The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  It was easy to read through to some of the anxieties that lay behind the questions. There was a clear worry about certain fanaticisms “out there.” At the same time there was a certain philosophical diffidence about how that anxiety could be expressed, since no one wants to use words or concepts that might boomerang on himself. You know how words can be used: I am civilized and steadfast; you are barbarian and fanatical: he is primitive and blind. Of course. I was on the side of the questioner, and understood his drift. But I got to feel, over the next few days, and perhaps from my somewhat removed position, that I couldn’t share the pessimism implied by the questions. I felt that the very pessimism of the questions, and their philosophical diffidence, defined the strength of the civilization out of which it issued. And so the theme of my talk, Our Universal Civilization, was given me.

  I AM NOT GOING to attempt to define this civilization. I will only speak of it in a personal way. It is the civilization, first of all, which gave me the idea of the writing vocation. It is the civilization in which I have been able to practise my vocation as a writer. To be a writer, you need to start with a certain kind of sensibility. The sensibility itself is created, or given direction, by an intellectual atmosphere.

  Sometimes an atmosphere can be too refined, a civilization too achieved, too ritualized. Eleven years ago, when I was travelling in Java, I met a young man who wanted above all else to be a poet and to live the life of the mind. This ambition had been given him by his modern education; but it was hard for the young man to explain to his mother exactly what he was up to. This mother was a person of culture and elegance; that should be stressed. She was elegant in visage and dress and speech; her manners were like art; they were Javanese court manners.

  So I asked the young man—bearing in mind that we were in Java, where ancient epics live on in the popular art of puppet plays—“But isn’t your mother secretly proud that you are a poet?” He said in English—I mention this to give a further measure of his education in his far-off Javanese town—“She wouldn’t have even a sense of what being a poet is.”

  And the poet’s friend and mentor, a teacher at the local university, amplified this. The friend said, “The only way he would have of making his mother understand what he is trying to do would be to suggest that he is being a poet in the classical tradition. And she would find this absurd. She would reject it as an impossibility.” It would be rejected as an impossibility, because for the poet’s mother the epics of her country—and to her they would have been like sacred texts—already existed, had already been written. They had only to be learned or consulted.

  For the mother, all poetry had already been written. That particular book, it might be said, was closed: it was, part of the perfection of her culture. To be told by her son, who was twenty-eight, not all that young, that he was hoping to be a poet would be like a devout mother in another culture asking her writer-son what he intended to write next, and getting the reply, “I am thinking of adding a book to the Bible.” Or, to attempt another comparison, the young man would be like the character in the story by Borges who had taken on himself the task of rewriting Don Quixote. Not just re-telling the story, or copying out of the original; but seeking, by an extraordinary process of mind-clearing and recreation, to arrive—without copying or falsity, and purely through original thought—at a narrative coinciding word by word with the Cervantes book.

  I understood the predicament of the young man in central Java. His background, after all, was not far removed from the Hindu aspect of my own Trinidad background. We were an agricultural immigrant community from India. The ambition to become a writer, the introduction to writing and ideas about writing, had been given me by my father. He was born in 1906, the grandson of someone who had come to Trinidad as a baby. And somehow, in spite of all the discouragements of the society of that small agricultural colony, the wish to be a writer had come to my father; and he had made himself into a journalist, even with the limited opportunities for journalism that existed in that colony.

  We were a people of ritual and sacred texts. We also had our epics—and they were the very epics of Java; we heard them constantly sung or chanted. But it couldn’t be said that we were a literary people. Our literature, our texts, didn’t commit us to an exploration of our world; rather, they were cultural markers, giving us a sense of the wholeness of our world; and the alienness of what lay outside. I don’t believe that, in his family, anyone before my father would have thought of original literary composition. That idea came to my father in Trinidad with the English language; somehow, in spite of the colonial discouragements of the place, an idea of the high civilization connected with the language came to my father; and he was given some knowledge of literary forms. Sensibility is not enough if you are going to be a writer. You need to arrive at the forms that can contain or carry your sensibility; and literary forms—whether in poetry or drama, or prose fiction—are artificial, and ever-changing.

