Bookless in Baghdad

by Shashi Tharoor

  Twelve days after the fall of the Allende government, Pablo Neruda died. His body lay for two days in his house, which had been ransacked by soldiers, and his funeral became the occasion for perhaps the only spontaneous popular demonstration against the military dictatorship. In his memorable poem “The Heights of Machu Picchu” he had written of the permanence of that durable Inca rock fortress (“the rock that abides, and the word”), but now it would be of Neruda himself that the next lines spoke: “death's plenitude holding us here, a bastion, the fullness / of life like a blow falling.” In his poem “The Poet's Obligation” Neruda had declared: “To whoever is not listening to the sea / this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up / in house or office, factory or woman / or street or mine or dry prison cell,/to him I come, and without speaking or looking / I arrive and open the door of his prison.”

  Those prison doors will always remain open to anyone who can pick up a volume of Neruda's. His biographer Adam Feinstein recounts how one morning soon after his death there was an uproar in a house where Neruda had used to live — a huge eagle had gotten into the living room, though all the doors and windows of the house had been locked for months. Pablo Neruda had always said that in his next life he wanted to be an eagle. No doubt his wish was fulfilled, and he soars above us today, like his poetry.

  13

  Speaking III of the Dead:

  Nirad Chaudhuri

  ONE MUST NEVER SPEAK ILL OF THE DEAD, of course, though it is tempting to wonder whether that old dictum applies to those who themselves, while they were alive, reveled in speaking ill of both the dead and the living. Still, now that the eulogies for the late Nirad Chaudhuri, who died in 1999, have been heard and read and no doubt filed away, only to be exhumed at the next unsuitable opportunity, one wonders whether the traditional kindness to the departed soul colored rather too much of our judgment.

  From the publication of his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian shortly after Independence through a series of disquisitions on his native India and the Britain to which he emigrated, Nirad Chaudhuri acquired a formidable reputation as a stylist and a contrarian. In books with arch titles like Thy Hand, Great Anarch! Chaudhuri placed his considerable erudition and florid English at the service of a worldview that combined personal introspection with ethnic self-hatred. It did not help that, though he was born in 1897, his political sensibilities seemed grounded in the nineteenth century; certainly his education, whether formal or self-taught, appears to have taken little account of ideas elaborated since then. British critics found in him an Indian they could agree with, and painlessly admire; the Indians who frothed at the mouth at his reactionary views were dismissed by Chaudhuri with the contempt that he reserved for most of his compatriots.

  The conventional wisdom — at least as reflected in the generous sampling of elegiac obituaries I read — is that Nirad-babu, as he was known in the Bengali fashion, was a great writer and a magnificent intellect, a highly civilized and elegant prosodist unfairly excoriated by Indians who had not read what they criticized. Some obituarists delighted in quoting the old curmudgeon's notorious dedication in The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian: “To the memory of the British Empire in India, which conferred subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship; to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: Civis Brittanicus Sum, because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule.” Most went on to say that outraged Indians did not read much more than the dedication; others pointed out, with a somewhat superior air, that the dedication was not the un-critical piece of British flattery it appeared to be, since, after all, it upbraided the Raj for denying British citizenship to Indians. Both sets of writers appeared to think that Indians who objected to Nirad-babu's autobiography were merely hypersensitive nationalists without the intelligence or discernment to know any better.

  I beg to differ. However generously one reads that appalling dedication, there is no escaping the unedifying spectacle of a brown man with his nose up the colonial fundament. “All that was good and living within us” — all, mind you, not some — “was made, shaped and quickened” by British rule? The mind boggles at the thought of Nirad Chaudhuri's omissions, both of the millennial Indian civilizational and intellectual heritage, and of the exactions and injustices of British colonial rule. Any author who can put such a thought into the dedication of his first book is not merely being polemical; he is advertising his allegiances, and deserves to be taken at his own xenolatrous word.

