A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling

by V. S. Naipaul

  His cause didn’t shrink; it became bigger. It grew far beyond the disabilities of Indians in South Africa. He looked inwards: from South African abuse and the business of the latrines in Ripon College to the all-India problems of caste and the sweepers, which were as old as history, and explained the attitudes of delegates and volunteers. He looked hard at broken-down, static, cruel India; he took nothing for granted. He saw the cruelties done to the sacred cow and the underfed, overworked oxen—still true today: India took some of his ideas, ignored others. He became a great Indian reformer even while working against British rule; he didn’t allow one thing to work against the other. And in the third strand of his extraordinary development he looked deep into himself, to his soul, his spirituality, which increasingly he saw as an expression of his social and political work.

  His mother was a woman of simple rustic piety. She loved rituals and embraced all that came in the course of a year. These rituals could be arduous. Sometimes they lasted a month, sometimes months, and they came with a series of fasts and half-fasts. She did them all, and on occasion, depending on her mood, added vows and fasts of her own. She might, for instance, during the incessant rains of the monsoon, vow not to eat if she didn’t see the sun. The unhappy children would watch for the rain clouds to break. If the sun peeped out, they would run to their mother with the good news. She would go outside to look for herself, but by that time the sun might have gone in again. Then she would say cheerfully, “It doesn’t matter. God doesn’t want me to eat today.”

  This story occurs on the second page of the autobiography. It contains the seed of Gandhi’s later experiments with food, which were to lead to his discovery as a politician and the mahatma of the power of the fast. He was his mother’s son. Contrary to a received idea, he liked his food, but it was easy for him to cut down, to do without, to push himself to the limit, to simplify and simplify.

  In Johannesburg in 1903 he used to have three square meals a day, in addition to afternoon tea. But he didn’t feel well. He had headaches and was using laxatives. One day he read in the paper about the formation of a No Breakfast Association in Manchester in England (in those days there seemed to have been associations or societies for everything). He liked what he read. He gave up breakfast, suffered a little, but got rid of the headaches. The constipation was more stubborn; it had to wait until a German who ran a vegetarian restaurant in Johannesburg (or someone like that: Gandhi wasn’t sure) recommended Return to Nature, a book about earth treatment. Then, following the book, Gandhi applied poultices of wet clean earth (spread on linen) on his stomach at night; and was cured.

  His ascetic ideas drew from many sources. He went to jail for the first time in 1908; this was in Johannesburg. Africans and Indians were not given tea or coffee and their last meal in jail had to be finished before sunset. This was hard, but Gandhi grew to think it was something he might add to his own daily discipline. Prisoners could use salt to season their food, but nothing else. Gandhi, pushing at the laws, as always, asked the jail medical officer for curry powder and also to be allowed to put salt in the food while it was cooking. (He knew, or had found out, the form: he knew who to ask.) The officer refused. He said, “You are not here for satisfying your palate.” Gandhi played with that idea, of not satisfying the palate, and was pleased with it. When he left jail he adopted two of the jail restrictions: eating dinner before sunset, and doing without tea and coffee.

  Later in South Africa he founded a commune and called it Tolstoy Farm. At the farm in 1912 he and his German friend Kallenbach gave up milk. (Kallenbach, a seeker after spirituality, was entirely under Gandhi’s thumb. Gandhi, holy man and commune-leader as he had become, had begun to radiate a great personal authority. Two years later, in 1914, when they had left South Africa and were going to England, sharing a cabin, Gandhi and Kallenbach began to talk about the simple life. During this discussion Gandhi took Kallenbach’s cherished binoculars and threw them through the porthole into the sea.) At Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi used his authority to make everyone vegetarian. Having done that, he pushed a little harder: he decided on a pure fruit diet, the fruit being the cheapest possible, so that they could live like the very poor.

