NOBEL LAUREATE NAIPAUL AND INDIA

Dr. D. Ramakrishna

The Swedish Academy’s citation for the Nobel Prize to V.S.Naipaul in December, 2001 said that he was given the award “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”. While scrutinizing the several suppressed Third World histories, Naipaul has been rediscovering his own ancestral Indian civilization. Certainly India has a special place in his mind. In his acceptance speech, Naipaul said: “I was an intuitive writer. That was so, and that remains so now, when I am nearly at the end…I had to do the books I did because there were no books about those subjects. I had to clear up my world, elucidate it, for myself”. Naipaul’s quest over the decades has been for his own self. What is unique about the travel books dealing with his peregrinations across the continents has been his scrutiny of men and matters with an eagle-like sharp vision. The traveller’s curiosity to explore new cultures is coupled with the novelist’s idealizing instinct.

Naipaul’s continuing travels to the enigma that is India have been his attempts at an “arrival” in the course of his search for an ancestral culture that has given him inner strength, an “arrival” different from the one in England.

In his Foreword to India: A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul says: “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”. Nevertheless, he is not caught in “a love-hate relationship with Hinduism,” as John Thieme puts it. In fact, he is engaged in coming to terms with the idea or reality that is Hindu India. Having heard of the ancient civilization of the country of his forefathers, Naipaul visited India for the first time in 1962. And the visit led to the writing of the controversial book An Area of Darkness. At Port of Spain in Trinidad he had been watching the Hindu rituals in his family with ironic detachment. On his first visit to the country from where his family customs and traditions originated, he was appalled by the squalor and poverty as well as hypocrisy, political corruption, and official apathy around. Basic to Naipaul’s sense of shock had been his concern for the plight for common man. Despite decades of independence, the detestable aspects of public life in the country questioned by Naipaul still persist. The real Naipaul, however, emerges only on a holistic assessment of the man and his writings, particularly in the light of his statements on An Area of Darkness during his recent visits to India and a re-reading of the book.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Naipaul said: “I was surrounded by areas of darkness”. These areas of darkness might be in the Third World countries he had been trying to explore or in his own psyche. Leon Gottfield refers to the “personal complexity” of An Area of Darkness, “the darkness in India echoing the darkness within himself.” The real “darkness” is in his own self which he has been trying to penetrate in his attempts to see the light coming down the ages.

Whatever the Westernized Naipaul’s attitude to Africa and other Third-World countries generally, his reaction to the land of his ancestors has been different. He has been trying to see the light coming from ancient times through the haze. India has been a deep-seated emotional problem for him and he is still trying to fully comprehend the mystery.

In Roots, Alex Haley, a Black American, goes to Africa in search of the origin of his ancestor taken to America as a slave. Although a free American citizen now, Haley feels different from the white Americans. While Naipaul’s Hindu Brahmin forefathers went to Trinidad from Uttar Pradesh in India as indentured labourers, Haley’s African Negro forebears had been forcibly brought by the Whites to America as slaves. Naipaul’s people preserved their Hindu Brahmin customs and traditions. Naipaul had been deeply attached to his family. His ironic detachment notwithstanding, he has been on a quest for his true self rooted in the ancestral culture in India from where the Hindu rituals and traditions practised by his elders at home in Port of Spain originated. It has indeed been a rediscovery of the cultural moorings that have made India a stable nation despite all the upheavals over the centuries. In fact, in An Area of Darkness, Naipaul regrets what he and his family in Trinidad have missed, living in an “alienness” into which they got absorbed.

Naipaul felt that even by the time of his first visit to India, the “philosophy of despair, leading to passivity, detachment, acceptance,” had also been his on account of his ancestry. It is not what John Thieme calls “the vehement anti-Hinduism of An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization” but a recognition on Naipaul’s part of the preeminence of the ancient Hindu civilization. He expressed the deep pain experienced by him on actually observing the way such a civilization was vandalized.

Philip Gourevitch refers to the concluding chapter in Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival concerning death and human mystery and the author’s recounting of the brief discourse by a distant-in-law on ancestral history at the time of his sister’s funeral. Naipaul reminisces: “Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.” In the course of his cultural explorations across the continents, with history in his heart, Naipaul looks back to his ancestral land as an answer to the spiritual problems of contemporary life.

In his fiction, as in his non-fiction, it is not “repudiation” of Hindu background but a quest for his Hindu self that Naipaul is engaged in, as evident from his recent statements. For Ralph Singh, his Hindu self is inescapable. As he says:

I no longer yearn for ideal landscape and no longer wish to know the god of the city. This does not strike me as less. I feel, instead, I have lived through attachment and freed myself from one cycle of events. It gives me joy to find that in so doing I have also fulfilled the fourfold division of life prescribed by our Aryan ancestors. I have been student, householder and man of affairs, recluse.

Unlike ending up with conflict as his characters like Ralph Singh, Ganesh or Biswas, Naipaul has been striving to achieve a resolution of the tension by means of his repeated visits to India and rethinking about the country.