  This was a part of what was passed on to me at a very early age. At a very early age—in all the poverty and bareness of Trinidad, far away, with a population of half a million—I was given the ambition to write books, and specifically to write novels, which my father had presented to me as the highest form. But books are not created just in the mind. Books are physical objects. To write them, you need a certain kind of sensibility; you need a language, and a certain gift of language; and you need to possess a particular literary form. To get your name on the spine of the created physical object, you need a vast apparatus outside yourself. You need publishers, editors, designers, printers, binders; booksellers, critics, newspapers, and magazines and television where the critics can say what they think of the book; and, of course, buyers and readers.

  I want to stress this mundane side of things, because it is easy to take it for granted; it is easy to think of writing only in its personal, romantic aspect. Writing is a private act; but the published book, when it starts to live, speaks of the co-operation of a particular kind of society. The society has a certain degree of commercial organization. It also has certain cultural or imaginative needs. It doesn’t believe that all poetry has already been written. It needs new stimuli, new writing; and it has the means of judging the new things that are offered.

  THIS KIND OF SOCIETY didn’t exist in Trinidad. It was necessary, therefore, if I was going to be a writer, and live by my books, to travel out to that kind of society where the writing life was possible. This meant, for me at that time, going to England. I was travelling from the periphery, the margin, to what to me was the centre; and it was my hope that, at the centre, room would be made for me. I was asking a lot, asking, in fact, more of the centre than of my own society. The centre, after all, had its own interests, its own worldview, its own ideas of what it wanted in novels. And it still does. My subjects were far-off; but a little room was made for me in the England of the 1950s. I was able to become a writer, and to grow in the profession. It took time; I was forty—and had been publishing in England for fifteen years—before a book of mine was seriously published in the United States.

  But I always recognized, in England in the 1950s, that as someone with a writing vocation there was nowhere else for me to go. And if I have to describe the universal civilization I would say it is the civilization that both gave the prompting and the idea of the literary vocation; and also gave the means to fulfil that prompting; the civilization that enabled me to make that journey from the periphery to the centre; the civilization that links me not only to this audience but also to that now not-so-young man in Java whose background was as ritualized as my own, and on whom—as on me—the outer world had worked, and given the ambition to write.

  It is easier today for someone setting out to be a writer from a place like Java or Trinidad; subjects once far-off are no longer so. But I have never been able to take my career for granted. I know that there are still large tracts of the world where the cultural or economic conditions I described a while ago do not obtain, and someone lik
e myself would not have been able to become a writer. I couldn’t have become a writer in the Mohammedan world; in China; in Japan—the Japanese make room for the literary culture only of the countries they see themselves competing against. I couldn’t have become the kind of writer I am in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union or black Africa. I don’t think I could have taken my gifts even to India.

  You will understand, then, how important it was to me to know when I was young that I could make this journey from the margin to the centre, from Trinidad to London. The ambition to be a writer assumed that this was possible. So, in fact, I was taking it for granted, in spite of my ancestry and Trinidad background, that with another, equally important part of myself I was part of a larger civilization. I suppose the same could be said of my father, though he was closer to the ritual ways of our Hindu and Indian past.

  BUT I NEVER formulated the idea of the universal civilization until quite recently—until eleven years ago, when I travelled for many months in a number of non-Arab Muslim countries to try to understand what had driven them to their rage. That Muslim rage was just beginning to be apparent.

  “Fundamentalism”—in connection with the Mohammedan world—was not a word often used by the newspapers in 1979; they hadn’t yet worked through to that concept. What they spoke of more was “the revival of Islam.” And that, indeed, to anyone contemplating it from a distance, was a puzzle. Islam, which had apparently so little to offer its adherents in the last century and in the first half of this—what did it have to offer to an infinitely more educated, infinitely faster, world in the later years of the century?

