indifferently or arrogantly. This was his first introduction to the real place with which he had identified in his imagination throughout his life. Thereafter, it was the all-pervading poverty and squalor that gave him a rude shock. He wrote: âI had seen the starved child defecating at the road side while the mangy dog waited to eat the excrementâ (Area of Darkness 45). What was more distressing to him was that it was not only a village scene. Such habits could be seen on the slopes of Himalayas, at the bus-stand of Madras and on the beaches of Goa. It was to be seen everywhere. He went on penning:
Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover ⌠the peasant, Muslim or Hindu, suffers from claustrophobia if he has to use an enclosed latrine. (Area of Darkness 210)
In the same vein, he loathed the corruption prevailing in the country and was pained to note that no shame comes to those corrupt people; instead, a lot of social prestige and status is bestowed on such unscrupulous officials:
It is estimated that in Kashmir, as in the rest of India, one-third of development funds drains away in corruption and the exchanging of gifts. No disgrace attaches to this. The Kashmir tailor spoke with envious admiration of his patwari friend, a surveyor and type of records-keeper, who in one day might collect as much as a hundred rupees; a lorry-driver had a similar admiration for a traffic inspector he knew who received monthly protection money from various lorry-drivers. (Area of Darkness 92)
He thus concluded that corruption had become deep-rooted in the Indian system of government and society and was as invisible as the habit of public defecation. And now, however sore we may feel about these observations, can we deny the fact that the same system of defecating is prevailing in the country even after about fifty years since Naipaulâs visit? And even after seventy years of independence, can we not admit that the malady of corruption is haunting us, albeit with more ferocity? These are the questions that Naipaulâs works force on us still and which made me remember him when I heard the Prime Ministerâs call for Swachh Bharat.
By the time he wrote his second India book, India: A Wounded Civilization (1976), the nation was passing through the pangs of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi. And, of course, poverty was relentless, while corruption mounted up in all walks of life. While the leaders were twittering about socialist slogans, the countryside presented a grim scenario of undernourished children. And visiting India for the second time but under such testing times, Naipaul continued to be disappointed by India. Reacting to the institutional collapse under the Emergency imposed by Mrs Gandhi, he pronounced: âThe dismantled institutionsâof law, press and Parliamentâcannot simply be put together againâ (India: A Wounded Civilization 98).
Speaking about Indian civilisation as a âwounded civilizationââdecayed and dyingâNaipaul states:
No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters. Five hundred years after the Arab conquest of Sind, Muslim rule was established in Delhi as the rule of foreigners, people apart, and foreign ruleâMuslim for the five hundred years, British for the last 150âended in Delhi only in 1947.
He pessimistically concludes his book with the statement: âThe crisis of India is not only political or economic. The larger crisis is of a wounded civilization that has at last become aware of its inadequacies and is without the intellectual means to move aheadâ (India: A Wounded Civilization 102).
No wonder if such comments attracted outrage from Indian readers: âHe seems to me to write for the same reason that many ossified academics publish; else they must perish,â said C. D. Narasimhaiah (âNaipaulâs Indian Experience Againâ 99). Nevertheless, one may have to admit that what Naipaul wrote about India is not wholly untrue, for India did suffer under the yoke of foreign rule for many centuries and responded by withdrawing into itself and as a result suffers from self-deception (India: A Wounded Civilization 102).
In his final book on the trilogy of India, India: A Million Mutinies Now, Naipaul appeared to have mellowed down. Or, perhaps by the 1990s, India was on the cusp of evolving into a nation, a promise in the emergence, perhaps! Although he witnessed a new generation of intellectuals crying in hoarse empty words, he could see that India was somehow managing to survive, and indeed evolving: âIndependence had come to India like a kind of revolution; now there were many revolutions within that revolutionâŚ. All over India scores of particularities that had been frozen by foreign rule, or by poverty or lack of opportunity or abjectness had begun to flow againâ (India: A Million Mutinies Now 19). What others might see as unrest, Naipaul saw as an awakening.
It is obvious that such a probing and the resultant writing about India in what some saw as disparaging ways brought a barrage of protests from the intellectuals of India. Some critics accused him of âlook [ing] at India through Western kaleidoscope which takes myriad unreal ...