An Area of Darkness

by V. S. Naipaul

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  Half-way across the world was Trinidad, a truly imperial creation. There people of many races accepted English rule, English institutions and the English language without questioning; yet England and Englishness, as displayed in India, were absent. And to me this remained the peculiar quality of the Raj: this affectation of being very English, this sense of a nation at play, acting out a fantasy. It was there in all the architecture of the Raj and especially in its faintly ridiculous monuments: the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, the India Gate in New Delhi. They were not monuments worthy of the power they celebrated; they were without the integrity of the earlier British buildings and the even earlier Portuguese cathedrals in Goa.

  In The Men Who Ruled India Philip Woodruff has written with sad, Roman piety of the British achievement. It was a tremendous achievement; it deserved this piety. But Woodruff’s Raj is far from the Raj of the popular English imagination: the sun-helmet (which Gandhi thought sensible but which, for reasons of national pride, he could not wear), the innumerable salaaming, sahib-ing and memsahib-ing servants, and English man as superman, the native as wog and servant and clerk, specimens of whose imperfect English can be gathered into little books (still found in secondhand bookstalls) for the amusement of those who know the language well: a Raj that can be found in a thousand English books on India, particularly in children’s books with an Indian setting, and can be found even in Vincent Smith’s annotations, for the Oxford University Press, on the writings of the great Sleeman.

  To Woodruff this side of the Raj, however established and real, is an embarrassment; it does not represent the truth of the British endeavour. But so it is with all who wish to see purpose, creative or negative, in the Raj, be it Woodruff or be it an Indian like K. M. Munshi, author of a 1946 pamphlet whose title, The Ruin That Britain Wrought, makes description unnecessary. There is always an embarrassment, of racial arrogance on the one hand and of genuine endeavour on the other. Which is the reality? They both are; and there is no contradiction. Racial arrogance was part of the Simpson’s-in-the-Strand fantasy, inevitably heightened in the puniness of the Indian setting, the completeness of the Indian subjection. Equally heightened, and part of the same fantasy, was the spirit of service. They both issued out of people who knew their roles and knew what was expected of their Englishness. As Woodruff himself says, there is something un-English, something too premeditated about the administration of the Raj. It could not have been otherwise. To be English in India was to be larger than life.

  The newspaperman in Madras presses me to attend his lecture on ‘The Shakespearean Hero in Crisis’. The business executive in Calcutta, explaining why he feels he must join the army to fight the Chinese, begins solemnly, ‘I feel I am defending my right – my right to – ’ and ends hurriedly with a self-deprecating laugh, ‘play a game of golf when I want to.’ Almost the last true Englishmen, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote some time ago, are Indians. It is a statement that has point only because it recognizes the English ‘character’ as a creation of fantasy. In India the Moguls were also foreigners, with fantasies as heady; they ruled as foreigners; but they were finally absorbed into India. The English, as Indians say again and again, did not become part of India; and in the end they escaped back to England. They left no noble monuments behind and no religion save a concept of Englishness as a desirable code of behaviour – of chivalry, it might be described, tempered by legalism – which in Indian minds can be dissociated from the fact of English rule, the vulgarities of racial arrogance or the position of England today. The Madras brahmin was reading O’Hara’s From the Terrace and loathing it: ‘You wouldn’t get a well-bred Englishman writing this sort of tosh.’ It is a remarkable distinction for a former subject people to make; it is a remarkable thing for a ruling nation to have left behind. This concept of Englishness will survive because it was the product of fantasy, a work of national art; it will outlast England. It explains why withdrawal was easy, why there is no nostalgia such as the Dutch still have for Java, why there was no Algeria, and why after less than twenty years India has almost faded out of the British consciousness: the Raj was an expression of the English involvement with themselves rather than with the country they ruled. It is not, properly, an imperialist attitude. It points, not to the good or evil of British rule in India, but to its failure.

