NAIPAUL’S CHANGE OF HEART AND MIND

By the time Naipaul came to write his third

travelogue on India, India: A Million Mutinies Now

(1990) he “had succeeded in making a kind of return

journey … abolishing the darkness that separated

me from my ancestral past.” He writes:

I had carried in my bones that idea of abjectness and

defeat and shame (his ancestors had left as

indentured servants for the sugar estates and Guyana

and Trinidad). It was the idea I had taken of India on

that slow journey by train and ship in 1962; it was the

source of my nerve.

(Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now. London

Minerva Paperbacks, 1990, 516-517)

He unabashedly admits that his return to India

after 27 years has been different from his visit in

1962. Naipaul’s early attitude and later

transformation become more understandable when

we examine the circumstances of his life which

made him an outsides wherever he went. Landeg

White in book V. S. Naipaul writes:

His visit to the village of his grandfather, though briefly

enchanting, arouses problems over language, fears

about the food and water, demands for money, and

concludes with Naipaul’s angry refused to give a

relative a lift into town. There is no home for him in

India; his assumptions are too much of the West. Yet

just as it was in London that he wrote the Trinidad

novels, viewing his background from the security of

escape so it is in Kashmir that he writes Mr. Stone

and the Knight’s companion, projecting on to his

English hero a strong Hindu sense of the world as

illusion. Returning to Europe, he is no longer able to

believe in the places in which he as lived and worked.

A Brahmin – cum - Englishman in Trinidad, a

European and Indian in London.

(Landeg white, V. S. Naipaul (London: The

MacMillan, Press Ltd., 1975)7.

Defending his earlier stance of hostility in an

interview with Dilip Padgaonkar for The Times of

India, Naipaul says that this hostility stems from his

involvement. He says:

I do not have the tenderness more secure people can

have towards bush people … I feel threatened by

them. My attitude and the attitude of the people lime

me is quite different from the people who live outside

the bush or who just go camping in the bush on

weekends.

(Dilip Padgaonkar. “An Area of Awakening”

Times, 19 July, 1993, 10)

He is too much obsessed with his ancestral

country. His present book is an example of a

positive assessment of the confusion and cultural

variety represented by India. At the same time he is

quite aware of the cultural loss of immigrant

community. He says,

There was a fundamental difference between the new

generation in India and our immigrant community far

away. For the people of that community, separated

from the Indian earth, Hindu theology had bcome

difficulty; the faith had then been half possessed by

many, abandoned by many. It had been part of a

more general cultural loss, which had left many with

no strong idea of who they were. That wouldn’t

happen in India, however much ritualism was left

behind, and however much the externals changed.

(Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now)

The solution to the dilemma is given by Naipaul

through Pravas, an engineer, when he says,

The food restrictions … are known to some, but not

known to most in my generation. They don’t know that

such things existed and exist. And yet they are

perfectly at balance in local surroundings. If you get

too attached to your roots in the old sense, you might

actually become unrooted, fossilized. At least in form,

at least in style, you must get into the new stream; get

the new roots… style becomes substance in one

generation. Things that one starts to do because other

people are doing it – like wearing long pants, in my

father’s case – become natural for the next

generation.

Naipaul has projected through his characters a

large vision of Indian, an India with a human

association rather that a clannish, casteist obligation,

an India which will utilize all “the bravery and the

skills of its people” towards building a better nation.

The glory as well as shame of its past is a spent

force. Possibilities only lie in a future built upon the

lessons learnt from the past. According to Naipaul it

will have to be an India with a “larger view of human

association” and he is sure that “out of this large

idea, and out of the encompassing humiliation of

British rule, there will come to India the ideas of

country and pride and historical self-analysis, things

that seem impossible remote”.

After the dark ages of invasion, vandalism and

wars, the freedom movement which led to the

independence of India symbolizes to Naipaul “the

truest kind of liberation”. It has awakened people to

knowledge of who they are and what they owe

themselves and this liberation of spirit has taken the

form of rage and revolt. India is now a land of a

million little mutinies. The mutinies become

necessary stepping stones towards Indian’s growth

and its restoration. The mutinies here symbolize the

many struggles for identity in the modern India of

various groups.

