The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  The students of a college held a meeting to “felicitate”—the Indian English word—a minister-designate. “The evening is cool and mild winds are tickling us,” a student said in his speech of welcome. He was heckled; the evening was hot. But we had moved away from reality already: the student was inviting the minister-designate to drown the audience “in the honey of his oration.” The minister-designate responded with pieces of advice. A cunning man never smiled; at the same time it was wrong for anyone to keep on laughing all the time. Some people could never forget the loss of a small coin; others could lose six argosies on the ocean and be perfectly calm. Reality was now destroyed, and we were deep in the world of old fairytale: the folk-wisdom, the honey, that was the satisfying substitute, even among politically active students, for observation, analysed experience and inquiry.

  The national newspaper that reported this reception also reported a religious discourse:

  MEDITATION ON GOD ONLY WAY TO REDEMPTION

  Madras, 9 March

  Even an exceptionally intellectual and astute person is likely to falter and indulge in a forbidden act and perform a suicidal act under the influence of destiny. One has to suffer the consequences of his errors in previous life …

  This, in South India, was still news. There had been an election, though, a process of the twentieth century. And here, on the main news page of another newspaper, were post-election headlines:

  MASSES MUST BE EDUCATED TO MAKE DEMOCRACY A SUCCESS

  —Prof. Ranga

  PAST MISTAKES RESPONSIBLE FOR CURRENT PROBLEMS

  —Ajoy Mukherjee

  CONGRESS REVERSES ATTRIBUTED TO LACK OF FORESIGHT

  A nation ceaselessly exchanging banalities with itself: it was the impression Indians most frequently gave when they attempted analysis. At one moment they were expressing the old world, of myth and magic, alone; at another they were interpreting the new in terms of the old.

  • • •

  THERE is an 1899 essay, Modern India, in which Swami Vivekananda, the Vedantist, takes us closer to the Indian bewilderment and simplicity. Vivekananda came from Bengal, the quickest province of India. He was pained by the subjection of his country and his own racial humiliation. He was also pained by the caste divisions of Hinduism, the holy contempt of the high for the low, the “walking carrion” of Aryan abuse. Vivekananda himself was of the Kayastha caste, whose status is still in dispute. In religion Vivekananda later found compensation enough: he exported the Vedas to the West itself, and found admirers. Modern India can be seen as a link between Vivekananda’s political distress and its religious resolution. It is an interpretation of Indian history in apocalyptic Hindu terms which barely conceal ideas borrowed from the West.

  Every country, Vivekananda states axiomatically, is ruled in succession by the four castes of priests, warriors, merchants and shudras, the plebs. India’s top castes have decayed. They have failed in their religious duties, and they have also cut themselves off from the source of all power, the shudras. India is therefore in a state of “shudra-hood,” which perfectly accommodates the rule of the vaishya or merchant power of Britain. Shudra rule, though, is about to come to the West; and there is the possibility, in India as well as in the West, of a “rising of the shudra class, with their shudra-hood.” The emphasis is Vivekananda’s; and from his curious position he appears to welcome the prospect, while saying at the same time that shudra-hood can be rejected by India, just as “Europe, once the land of shudras enslaved by Rome, is now filled with kshatriya [warrior] valour.”

  So, out of mock-Western historical inquiry, out of borrowed ideas and personal pain, Vivekananda reduces the condition of his country to a subject for simple, though slightly distorted, Hindu religious contemplation. Failure was religious; redemption can come only through religion, through a rediscovery by each caste of its virtuous duty and—at the same time—through a discovery by India of the brotherhood of all Indians.

  Modern India is part of the unread but steadily reprinted literature of Indian nationalism. It is not easy to read. It wanders, is frequently confused, and is full of the technicalities of Hindu metaphysics. It could never have been easily understood. But with Indian sages like Vivekananda, utterance is enough; the message is not important. A nation exchanging banalities with itself: it cannot be otherwise, when regeneration is believed to come, not through a receptiveness to thought, however imperfect, but through magic, through reverential contact with the powerful, holy or wise. The man himself is the magic.

