A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling

by V. S. Naipaul

  This is where the Autobiography, great book though it is, becomes broken-backed; an intellectual flaw becomes a structural flaw. The reader has been led—by what he has read of Bengal village life, and the journeys along its waterways, and childhood, and Calcutta, and the university—to expect something personal and descriptive (and humorous) about the nationalist movement (with all its great figures), set off perhaps at a lower level by something about Chaudhuri’s marriage and his poor jobs. But there is nothing. There is only a long and wordy chapter of historical analysis, which reads like something from another book. As soon as Chaudhuri attempts analysis he becomes vain and mad and begins to use too many words, indifferent to the reader’s patience. So it happens that out of a strange, suicidal vanity his once solid book ends in the air, and its better parts have lacked readers.

  The error may have begun in Chaudhuri’s too golden idea both of his childhood and the new Bengal civilisation which he sees as his own. At the end of the first chapter he states his case, and it is outrageously reactionary. But we are too early in the book to judge it; we read on and forget; and then, when it is almost too late, we are pulled up.

  There was violence and sharp practice in the world in which he grew up, he says at the end of the first chapter. But there was also felt to be religion and morality, and justice (like something in the sky, as in the classical world) and order. When things became too bad, justice came down, long-armed and powerful. “It passed by different names among us. The common people still called it the Company, others Queen Victoria, and the educated the Government.” With the coming of nationalist agitation, Chaudhuri says, this idea of justice vanished, but the idea of its protective power lived on for some decades. “Today everything is giving way. The thing overhead, once believed to be immutable, has blown up, and the primordial foundation of rock below, on which we thought we had our feet firmly planted, is rotting into dust.”

  But Chaudhuri’s golden past was comparatively new. The Hindu College of Calcutta, which encouraged the Bengal renaissance, was established only in 1817. So the renaissance grew fast. It couldn’t stand still when it got to a certain stage. Yet Chaudhuri seems to be saying, in effect, and it is a strange thing to hear from someone claiming historical sensibility, that everything should have stood still in 1910, the last year of virtue—1860 to 1910 is for him the great period of the Bengal renaissance—and that the Company or Queen Victoria should have continued to rule. This is nonsense. But Chaudhuri feels he can say it because, unlike the rest of us, he is a scholar.

  He developed this vanity, about being a scholar, when he was quite young. A relation had bought the eleventh edition of the Encyclopœdia Britannica and had left the set for a few months in the Chaudhuri family home. Chaudhuri loved the appearance and even the smell of the big volumes. He first read with fascination about dogs, and looked at the gorgeous pictures; then, like a child (which is what he was at the time) with an old-fashioned children’s Book of Knowledge, he jumped about from subject to subject, from guns to ships.

  He discovered in himself an immense, easily satisfied curiosity. This pleasurable idleness, which a multitude of children know, he thought was scholarship. It was how he prepared for the BA examination at Calcutta University, reading up on this and that. Miraculously, it worked: bits of his random reading coincided with the questions, and he came first in his group.

  But it didn’t work with the more rigorous MA examination. He read and read, but he hadn’t looked at the prescribed textbooks. And then, a few weeks before the examination, it was too late to do so. He didn’t even try. He stayed in his room and made cardboard boxes or jotted down ideas for an Indian national army. In the examination hall, finally, he found himself all at sea. By the third day—the examination was spread over four days—he thought he should give up. He told his mother. He could have done the examination again the following year, but he didn’t have the energy. He told his father. His father, who must have watched his son’s scatterbrained, unfocused ways with bewilderment and distress, said, “All right.” And Chaudhuri was wounded by what he saw as his father’s coolness.

  It can be said, strange though it may appear, that Chaudhuri cherished this failure. We can see that its cause was not a lack of intelligence, but waywardness, the perversity of a man who (to put it at its simplest) wished to pass an examination without preparing for it. Many of us will have done similar things on other occasions, will have acted with stubbornness in situations where we know that stubbornness can prove nothing; and Chaudhuri might have won some kind of sympathy from us. He doesn’t here because of his hectoring manner.

  He exalts his rectifiable MA failure into tragedy, finding in it a sign of his own brilliance and too high ambition. He was the man who wished to possess all knowledge, who wished to move far beyond the university syllabus, and for that reason had failed. Yet he doesn’t shed his scholar’s vanity; he allows it to spoil his book, with his long and bad historical chapter about Indian nationalism. In later writing he continues to hold his tragedy close, to display it; he turns it almost into achievement.

