An Area of Darkness

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  Withdrawal, denial, confusion of values: these are vague words. We need more direct evidence; and a little, I feel, is provided by a recent Indian novel, The Princes, by Manohar Malgonkar, published in London by Hamish Hamilton in 1963. The Princes is the medieval tragedy of a medieval Indian petty prince who loses power with Independence and feels the humiliation of his fall so deeply that he goes out unarmed after a wounded tiger and is killed. It is an honest book, and the writing is not without skill. Malgonkar has a feeling for outdoor life and his descriptions of hunting and shooting can convey the enchantment of these pastimes even to those who do not practise them.

  The Prince is descended from casteless Deccani bandits who, when they acquired political power, surrendered a lakh of rupees to the pundits in exchange for caste privileges. The treasures they amassed remain in the state treasury, objects of almost religious awe, guarded by a special group of retainers. For the ruling house these treasures are a private delectation, a reminder of the past; it is unthinkable that they should be used to improve the impoverished state. The Prince is opposed to progress. He states the view quite bluntly; and when the British decide to build a dam in territory adjacent to the state, he persuades his aboriginal subjects who live in the area to be affected to vote against the scheme. The Prince gives five annual scholarships, each worth £70, to deserving boys. On himself he is more lavish. He has two palaces, thirty motorcars and annual pocket money of £70,000. To spend £1,500 to bring down a courtesan from Simla is as nothing. He has much time to devote to his hobbies. He is an excellent shot and a fearless tracker of wounded tigers. ‘I am rich and well-born,’ he says, quoting the Gita. ‘Who else is equal to me?’ He matches words with action. When the nationalists of the state occupy the administration building in 1947 he goes in alone, ignoring the crowd, and hauls down the Indian flag. He is unable to accommodate himself to the handsome terms of the Home Ministry in Delhi, and when he sees that it is too late to save his state and his powers he is heartbroken. He does not rage or weep. Quoting that line of the Gita, he goes out unarmed after a wounded tiger and is killed. He was rich and high; he has fallen.

  It is a medieval concept of tragedy.

  Reduce we all our lessons unto this:

  To rise, sweet Spenser, therefore live we all.

  Spenser, all live to die, and rise to fall.

  But what is puzzling is that it should be so presented to us by the Prince’s son, who is the narrator. He was born in 1920, educated at an English-style English-staffed public school for the sons of princes, and served as an officer in the army during the war. ‘Indeed it seems to me,’ he says, ‘that with the passing of the years I have come to identify myself more and more with (my father’s) values.’ After the public school which sought to root out snobbery between princes of big states and princes of little states; after the army; after the love affair with an Anglo-Indian girl, encountered in Simla:

  The British certainly knew all about resisting change. It was spring in the Himalayas, and Simla was exactly as it had been fifty years ago or a hundred, and Mrs Hauksbee might have been living just around the corner.

  ‘I like your perfume, whatever it is.’

  ‘Chanel number five. I had just a scrap left, but I had to wear it – for going out with a prince.’

  ‘Why, thanks! I’ll buy some more.’

  After the clubs of Delhi:

  ‘Rumpus?’ I exclaimed. ‘Why not? Of course we can have a rumpus. One is not a father every day, dammit! What sort of a rumpus had you in mind?’ I was certainly learning to handle conversation, now that I had been in New Delhi for nearly two years; meaningless, insincere, but light. You had to keep it frothy, that was all that mattered.

  This is how far we will appear to move from the Prince and his derelict principality and the local primary school where, at the beginning of the story, the narrator, Abhayraj, and his half-brother Charudutt are pupils. They are kept separate from the untouchables, who sit on the floor at the back. One morning during the break a game of mango-seed football starts in the veranda. The untouchables watch from a distance. One joins in, trips Charudutt. The caste boys, Abhayraj included, abuse the untouchables: ‘Cow-eaters, stinkers, cow-skinners.’ And they throw the offending untouchable boy and his satchel into the pond. ‘Bastard!’ the boy shouts from the pond at Charudutt. ‘You are no prince. You are a whore’s son.’