  There is a whole department of the Central Government at work on The Complete Works of Mahatma Gandhi; they have an entry, under that name, in the Delhi telephone directory. But The Hindu newspaper of Madras reported in March that 90 per cent of high-school students in one district knew nothing of Gandhi except that he was a good man who had fought for independence. In a southern city I met a twenty-year-old Dravidian student. He was a product of independence, privileged; and we met at, of all twentieth-century things, an air show. The uncertain native, of Jabalpur or Gerrard’s Cross, seeks to establish his standing in the eyes of the visitor by a swift statement of his prejudices. And all this student’s social attitudes were anti-Gandhian. This was news to him. He reverenced the name. It was the name alone, the incantatory magic, that had survived.

  Mind will not be allowed to play on the problems of India. It is part of the Indian frustration.

  BUT NOW INDIANS have a sense of wrongness. They have begun to feel, like the Spaniards, that they are an inadequate people; and, like the Spaniards, they feel they are inadequate only because they are uniquely gifted. “Intelligent” is the word Indians use most often to describe themselves, and the romantic view is gaining ground that they might be intelligent to the point of insanity. In India self-examination is abortive. It ends only in frenzy or in generalities about the Indian “character.”

  The humanities are borrowed disciplines that always turn discussions about famine or bankruptcy into university tutorials. There can be no effective writing. The ritual of Indian life smothers the imagination, for which it is a substitute, and the interpretation of India in the Indian novel, itself a borrowed form, is at a low, unchanging level. “I don’t wait for another novel,” Graham Greene says of the Indian writer he admires; he waits for an encounter with another stranger, “a door on to yet another human existence.” The Delhi novelist R. Prawer Jhabvala has moved away from the purely Indian themes with which she started; she feels unsupported by the material.

  In such a situation the novel is almost part of autobiography, and there have been many Indian autobiographies. These—always with the exception of the work of Nirad Chaudhuri—magnify the Indian deficiency. Gandhi drops not one descriptive word about London in the 188os, and even Mr. Nehru cannot tell us what it was like to be at Harrow before 1914. The world in these books is reduced to a succession of stimuli, and the reacting organism reports codified pleasure or pain: the expression of an egoism so excluding that the world, so far from being something to be explored, at times disappears, and the writers themselves appear maimed and incomplete. All Indian autobiographies appear to be written by the same incomplete person.

  So the sense of wrongness remains unresolved. But it is possible now for the visitor to raise the question and at times to tease out a little more, especially from men under thirty-five. At a dinner party in Delhi I met a young businessman who had studied in America and had felt himself at a disadvantage. He said, “I felt that intellectually”—the Indian pride!—“they were far below me. But at the same time I could see they had something which I didn’t have. How shall I say it? I felt they had something which had been excised out of me. A sort of motivational drive, you might call it.”

  The jargon was blurring, but I felt that, for all his businessman’s adventurousness, he was like the peasants I had met some hundreds of miles away. It was a late afternoon of dust and cane-trash, and golden light through the mango trees. The peasants were boiling down sugarcane syrup into coa
rse brown sugar. The bullocks turned the mill; a black cauldron simmered over a fire-pit. A bare-backed, well-built young man scraped up sugar from the shallow brick trough level with the ground and pressed it into balls. His father chewed pan and watched. He said, just giving information, that his son had to write an examination in the morning. He would fail, of course; another son had written an examination six months before and had failed. In his mind, and perhaps in his son’s mind, there was no link between failure and this labour in the fields. The peasants were Kurmis, a caste who claim Rajput ancestry. The British-compiled gazetteers of the last century are full of praise for the Kurmis as diligent and adaptable cultivators; they are praised in exactly the same way by Indian officials today. But they have remained Kurmis, demanding only to have their Rajput blood acknowledged.

  What had been excised out of the Kurmis had been excised out of the businessman: “motivational drive,” that profound apprehension of cause and effect, which is where magic ends and the new world begins.

  CAUSATION: it was the theme of the Buddha 2,500 years ago in the distressed land of Bihar. It was the theme 150 years ago of Raja Rammohun Roy, the first British-inspired Indian reformer. It is the necessary theme today. It is depressing, this cycle of similar reform and similar relapse. Reform doesn’t alter; it temporarily revives. Ritual and magic forever claim the world, however new its structure.