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  It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad. And it is well that they have no sense of history, for how then would they be able to continue to squat amid their ruins, and which Indian would be able to read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger and pain? It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism, to trust to the stars in which the fortunes of all are written – there are lecturers in astrology in some universities – and to regard the progress of the rest of the world with the tired tolerance of one who has been through it all before. The aeroplane was known to ancient India, and the telephone, and the atom bomb: there is evidence in the Indian epics. Surgery was highly developed in ancient India; here, in an important national newspaper, is the text of a lecture proving it. Indian shipbuilding was the wonder of the world. And democracy flourished in ancient India. Every village was a republic, self-sufficient, ordered, controlling its own affairs; the village council could hang an offending villager or chop off his hand. This is what must be recreated, this idyllic ancient India; and when panchayati raj, a type of village self-rule, is introduced in 1962 there will be so much talk of the glories of ancient India, so much talk by enthusiastic politicians of hands anciently chopped off, that in some villages of the Madhya Pradesh state hands will be chopped off and people will be hanged by village councils.

  Eighteenth-century India was squalid. It invited conquest. But not in Indian eyes: before the British came, as every Indian will tell you, India was rich, on the brink of an industrial breakthrough; and K. M. Munshi says that every village had a school. Indian interpretations of their history are almost as painful as the history itself; and it is especially painful to see the earlier squalor being repeated today, as it has been in the creation of Pakistan and the reawakening within India of disputes about language, religion, caste and region. India, it seems, will never cease to require the arbitration of a conqueror. A people with a sense of history might have ordered matters differently. But this is precisely the saddening element in Indian history: this absence of growth and development. It is a history whose only lesson is that life goes on. There is only a series of beginnings, no final creation.

  It is like reading of a land periodically devastated by hordes of lemmings or locusts; it is like turning from the history of a coral reef, in which every act and every death is a foundation, to the depressing chronicle of a succession of castles built on the waste sand of the sea-shore.

  This is Woodruff on the difference between European history and Indian history. He has chosen his images well. But the sandcastle is not quite exact. The sandcastle is flattened by the tide and leaves no trace, and India is above all the land of ruins.

  From the south Delhi is approached through a wilderness of ruins that extend for forty-five square miles. Twelve miles away from the modern city are the ruins of the mightily walled town of Tughlakabad, abandoned for lack of water. Near Agra is the still complete city of Fatehpur Sikri, abandoned for the same reason. (‘Why do you want to go to Fatehpur Sikri?’ asked the travel agent in the foyer of the Delhi hotel. ‘There is nothing there.’) And listen to the guide at the Taj, talking to a party of Australians: ‘So when she died he said, “I can’t live here any more.” So he went to Delhi and he built a big city there.’ To the Indian, surrounded by ruins, this is a sufficient explanation of creation and decay. Consider these extracts from the first ten pages of Route? in the Pakistan section of Murray’s Handbook:

  Tatta, now small, but as late as 1739 a great city of 60,000 inhabitants.… The most remarkable sight in Tatta is the great mosque, 600 ft by 90
ft with 100 domes, begun by Shah Jahan in 1647 and finished by Aurangzeb, though now much decayed …

  1½m farther N.… is the tomb of the famous Nizam-ud-din … which some have thought was built from the remains of a Hindu temple.

  Excursion to Arore – formerly the very ancient Alor (Alor, Uch and Hyderabad are believed to have been the sites of three of many Alexandrias)…. A ridge of ruins runs N.E. Reti station … 4m S. are the vast ruins of Vijnot, a leading city before the Muslim conquest: there is nothing to be seen but debris.

  Multan … of great antiquity, and supposed to be the capital of the Malli mentioned in Alexander’s time.… The original temple stood in the middle of the fort and was destroyed by Aurangzeb, while the mosque built upon its site was totally blown up in the siege of 1848.

  During the reign of Shah Beg Argun the fortifications were rebuilt, the fort of Alor, 6m away, being destroyed to supply material.

  Sukkur, pop. 77,000, was formerly famous for its pearl trade and gold embroidery. A large biscuit factory has recently been started.