  It is this word, bastard, which interests Abhayraj. He asks his English tutor, Mr Moreton, what the word means. Mr Moreton hesitates. ‘I could understand his embarrassment. He was a sensitive man, and he knew about Charudutt and about the numerous upraja sons in our family – children born to rulers out of wedlock.’ This is the sensitivity of Mr Moreton. Neither tutor nor pupil speaks of the scene in the school grounds.

  The untouchable boy, Kanakchand, has no books the next day. He is put out of the class and in the afternoon Abhayraj sees him ‘miserable and downcast, still squatting on the wall’. He is still there the following morning. Abhayraj speaks to him and finds out that he cannot stay at home because he will be flogged if his father gets to know that his books have been destroyed; he cannot go into the class because he has no books and no money to buy new ones. Abhayraj gives Kanakchand all the books in his own satchel. Among them, however, is the Highroads Treasury, which is not a school book but a gift from Mr Moreton. Mr Moreton, by some chance, asks after the book that day; the truth is told him; he understands. The next morning Kanakchand comes to Abhayraj and returns the Highroads Treasury. ‘It was a present. Here, I have brought it back.’

  It is a brutal but touching episode, rendered with fidelity, from the taunting to the forgetting to the impulse of pity and generosity. Now comes the sentence which distorts it all, which cuts the ground from under our feet. ‘He was as sound as a silver rupee when he began,’ Abhayraj comments. ‘What made him turn so sour and twisted in later life?’ Kanakchand sound as a silver rupee! Kanakchand, untouchable, cow-eater, stinker, squatting on the floor at the back of the class, sitting on the fountain wall for two days because he has lost his books! Did his soundness lie in his acceptance of degree? Did it lie in his refusal to steal from someone who had made him a valuable gift?

  The friendship develops. One day Kanakchand makes a gift to Abhayraj of enormous bean seeds, good for nothing except looking at and holding in the hands, and Abhayraj is ‘vaguely distressed at my first contact with the playthings of the poor, bean seeds found on the floor of the forest’. And more is to come. ‘I did not realize it then, but Kanakchand was my first direct contact with the quivering poverty of India.’ It is a singular word, this quivering. At first it seems unnecessary; then it seems theatrical yet oddly matter-of-fact; then it seems a concession to a convention of feeling.

  Kanakchand’s poverty is certainly theatrical. His lunch is one black roti, chillis and an onion.

  It seemed that even the onion was something of a treat, and that bajra or millet bread and chilli powder mixed with groundnut oil formed his main meal of the day. I watched with fascination as he ate, hungrily and with relish … He wolfed the very last crumb, biting alternately on the charred bajra roti and the onion. And when he finished the very last mouthful, he licked his fingers clean.

  It is like a description of the feeding habits of a rare animal. Poverty as occasional spectacle: this is our poverty. Abhayraj offers Kanakchand a chocolate. Kanakchand throws it, wrapper and all, into his mouth. Abhayraj exclaims. Kanakchand spits it out and – sound as a silver rupee, remember – makes this curious statement: ‘Oh, I didn’t know. I thought Bal-raje was playing some kind of joke on me – making me eat green paper.’

  Kanakchand is intelligent but his English is poor. To win one of the Prince’s five scholarships to a high school he has to write an English essay. Abhayraj writes the essay for him; Kanakchand wins the scholarship; and the day arrives for the Prince to make the presentation. Kanakchand’s parents are present, ‘deliriously happy’. ‘Truth, honesty, faith in God and above all, loyalty,
’ the Prince begins his speech, ‘add up to far more than the gaining of worldly rewards.’ With this he raises his riding crop and strikes Kanakchand to the floor, strikes him twice again and ‘wiped his hands delicately on a handkerchief’. Abhayraj is horrified. He persuades his mother to provide for Kanakchand’s education. But Abhayraj notes that Kanakchand never shows any ‘gratitude’; and Abhayraj is tormented, not by Kanakchand’s humiliation, but by ‘the guilt of turning a high-spirited, ambitious boy into a malevolent revolutionary’: again that distorting gloss, that cutting of the ground from under our feet.