  It was with clothes as it was with food. He wished now to more than simplify, to dress like the very poor, whom he represented and who had given him his authority. He had begun in South Africa, wearing a shirt, a dhoti, a white cloak, and scarf, all of cheap Indian mill cloth. He wore that in England in 1914. In India in 1915, because he intended to travel third class on the railways, he got rid of the cloak and the scarf as being too showy.

  He became at last as Huxley saw him ten years later in Kanpur, and Huxley would not have known what a complicated journey the small man with the shawl over his bare shoulders had made. He had drawn from many sources, some of them very strange—not only Ruskin and Tolstoy and Thoreau, but also his mother’s rustic religious ideas, the No Breakfast Association of Manchester, and the South African jail code. He had created his own idea of spirituality and holy living. He hadn’t stamped something out from the Indian pattern: the long hair, the saffron robe, the sandalwood caste-marks.

  GANDHI WENT TO South Africa in 1893, five or six months before he was twenty-four; and he left in 1914. It is possible that if he had not spent all those years in middle life in South Africa many of the spiritual and political developments that led to the mahatmahood would not have come to him. His three earlier years in London as a law student, from 1888 to 1891, had in the main taught him thrift. He was confirmed in his old ideas and was changed in no important way. When he went back to India he was as gauche and tongue-tied as before. He found himself unable to speak in the Bombay court when at last he got a petty, thirty-rupee case; and he decided, with his unhappy brother, who had paid for the three years in London, that his best bet as a lawyer would be to go back to Rajkot and draft applications and memorials.

  South Africa overwhelmed him. He had read very little; he hardly knew the history of India. He was unprepared for the racial insults and the racial legislation of South Africa; they taught him in the most brutal way about the political shape of the world, and his unprotected place as an Indian in the general scheme. In India he had picked up a few ideas about British rule; but they were simple ideas; they did not undermine him or (except in one case) wound him. In South Africa he was assailed in the core of his being; he found himself in a kind of political quicksand, which was also like a spiritual quicksand. If he didn’t act he was going to sink.

  Overnight, then, he became a doer; he lost his shyness; shyness was like a luxury from another life. He became a true lawyer; the law indicated how in this bad situation he might best act. He became a drafter and organizer of petitions, real petitions now, about people’s lives, and not the petty memorials he had been writing in Rajkot as a country lawyer just a few months before. If he had been a little more evolved, a little more used to the ways of the world, a little more like the Gujarati merchants who had asked him to come to South Africa, his ideas might have been more like theirs. They said simply that this was how it was in South Africa; one had to work around the law and live with the bad manners, find the areas of privacy, keep one’s head down and make money. But Gandhi was a country boy, in spite of the years in London. He was raw; his nerves were raw; he wasn’t clever enough or experienced enough to adapt.

  The theme of rebellion is one of the great themes of Western European literature. The true modern novel arises when the rebel, the man apart, feels himself strong enough to take on the established order, and when that order is fluid enough and secure enough to make room for him. At the very end of Old Goriot, Balzac’s great novel of ambition and failure, Rastignac climbs the hill at evening above the cemetery of Paris, looks down at the “hive” of the famous city, now twinkling with lights, and declares war on it. It is a false declaration; even as Rastignac makes his vow, he can taste the honey of the hive on his lips. He wishes to possess the city.

  Gandhi’s rebellion is not a
t all like Rastignac’s. He has no idea of the unbearable beauty of the hostile city. Gandhi in South Africa has small, manageable, political aims. (He is particular about that: he likes his petitions to be concrete and precise, without rhetoric, and about a specified small matter.) But then, as Gandhi’s vision widens, the nature of his rebellion grows. His politics becomes indistinguishable from his spirituality. There has never been any taste of honey on his lips.

  If Gandhi’s journey can be compared with anyone else’s, it is with that of another Indian, the Buddha. Both these men make wounding journeys. Gandhi leaves his secure small-town life to travel first to England, which is all right, but then to South Africa, which changes his life. The Buddha, a prince, leaves his cosseted palace life to explore the town outside. He discovers sickness, old age, and death. These are the things from which by his father’s orders he has been shielded all his life. He sets himself to meditate on the fact of pain, and he does so until he has an illumination.