  In his second book he writes, “I shall mention the names of four men whom I consider truly learned. They are Mommsen, Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Harnack, and Eduard Meyer. When young and immature I cherished the ambition of being the fifth in that series. So I could not have been very modest. But a standard is a standard.” Mommsen we know: the historian of Rome, the second winner of the Nobel Prize. But who is Wilamowitz-Moellendorf? (Here Chaudhuri tripped me up. Much later I was to learn, to my shame, that Wilamowitz was not only a very great editor of classical texts, but also—though little known in England, his books not easily available—a figure of authority in the European cultural life of his day.) Chaudhuri’s list of learned names is more than impressive. In Calcutta it would have been out of this world, a piece of display in itself, encouraging the reader to feel that Chaudhuri is being unfair to himself and may indeed be the fifth in the series.

  To fail the Calcutta MA is not the end of the world for someone wishing to be a scholar. It is an affectation in Chaudhuri to pretend that it is; it might even be an excuse to give up. He could have done the examination again; and if he didn’t have the energy to do so just then, there were all the writing years ahead, when he could have redeemed himself. He could have done better work in the two analytical chapters about Indian history that spoil the Autobiography. A scholar would have set aside grand theories and been more focused, would have moved more carefully; would not, to state the simplest thing first, have left out the thousand years of Indian Buddhism; would have known that querulous ideas on the Indian hatred of foreigners, this hatred tainting the ten later centuries of Indian history (centuries in the main of Indian defeat), cannot be hung on selective quotations from a tenth-century Arab writer; and on personal prejudice.

  Personal prejudice can be amusing in the autobiographical mode; Chaudhuri himself uses it to great effect in his near-ethnographic chapter on life in Calcutta. Prejudice sets him alight. His jaundiced words have a humorous edge then (as they had for me forty years ago, when I first read the Autobiography). It was only later that I began to feel that the humour and irony I saw were perhaps not intended, that the writer’s prejudice was deadly serious, that he was a man caught in a web and speaking out of pain.

  There are perhaps three references in the Autobiography to the writer’s small size; and he was, indeed, very small, almost dwarfish, some inches shorter than his father, who (he says) was just under five feet six, the Bengali average. Somerset Maugham, a small man, says somewhere that the world looks different to a small man. The world would have looked very different to Chaudhuri.

  Chaudhuri, in spite of all the great names he takes, was not a scholar. He had no idea what scholarship meant. He held on to the idea only because it was the main part of his self-esteem. Take that away and he would have been completely lost. The success of esteem of the Autobiography (justified success: it is a great book for four hundred out of its fiv
e hundred pages) enabled Chaudhuri to keep on writing. Being Chaudhuri, he thought success had come to him not for his picture of East Bengal and Calcutta between 1890 and 1920, but for his hundred pages of “scholarship,” his ideas about the history of India; and the later books magnified his flaws.

  The thesis of his second big book was that Indians were really ancient “Europeans” (he never fixes these strange people in geography or time) who had been denatured by the pitiless climate. Again, he quotes from his tenth-century Arab (Alberuni, a good man). And, in final support of his absurd case, he claims, in a very Indian way, the privilege of age: “I am old [he was only sixty-eight when this second book was published, and there were quite a few more books to come], and I cannot spend the few years that are left to me tilting at theories which I have taken a lifetime to outgrow.”

  Still later, there was yet another poor book, this time about the life of the nineteenth-century Sanskritist Max Müller, who had edited the famous Sacred Books of the East series. Chaudhuri, now being pampered as a scholar in some quarters, had been given access to some family papers of Müller. But the life of Müller was a very big subject. It had ramifications. It went far beyond the papers Chaudhuri had been given. To be properly done, this study had to take in nineteenth-century Germany, the British Empire in India, the decay of Indian learning, the early orientalists, the Sanskrit idea and the Aryan idea in Europe, the self-regarding academic world of nineteenth-century Oxford.

  In a rhetorical passage in the Autobiography Chaudhuri had defined his ideal of scholarship, the rhetoric, as so often with Chaudhuri, suggesting that he had attained the ideal or was within striking distance. “I should … have thought that the editing of one text with elegant finality would be a creditable achievement for a decade’s hard work. The contribution of a volume or two to a collection like the great Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, or the Rolls Series, or the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum would … have appeared to me as the very summit of ambition and happiness.”

  It might have been thought that Chaudhuri now had his chance as a scholar, with the Müller book. But Chaudhuri didn’t know what to do. He loved the idea of scholarship. Like a kind of Buddhist monk, so to speak, he loved the incantation of the great names of books and their creators. All he could do with the Müller was to go into the family papers and present them flatteringly, in gratitude, almost, for the courtesy done him.

  I read no more Chaudhuri after that. But something extraordinary was happening. As Chaudhuri’s intellectual worth was declining his reputation in England was rising. It was because of that formal, twelve-line dedication in the Autobiography “to the memory of the British Empire in India.” The news of the dedication spread slowly; there were always a few more important people who, without feeling the need to read any more of the difficult book, were ready to declare for Chaudhuri. They managed to bring him over to England in extreme old age; he settled in Oxford and celebrated his hundredth birthday there.