  The adaptation of my own family and Trinidad Indian community to colonial Trinidad and, through that, to the twentieth century hadn’t been easy. It had been painful for us, an Asian people, living instinctive, ritualized lives, to awaken to an idea of our history and to learn to live with the idea of our political helplessness. There had been very difficult social adjustments as well. For example, in our culture marriages had always been arranged; it took some time, and many damaged lives, for us to arrive at the other way. All of this went with the personal intellectual growth I have described.

  And I thought, when I began to travel in the Muslim world, that I would be travelling among people who would be like the people of my own community.

  A large portion of Indians were Muslims; we had both had a similar nineteenth-century imperial or colonial history. I thought that religion was an accidental difference. I thought, as people said, that faith was faith, that people living at a certain time in history would have felt the same urges.

  But it wasn’t like that. The Muslims said that their religion was fundamental to them. And it was: it made for an immense difference. I have to stress that I was travelling in the non-Arab Muslim world. Islam began as an Arab religion; it spread as an Arab empire. In Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia—the countries of my itinerary—I was travelling, therefore, among people who had been converted to what was an alien faith. I was travelling among people who had had to make a double adjustment—an adjustment to the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and an earlier adjustment to the Arab faith. You might almost say that I was among people who had been doubly colonized, doubly removed from themselves.

  Because I was soon to discover that no colonization had been so thorough as the colonization that had come with the Arab faith. Colonized or defeated peoples can begin to distrust themselves. In the Muslim countries I am talking about this distrust had all the force of religion. It was an article of the Arab faith that everything before the faith was wrong, misguided, heretical; there was no room in the heart or mind of these believers for their pre-Mohammedan past. So ideas of history were quite different from ideas of history elsewhere; there was no wish here to go back as far as possible into the past, and to learn as much as possible about the past.

  Persia had a great past; it had been the rival in classical times of Greece and Rome. But you wouldn’t have believed it in Iran in 1979; for the Iranians the glory and the truth had begun with the coming of Islam. Pakistan was a very new Muslim state. But the land was very old. In Pakistan were the ruins of the very old cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Fabulous ruins, the discovery of which earlier this century had given a new idea of the history of the sub-continent. Not only pre-Islamic ruins; but possibly also pre-Hindu. There was an archaeological department, inherited from British days, that looked after the sites. But there was, especially with the growth of fundamentalism, a contrary current. This was expressed in a letter to a newspaper while I was there. The ruins of the cities, the writer said, should be hung with quotations from the Koran, saying that this was what befell unbelievers.

  The faith abolished the past. And when the past was abolished like this, more than an idea of history suffered. Human behavior, and ideals of good behavior, could suffer. When I was in Pakistan the newspapers were running articles to mark the anniversary of the Arab conquest of Sind. This was the first part of the Indian sub-continent to be conquered by the Arabs. It occurred at the beginning of the eighth century. The kingdom of Sind—an enormous area: the southern half of Afghanistan, the southern half of Pakistan—at that time was a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom. The brahmins didn’t really understand the outside world; the Buddhists didn’t believe in taking life. It was a kingdom waiting to be conquered, you might say. But it took a long time for Sind to be conquered; it was very far away from the Arab heartland, across immense deserts. Six or seven Arab expeditions foundered.

  At one time the third caliph himself, the third successor to the Prophet, called one of his lieutenants and said, “O Hakim, have you seen Hindustan and learnt all about it?” Hakim said, “Yes, O commander of the faithful.” The caliph said, “Give us a description of it.” And all Hakim’s frustration and bitterness came out in his reply. “Its water is dark and dirty,” Hakim said. “Its fruit is bitter and poisonous. Its land is stony and its earth is salt. A small army will soon be annihilated, and a large one will soon die of hunger.” This should have been enough for the caliph. But, looking still for some little encouragement, he asked Hakim, “What about the people? Are they faithful, or do they break their word?” Clearly, faithful people would have been easier to subdue, easier to lighten of their money. But Hakim almost spat out his reply. “The people are treacherous and deceitful,” Hakim said. And at that the caliph did take fright—the people of Sind sounded quite an enemy—and he ordered that the conquest of Sind to be attempted no more.