  The Buddha’s journey is more overtly spiritual than Gandhi’s, but Gandhi’s political cause in time acquires a spiritual tinge; and Gandhi’s journey is more human and understandable. His political achievement is immense. He raised consciousness about caste and made possible the reforms that were carried out in India after independence; he failed completely in the matter of cruelty to animals, but that nastiness runs deep in humankind. The Buddha’s illumination is opaque; it is so in Ananda Coomaraswamy’s sympathetic exposition (published, it should be said, in the last year of Coomaraswamy’s life); and it is so again in the book of another sympathetic religious scholar, Trevor Ling.

  I am attracted to the Buddha story, and I would like to understand. There are times when the repetitive Buddhist scriptures make me feel that I do understand this great story of India, where the mysterious faith, for reasons I cannot fathom, ruled for a thousand years. But after a while I know, with these Buddhist scriptures, as with the poetry of William Blake (giving this just as an example of something attractive and baffling), I have failed again. Between the basic, beautiful story of the prince, his discovery of human pain, and his renunciation, and the complicated, even top-heavy theology of the organised faith, I can see no clear link.

  Everything about Gandhi is clear, even when wilful and irritating. A certain amount is even funny.

  NEHRU, IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, published in 1936, shows us Gandhi in close-up. Nehru’s autobiography, once it gets going politically, is done year by year; his method suggests a man working from end-of-the-year notes. This gives the book its vividness. Nehru was twenty years younger than Gandhi. It was late in 1916 that he saw the older man for the first time and then (though he knew about his work for Indians in South Africa) he thought him distant and unpolitical, not interested in the Congress or Indian politics. Nehru was wrong. The politics Gandhi wasn’t interested in was the formal politics of the Congress at that time. And, in fact, when Nehru saw him, Gandhi, though without a populist Indian reputation, was on the point of injecting himself successfully into an Indian peasant movement. It was not an easy thing to do, and after this Nehru’s attitude changed. He began to see in Gandhi the authority people had seen in him in South Africa.

  His physical description of Gandhi at this stage is fascinating. It complements Huxley’s portrait of a few years later. It shows the steel that was in the bare-backed sage or saint. The eyes were mild and “deep,” bright with energy and determination. He was humble but precise and hard, soft-spoken but “terribly earnest,” not ready to take no for an answer. His speech could develop a “dictatorial” vein, and people who were uncertain about his methods, but yet wished to be with him, could be frightened after he spoke.

  In Nehru’s annalistic narrative Gandhi develops, from event to event, and each development is minutely noted; and Nehru’s attitude also changes. He is a logical, educated man, and he can be critical, bewildered by the Gandhian way of starting and stopping a great movement on an apparent whim (at least one important idea came to Gandhi in a half-dream); but always at bottom Nehru is adoring; always at bottom there is the feeling—and it is like a belief in magic (which is part of Gandhi’s hold on the enormous, varied country)—that the mahatma with his saint-like illogicality knows the way ahead, and without him, without this man who is in tune with the peasant soul of India, they have no true following and are lost.

  Halfway through his book Nehru, always seeking to understand the Gandhi enigma, and his own attraction to the mahatma, arrives at the idea that Gandhi is really a peasant but on a heroic scale. He has some of the peasant’s limitations, the lack of the aesthetic sense, for example: Nehru says that Gandhi, faced with the Taj Mahal, would have thought more of the forced labour that had gone to its building. But always in his essence Gandhi is infinitely more than a peasant; he has intellect, vision, an ability to attract; and his asceticism is real; his suppressed passions run naturally to spirituality.

  Nehru came of an educated and rich family. He himself was educated for seven years in England, at Harrow and at Cambridge. He should in those years have been granted the gift of vision and, as an Indian in England in a high imperialist time, an oddity, he should have learned something of the art of self-assessment. Yet, going by the autobiography, he was at the end of this period a perfect blank. He has very little to report about London or Harrow or Cambridge; much less, in fact, than Gandhi has to say about London twenty-five years before. In Nehru’s account these places are just their names. It is very strange.