Though there is a resistance to change and an

adherence to a prescribed way of living it is

gradually giving way to new ways of seeing and

feeling. These winds of change bring hope with them

for the better-men and women opening up to

broader visions of community, like the south Indian

Brahmin Ashok marrying into a different community

or Nazir from Kashmir venturing to aspire beyond

the valley because of his education and abilities as

an accountant. These men demonstrate a step by

step rising. As Pravas (an engineer) writely says:

Change is a continuous process. You can discern a

change only once in a generation. Because once you

discern it, you are already there. So in these last 50

years I can discern only tow changes, but they are

large because a continuing process is being focused

… There are spans of transition. There are much

bigger spans with the succeeding generations.

The process at work in India and the direction

in which it is moving is best illustrated by Amir, a son

of a Raja. The son with his western education had

developed religious doubts, but these doubts do not

smother him. The cultural upbringing and historical

apprehension of his experience unfold a “path in a

dialectical manner” in which religion and the

concerns of the real would are simultaneously

present. He moves back and forth between the world

of spirit and world of matter. He says:

I find solace in both ways of thinking. The historical

way shows me that human destiny is above this - our

suffering, our little problems. This idea of human

destiny shows me that we are really moving towards a

better world, in spite of the trouble and conflagration.

The religious way teaches me endurance,

reconciliation with the divine plan of which this is a

part, but with hope and belief in better future.

(Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now, 381)

According to him “religion could be used to

bring about a great change of consciousness –

about the world and the place of men in it –and also

to bring men to action”.

For Naipaul India represented two things- a

great classical past and the sense of a communal

identity. At the same time, it also represented

“poverty and an abjectness too fearful to imagine” –

all the frightening things his ancestors had tried to

escape and which he himself continued to find

threatening. When he visited India for the first time in

1962 to write “An Area of Darkness”, he found

himself overwhelmed by a sense of “abjectness and

defeat and shame”.

The poverty of the Indian streets and the countryside

was an affront and a threat, a scratching at my old

neurosis. Two generations separated me from that

kind of poverty; but I felt closes to it than most of the

Indians I met.

An Area of Darkness is a work of sharp

luminosity. The book, however, was severely

panned by Indian critics and readers who found it

dwelling only on the negative, and inspection of the

gutters. Naipaul himself has moved on, stating this

particular book was the outcome of an emotional

reaction at that age.

The pain he suffered on his first arrival was

creative rather than numbing, has been well said by

John Wain:

Brilliant… true autobiography arises when a man

encounters something in his life which shocks him into

the need for self-examination and self-explanation. It

was natural that a sojourn in India should provide this

shock for Naipaul. The experience was not a pleasant

one, but the pain the author suffered was creative

rather that numbing. An Area of Darkness is tender,

lyrical, explosive and cruel”.

(John Wain, observer)

Having said that:

Indian interpretations of their history and 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.

(Naipaul, An Area of Darkness, Page no. 216)

Now he realizes a process of awakening through

which India is going:

What is happening in India is a new historical

awakening … India intellectuals, who want to b secure

in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is

going on. But every other Indian knows precisely what

is happening: deep down he knows that a larger

response is emerging even if at times this response

appears in his eyes to be threatening.

(Source: An Area of Awakening – Interviews

with V.S. Naipaul – By Dilip Padgaonkar,

Times July 18, 1993)

The question arises that whether his book

depict genuinely the India of the 1960s? The answer

is affirmative. Naipaul visited India when it was a

country in flux. The initial euphoria of Independence

had evaporated, the Chinese was had deflated its

confidence and crushed its philosophy of non-

violence, the economy was non-existent and at the

helm was an ageing, crestfallen Prime Minister;

definitely not an optimistic picture. So when Naipaul

suggests, much to the dislike of some Indian, that

there was little intellectual life in India 40 years ago,

he is probable right. The guiding principles of India

at that time had failed.