  Chaudhuri was the first Indian writer of any distinction to tap into the vein of an Indian national weakness — Indians’ readiness, as a people, to lap up critical judgments about ourselves, especially if they have first been published abroad. I remember, as a child in the late 1960s, my mounting horror and indignation at reading an article by Niradbabu in the Illustrated Weekly of India entitled “Why I Hate Indians.” Sure enough, it elicited a flurry of rejoinders that the editor, the puckish Khushwant Singh, published under the heading “Why I Hate Nirad Chaudhuri.” But even then I wondered why the arrogant pedantry of the man, his sweeping generalizations and apocalyptic conclusions, usually unsupported by any empirical evidence, were taken so seriously by readers and editors.

  Of course Nirad Chaudhuri was a man of learning and refinement. Of course he could quote Greek and Latin and drop classical allusions in a manner that went out of style with the solar topee. Of course he could write with elegance and erudition — though all too often his orotund sentences were weighed down by the turgidity of his vocabulary. Of course he was a literary original, in a way that was uniquely his own. But after granting all that, it is also true that he was a crotchety eccentric whose delight in his own iconoclasm showed little respect for the qualities and attainments of others. Nirad-babu was an Indian whose greatest satisfaction in his prospective bride lay in her ability to spell “Beethoven”; an Indian who thought more highly of Winston Churchill than he did of Mahatma Gandhi or Pandit Nehru. It was typical that his take-no-prisoners assault on all the citadels of Indian culture and civilization was titled The Continent of Circe: he had to turn to Western mythology even for his principal metaphor. Civis Brittanicus Sum indeed: no doubt woggishness loses something in the translation.

  There is a great deal of truth in the indulgent suggestion by the American historian David Lelyveld that “Nirad Chaudhuri is a fiction created by the Indian writer of the same name — a bizarre, outrageous and magical transformation of that stock character of imperialist literature, the Bengali babu.” The problem is that the caricatured babu was not transformed enough. While the British laughed at the breed for their half-successful attempts to emulate their English masters, Nirad-babu sought to demonstrate that his success was impossible to laugh at. In 1835, that archimperialist Lord Macaulay had envisaged the creation of an intermediate class of Indians, educated in English, to serve and support British rule: they would be “a class of persons Indian in blood and color but English in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Not only did Nirad Chaudhuri teach himself to become the perfect English gentleman in terms of his intellect, tastes, and pro-imperial opinions (carrying the Macaulayan fantasy to its absurd extreme), but he went one better than most Englishmen, scattering phrases in French, German, and Italian through his writing.

  Nirad-babu moved to England for good in 1970, but in his mind he had always lived there. Yet his writing itself evoked the Bengali babu's obsession with his lofty heritage, and his petulance at the failure of the white man to recognize and reward it. That there might be something faintly comical about the sight of this wizened figure, in his immaculate Bengali dhoti, strutting about Oxford lamenting the decline of British civilization does not seem to have occurred to his admirers. But then comedy is not what one thinks about at the crematorium.

  14

  R. K. Narayan's Comedies of Suffering

  WHEN THE NEWS BROKE IN 2001 of the ending of India's most distinguished literary career of the twentieth century, that of R
asipuram Krishnaswamy Narayanaswami (contracted, at Graham Greene's suggestion, to R. K. Narayan), who had passed away at ninety-two, I immediately received a number of calls from journalists and editors, mainly in the United States, who were hastily penning appreciations of the veteran writer. In every case, they asked for a contribution, a few lines, or at least a quote; in every case, I demurred. Death is a moment for regret, for retrospection and remembered affection, but I had little admiration to offer. At the same time, only once had I allowed the news of a writer's death to prompt me to pour vitriol onto his pyre, and that was when the Indophobic Nirad Chaudhuri went to his Elysian fields. I certainly did not feel so negatively about Narayan. Better to say nothing, I decided, when you have nothing much to say.