  When, in the autobiography, he leaves England behind and, roughly seven years later, begins to write his year-by-year story about his entry into Indian politics (based perhaps on old notes) he is very full; his sensibility is developed; he has a feeling for the material world and has a descriptive gift. It might be that in the beginning he is following an idea of good manners that it is wrong to thrust oneself forward. This permits him to write about a holiday skiing mishap but about very little else. It might be that his sensibility at Harrow and Cambridge was limited; it might be that in those days he was fearful as an Indian of considering himself, and thought that it was enough to take the names of famous places.

  It might be that, in spite of the differences between them, he too had to make a journey like Gandhi’s, from not seeing to seeing. Gandhi’s journey began rudely in South Africa in 1893. Nehru’s journey began by chance in 1920, with his discovery of the country poor, overwhelming in numbers, but whom perhaps for that very reason people like himself had always taken for granted: people there, in the background. In those days, Nehru says, the British-owned newspapers hardly reported on Indian politics; and the Indian newspapers, modelling themselves on the British, had little in their columns about Indian rural politics. So it happened in 1919–20 that a spontaneous unprotected peasant movement erupted and spread in the United Provinces, near Nehru’s home town of Allahabad. And if two hundred of the desperate peasants, ragged and starving, hadn’t thought one day of walking the fifty miles from their villages to Allahabad, to put their case to public figures they had heard about, Nehru (the son of a famous lawyer and politician) would not have known about their movement, and his life might have taken a different course.

  Nehru had known about the poor of India, had seen them in their thousands at religious fairs, part of the pageant of India. But now he was inexpressibly moved to be taken to their villages, to see this pathetic domestic side of the very poor. His visit was casual, an accident. But for the villagers it was everything; they were full of enthusiasm. They called out the neighbouring villages for him, shouting “Sita Ram” and getting the same answering call from village after village. They all had unbounded faith in his ability to do something for them. And because he had known so little about them they filled him with sorrow and shame. As a politician he would almost certainly have become involved with the peasants when the time came. But it would have been in a more formal way; the encounter then wouldn’t have had this intimate, unexpected, emotional side.

  He stayed for thre
e days with the peasants that first time. Later he went back and found that for this visit the peasants had built roads for him. He had taken a “light car” (the date is 1920), and when it got bogged down the peasants simply lifted it out. He ate with the peasants and slept in their huts. Everything would have been new to him. He would have noted a hundred details. He wouldn’t have been able to take anything for granted. He would have learned to look. His sensibility would have widened, with his compassion and his political growth; it was with these peasants that he lost his shyness about talking in public, even in front of ten thousand people; and later, when he came to write, this developed sensibility would show. He would be able, for instance, to describe his jail cells in gripping detail; he would be able to do the more difficult thing of describing the ever-changing mahatma, understanding at the end that the man who was truly a great soul was also in a part of his heart a great peasant.

  THE AREA WHERE this peasant epiphany, this epiphany of Indian distress, came to Nehru was the area known to the author of Jeevan Prakash twenty-two years or so before when he was thinking of migrating as an indentured servant to the South American Dutch colony of Surinam. For many months at that time the young Rahman had been moved from depot to recruiting depot in the Kanpur-Fyzabad area and had preferred not to write to his family, who might have been able to have his indenture agreement annulled. There is no hint in Rahman’s autobiography of distress of the kind that moved Nehru. The big men in his book are landowners; they employ Pathan assistants; Rahman, full of the excitement of religious festivals and magic and magical healers, seems to think that all this is in order. Rahman’s world is complete and full; we can never imagine it challenged or disturbed by peasant agitation. He never takes us off the road to a village in the interior; so we have no idea how the poor live. All we know about travel and local roads is that big landowners move about in a palanquin carried by four men, who are apparently always just there, waiting to be hired.