India is old, and India continues… India blindly swallows its past. But to know India, most people look inward. They consult themselves: in their own past, in the nature of their caste or clan life, their family traditions, they find the idea of India which they know to be true, and according to which, they act…
“There is no room in India for outsiders.”
— VS Naipaul in India: A Wounded Civilization
Many writers cope with one ineluctable problem: they tend to forget how they began writing, how they learnt to write, and how actually they started writing in true sense of the term. Or does this problem stem from an unconscious act of refusal to recollect connecting threads that refuse to unreelij More often than not such writers ultimately spin the threads themselves. VS Naipaul, unquestionably one of the greatest writers of our times, seems to be classifiable in this league of writers.
The wish to become a writer visited Naipaul, as he confesses in his book literary Occasions, when he was eleven and he noticed in that early ambition to become a writer was nothing “extraordinary” as he was “told by distinguished film director Shyam Benegal that he was six when he decided to make a life in cinema as a director.” India, the country his ancestors lived, was far away but the separation was not so long as to eliminate “instincts of people of the Gangetic plain.” On the contrary, Naipaul was full of these instincts. Self-disparagement, a sense of futility and gnawing guilt come later, often fueled by rage and regret: “Our little rural Indian world, the disintegrating world of a remembered India, was left behind. I never returned to it.”
Surveying this book further, one finds Naipaul struggling with search for material and form, for he had trouble with both. His “blankness inside” made him nervous and his inability to know how to travel for a book troubled him as to the form of writing. A reader cannot escape shadows of pessimism while gleaning through his observation, “India was a greater hurt. It was a subject country. It was also the place from whose very great poverty our grandfathers had had to run away…The more personal India was quite hidden, it vanished when memories faded.” Midway this splendid book, it seems to me relevant to recall what I read in The Georgia Review long time back. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya confronts his readers with realms of tragedy when he bursts out, “I could have been another Schopenhauer, another Dostoyevsky.” Through this exclamation, Vanya exhibits not only the victimisation to which he subjected himself, but also his own helplessness and failure. Vanya could account for his frustrations as a writer because he accepted literary standards set by Dostoyevsky or Schopenhauer and placed expectations on him to reach these standards. A writer’s sufferings and losses are real despite the fact that a Vanya’s desire to become another Schopenhauer or Dostoyevsky was as improbable as it was abject. Getting influenced is another story. In his essay titled Conrad’s Darkness and Mine, a reader can gauge the direct or indirect evidence of the impact Conrad had on Naipaul but most certainly, the latter never cherished wishes akin to those of Vanya.
As a writer and it is his confession, he could barely understand his world --- family background, migration, and most importantly, “the curious half-remembered India in which we continued to live for a generation”. Obviously, other ways had to be fathomed. An Indian leaving India and all its assumptions for the first time for some other country may get “unsettled”. To discern the reasons, he turns to Indian autobiographies and picks up a few. Mahatma Gandhi’s The story of my experiments with truth. A fuller treatment follows in a chapter titled A Defect of Vision from his celebrated book India: A Wounded Civilization. Naipaul’s analysis of this autobiography leads him to conclude, “The inward concentration is fierce, the self-absorption complete.” There is no description of the climate or the seasons, roads, streets, crowd or public conveyance. Nothing about anything that did not affect the writer’s “physical or mental well-being”. Naipaul is not too pleased with other autobiographies like Punjabi Century by Prakash Tandon and Nirad Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. He watches carefully Tandon describing minutely festivals, his father’s engineering duties, his courtship in Sweden, etc, and then concludes that Tandon “barely attempts the theme.” In Chaudhuri, he finds both the failure and futility: “of his country, his race and the land itself…” When Chaudhuri seeks to account for these failures and futilities, this act “frequently drives him to rage”. In Chaudhuri’s The Continent of Circe, Naipaul comes to grips with what he calls “the philosophy of the devitalized”. Naipaul seeks answers to his questions cropping up from the autobiographies he read. For example why “The outer world matters only in so far as it affects the innerij” To get the answer, he turns to Sudhir Kakar, Indian psychotherapist who comes to his rescue. Kakar blames “the Indian ego”, which he finds and describes as “underdeveloped” which results in reduced need for individual observation and judgment. The explanation is difficult to accept but then Naipaul recorded it in detail in the chapter A Defect of Vision.
Naipaul’s world of darkness emanated from the unexplored vacuity of the past, the history, India, the Muslim world and the colony. He could fill that emptiness with his words, and indeed his readers go along with him. His books are like a river’s current. Through his creativity and literature, Naipaul allowed his readers to cross a border. To put it more succinctly, he allowed his readers to lodge in a borderland between inaction and alteration. His books possess a seizing unification, alive with a potential for transformation. He tasted life and knowledge and blended them by imposing imperatives which offered a way to deep insight into human characters and nature. He conveyed a structure of values quite consistent with his personality and remoteness from his observations. Readers suffer neither any discontinuity nor any disorientation. The “mangled bits of old India”, as Naipaul uses the phrase, have magic, music, coherence and decisiveness.