  But Sind was too tempting. The Arabs tried again and again. The organization and the drive and the attitudes of the Arabs, fortified by their new faith, in a world still tribal and disorganized, easy to conquer, the drive of the Arabs was remarkably like that of the Spaniards in the New World eight hundred years later—and this was not surprising, since the Spaniards themselves had been conquered and ruled by the Arabs for some centuries. Spain, in fact, fell to the Arabs at about the same time as Sind did.

  The final conquest of Sind was set on foot from Iraq, and was superintended from the town of Kufa by Hajjaj, the governor of Iraq. The topicality is fortuitous, I assure you. The aim of the Arab conquest of Sind—and this conquest had been thought about almost as soon as the faith had been established—the aim of the conquest had always been the acquiring of slaves and plunder, rather than the spreading of the faith. And when finally Hajjaj, the governor of Iraq, received the head of the king of Sind, together with sixty thousand slaves from Sind, and the royal one-fifth of the loot of Sind, that one-fifth decreed by the religious law, he

  placed his forehead on the ground and offered prayers of thanksgiving, by two genuflections to God, and praised him, saying: “Now I have got all the treasures, whether open or buried, as well as other wealth, and the kingdom of the world.”

  There was a famous mosque in the town of Kufa. Hajjaj called the people there, and from the pulpit he told them: “Good news and good luck to the people of Syria and Arabia, whom I congratulate on the conque
st of Sind and on the possession of immense wealth … which the great and omnipotent God has kindly bestowed on them.”

  I am quoting from a translation of a thirteenth-century Persian text, the Chachnama. It is the main source for the story of the conquest of Sind. It is a surprisingly modern piece of writing, a good fast narrative, with catching detail and dialogue. It tells a terrible story of plunder and killing—the Arab army was allowed to kill for days after the fall of every town in Sind; and then the plunder was assessed and distributed to the soldiers, after one-fifth had been set aside for the caliph. But to the Persian writer, the story—written five hundred years after the conquest—is only “a pleasant tale of conquest.” It is Arab or Muslim imperial genre writing. After five hundred years—and though the Mongols are about to break through—the faith still holds; there is no new moral angle on the destruction of the kingdom of Sind.

  This was the event that was being commemorated by articles in the newspapers when I was in Pakistan in 1979. There was an article by a military man about the successful Arab general. The article tried to be fair, in a military way, to the armies of both sides. It drew a rebuke from the chairman of the National Commission of Historical and Cultural Research.

  This is what the chairman said. “Employment of appropriate phraseology is necessary when one is projecting the image of a hero. Expressions such as ‘invader’ and ‘defenders’ and ‘the Indian army’ fighting bravely but not being quick enough to ‘fall upon the withdrawing enemy’ loom large in the article. It is further marred by some imbalanced statements such as follows: ‘Had Raja Dahar defended the Indus heroically, and stopped Qasim from crossing it, the history of this sub-continent would have been quite different.’ One fails to understand”—this is the chairman of the Commission of Historical and Cultural Research—“whether the writer is applauding the defeat of the hero or lamenting the defeat of his rival.” After 1,200 years, the holy war is still being fought. The hero is the Arab invader, bringer of the faith. The rival whose defeat is to be applauded—and I was reading this in Sind—is the man of Sind. To possess the faith was to possess the only truth; and possession of this truth set many things on its head. The time before the coming of the faith was to be judged in one way; what came after the faith in Sind was to be judged in another. The faith altered values, ideas of good behavior, human judgements.