  The process of relapse can be charted in our own time in the work of Vinoba Bhave, the Gandhian land-reformer of Bihar, who fifteen years ago made the cover of Time magazine. “I have come,” Time reported him saying, “to loot you with love.” His programme was simple: he would ask landowners to give away land to the landless. It was the spiritual way of India. “We are a people wedded to faith in God and do not give ourselves to the quibblings of reason. We believe in what our Rishis [sages] have taught us. I have the feeling that the present-day famines and other calamities are all due to our sins.” It was not therefore his business to think in any practical way of the food problem or of creating economic units of land. “Fire merely burns; it does not worry whether anyone puts a pot on it, fills it with water and puts rice into it to make a meal. It burns and that is the limit of its duty. It is for others to do theirs.”

  With this there went ideas about education. “Human lives are like trees, which cannot live if they are cut off from the soil … Therefore, everyone must have the opportunity to tend the soil …” Agricultural work will also keep the population down, because it takes the mind off sex. Care has to be taken in choosing a craft for a school, though. Fishing, for example, wouldn’t do, because “I have to show [the children] how to deceive the fish”; poultry-keeping is better. Literature should not be neglected. “It is a fault in the Western system of education that it lays so little stress on learning great lines by heart.” But the best education is the one Krishna, the mythological-religious figure, received. “Shri Krishna grazed cattle, milked them, cleaned the cowshed, worked hard, hewed firewood …; later, as Arjuna’s charioteer, he not only drove his horses but also cared for them.”

  It isn’t only that so much of this is absurd, or that Bhave was taken seriously until recently. It is that Bhave’s sweetness adds up to a subtle but vital distortion of the Mahatma’s teaching. The stoic call to action and duty becomes, with Bhave, an exercise in self-perfection, an act of self-indulgence and holy arrogance. He will not see his responsibility through to the end; it is the duty of fire only to burn. He separates, in a way the Mahatma never did, the private religious act from its social purpose. He misapplies the doctrine of bread-labour by which the Mahatma hoped to ennoble all labour, including that of the untouchables. Bhave says that the untouchables do work which is “not worthy of human dignity”; they must become tillers and landowners. He leaves them, in effect, where he finds them. And he does nothing to solve the food problem which, in India, is related to the ignorant use of land.

  Bhave goes back again and again to the scriptures: their rediscovery becomes an end in itself. So, in the name of reform, the Mahatma and goodness, Bhave slips into reaction. The old world claims its own.

  Indians are proud of their ancient, surviving civilization. They are, in fact, its victims.

  REFORM this time will be more brutal. China presses; Pakistan threatens; non-alignment collapses and America drives hard bargains. The new world cannot be denied. Incapable of lasting reform, or of a correct interpretation of the new world, India is, profoundly, dependent. She depends on others now both for questions and answers; foreign journalists are more important in India than in any other country. And India is fragmented; it is part of her dependence. This is not the fragmentation of region, religion or caste. It is the fragmentation of a country held together by no intellectual current, no developing inner life of its own. It is the fragmentation of a country without even an idea of a graded but linked society.

  There is no true Indian aristocracy, no element that preserves the graces of a country and in moments of defeat expresses its pride. There have been parasitic landowners, tax-farmers; there have been rulers. They represented a brute authority; they were an imposed element on a remote peasantry; in moments of stress they have—with exceptions—proclaimed only their distance. They are the aptly named “native princes”; and though here and there their brute authority, of money or influence, has been reasserted, they have disappeared and nothing marks their passing. In Hyderabad you wouldn’t have known that the Nizam had just died, that a dynasty older than Plassey had expired. Every Indian, prince or peasant, is a villager. All are separate and, in the decay of sensibility, equal.