  Mosque on temple: ruin on ruin. This is in the North. In the South there is the great city of Vijayanagar. In the early sixteenth century it was twenty-four miles round. Today, four hundred years after its total sacking, even its ruins are few and scattered, scarcely noticeable at first against the surrealist brown rock formations of which they seem to form part. The surrounding villages are broken down and dusty; the physique of the people is poor. Then, abruptly, grandeur: the road from Kampli goes straight through some of the old buildings and leads to the main street, very wide, very long, still impressive, a flight of stone steps at one end, the towering gopuram of the temple, alive with sculpture, at the other. The square-pillared lower storeys of the stone buildings still stand; in the doorways are carvings of dancers with raised legs. And, inside, the inheritors of this greatness: men and women and children, thin as crickets, like lizards among the stones.

  A child was squatting in the mud of the street; the hairless, pink-skinned dog waited for the excrement. The child, big-bellied, rose; the dog ate. Outside the temple there were two wooden juggernauts decorated with erotic carvings: couples engaged in copulation and fellatio: passionless, stylized. They were my first glimpse of Indian erotic carving, which I had been longing to see; but after the first excitement came depression. Sex as pain, creation its own decay; Shiva, god of the phallus, performing the dance of life and the dance of death: what a concept he is, how entirely of India! The ruins were inhabited. Set among the buildings of the main street was a brand-new whitewashed temple, pennants flying; and at the end of the street the old temple was still in use, still marked with the alternating vertical stripes of white and rust. One noticeboard about six feet high gave a list of fees for various services. Another, of the same size, gave the history of Vijayanagar: once, after the Raja had prayed, there was ‘rain of gold’; this, in India, was history.

  Rain, not of gold, swept suddenly across the Tungabhadra River and over the city. We took shelter up a rock slope behind the main street, in the recesses of an unfinished gateway of rough hewn stone. A very thin man followed us there. He was wrapped in a thin white cotton sheet, dappled with wet. He let the sheet fall off his chest to show us that he was all skin and bones, and he made the gestures of eating. I paid no attention. He looked away. He coughed; it was the cough of a sick man. His staff slipped from his hand and fell with a clatter on the stone floor down which water was now streaming. He hoisted himself on to a stone platform and let his staff lie where it had fallen. He withdrew into the angle of platform and wall and was unwilling to make any motion, to do anything that might draw attention to himself. The dark gateway framed light: rain was grey over the pagoda-ed city of stone. On the grey hillside, shining with water, there were the marks of quarryings. When the rain was over the man climbed down, picked up his wet staff, wrapped his sheet about him and made as if to go. I had converted fear and distaste into anger and contempt; it plagued me like a wound. I went to him and gave him some money. How easy it was to feel power in India! He, earning his money, took us out into the open, led us up the washed rock slope and pointed silently to buildings. Here was the hill of rock. Here were the buildings. Here the five-hundred-year-old marks of chisels. An abandoned, unfinished labour, like some of the rock caves at Ellora, which remain as the workmen left them one particular day.

  All creation in India hints at the imminence of interruption and destruction. Building is like an elemental urge, like the act of sex among the starved. It is building for the sake of building, creation for the sake of creation; and each creation is separate, a beginning and an end in itself. ‘Castles built on the waste sand of the seashore’: not quite exact, but at Mahabalipuram near Madras, on the waste sand of the sea shore, stands the abandoned Shore Temple, its carvings worn smooth after twelve centuries of rain and salt and wind.