  He had turned his back on the Indian nationalist movement, on Gandhi and Nehru and all the rest. He couldn’t have dreamed of this Oxford apotheosis after the Calcutta MA failure and during the long years afterwards of poverty and unhappiness in India. It would have seemed to him a just reward for his dream of scholarship, for standing by his ideas, for enduring.

  I saw a photograph of him in his Oxford days: sitting contentedly in an armchair, an Indian regency figure, dwarfish and shrunken and elderly, in a ruched shirt. At the other pole from the half-naked Gandhi, fifty-six years old, in his made-up Indian costume, whom Aldous Huxley saw at the Indian National Congress in Kanpur in 1925. Two solutions to the same problem: fitting one civilisation to another.

  SIXTY YEARS AFTER independence that problem is still there. India has no autonomous intellectual life. Of the many millions whom independence has liberated a fair proportion now look away from India for ultimate fulfilment. They look in the main to Britain and the United States. They look especially to the United States. Immigration rules have changed; but the place is still not crowded out with Indians. That is where the better jobs are, where Indians are well thought of, and that is where people of a certain level wish to live and marry—and make cookies and shovel snow off the pavement in winter—and educate their children.

  As much as Chaudhuri did (though he kept it quiet, almost until the end), they wish to shake India off, shake off what they see as the retarded native element in dhotis and caste-marks, temple-goers, to use a kind of shorthand, bad at English, and as an element getting bigger and politically more dangerous by the year. In their new setting the people who have got away wish to dress more stylishly. They wish to wear their own contemporary equivalent of Chaudhuri’s regency gear. It is their solution to the problem of India, which is really the problem they have with India.

  Out of India’s improved English education there has come a crop of novels—a fair number are also by Indian expatriates, mainly from the United States—and there is a new one almost every month. These novels are by and large autobiographical. Every Indian who looks within himself finds the matter for a family story, with great characters, daddyji and mamaji and nanee and chacha, against a background of the extended Indian family. Since no writer can have two extended families, these novels appear to be rationed, one per writer. One writer, one book: it may not build a literature, but it is a system that allows new writers and new families to come up all the time.

  Is this writing just old-fashioned Indian boasting? Or are these books to be seen as part of a new Indian literary awakening, matching Bengal’s of a hundred years ago, helping India now to understand its more complicated self, to develop an autonomous cultural life, to bridge the gap between native and evolved? Or do they belong more to the publishing culture of Britain and the United States? The question has to be asked, because no national literature has ever been created like this, at such a remove, where the books are published by people outside, judged by people outside, and to a large extent bought by people outside.

  In the nineteenth century Dostoevsky and Turgenev and Gogol and Herzen lived for some time outside their native Russia; but they wrote in Russian for Russian readers and (for all of them except Herzen) Russia was where they were published and had their readers. Russia was where their ideas fermented.

  Nineteenth-century Russian writing created an idea of the Russian character and the Russian soul. There is no equivalent creation, or the beginning of one, in Indian writing. India remains hidden. Indian writers, to speak generally, seem to know only about their own families and their places of work. It is the Indian way of living and consequently the Indian way of seeing. The rest of the country is taken for granted and seen superficially, as it was even by the young Nehru, until some desperate, ragged villagers, in the middle of an angry agrarian movement that no one in the towns nearby knew about, marched to Allahabad, Nehru’s home town, in June 1920 and asked him to come to their villages and see the conditions in which they lived.

  The education of the new Indian writers—and nowadays some of them have even been to writing schools—also gets in the way. It seems to them they have the most enormous choice when, in imitation of the successful people who have gone before, they settle down to do their own book. They are not bursting with a wish to say anything; nothing is going to force itself out in its own way; they are guided in the main by imitation. Should they be Irish or German and indulge in wordplay? Should they be South American and see magic everywhere? Should they be like the late Raymond Carver and pretend they know nothing about anything? Or should they simply talk it over with their teacher at the writing school? This is where India begins to get lost. The writing school’s India is like the writing school’s America or Maoist China or Haiti.

  India has no means of judging. India is hard and materialist. What it knows best about Indian writers and books are their advances and their prizes. There is little discussion about the substance of a book or its literary quality or the point of view of the writer. Much keeps on b
eing said in the Indian press about Indian writing as an aspect of the larger modern Indian success, but literary criticism is still hardly known as an art. The most important judgements of an Indian book continue to be imported.

  As much as for Gandhi, born in 1869, and for Chaudhuri, born in 1897, India’s poverty and colonial past, the riddle of the two civilisations, continue to stand in the way of identity and strength and intellectual growth.

  July 2005–October 2006