Gandhian principle of non-violence had fallen

flat in the face of Chinese aggression, socialism had

failed miserable and the image of India as a beggar

with a begging bowl was gaining strength. Resistant

and oblivious to the changing world, India’s ageing

leaders, proponents of this decaying ideology clung

stubbornly to it, ruthlessly suppressing any

alternative thought process and allowing India to

sink deeper and deeper into a quagmire. In the

absence of a rejuvenating force, there, indeed

existed an intellectual vacuum. Though rather harsh,

Naipaul rightly concludes:

Indian has been a shock for me because – you know,

you think of India as a very old and civilized land. One

took this idea of an antique civilization for granted and

thought it contained the seed of growth in this century

… India has nothing to contribute to the world, is

contributing nothing.

On a personal note he ends: “It was a journey

that ought not to have been made; it had broken my

life in two”. But he did return. The greater frequency

of his visits to India in recent years signifies a

yearning for ‘identity’. He returns again and again

until he had made peace with the civilization of his

origin.

Ten years later in 1975, at the height of Indira

Gandhi’s “Emergency”, Naipaul returned to India and

the shock, disgust and anger persist. Louis Heren in

The Times described this travelogue as:

A devastating work, but proof that a novelist of

Mr. Naipaul’s stature can often define problems

quicker and more effectively than a team of

economists and other experts from the World

Bank.

When in an interview by Rachael Kohn he was

asked:

Rachael Kohn: Well does not complexity attract

you over and over again, because

you have gone back to India and

written several times about it?

Naipaul answered: Well I was interested in India

because, and I still am, because of

my concern, I hate distress, I hate

poverty, and I wish to see it

alleviated, it can’t disappear

unfortunately, but I wish to see it

alleviated, that’s what I go back to

look for, I look for signs of that.

(Interview with Rachael Kohn at

Radio National)

It’s quite evident that Naipaul is looking for the

signs of Indian self help and self renewal.

Amongst the chawls, the substandard

accommodation blocks for factory labour, Naipaul

found those signs of self help and renewal in the

Shiv Sena Movement. Taking their name from a 17th

century guerrilla leader, Shivaji, who fought against

the Moghul Empire, these neo-warriors are on the

march, not for India itself, but for their own

betterment in the state of Maharastra and the city of

Bombay.

Identity was what the young men of the sena were

reaching out to, with the simplicities of their politics

and their hero figures (the 17th century Shivaji, warrior

Chieftain turned to war-god, the 20th century Dr.

Ambedkar, untouchable now only in the sanctity.)

For the Sena men, and the people they led, the world

was new; they saw themselves at the beginning of

things, unaccommodated men making a claim on their

land for the first time, and out of chaos evolving their

own philosophy of community and self-help. For them

the past was dead, they had left it behind in the

villages.

(Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now)

Having uttered plenty of unpleasant things

about India in his travelogues, Naipaul later on

realizes that he was a bit too harsh; he speaks to

Farrukh Dhondy in an interview first published in

the Literary Review. He defends himself saying:

I didn’t think of it that way, as an attack on India. I

thought of it as a record of my unhappiness. I wasn’t

knocking anybody; it was a great melancholy

experience actually. Mark you, it’s full of flaws: what it

says about caste is influenced by ideas I had picked

up here, British ideas. I think different about caste

now, I understand the clan feeling, the necessity of

that in a bign country. Ant the book was bad about

Indian art. I should have understood that art depends

on patrons, and that in independent India, with the

disappearance of Indian royal courts, the possibility

for art had been narrowed instead of thinking that this

was rather terrible, that there was no art. It will nag at

me now, it will nag at me for some years.

(Interview first published in the Literary Review,

Naipaul speaks to Farrukh Dhondy with

reference to India: A Wounded Civilization)

No doubt, when Naipaul returned to India,

during Indira Gandhi’s period of rule by decree he

found some hopeful signs of change, but his overall

view of the country, remained grim: he saw the

nation as paralyzed by its inward - looking tradition

of Karma and debilitated further by its stubborn

adherence to ritual and caste.