  There are contractors and civil servants in Delhi, where a “society lady” is usually a contractor’s wife. There are business executives in Calcutta, which still has an isolated, ageing set with British titles. There are the manufacturers and advertising men and film people of Bombay, where “suave,” “sophisticated,” and “prestigious” are words of especial approval. But these are trade guilds; they do not make a society. There is an absence of that element, to which all contribute and by which all are linked, where common standards are established and a changing sensibility appears to define itself. Each guild is separate. Even the politicians, with the state withering away for lack of ideas, are sterilized in their New Delhi reserve. And each trade—except the entertainment trade—is borrowed.

  Every discipline, skill and proclaimed ideal of the modern Indian state is a copy of something which is known to exist in its true form somewhere else. The student of cabinet government looks to Westminster as to the answers at the back of the book. The journals of protest look, even for their typography, to the New Statesman. So Indians, the holy men included, have continually to look outside India for approval. Fragmentation and dependence are complete. Local judgment is valueless. It is even as if, without the foreign chit, Indians can have no confirmation of their own reality.

  But India, though not a country, is unique. To its problems imported ideas no longer answer. The result is frenzy. The journals of revolt are regularly started; they are very private ventures, needing almost no readership and having responsibility to no one; within weeks they are exhausted and futile, part of the very thing they are revolting against. Manners deteriorate. Each Indian wishes to be the only one of his sort recognized abroad: like Mr. Nehru himself, who in the great days was described, most commonly, by visiting writers as the lonely Indian aristocrat—his own unexplained word—presiding over his deficient but devoted peasantry. Each Indian, looking into himself and discovering his own inadequacy, attributes inadequacy to every other Indian; and he is usually right. “Charlatan” is a favourite word of Indian abuse. The degree of this self-destructive malice startles and depresses the visitor. “The mutual hatred of men of their own class—a trait common to shudras”: the words are Vivekananda’s; they describe a dependent people.

  This dependent frenzy nowadays finds its expression in flight. Flight to England, Canada, anywhere that lets Indians in: more than a flight to mon
ey: a flight to the familiar security of second-class citizenship, with all its opportunities for complaint, which implies protection, the other man’s responsibility, the other man’s ideas.

  IT WAS WRITTEN, of course. It was the price of the independence movement.

  The movement, as it developed under Gandhi, became a reforming religious movement, and it was in the Indian tradition that stretched back to the Buddha. Gandhi merged the religious emphasis on self-perfection in the political assertion of pride. It was a remarkable intuitive achievement. But it was also damaging. It was not concerned with ideas. It committed India to a holy philistinism, which still endures.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century Raja Rammohun Roy had said that forty years of contact with the British would revivify Indian civilization. He spoke before the period of imperialist and racialist excess; the technological gap was not as wide as it later became; the West, to the forward-looking Indian, was then less the source of new techniques than the source of a New Learning. But the gap widened and the mood changed. The independence movement turned away, as it had to, from people like Roy. It looked back to the Indian past. It made no attempt to evaluate that past; it proclaimed only glory. At the same time the imaginative probing of the West was abandoned. It has never been resumed. The fact escapes notice. The West, so much more imitable today than in 1800, might be pillaged for its institutions and technology; its approval is valuable. But the political-religious-philistine rejection still stands. The West is “materially affluent but psychologically sick”; the West is a sham. No Indian can say why. But he doesn’t need to; that battle has been won; independence is proof enough.

  A scholar in Delhi reminded me that Macaulay had said that all the learning of India was not worth one shelf of a European library. We had been talking of aboriginal Africa, and Macaulay was brought in to point out the shortsightedness of a certain type of obvious comment. Later it occurred to me, for the first time, that Macaulay had not been disproved by the Indian revolution. He had only been ignored. His statement can be reaffirmed more brutally today. The gap between India and the West is not only the increasing gap in wealth, technology and knowledge. It is, more alarmingly, the increasing gap in sensibility and wisdom. The West is alert, many-featured and ever-changing; its writers and philosophers respond to complexity by continually seeking to alter and extend sensibility; no art or attitude stands still. India possesses only its unexamined past and its pathetic spirituality. The Indian philosopher specializes in exegesis; the holy man wishes to rediscover only what has been discovered; in 1967 as in 1962 the literary folk squabble like schoolmen, not about writing, but about the proprieties of translation from all their very ancient languages. India is simple; the West grows wiser.