'The Hindu land is a wounded civilisation'

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'The Hindu land is a wounded civilisation'

'Even an attempt to accurately define India'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 civilisation- 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.'

Vivek Gumaste

Posted online: Thursday, June 30, 2005 at 1624 hours IST

Updated: Thursday, June 30, 2005 at 1642 hours IST

 

NAIPAUL'S INDIA: "That was a time when there was no intellectual life

in India..."

 

 

 

In reacting to his Nobel Prize laudation, Naipaul averred: "I am

utterly delighted, this is an unexpected accolade. It is a great

tribute to both England, my home, and to India, home of my

ancestors." While England provided him with a place and a language to

express his thoughts, the ethos of his writings is clearly his Indian

ancestry. Never before has a writers work been so consumed by the

complexities of his origin, compounded by the geographical

displacement of his forefathers.

 

His writings about India, scathingly depreciating at times, have

never gone down well with the Indian intelligentsia. His post Nobel

Prize remark that he had contributed to India's intellectual

development was greeted with profound scepticism and deep antipathy

in India. However, a close reading of his works reveals that his

three books about India (An Area of Darkness, A Wounded Civilisation

and India-A Million Mutinies Now) are in essence, an accurate,

objective picture of the changing scenario in post-independent India.

 

Naipaul, the son of Indian immigrants to Trinidad, first visited

India in the 1960's. He carries in his mind a carefully cultivated

image of India-the land of Nehru and Gandhi, the land of a great

civilisation. His shock and disappointment at the land of his

ancestors finds vent in a harsh and stinging tirade in An Area of

Darkness, ostensibly to mask the deep hurt that he himself

experiences. Jeffery Paine author of Father India rightly

concludes: "Area is the narrative of a young man not finding the

India he expected and not liking the India he finds." India does not

live up to his dreams and the young Naipaul lacks the maturity to

gauge the strength of an ancient civilisation.

 

Naipaul's disgust at what he sees is exemplified in sentences like

this: "Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate mostly, besides the

railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate

on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the

streets; they never look for cover."

 

However his observations are not all gloom and doom. He appreciates

the Indian attitude and deep down in his mind exists a glimmer of

hope for the country of his forefathers: "Nowhere are people so

heightened, rounded, and individualistic; nowhere did they offer

themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to

take delight in people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not

want India to sink; the mere thought was painful." (An Area of

Darkness)

 

But does his book depict genuinely the India of the 1960's? The

answer is, yes. Naipaul could not have come to India, at a more

inappropriate time. It was a country in flux. The initial euphoria of

Independence had evaporated, the Chinese war had deflated its

confidence and crushed its philosophy of non-violence, the economy

was non-existent and at the helm was an aging, crestfallen Prime

Minister; certainly not an optimistic picture. So when Naipaul

suggests, much to the dislike of some Indians, that there was little

intellectual life in India 40 years ago, he is probably right. The

guiding principles of India at that time had failed.

 

Ahimsa (Gandhian principle of non-violence) had fallen flat in the

face of Chinese aggression, socialism had failed miserably and the

image of India as a beggar with a begging bowl was gaining strength.

Resistant and oblivious to the changing world, India's aging leaders

(both political as well as intellectual), 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: "India has been a shock for me, because-

you know, you think of India as a very old and civilised land. One

took this idea of an antique civilisation 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 return he did. Again and

again until he had made peace with the civilisation of his origin.

 

Ten years later (A Wounded Civilisation, 1976) the shock, disgust and

anger persist but in an attempt to assuage his own wounds he conducts

a root cause analysis of India's plight. He concludes that the Hindu

land is "a wounded civilisation", injured by the British Raj and the

preceding Islamic invasion. Again his strong emotional links with

India come to the fore: "India is for me a difficult country. It

isn't my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be

indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once

too close and too far."

 

Towards the end of the first millennium, India had become an inward

looking society which arrogantly ignored the outside world and this

attitude had brought with it, its inherent weaknesses and prepared

the ground for its impending invasions: "No civilisation was so

little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so

easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its

disasters. Five hundred years after the Arab conquest of Sind, Moslem

rule was established in Delhi as the rule of the foreigners, people

apart; and foreign rule-Moslem for the first five hundred years,

British for the last 150-ended in Delhi only in 1947."

 

The catastrophic effect that these repeated invasions had on the

Hindu psyche are well delineated by Naipaul. Commenting on the

decline of the Vijayanagar Kingdom, one of the last bastions of Hindu

rule during the Islamic invasion, he astutely observes: "I wondered

whether intellectually, for a thousand years India hadn't always

retreated before its conquerors and whether in its periods of

apparent revival, India hadn't only been making itself archaic again,

intellectually smaller, always vulnerable."

 

This idea is repeatedly emphasized in the book:" Hinduism hasn't been

good enough for the millions. It has exposed us to a thousand years

of defeat and stagnation. Its philosophy of withdrawal has diminished

men intellectually and not equipped them to respond to challenge; it

has stifled growth. So that again and again in India, history has

repeated itself: vulnerability, defeat and withdrawal."

 

And for a thousand years (1000 AD to 1947) foreign rule suppressed

the native intellect and stymied any growth of the native

civilisation. Free of the shackles of alien subjugation, one would

have expected to see a positive assertion of ones identity in the

post 1947 period. Tragically this was not to be. India's intellectual

power fell into the hands of a myopic Indian intellectually community

(largely comprised of Marxist oriented historians-sophisticated Pol

Pots who desired to erase any reference to India's past) 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 to the dictionary

definition of the word. 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 India's self- confidence. Naipaul was

probably the first person to make this observation and express it in

no uncertain terms: "The loss of the past meant the loss of that

civilisation, 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 accurately define India'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 civilisation- 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 if 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 an intellectual

depletion but also a crass intellectual perversion that failed to

identify the true cause of its backwardness and thus hampered

progress.

 

Therefore Naipaul correctly avers: "The crisis of India is not only

political or economic. The larger crisis is of a wounded old

civilisation that has at last become aware of its inadequacies and is

without the intellectual means to move ahead." I am not certain

whether India had 'become aware of its inadequacies' but certainly it

lacked the intellectual means of 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, after its own equivalent of the

dark ages-after the Muslim invasions and the detailed, repeated

vandalising of the North, the shifting empires, the wars, the 18th-

century anarchy."

 

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 (to some extent

fuelled by the growth of the nationalist BJP): "People everywhere

have ideas now of who they are and what they owe themselves"

 

Change is present everywhere, "India was now a country of million

mutinies. A million mutinies, supported by twenty kinds of group

excess, sectarian excess, religious excess, regional excess: the

beginnings of self-awareness, it would seem the beginnings of an

intellectual life, already negated by old anarchy and disorder. But

there was in India now what didn't exist 200 years before: a central

will, a central intellect, a national idea. .... 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 that they could appeal. They were a part

of the beginning of a new way for many millions, part of India's

growth, part of its restoration."

 

In summary, India had changed. India was 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 existence.

 

After winning the Nobel Prize, Naipaul arrogantly claimed he helped

effect this change in India. What he overlooks is the fact that he is

merely the chronicler of the change and not its instigator. However,

one may also look at this remark from a different perspective. Does

it reflect a deep empathy for India? Does he badly want to be a part

of its success?