His latest sojourn on the sub-continent (from

December 1988 through February 1990) has

produced a third book on India – and a far more

optimistic and generous assessment of the country’s

condition, In part, this shift in Naipaul’s views stems

from what he sees as positive social and economic

developments. In part, it stems from an evolution in

his own consciousness – time and distance and

perhaps the security conferred by the recognition he

has achieved as a writer have enabled him to make

“a kind of return journey, shedding my Indian

nerves, abolishing the darkness that separated me

from my ancestral past.”

Although “India: A Million Mutinies Now” is

filled with scenes of wrenching poverty (a family of

10 living in a room 10 feet by 10 feet) and horrifying

injustice (brides being set on fire by their husbands’

families for failing to bring a sufficient dowry),

Naipaul emphasizes that the country seems to have

embraced “the idea of freedom” and achieved a kind

of “liberation of spirit”. He reports noticing not only

increased wealth but also a new confidence and

pride among the poor.

Some of Naipaul’s favorite themes about post-

colonialism resurface in “A Million Mutinies Now.”

He compares the international style buildings that

were cheaply erected in recent years unfavorably

with the ornate edifices left over from the days of the

British Raj. He complains about the shoddy goods,

the bad hotels, the difficulties of travel and the

growing “criminalization” of Indian business and

politics. In addition, he dwells at length on the

extremes of ideology that have fractured the country

– from the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims to

the tensions between different castes to the

terrorism of radical Sikhs.

In the end, though, Naipaul says he regards

the excesses in India – “group excess, sectarian

excess, religions excess, regional excess” – as

something encouraging, as signs of growing

freedom and self – awareness, as the “beginning of

a new way for many millions, part of India’s growth,

part of its restoration”.

Indeed “A Million Mutinies Now”, which is made

up dozens of overlapping profiles, leaves the reader

with a powerful sense of people’ dedication,

perseverance and passion. Seemingly selected at

random, these individuals may not be entirely

representative of the country, but they come from a

variety of religious, social and economic

backgrounds. What they have in common is a

willingness to brave enormous hardships to realize

their ideals or their dreams. Some lead existences

light-years removed from those of their fathers and

grandfathers; others resolutely attempts to preserve

tradition and ritual in their lives.

Among the people whom Naipaul introduces

are Namdeo, a poet whose childhood experience

with caste prejudice fostered his decision to found

the Dalit Panthers (a group dedicated to liberating

India’s so called untouchables); Dipanjan, a member

of the Bengali gentry, whose awareness of the

poverty and misery around him led him to join the

Communist Party and live among the very poorest

of the village peasants; and Kakusthan, an

employee of a large company, who tries to live as “a

full Brahmin”- meaning that he cannot eat or drink

anything that he has not already offered up to his

god and that he must wear religious marks on his

forehead and traditional attire at all times.

In fact, two overarching themes occur in many

of these profiles. The first is the pervasiveness in

India of religion and faith (be it faith in God, ritual or

ideology). The second is the conflict in so many

people’s lives between the old and the new, the

traditional and the modern. In the course of the

travelogue, we meet Muslims who make a living as

gangsters but who pray five times a day, a pujari

who obliges time pressed clients by reciting the

traditional six hours wedding verses in half the time

and businessmen who spend hours praying before

works every day.

In the introductory chapter of his elegant

account of a journey around the world’s largest

democracy, Naipaul says, “Independence had come

to India like a kind of revolution”. He further says:

Now there were many revolutions within that

revolution… All over India scores of particularities that

had been frozen by foreign rule, or by poverty or lack

of opportunity or abjectness had begun to flow again.

From winter to spring: it is a comforting image

reassuring, suggestive of natural cycles and an

inevitable movement toward warmth and light. The

ground thaws, the sap flows, then comes the leaf,

the bud, the full flowering of national and individual

entitlements, an unstoppable surge towards the

glorious fruition promised by the idea of

independence. And yet blight intrudes: “Disruptive,

lesser loyalties – of region, caste, and clan – now

played on the surface of Indian life.”

