“India Through V.S.Naipaul’s Eyes”

Excerpts from an interview of  Sir V S Naipaul in 2001, reproduced below. From “India: A Million Mutinies Now”

*** Excerpts Begin ***

Rachael Kohn: When did you first have an inkling that you wanted to visit and document the land of your forefathers?

V.S. Naipaul: I suppose since I became a writer, when I became a writer, I always wanted to do it, and it seemed to me natural, some of it had to be done, and as soon as I could do it, I went out to do it. I was 29. I invested everything I had in that first journey. I was going to drive to India, I even went and bought the Volkswagen mini-bus, I was even talking with them about the colour of the little plastic plates they fitted those things up with in 1961/62, but I couldn’t get the insurance, so that had to be abandoned. But I’m just telling you how important it was. I gave everything I had, I had very little money, but all of it went onto this idea of a year in India.

Rachael Kohn: When you grew up in Trinidad did your parents tell you stories about India, that they had heard from their parents?

V.S. Naipaul: No. I suppose my parents were born in Trinidad and their parents were the people who had come from India, and I think we were not that kind of people who would tell one another stories or who would try to analyse the past. I think we were still, when I was growing up, people who were pretending that we were carrying on living on the Gangetic Plain in eastern Uttar Pradesh. I don’t think we had been able to step backwards, to consider the experience.

So there were no stories. I was not able to ask any questions. Great shame, because you see a whole section of my ancestry has been lost to me. I don’t know who my father’s grandfather was, and I don’t know where they came from. I know that they came from Nepal, but that’s as far as it gets.

Rachael Kohn: So your investigations in India never uncovered those personal ancestral lines?

V.S. Naipaul: Only on my mother’s side, but we always knew that, but we had nothing to go on, no names, nothing, a great mystery. So it’s hanging in the air and I suppose it’s very disconcerting to look back and it just falls away, there’s no past.

…

Rachael Kohn: Well when you went to India it was something of a shock, you weren’t prepared for what you saw. Was it the poverty that preoccupied you, or was it the religion?

V.S. Naipaul: I think it was the general awfulness, beginning with the poverty. But the poverty was not a surprise.

I think we all knew that we had come from a very poor country and that we had migrated there, because of the wretchedness of conditions in India in the 1880s when there were famines. I don’t know why there should have been famines in India in the 1880s, or why it was so specially wretched, but one relation of mine went back to India to visit my mother’s family’s ancestral village. When this person came back, he said, “If my grandfather or my father had to indenture himself 20 times to get away from that, it would have been well worth doing”, such was the shock he felt on seeing what he did see. And these were my nerves on going to India, it was a land of an extraordinary wretchedness from which we had fled.

We were not middle-class people going to university in England and as it were lying about ourselves, talking about our social standing, we were peasantry and we knew that it had been awful, and that was the India that I was very nervous of finding, and it was the India I’m afraid I horribly found.

Rachael Kohn: Well you’ve certainly written in many ways about the cultural, as opposed to purely economic sources of that poverty, and in particular the ideal of holy poverty. How would you describe its influence on the Indian psyche and society generally?

V.S. Naipaul: I think I would like to go back just a little bit to the wretchedness of India, and to talk about what might have caused it, that people behave as though it was always there, it was an eternal. I don’t think it was an eternal.

India was destroyed by the Muslim invaders, they ruled it severely and ravaged it for five to six centuries and they left nothing behind. They didn’t build a school, no institutions, so that was the cause of the poverty, that utter wretchedness where people had no faith in institutions, had no-one to appeal to ever, produced this idea of holy poverty. I think we have to understand that.

Rachael Kohn: So the religious ideals grew out of a social and political context, are you saying?

V.S. Naipaul: I think so, yes, grew out of wretchedness, grew out of defeat, and its not beautiful at all, and as India gets richer today, people’s idea of what is owed to them by the world, or what they owe themselves, those ideas are steadily rising. Its not an eternal this idea of holy poverty.

…

Rachael Kohn: And yet it has a deeply Indian religious basis in the notion that the self is where God resides and therefore documenting the self and one’s feelings.