  But the queries continued to come in, and once a decent interval had passed, I agreed that perhaps the time had come to unburden myself. First of all, of a past wrong. Back in 1994, in a review of his Grandmother's Tale in the New York Times, I had criticized R. K. Narayan's writing in a manner that, I later learned, deeply hurt the old man. (I had not intended to, but was guilty, like most reviewers, of forgetting that writers, however eminent they may be, also have feelings.) My review also offended a number of friends I liked and respected — friends who accused me of lèse-majesté, iconoclasm, and Stephanian elitism, among other sins. So I suppose I had better explain myself.

  To begin with, let me stress that my favorite Narayan story is the story of how he got his start as a novelist. “Some time in the early thirties,” Graham Greene recalled, “an Indian friend of mine called Purna brought me a rather traveled and weary typescript — a novel written by a friend of his — and I let it lie on my desk for weeks unread until one rainy day….” The English weather saved an Indian muse: Greene didn't know that the novel “had been rejected by half-a-dozen publishers and that Purna had been told by the author… to weight it with a stone and drop it into the Thames.” Greene loved the novel, Swami and Friends, found a publisher for it in London, and so launched a career that was to encompass twenty-seven more books, including fourteen novels.

  In giving him the Yatra Award for outstanding lifetime achievement — one of those Indian prizes that seem quite unable to sustain themselves, so that subsequent winners (if any) remain entirely unknown — the distinguished jury's citation declared Narayan “a master story-teller whose language is simple and unpretentious, whose wit is critical yet healing, whose characters are drawn with sharp precision and subtle irony, and whose narratives have the lightness of touch which only a craftsman of the highest order can risk.” In the West, Narayan is widely considered the quintessential “Indian” writer, whose fiction evokes a sensibility and a rhythm older and less familiar to westerners than that of any other writer in the English language. My friends in India saw in Narayan our country's best hope of a Nobel Prize in Literature.

  At his best, Narayan was a consummate teller of timeless tales, a meticulous recorder of the ironies of human life, an acute observer of the possibilities of the ordinary: India's answer to Jane Austen. The gentle wit, the simple sentences, the easy assumption of the inevitabilities of the tolerant Hindu social and philosophical system, the characteristically straightforward plotting, were all hallmarks of Narayan's charm and helped make many of his novels and stories interesting and often pleasurable.

  But I felt that they also pointed to the banality of Narayan's concerns, the narrowness of his vision, the predictability of his prose, and the shallowness of the pool of experience and vocabulary from which he drew. Like that of Austen, his fiction was restricted to the concerns of a small society portrayed with precision and empathy; unlike that of Austen, his prose could not elevate those concerns beyond the ordinariness of its subjects. Narayan wrote of, and from, the mindset of the small-town South Indian Brahmin, and did not seem capable of a greater range. His metronomic style was frequently not equal to the demands of his situations. Intense and potentially charged scenes were rendered bathetic by the inadequacy of the language used to describe them. In much of his writing, stories with extraordinary possibilities unfolded in flat, monotonous sentences that frustrated rather than convinced me, and in a tone that ranged from the clichéd to the flippant. At its worst, Narayan's prose was like the bullock-cart: a vehicle that can move only in one gear, is unable to turn, accelerate, or reverse, and remains yoked to traditional creatures who have long since been overtaken but know no better.

  I was, I must admit, particularly frustrated to find that Narayan was indifferent to the wider canon of English fiction and to the use of the English language by other writers, Western or Indian. Worse, his indifference was something of which he was inordinately proud. He told interviewers that he avoided reading: “I don't admit influences.” This showed in his writing, but he was defiant: “What is style?” he asked one interviewer. “Please ask these critics to first define it…. Style is a fad.” The result was that he used words as if unconscious of their nuances: every other sentence included a word inappropriately or wrongly used; the ABC's of bad writing — archaisms, banalities, and clichés — abounded. It was as if the author had learned the words in a school textbook and imagined them hallowed by repetition rather than hollowed by regurgitation. Narayan's words were just what they seemed; there was no hint of meanings lurking behind the surface syllables, no shadow of worlds beyond the words. When asked why he didn't write in an Indian language, Narayan replied that he did, for English was an Indian language. Ironically, though, much of Narayan's prose reads like a translation.