Democracy, after the first exciting flush of its

birth struggle, is often fractious, frequently inefficient

and unstable, a maelstrom of “disruptive lesser

loyalties”. Its great strength lies in its willingness to

tolerate this messiness in the service of an ideal of

fair government. Democracy’s toughest test case is

India, with its population of 800 million, with more

than a dozen major language and hundreds of

dialects, with many faiths and religious traditions in

conflicts and symbiosis. In “India: A Million

Mutinies Now,” Naipaul is an erudite and sensitive

guide at a time when the strain of accommodating

the revolutions within the revolution – the growth of

that internalized awareness of the meaning of

independence, the sometimes violent clash of

competing rights and entitlements, the “million

mutinies now” – is particularly intense.

With the passing of time Naipaul is able to see

pattern and meaning in the fragmentation. During

his latest visit he crisscrossed India from Bombay to

Calcutta (Now Kolkata) from Kashmir in the North to

Chennai in the South. He sought out many of the

people he met on his first trip, examining the

changes in their lives and altitudes, at the same time

scrutinizing his own memories and changed

reactions. He has also sought out the more

explosive “revolutions within the revolutions,”

meeting with individuals who are representatives of

the “million mutinies” now fermenting.

The tone of Naipaul’s first two travelogues

about India was intensely person and often harsh.

This time he is altogether gentler, more

compassionate, an observer who has made private

peace with is ancestral land and is moved both to

humility and to celebration by its diversity. What is

extraordinary is the sheer exuberance and

catholicity of his curiosity. He meets with a criminal

gang leader in Bombay, with Hindu and Muslim

extremists with a leader of the Dalit Panthers (the

aggressive political arm of the untouchable caste),

with Maoist anti – Brahmin rebels and their police

tortures in Chennai. He meets with Sikh terrorists

and with a former naxalite rebel who had belonged

to a splinter group of Communist peasants. But

there are ordinary people too – government clerks,

film-makers, stock - brokers, holy men.

Voices on all sides tell Naipaul that “India has

changed; it was not the good and stable country it

had once been.” They maintain that “the great

investment in development over three or four

decades had led only to this: to ‘corruption’, to the

criminalization of politics. ‘In seeking to rise, India

had undone itself. No one could sure of anything

now; all was fluid.”

Independence, that heady celebration of Aug.

15, 1947, is recalled by many as a brief and shining

moment, a joyous birth only to be followed by

betrayals and rivalries, Camelot tragically undoing

itself. But there was no “good and stable country” at

the time of independence. There was chaos. India

was bloodily partitioned, its east and west flanks

were looped off to form the two halves of Pakistan,

and millions of Hindus and Muslims were resettled

on a redrawn map of roughly 10 million people

exchanged by the two new countries, at least half a

million were slaughtered. The new nation was in fact

an abattoir.

Yet Naipaul understands the yearning for

Utopia, the evocation of a world that was once

whole. The search for the unfragmented ideal is the

most urgent and consistent theme in all of his

writing. It is an idea at the core of both his personal

and his literary survival. Ant the threat of losing that

unified world has haunted him. “To see the

possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment

of creation: it was my temperament,” he wrote in

“The Enigma of Arrival” (1987), a brilliant work

which is really in the tradition of St. Augustine’s

“Confessions”, an inner voyage of discovery. “The

history of carried with me, together with the self

awareness that had come with my education and

ambition, had sent me into the world with a sense of

glory dead.”

“ I dreaded change”, Naipaul explained, “and

that was why, meeting distress halfway, I cultivated

old, possibly ancestral ways of feeling, the ways of

glory dead, and held on to the idea of a world in flux;

the drum of creation in the god’s right had, the flame

of destruction in his left.”