Self-scrutiny runs throughout Naipaul’s creations as he stares with wonder and rue at the prismatic darkness, encompassing India, Africa and other third world countries and also when he acts as a traveler delving into a series of scenes with overlapping “illusions and mirages.” He removes the blur and haze or rather reduces it and thereby exposes absurdity to light. The beauty of writings of both Naipaul and Nirad C Chaudhuri lies in their ability to put on hold or even ultimately not allowing what psychological researchers call our ability to juxtapose a present or future reality with “what might have been.” A sort of “Counterfactual thinking”. They present facts with their arguments and analysis for easy absorption. The basic conclusion both reach is that ruefulness over past offers choices for correcting historical absurdities and aberrations. Naipaul subjected himself to what Milan Kundera describes in his novel Ignorance, “the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” Naipaul’s magnum opus, complex and demanding body of work, bear testimony to his readiness to suffer in order to have the desire to return fulfilled.
In Half a life, another novel sometimes described as languid, Naipaul concerns himself about people who, “look at you but don’t see you”. This book is about a hollowness which colours the unprotected existence of its chief character Willie Chandran. Naipaul looks not so favouringly at “charity” for poor people. “The maharaja gave a certain amount of scholarships to downtrodden. The maharaja was known for his piety, and this giving of scholarships was one of his acts of religious charity,” thus analyses he. Followed by yet another extract from Half a life: dialogue between Willie and his father:
‘We have to think of your higher education. Willie, you must not be like me.’
‘Why do you say thatij You are pretty pleased with what you do.’ Willie said.
‘I burnt my English books and I didn’t get a degree. All I’m saying now, if I’m allowed, is that Willie should get a degree.’
‘I want to go to Canada.’ Willie said.
‘I can send you to Benares or Bombay or Calcutta or even Delhi. But I can’t send you to Canada.’ Willie’s father surrendered.
‘The fathers will send me.’ Willie averred.
‘Your mother has put this low idea in your head. Why would the fathers want to send you to Canada,’ quipped Willie’s father.
‘They will make me a missionary.’
‘They will turn you into a little monkey and send you right back here to work…..You are a fool.’
‘You think soij’ Willie Chandran said. And put an end to the discussion.
Naipaul shares through such dialogues his pain: the inability of a father to send his son abroad for foreign education and the resultant sufferings and consequences. He offers new perspectives on the vicissitudes of civilisations and history; lamenting loss of heritage and culture in the clash of civilisations.
Half a life is about settlement; displacement, restlessness and fear of losing one’s identity. Conradian darkness which was so near and dear to Naipaul is writ large throughout his work: he the great surveyor exploring his links with the unorganised societies, pondering “the mystery — Conradian word — of my own background.” Or as Willie had to realise later, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” For Naipaul, there is no pall of sentimental verbiage. Efforts by people in third world countries, ravaged by degradation and violence, to find refuge in falsehood and lies never found favour with Naipaul.
Naipaul’s prescient narratives don’t take much persistence to follow. His sentences are constructed around real experiences and perspectives which masses might share. Of Naipaul prose and style, one will be tempted to recall what Edmund Wilson says of TS Eliot’s critical prose that has affected literary opinion “more profoundly than any other critic writing English.” It is “almost primly precise and sober, yet with a sort of sensitive charm in its austerity --- closely reasoned and making its points with the fewest possible words, yet always even, effortless and lucid.” One comes across painstaking, coherent and multiple-peaked narratives.
One may quarrel with Naipaul’s visionary qualities and appreciation of history and its distortions but one may never quarrel with his desire to see “half-made societies” as fully functional and complete societies where we are not “imprisoned by our assumptions.” Despite the harshness displayed against third world countries in his books, Naipaul could never keep his childhood and his immutable connections with India (proud moments for we Gorakhpurians, for Naipaul’s ancestors hailed from Gorakhpur) at bay. He returned to these as regularly as they returned to him. His reminiscences of both abound. He at the core of his heart loved India and that is the precise reason why he asserted, “There is no room in India for outsiders,” and against the backdrop of wounds on Indian civilisation, continued his belief in, “…there is the possibility of a true new beginning.” He nourished that belief throughout while being intensively aware of India’s (which he fondly describes as old and continuing) contribution to the world civilisation and completeness and vastness of Indian culture. Time for us to realise and feel ecstatic about that completeness and vastness which no better words than the ones from Wordsworth, “And I have felt/A presence that disturbs me with the joy/ Of elevated thoughts,” can sum up.
(The writer was born in Gorakhpur in 1960. He did his Masters in Economics from Gorakhpur University in 1980 and joined Indian Audit & Accounts Service in 1983. Currently, he is Director General in the Office of Comptroller & Auditor General of India. He is a poet writing in English. His fourth book: a semi-autobiographical: literary non-fiction will be released in November 2018. The views expressed in this article are his personal views)