  At Mahabalipuram and elsewhere in the South the ruins have a unity. They speak of the continuity and flow of Hindu India, ever shrinking. In the North the ruins speak of waste and failure, and the very grandeur of the Mogul buildings is oppressive. Europe has its monuments of sun-kings, its Louvres and Versailles. But they are part of the development of a country’s spirit; they express the refining of a nation’s sensibility; they add to the common, growing stock. In India these endless mosques and rhetorical mausolea, these great palaces speak only of a personal plunder and a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered. The Mogul owned everything in his dominions; and this is the message of Mogul architecture. I know only one building in England with this quality of dead-end personal extravagance, and that is Blenheim. Imagine England a country of Blenheims, continually built, destroyed and rebuilt over five hundred years, each a gift of the nation and seldom for services rendered, all adding up to nothing, leaving at the end no vigorous or even created nation, no principle beyond that of personal despotism. The Taj Mahal is exquisite. Transported slab by slab to the United States and re-erected, it might be wholly admirable. But in India it is a building wastefully without a function; it is only a despot’s monument to a woman, not of India, who bore a child every year for fifteen years. It took twenty-two years to build; and the guide will tell you how many millions it cost. You can get to the Taj from the centre of Agra by cycle-rickshaw; all the way there and all the way back you can study the thin, shining, straining limbs of the rickshawman. India was not conquered, the British realist said, for the benefit of the Indians. But then it never had been; this is what all the ruins of the North say.

  At one time the British held dances on the platform before the Taj Mahal. To Woodruff and to others this is a regrettable vulgarity. But it is in the Indian tradition. Respect for the past is new in Europe; and it was Europe that revealed India’s past to India and made its veneration part of Indian nationalism. It is still through European eyes that India looks at her ruins and her art. Nearly every Indian who writes on Indian art feels bound to quote from the writings of European admirers. Indian art has still to be compared with European; and the British accusation that no Indian could have built the Taj Mahal has still to be rejected as a slander. Where there has been no European admiration there is neglect. The buildings of Lucknow and Fyzabad still suffer from the contemptuous political attitudes of the British towards its decadent rulers. Yearly the great Imambara in Lucknow crumbles into ruin. The detail on the stonework of the mausolea in Fyzabad has almost disappeared under heavy coats of what looks like PWD whitewash; elsewhere metalwork is preserved by a good deal of bright blue paint; in the centre of one garden a white Ashoka pillar, destroying symmetry and obscuring the view through the arched entrance, has been put up by an IAS officer to commemorate the abolition of zemindari. But of what Europe has discovered not enough care can be taken. This has become India’s Ancient Culture. It is there in the comic little cupolas of the Ashoka Hotel in New Delhi, the comic little cupolas of the radio station in Calcutta, the little pillars with wheels and elephants and other devices of Indian cult
ure that have been scattered about the zoological gardens of Lucknow, in the mock-Vijayanagar stone brackets of the Gandhi Mandap in Madras.

  The architecture of nationalist India comes close in spirit to the architecture of the Raj: they are both the work of people consciously seeking to express ideas of themselves. It is comic and it is also sad. It is not of India, this reverence for the past, this attempt to proclaim it. It does not speak of vigour. It speaks as much as any ruin of exhaustion and people who have lost their way. It is as though, after all these endless separate creations, the vital sap has at last failed. Since the schools of Kangra and Basohli, Indian art has been all confusion. There is an idea of the behaviour required in the new world, but the new world is still bewildering. At Amritsar the monument honouring those who fell in the massacre is a pathetic affair of flames cut into heavy red stone. At Lucknow the British memorial of the Mutiny is the ruined Residency, preserved by Indians with a love the visitor must find strange; and just across the road is the rival Indian memorial, a white marble pillar of inelegant proportions capped by a comic little dome which might, again, represent a flame. It is like seeing Indians on a dance floor: they are attempting attitudes which do not become them. I did not see a Buddhist site that had not been disfigured by attempts to recreate India’s ancient culture. Near Gorakhpur, for instance, there now stands amid the ruins of an old monastery a reconstructed temple of the period. On the flat wasteland of Kurukshetra, the scene of the Gita dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna, his charioteer, there is a new temple, and in its garden there is a representation in marble of the scene. It is less than bazaar art. That chariot will never move; the horses are dead, stiff, heavy. And this is the work of people whose sculpture is worth all the sculpture of the rest of the world, who in the South, at Vijayanagar, could create a whole ‘Horse Court’ of horses rampant.