It is at the moment of loss, in Naipaul’s

experience, that the darshan comes, the moment of

glory revealed, that moment in Hindu Temple ritual

when the devotee is given a glimpse of the deity. It

was not until he left Trinidad and was living in

London that Naipaul recognized the wholeness, the

perfection of his own childhood. He enshrined it in

“Miguel Street”, but almost as soon as he found

that glory, it was gone. He returned to Trinidad and

nothing was the same. He fled, wrote the story of his

father’s life in “A House for Mr. Biswas”, then fled

again – to India – and again to Britain.

Now Naipaul no longer seems to dread

change. The world may be in flux, but the drum of

creations more powerful than the flame of

destruction. Past glories return in new and more

hopeful incarnations in every city in India, in every

village, in every life.

In one of many memorable encounters,

Naipaul visits a high official of the Shiv Sena, a

militant Hindu fundamentalist sect that has had

much to do with the current turbulence of Bombay

politics. The Shiv Sena official, despite position,

power and increased income, still lives with his

family in two rooms in the Bombay chawl (tenement)

where he grew up. Were it not for the

encouragement of his young Brahmin guide, Charu,

Naipaul notes:

I don’t think I would have made it even to the internal

staircase of the place – I was so demoralized, so

choked, driven so near to a stomach heave, by the

smell at the entrance, with we mangled garbage and

scavenging cats … and then, in the suddenly dark

passage, by a thick warm smell, catching at my throat,

of blocked drains. It was Charu, with his Brahmin’s

sense of duty … who (constantly looking back at me,

and sometimes even stretching out a hand, like a

father leading his child from sand to sea for the first

time) led me on and on, up the chawl steps, past open

doors giving glimpses of family living spaces.

(Naipaul; India: A Million Mutinies Now).

When Naipaul questions Mr. Ghate, the Shiv

Sena Official, about the filth and the overcrowding of

the chawl, Mr. Ghate responds with a paean to

chawl life. There had a fact been a time when Mr.

Ghate and his wife had moved to a modern

apartment (“after 100 square feet for 10 people in

the chawl, they had 300 square feet for three people

in the new apartment”). And Mrs. Ghate had come

close to a nervous breakdown from claustrophobia

and isolation, so they had returned to the chawl. Mr.

Ghate rhapsodizes: “In a chawl, you always know

what’s happening every where … There is no life in

an apartment.” There is no overcrowding as far as

Mr. Ghate is concerned. He does not notice the

stench or the filth.

In this elucidation of disparities, this revelation

that what is seen by the Trinidadian / British eye is

precisely what is not seen by the Bombay eye lies

Naipaul’s particular brilliance as a cultural analyst.

There is a constant interplay of dualities of

vision, so that the culture being examined grows

ever sharper in focus, gains an ever greater depth.

There is not only what Ghate sees and what Naipaul

sees; there is also the after-image of the ‘glory dead’

that throws the present into high and ghastly relief.

Naipaul insists on the simultaneity of these

perspectives; he refuses to romanticize, to suppress

the ugly views for false reasons of political

sentimentality.

This truth – tilling has not always endeared him

to Indians. He gazes into every shadowy corner of

the society, giving us a picture that is both, harsh

and beautiful, familiar and strange. At the same time

he is hopeful about future.

“I am sure there’s going to be a revolution,

“predicts Papu, jain stock-broker, gloomily. “In a

generation or two. It cannot last, the inequalities of

income. I shudder when I think of that… It will be

totally chaos.” Some people think the descent into

chaos has begun. A journalist for the Indian Express

was stabled outside the Golden Temple by sikh

terrorists, who Naipaul said, “lived hectically, going

out to kill again and again.” “It’s madness, it’s

fanaticism”, another journalist cried. “It can’t really

be explained.”

Yet Naipaul sees some pattern in the mutinies:

The idea of freedom has gone everywhere in India …

There was ... Now what didn’t exist 200 years before:

a central will, a central intellect, a national idea.

He goes on, “The Indian Union was greater

than the sum of its parts; and many of these

movements of excess strengthened the Indian state,

defining it as the source of law and civility and

reasonableness.”