  The years pass. Kanakchand becomes important in the nationalist movement. He wishes to be avenged, and with Independence vengeance is his. He is now presented to us as physically repulsive and contemptible, overbearing at one moment, instinctively cringing at the next. The Prince’s little principality disappears. Kanakchand, adding insult to injury, leads a demonstration through the streets, chanting, ‘The raj is dead!’

  That, I thought, was the one thing I would never forgive Kanakchand. He was hitting at a man who had already fallen but was putting up a brave front. He was humiliating someone who still held that he had no equal among men. That, truly, was the vengeance of sheep, as my father had said.

  The stiff upper lip reinforcing a medieval conception of degree, public school fair-play stimulating an opposed passion: the confusion is now apparent. It is with more than public school righteousness, though it might seem that in its name alone action is being taken, that Abhayraj makes a vow. He will avenge his father. He will do so by inflicting an old humiliation – in retrospect how deserved, answering how apt an assessment of degree – on Kanakchand. He will flog him in public; he will flog him with a riding crop. ‘He was one of those who would always squeal, one of those unfortunates who had not learned to take their punishment without showing it.’ This is the action with which the book ends. This is what is presented for our approval; this is what, after the tragedy of the Prince’s fall, restores calm of mind to the narrator and is meant to restore it to us.

  The poverty of India is quivering. The guilt Abhayraj carries for his father’s flogging of Kanakchand, not public school material in the final analysis, is only the guilt of turning a high-spirited boy into a revolutionary. And all the cruelty of India is magicked away in textbook Western phrases which are as empty as that quivering: the narrator sees his father denying ‘basic rights’ to ‘the people’, he talks of the ‘collective wish of the people’. Nowhere do I see the India I know: those poor fields, those three-legged dogs, those sweating red-coated railway porters carrying heavy tin trunks on their heads. ‘The mountains were rainwashed, the sky was a bright blue and the air was stiff with the scent of pine and flowers and charged with an almost electric silence broken by the sharp warnings of the rickshaw pullers.’ It is so the rickshaw puller appears, beast of burden more degrading than degraded: unseen, the source only of a holiday sound, part of the atmosphere of a Simla romance. This is the Indian withdrawal and denial; this is part of the confusion of Indian Anglo-India.

  *

  So too it comes to the traveller. The poor become faceless. Then all the rest, the dance floors, the Western mimicry, might be subjects for gentle satire. But first the background, the obvious, must be ignored.

  3. The Colonial

  Well, India is a country of nonsense.

  M. K. Gandhi

  THE MAN MOVES briskly among the passengers on the crowded suburban train, distributing leaflets. The leaflets are smudged and dog-eared; in three languages they tell of the misfortunes of a refugee family. Some passengers read the leaflets; many more don’t. The train comes into a station. The leaflet-distributor goes out through one door and a woman and a boy enter through another. The leaflet didn’t promise this. It promised an impoverished Bengali woman and her six starving children, not this small boy, blind, thin, half-naked, scaly with dirt, whining at a low, steady pitch, tears streaming out of raw red eyes, his arms held aloft in supplication. The boy is manoeuvred and propelled through the coach by the woman, who weeps and whines and briskly, without acknowledgement, collects the small coins which the passengers, barely looking up, hand to her. She does not pause to plead with those who don’t give. By the time the train stops she and the boy are at the door, ready to change coaches. They go out. Another man comes in. He too is in a rush. He pushes through the coach, retrieving what leaflets he can before the next station.

  It has been swift; everyone, passengers included, is well-drilled; there has been little stir. Stencilled notices in three languages on the grimy woodwork warn against alms-giving, as they warn against accepting cigarettes from strangers since ‘these may be doped’. But it is good to give to the beggar. He follows a holy calling; he can exercise the pity and virtue of even the poor. Possibly the boy had been blinded to work this suburban route; and the organization was certainly at fault in issuing the wrong leaflets. But this is not important. What matters is the giving to the beggar, the automatic act of charity which is an automatic reverence to God, like the offering of a candle or a spin of the prayer-wheel. The beggar, like the priest, has his function; like the priest, he might need an organization.