As Bruce Bawer says, “At the center of Naipaul oeuvre lies a profound irony. It was Western colonialism that provided him with his first experiences of indignity and exploitation and planted in him a lifelong feeling of dislocation and an ire that continues to burn in his soul”. Naipaul has been striving to overcome the feeling of dislocation. As Malcolm Jones says: “He depicts colonialism and its aftermath. But he also sneers at the formerly colonized”. However, as his reaction during the recent meeting at Neemrana Fort makes it evident, Naipaul has recognized the adverse effects of colonialism on the Third World cultures. Instead of postcolonial perspective, he has the historical as a source of inner strength, since he is engrossed with issues of ancestral origins. As he says in A Way in the World. “We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves”.

Outside the formal sessions of the Neemrana meet, other Indian writers were said to have been apprehensive of facing Naipaul: “He does not suffer …… gladly and it’s hard to tell who or what will irritate him”. While Kushwant Singh was seen frequently in this company, other writers “kept a wary distance from the irascible Nobel Laureate, speaking only when he summoned them for a conversation”. This is due to Naipaul’s famously forbidding, admonitory presence, what Saul Bellow called his “eagle-on-the-orage ….ook” on his first meeting in London with Naipaul in the winter of 1982. In his writings as well as his personal interaction with people, Naipaul is known as irascible and unpredictable. He has immense moral courage and intellectual honesty with unswerving literary integrity and a high degree of sophistication.

In his travel books, there is a unique blend of fact and fiction and the real people he encountered would sometimes look like fictional characters, just as a fictional characters in his novels would come alive as real people.

The “people” that Naipaul encountered provided the themes for his writings which were more than the pedestrain reporting of a journalist. As he says, “People are responding to the same political or religious and cultural pressures. The writer has only to listen very carefully and with a clear heart to what people say to him, and the next question, and the next”. In Naipaul’s view, history is woven around people, it is a kind or order, despite occasional disorder. As Stephen Schiff says, “For him, the knowledge of history is a humanizing influence—humanizing in the sense of make humans”. Whether dealing with Africa and the Third World countries or the Caribbean, Naipaul’s travel writings are imbued with such concern for the humane. He tells Stephen Schiff:

Some people write on simple things. The thing is, I am not a simple man. I have an interesting mind, a very analytical mind. And what I say tends to be interesting. Also very true. That’s all that I can do about it. I can’t lie. I can’t serve a cause. I’have never served a cause. A cause always corrupts.

This is indeed Naipaul’s credo as a travel writer, forthright and without advocating any cause. Being intellectually honest and without narrow sentimentality, he eminently succeeds in analysing men and matters with detachment.

While Khushwant Singh hailed the award of the Nobel Prize to Naipaul, Gita Hariharan questioned it: Naipaul looks with disdain at the Islamic culture from Iran to Indonesia. As he says in Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, “Converted peoples have to strip themselves of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such a thing can be arrived at), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism”. Naipaul’s assertion is a result of his conviction that genuine cultural stability comes from a respect for the past.

According to Malcolm Jones, Naipaul “reaffirmed his opinions regarding Islam at a reading in October 2001 in London, condemning what he called Islam’s ‘Calamitous effect’ ” Elaborating, Naipaul is reported to have said: “To be converted, you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say, ‘My ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.” Naipaul’s views result from an unswerving faith in his own ancestral culture.

Naipaul’s widening comprehension of the richness and complexity of the Indian civilization is evident. The “million mutinies” that he recognizes in the country have been resurgence of the Indian civilization that flourished even before the Western countries were civilized. As in An Area of Darkness, in India: A Wounded Civilization too he expresses agony at the chaos around. As he says,With Independence and growth, chaos and a loss of faith, India was awakening to its distress and the cruelties that had always lain below its apparent stability, its capacity simply for going on. Not every one was content simply to have his being. The old equilibrium had gone, and at the moment all was chaos. But, out of this chaos, out of the crumbling of the old Hindu system, and the spirit of rejection, India was learning new ways of seeing and feeling.

Naipaul sees the wounds inflicted on the Indian civilization and the process of its recuperation. As he says, he grew up in Trinidad with two ideas of India: the private and personal, the India or the anxiety about where the migrant Indians had come from was like a neurosis. And the second idea of India was one of the independence movement, the India of the great civilization and the great classical past. This second idea, Naipaul says, was an aspect of their identify, the community identity they had developed in the multi-recial Trinidad (7-8).

In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington argues that the “rivalry of the superpowers is replaced by the clash of civilization”. While identifying six or seven civilizations, Huntington perceives a clash between the two proselytizing religions of Christianity and Islam. These proselytizing religions have taken undue advantage of the tolerance of the more ancient civilization of Hinduism in India. In the present “clash of civilization” on the subcontinent, India is poised to regain much of the cultural richness which is the real source of intellectual and spiritual strength for the country now emerging as a global power.

It is the shock-absorbing nature of Hinduism with its Karma doctrine and the familial bonds which Naipaul recognizes as central to the culture of his ancestors. He continues to be deeply attached to his family in Port of Spain, looking back to the distant ancestry. In An Area of Darkness as well as some of his subsequent publications and statements in India, Naipaul acknowledges the basic strength of the Indian mind which is also his own. And this indeed has been his cultural rediscovery in the course of his Indian odyssey.

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