Naipaul acknowledges that there is corruption

and violence and excess, but, he says:

Excess was now felt to be excess in India. What the

mutinies were also helping to define was the strength

of the general intellectual life, and the wholeness and

humanism of the values to which all Indians now felt

they could appeal. And strange irony – the mutinies

wee not to be wished away. They were part of the

beginning of a new way for many millions, part of

Indian’s growth, part of it’s restoration.

(Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now)

For a thousand years (1000 AD to 1947)

foreign rule suppressed the native intellect and

stymied any growth of the native civilization. Tree of

shackles of alien subjugation, one would have

expected to see a positive assertion of ones identity

in the past 1947 period. Tragically this was not to

be. India’s intellectual power fell into the hands of a

myopic Indian intellectual community who failed to

give a sense of direction to free India.

These armchair intellectuals propounded new

fangled philosophies that only accelerated its sense

of purposelessness. One such concept was

secularism. This secularism did not subscribe to the

dictionary definition of the world. But took on a

totally different meaning in India. It was a corruption.

It led to showering on the non-Hindu communities a

set of privileges that could not be justified morally,

economically or legally. But more important it

expected the Hindu to negate his own identity. Any

attempt by the Hindu, however innocent, to assert

his identity was dubbed as reactionary and divisive.

This proved disastrous in terms of Indian’s self-

confidence. Naipaul was probable the first person to

make this observation and express it in no uncertain

terms: “The loss of the past meant the loss of that

civilization, the loss of a fundamental idea of India,

and the loss therefore to a nationalist- minded man,

of a motive for action. It was a part of the feeling of

purposelessness of which many Indians spoke.”

Even an attempt to precisely define Indian’s

historical past was frowned upon. Over the centuries

India had shrunk physically. Its boundaries had

receded from mountains of the Hindu Kush in the

West to deserts of Rajasthan forsaking in the

process even its traditional cradle of civilization –

the Indus Valley. Academics foolishly contended

that the very fact that India existed now was enough

to infer that the Islamic invasion was not detrimental

to India. They went on to add that invasions had

enriched India. Even it India had shrunk to a sliver of

land near the Southern tip of India – these

intellectuals would seek satisfaction that India still

existed, totally oblivious of its loss and incapable of

appreciating the magnitude of damage. India not

only suffered and intellectual depletion but also a

crass intellectual perversion that failed to identity

the true cause of its backwardness and thus

hampered progress during that period.

Finally when he returns to India in the 1990’s

(India – A Million Mutinies Now), Naipaul is more

mature and discerning:

What I hadn’t understood in 1962, or had taken too

much for granted was the extent to which the country

had been remade; and even the extent to which India

had been restored to itself had been restored to itself,

after its own equivalent of the dark ages-after the

Muslim invasions and the detailed, repeated

vandalizing of the North, the shifting empires, the

wars, the 18th - century anarchy.

(Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now)

Naipaul now sees the benefits of

independence, a crucial catalyst for human growth:

“The idea of freedom had gone everywhere in

India.” And he observes Indians discovering their

own identity: “People everywhere have ideas now of

who they are and what they owe themselves.”

Ultimately India had changed. It was a country

now something to be proud of. Naipaul had

something to be proud of. He is finally at peace with

India, the very essence of his origin and his existent.

Naipaul’s contempt for India was owing to his

British self. But with growing age, his sensibility also

became mellower. The change in Naipaul’s

approach and outlook and his becoming more

compassionate have been revealed in his latest

travelogue, India: A million Mutinies Nos. A

magnificent work about changes and development

in India. Indian conditions are honestly recorded

here. Paul Theroux, K. Natwar Singh and Joseph

Lelyveld appraise it for its faithful recorded of Indian

mind. Joseph Lelyveld states, “The most notable

commitment of intelligence that post –colonial India

has evoked… He is indispensable for anyone who

wants seriously to come to grips with the experience

of India.”