V.S. Naipaul: I think all of this is said, but you see I reject all of this. I feel all of this tells people that they should be defeated again, its good for them to live with defeat, and that somehow beauty comes out of defeat. I don’t think beauty comes out of defeat, I think the Indian wretchedness comes out of the Indian defeat, and this idea of experiencing is utterly wrong. I don’t think the Sanskrit texts pre the Muslim conquest, dealt in this kind of negation. I think this negation has come with the years of squalor and defeat.

Rachael Kohn: Well the idea of the importance of the self and the interior world certainly took hold in the West in the ’60s, it became very popular with the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. You were in India at that time…

…

It’s a land that has often been romanticised by the West, and by Indians themselves, especially as a reaction to the Muslim conquests from 1000 AD onwards. But the British India of E.M. Forster and its dying embers in the work of Somerset Maugham, has given way to a modern post-independent India. In the urban centres Indians have embraced modernity, but its effects are often as ugly as they are confusing, as V.S. Naipaul writes.

At dinner that evening, high up in one of those towers, a journalist touched the subject of identity. “Indian” was a word that was now without meaning, he said. He himself, he was in his thirties, of the post-Independence generation, no longer knew who he was. He no longer knew the Hindu gods.His grandmother, visiting Khajuraho or some other famous temple, would immediately be in tune with what she saw; she wouldn’t need to be told about the significance of the carvings. He was like a tourist; he saw only an architectural monument. He had lost the key to a whole world of belief and feeling, and was cut off from his past.

It explained his frenzy. His idea of India was one in which India couldn’t be accommodated. It was an idea of India which, for all its seeming largeness, only answered a personal need: the need, in spite of the mess of India, to be Indian, to belong to an established country with an established past. And the journalist was insecure. As an Indian he was not yet secure enough to think of Indian identity as something dynamic, something that could incorporate the millions on the move, the corrupters of the cities.

For the journalist, though he was an economist and had travelled, and was professionally concerned with development and change, Indian identity was not something developing or changing but something fixed, an idealisation of his own background, the past he felt he had just lost. Identity was related to a set of beliefs and rituals, a knowledge of the gods, a code, an entire civilisation.

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 part of the feeling of purposelessness of which many Indians spoke, part of the longing for Gandhian days, when the idea of India was real and seemed full of promise, and the “moral issues” clear.

But it was a middle-class burden, the burden of those whose nationalism, after the years of subjection, required them to have an idea of India. Lower down, in the chawls and the squatters’ settlements of the city, among the dispossessed, needs were more elemental: food, shelter, water, a latrine. Identity there was no problem; it was a discovery.

From India: A Wounded Civilisation

…

Rachael Kohn: Well apart from the sexual dissatisfaction and confusion, there’s also the challenging and the breaking apart of the sacred caste system in which Brahmin men for example fall in love with someone below their caste. Now this is really where the social and the personal collide. In your view, is the caste system a kind of neutered violence throughout Indian society?

V.S. Naipaul: It might do at some levels and at some places, but I think please remember that in a world where there are no institutions and where until recently you had no legislators of your own choosing, the caste system was your group. It was almost literally your friendly society and you couldn’t do without it, and earlier in the last century there was a reforming movement in India called the Brotherhood, which was going to reform Hinduism and get rid of the caste idea and things like that.

Not understanding this aspect of the caste system, the idea of the friendly society, the protecting society, and it failed for that reason. People couldn’t get brides, they couldn’t get husbands, they couldn’t move out in the big world. Its not always violence, it probably is violence in Bihar, it probably is violence among various castes, and please remember that sometimes the violence is between the middle castes, one against the other, its not this crude thing about the upper and the lower, its infinitely varied.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, within any caste there are a number of different possible roles, or kinds of work that one can take that are proscribed.

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, but you see what happens, that was true in a pastoral society but in society becoming rapidly urban or industrial, that is no longer true, everybody is doing a new kind of job now.