  But here is an observer who dissents:

  If I had the power, I would stop every sadavrata where free meals are given. It has degraded the nation and it has encouraged laziness, idleness, hypocrisy and even crime. Such misplaced charity adds nothing to the wealth of the country, whether material or spiritual.… I know that it is … much more difficult to organize an institution where honest work has to be done before meals are served.… But I am convinced that it will be cheaper in the long run, if we do not want to increase in geometrical progression the race of loafers which is fast overrunning this land.

  It is the attitude of the foreigner who does not understand the function of the beggar in India and is judging India by the standards of Europe. He is too radical to succeed and of course in this matter of beggary he has failed.

  *

  Shankaracharya Hill, overlooking the Dal Lake, is one of the beauty spots of Srinagar. It has to be climbed with care, for large areas of its lower slopes are used as latrines by Indian tourists. If you surprise a group of three women, companionably defecating, they will giggle: the shame is yours, for exposing yourself to such a scene.

  In Madras the bus station near the High Court is one of the more popular latrines. The traveller arrives; to pass the time he raises his dhoti, defecates in the gutter. The bus arrives; he boards it; the woman sweeper cleans up after him. Still in Madras, observe this bespectacled patriarch walking past the University on the Marina. Without warning he raises his dhoti, revealing a backside bare save for what appears to be a rope-like G-string; he squats, pisses on the pavement, leisurely rises; the dhoti still raised, he rearranges his G-string, lets the dhoti fall, and continues on his promenade. It is a popular evening walk, this Marina; but no one looks, no face is averted in embarrassment.

  In Goa you might think of taking an early morning walk along the balustraded avenue that runs beside the Mandovi River. Six feet below, on the water’s edge, and as far as you can see, there is a line, like a wavering tidewrack, of squatters. For the people of Goa, as for those of imperial Rome, defecating is a social activity; they squat close to one another; they chatter. When they are done they advance, trousers still down, backsides bare, into the water to wash themselves. They climb back on to the avenue, jump on their cycles or get into their cars, and go away. The strand is littered with excrement; amid this excrement fish is being haggled over as it is landed from the boats; and every hundred yards or so there is a blue-and-white enamelled notice in Portuguese threatening punishment for soiling the river. But no one notices.

  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 river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover. Muslims, with their tradition of purdah, can at time
s be secretive. But this is a religious act of self-denial, for it is said that the peasant, Muslim or Hindu, suffers from claustrophobia if he has to use an enclosed latrine. A handsome young Muslim boy, a student at a laughable institute of education in an Uttar Pradesh weaving town, elegantly dressed in the style of Mr Nehru, even down to the buttonhole, had another explanation. Indians were a poeticpeople, he said. He himself always sought the open because he was a poet, a lover of Nature, which was the matter of his Urdu verses; and nothing was as poetic as squatting on a river bank at dawn.

  These squatting figures – to the visitor, after a time, as eternal and emblematicas Rodin’s Thinker – are never spoken of; they are never written about; they are not mentioned in novels or stories; they do not appear in feature films or documentaries. This might be regarded as part of a permissible prettifying intention. But the truth is that Indians do not see these squatters and might even, with complete sincerity, deny that they exist: a collective blindness arising out of the Indian fear of pollution and the resulting conviction that Indians are the cleanest people in the world. They are required by their religion to take a bath every day. This is central; and they have devised minute rules to protect themselves from every conceivable contamination. There is only one pure way to defecate; in love-making only the left hand is to be used; food is to be taken only with the right. It has all been regulated and purified. To observe the squatters is therefore distorting; it is to fail to see through to the truth. And the ladies at the Lucknow Club, after denying that Indians defecate in public, will remind you, their faces creased with distaste, of the habits of Europe – the right hand used for love-making, toilet paper and food, the weekly bath in a tub of water contaminated by the body of the bather, the washing in a washbasin that has been spat and gargled into – proving by such emotive illustrations not the dirtiness of Europe but the security of India. It is an Indian method of argument, an Indian way of seeing: it is so that squatters and wayside filth begin to disappear.