(Joseph Lelyveld. The New York Times Book

Review, The Back cover – Jacket of V. S. Naipaul’s

India: A Million Mutinies Now)

In the chapter entitled “The House on the lake, A

return to India,” Naipaul avers,

… I had grown up with my own ideas of the distance

that separated me from India. I was far enough away

from it to cease to be of it I knew the rituals but

couldn’t participate in them; I heard the language, but

followed only the simpler words. But I was near

enough to understand the passions; and near enough

to feel that my own fate was bound up with the fate of

the people of the country. The India of my fantasy and

heart was something lost and irrecoverable.

In the chapter ‘Breaking Out’, Naipaul writes about

the changing and developing agrarian system in

India. When he comes to Goa, he witnesses a

healthy change in Indian agriculture. In Banglore, he

comes to know the caste, money and power-factors

in politics. His visit to Madras (Chennai) makes him

aware about India, “an area of awakening”. The

mutinies like Dalit movement, Dravidian movement,

Movement against Brahminism leave him

flabbergasted. He understands about Sangam Age

and Tamil cultures are literature. He comes to know

about Periyar, Veeraswami and Prabhakaran. They

look appealing to hi,. Then he goes to Calcutta

where Dipanjan and other sub-leaders of Maoism,

peasant movement or Naxalbari tell him of their

objectives to kill the Zamindari system. Naipaul’s

encounter with Rashid leaves him patient and

purified. He comes to know how partition became a

cause for the death of millions of Indian, for the

separation of various families, and for the downfall

of the Moslem Community in independent India.

However, the health changes Naipaul learns

about Indian literature either in English or in

vernaculars and journalism impress him. The

magazines like Women’s Era, Savvy and Femina

and their striking sale due to their cause of

emancipation and empowerment of women, pacify

the traveler about the nation. Later he goes to

Punjab and understands much about the rise of

Sikhism and the later happenings in the Punjab.

Commenting on the present travelogue Paul

Theroux says that, “It is literally the last word on

India today, witness within witness, a chain of voices

that illustrates every phase of Indian life… with

truthfulness and a subtlety that are joy to read.

Something like love enters the narrative – a real

feeling for the land and its people.”

The Hindu past which he inherited in his blood

has always weighed very heavy on his

consciousness and in one form or the other it kept

him battered and pre-occupied. He was deeply

impressed by certain Hindu institutions like the four

ashrams and is evident by its artistic appropriation in

The Mimic Men.

Recently he has publicly announced his

retirement and in this way he is following the Hindu

tradition of Vanaprastha or voluntary retirement.

Remarking that “books require an immense amount

of energy”, Naipaul said that his recently published

novel Magic Seeds would be his last. By stepping

aside, Naipaul has ensured that he will not made a

mockery of him by churning out stale ideas of

producing writings that say nothing. Of suffer

Samuel Beckett’s anguish when he said, “I wish I

had the strength to get out of my chair and throw

myself out of the window because my mind won’t

stop working.”

Having once dismissed India and all things

Indian – as an area of darkness, Naipaul now seeks

to have come full circle.

Work Cited

Dilip Padgaonkar. Interview with V.S. Naipaul. “An

Area of Awakening” Times, 19 July, 1993.

Farrukh Dhondy. Interview with V.S. Naipaul, with

Reference to India: A Wounded Civilization.

Interview first published in the Literary Review,

Rachael Kohn. Interview with V.S. Naipaul at Radio

National’s The Spirit of Things on 09/09/2001.

John Wain, “observers”.

Joseph Lelyveld. The New York Times Book

Review, The Back cover-jacket of V.S. Naipaul’s

India: A Million Mutines Now.

Landeg White, V.S. Naipaul (London: The

Macmillan, Press Ltd., 1975).

Naipaul, V.S. India: A Million Mutinies Now, London,

Minerva Paperbacks, 1990.

---. An Area of Darkness Picador 2001.

---. A House for Mr. Biswas. London: Andre Deutsch,

1962.

---. Miguel Street, London: Andre Deutsch, 1959.

Theroux Paul. Sir Vidia’s Shadow- a Friendship

across Five Continents. New York: Houghton

Miffin, 2000.