Rachael Kohn: Yes. Well there certainly have been violent responses to the social order, the sacred social order of the caste, and you’ve mentioned the brotherhood, and I’m also thinking of your account of Periyar the hero of the south, the Tamils. Now he established these self respect marriages; are they still practiced?

V.S. Naipaul: I think the Periyar group have come to such political power.

Rachael Kohn: In Madras, isn’t it?

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, Tamil Nadu, you know they run the country, the run the State, various aspects of them. I don’t think they need that any longer, that was a protest, that was the protest aspect. But the Brahmins have been overthrown in the south, the Brahmins have migrated, many have gone to the United States, probably there might be some here in Australia, I don’t know.

So there is another way of understanding the caste war. The tables have been turned to some extent, in independent India, with democratic institutions and people voting and choosing their own legislators, you know. Its a great change, the migrations of the Brahmins, because they were a learned caste, and India very much needed their talent.

…

Rachael Kohn: Well do you think that the caste system of India is there to stay in the consciousness?

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, I think very few people can get out of it, very few people have the talent in a brutally simply way, to find their own husbands and to live in their own little social groups. Very few people can do it. The caste system, that friendly society which provides people with every kind of cushion, in bad times, will be around for most people in India.

…

Rachael Kohn: Yes. Well you’re certainly one of the most unusual writers today, because you’re a cultural and religious critic. Now many people today champion the blending of cultures and the religions of far-off places and far-off peoples, and yet you remain a critical observer. Is this just an anti-religious streak or are you not very optimistic about the multicultural, multireligious society today that has determined policy, and that we’re trying to live out?

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, I think the multicultural idea which comes from the United States, is being fostered by Islamic groups, and I think its extremely dangerous. I think one aspect of it.

Of course there are many others, I’m just talking about this thing which says that women must cover themselves up, although they might wish to come and live in your country, they must cover themselves up, and I think thats so dangerous, because I think we should be extending the hand to these people who come from oppressive regimes, and the oppressive faith of converted people, their faith is an oppressive faith, its a faith which hates humanity and the converted people begin in Iran, they come all the way down to Indonesia, and to talk about multiculturalism, about the converted people who have destroyed their own civilisations, who have no time for their own culture, is absurd.

It can’t be countenanced, because you’d say, “You destroy Buddhism in Afghanistan, you destroy Hindusim and Buddhism in Pakistan, you destroy the past in Iran, how can you claim my tolerance for your intolerance?” I think there must be an intellectual confrontation, instead of this glib multi-culti talk.

Rachael Kohn: Multi-culti. Sir Vidia, I wonder if that can also be laid at the feet of other missionary traditions. I mean isn’t it always the case when a tradition feels compelled to share its truth, its revelation with other peoples, that this will inevitably happen, that a previous culture or tradition will be repressed?

V.S. Naipaul: Now I think you’re being very general. I’m talking about something very specific. You’re talking about the missionary thing, and that word will let the listener believe that Christianity is missionary and they have missionaries, and that you have Islamic missionaries, and they’re the same thing. I don’t think the people who become Christians are required to discard their history. I don’t think they’re required to destroy their past.

I think in our modern world we cherish the past, we wish to find out more and more about the past. To destroy the sites of the world, it happened in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, is really to wound us all. It is just a missionary act and the people there must learn to hate the past. It’s not so, Islam makes especially heavy demands on its converts. They have to shed their past, and the neurosis is much worse than the colonial neurosis, that people through political days.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, I want to ask you about that because you haven’t mentioned the British presence in India. Now in your view, was that a good or a bad thing for Indian civilisation?

V.S. Naipaul: It was an excellent thing. Benign, not consciously, not deliberately, but the British were the first to institutions, courts, property rights, law, universities, schools, extraordinary achievement.

Rachael Kohn: It certainly was taken up very quickly.

V.S. Naipaul: And India, which has really been trampled into the dust by the centuries of illiterate brutal conquerors, religious fanatics, was able to pick itself up very slowly. It’s still not picked itself up completely, but I think the British contribution really was quite benign. Its very extraordinary because England itself is such a cultural mess these days, but in India their contribution was benign.

*** End of Excerpts ***