  Some of my friends felt I was wrong to focus on language — a writerly concern, as they saw it — and lose sight of the stories, which in many ways had an appeal that transcended language. But my point was that such pedestrian writing diminished Narayan's stories, undermined the characters, trivialized their concerns. Other serious readers of Narayan disagree with me, and perhaps so many of them can't be wrong. I was perhaps particularly unfair in suggesting that Narayan was merely a chronicler of the ordinary who reflected faithfully the worldview of a self-obsessed and complacent upper caste (and middle class). “I write primarily for myself,” Narayan had said. “And I write about what interests me, human beings and human relationships…. Only the story matters; that's all.” Fair enough: one should not expect Austen to be Orwell. But one does expect an Austen to enrich the possibilities of the language she uses, to illuminate her tools as well as her craft. Narayan's was an impoverished English, limited and conventional, its potential unexplored, its bones bare.

  And yet my case was probably overstated. For there is enchantment in Narayan's world; his tales often captivate, even if they could have been better written. The world that emerges from his stories is one in which the family — or the lack of one — looms as the defining presence in each character's life; in which the ordinary individual comes to terms with the expectations of society; and in which these interactions afford opportunities for wry humor or understated pathos. Because of this, and because of their simplicity, the stories have a universal appeal, and are almost always absorbing. And they are infused with a Hindu humanism that is ultimately Narayan's most valuable characteristic, making even his most poignant stories comedies of suffering rather than tragedies of laughter.

  So I, too, lament the great man's passing. “The only way to exist in harmony with Annamalai,” Narayan wrote in one of his stories of a troublesome servant, “was to take him as he was; to improve or enlighten him would only exhaust the reformer and disrupt nature's design.” Even the most grudging critic should not deny R. K. Narayan this self-created epitaph.

  15

  The Enigma of Being V. S. Naipaul

  FOR DECADES, THE POTTED BIOGRAPHY of V. S. Naipaul that accompanies each of his more than twenty books has carried the curious sentence, “After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession.” It is a fiercely idiosyncratic formulation, as if Naipaul has defined his commitment to his craft by his unwillingness to pursue any other. A
nd it has stayed in my mind ever since, in my teens, I first read Naipaul, as the biographical hallmark of the True Writer, something that those of us who labor at other employment can never really hope to be.

  And yet it is only with the publication of the remarkable and moving collection of letters sent to and from the adolescent “Vido” at Oxford (Between Father and Son: Family Letters, edited by Naipaul's literary agent Gillon Aitken) that I have fully understood the depth of meaning embodied in that sentence. These letters, for the most part between Naipaul and his father (even though many are addressed, with undergraduate casualness, to “Dear Everybody”), profoundly reflect both men's efforts to write successfully — which is to say, to write well enough to be published or broadcast, and above all, to be paid for it. They are full of the pathos and struggle of writing — the creative blocks, the malfunctioning typewriters, the distractions of work and family, the depression-inducing rejections, and the anxious accounting of remuneration for each completed effort — as well as mutual appreciation, advice, and encouragement for each other's work.

  Naipaul père (referred to throughout as “Pa”) was a journalist and subeditor for the Trinidad Guardian, but really wanted to write fiction. In his letters, Pa is burned up by the struggle to make ends meet to support his growing family (a seventh child is born in the course of this correspondence), and burning, too, with envy of lesser writers who have attained publication. His son, supplementing a government scholarship at Oxford by living off funds he knows his father can ill afford to send him, writes to pull himself out of the dead-end middle-class penury to which a job in Trinidad would have condemned him, as it condemned his father. When Pa dies following a heart attack at the age of forty-seven, it seems Vido will have to seek a job to support the family. But a variety of international employment possibilities identified by the Oxford Appointments Committee — from the United Nations to the Western India Match Company — fail to materialize. The choice is stark: return to Trinidad (as one surmises his family would have wished) or risk further poverty and failure by pursuing his literary ambitions (as his father would no doubt have wanted).