Unbelievable at it seems, the Centre is said to be parleying with a host of Mumbai-walas to decide which supercilious secularist should be rescued from oblivion and gifted the Bharat Ratna. None of the names doing the rounds inspires confidence, though this may not matter much given the manner in which successive governments have devalued the nation’s topmost honour. What is disturbing, however, is the news that the secular club is overactive mainly to rebuff that most eminent person of Indian origin – Sir Vidia Naipaul. Prime Minister Vajpayee conferred the Bharat Ratna upon Mr. Amartya Sen with alacrity after he won the Nobel for Economics, even though his work in the past two decades has been mediocre to say the least. It is truly distressing that the government should drag its feet in the matter of honouring the scintillating Sir Vidia.
Sir Vidia’s talents, like the Hindu ideal of Consciousness, are an evolving, uplifting affair. The movement of his oeuvre from the dimly understood areas of darkness in his own psyche, to the compassionate yet searing exposes of gnawingly empty lives only half-lived, puts him far above the reach of the puerile condemnation of envious Cascas. Politically correct criticism is a poor shield against the deep truths unbottled like trapped genies by the sheer power of his narrative.
When he received the Nobel tribute last month, the Trinidad Express (17 December 2001) carried an article by that country’s most illustrious native-refugee. Here Naipaul explains himself succinctly, negating the acidic censure that at the moment of his greatest public triumph, he remembered and expressed gratitude to India and Britain but did not deign to remember the land of his birth.
The disparagement is false because Trinidad was not Naipaul’s story; it was only part of his journey, experienced through the travails of his immigrant family and his own deep explorations. India, on the other hand, is with him throughout; the first moments of mental quickening relate intimately to the mother country. Recalling his childhood in his grandmother’s house in Chaguanas, Naipaul reminiscences about the old prayer-room with sculptures of Hindu deities, and the futile attempts of his people to “live in our own way …to live in our own fading India…”.
The isolation of those living in this grim, alien world can hardly be imagined by today’s culturally rootless Indians. Naipaul’s simple statements highlight the rupture experienced with the severing of the civilizational tie: “If it were not for the short stories my father wrote I would have known almost nothing about the general life of our Indian community. Those stories gave me more than knowledge. They gave me a kind of solidity. They gave me something to stand on in the world.”
Yet even the stories were not enough; they could not atone for the loss of the bio-cultural environment to which they belonged. By the time this was realized, it was too late. Says Naipaul, “We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father’s side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal. Two years ago a kind Nepalese who liked my name sent me a copy of some pages from an 1872 gazetteer-like British work about India, Hindu Castes and Tribes as Represented in Benaras; the pages listed — among a multitude of names – those groups of Nepalese in the holy city of Benaras who carried the name Naipal. That is all that I have.”
The desire for more was clearly the impetus behind his great literary quest; yet he was never too India-centric. It is unfair that though Naipaul has manfully shouldered the burden of the fractured cultures of his African and African-derived fellowmen, he has not received credit for painstakingly recording their plight under the multiple outrages of colonialism, racism, and loss of religion and culture.
This comes out forcefully in Half a Life, supposedly a fictional return to the priestly origins of his Brahmin ancestors, but also a sharp rebuke of Mr. Nehru’s India, in which the youth can have a ‘life’ only if they leave! But Half a Life witnesses, through the eyes of a rootless but financially comfortable Indian, the horrors of the African colonies and the hideous lives of the half-African peoples. It is not about the fears of a rich civilian society in the fading years of colonialism, but about the uncertain identities and ambiguous futures of the mixed races and native populations in economically raped and culturally ravaged countries. Seldom does one see a work of such uncensorious sensitivity; I am surprised none of the literary pundits have been moved to comment upon it.
Of course, much of the amnesia about the true worth of Naipaul’s works is due to his perceptive exposes of Islam’s consistent failure to produce functioning civil societies (Among the Believers, Beyond Belief) anywhere in the world, and the fact that he defended the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, calling it a civilizational issue. If this was not enough, he backed India’s nuclear tests in 1998. As no one so politically incorrect has ever got the Nobel; the monumental events of September 11 alone could have overcome the resistance to giving him his due.
Yet Naipaul did not arrive at his views without deep reflection. Speaking to Farukh Dhondy (Literary Review, August 2001), he explains his realization that India suffered greatly under the British Raj and the Islamic conquest, both “dark ages,” described in A Wounded Civilization (1977). He says, “that was the book in which I began to understand the nature of the Indian calamity… and I saw that India had been crushed by the Muslims.” Naipaul scorns the view that his analysis of the Islamic conquest is divisive, arguing that “people who say this have no wish to understand history.” He criticizes Nehru for promoting a certain “construct” of Indian history which refuses to face facts.
Such forthright opinions have not gone down well with mediocrities for whom the defence of the intolerable is a sign of high-mindedness. But Naipaul can be dogged when he gets after a subject, so he goes on to lambast the reputed R.K. Narayan for writing that “hangs in the air” for lack of historical perspective. The argument makes perfect sense; I have always wondered what it is about Indian writers that fails to appeal to me, but I could not put my finger on it.
Naipaul puts it in perspective. Narayan, he says, grew up in the shadow of Hampi, the fabulous ruins of the Vijayanagar empire, and as a writer he “should have understood what had happened, especially as he’d written a guidebook to the area. But he didn’t respond to that… How can you write about your setting, your culture, if you can’t see what happened four hundred years ago?” Narayan’s India, as Naipaul argues, “is a ruin, he’s writing about a ruin. And, indeed you should ask, who created the ruin? Why is there this ruin? The ruin wasn’t eternal.”
Now, this incorrigible genius has landed the highest international literary acclaim, despite the fact that its Western sponsors still refuse to accept the validity of the Hindu civilizational ethos and continue to pamper political Islam. It is an irony Naipaul will appreciate.
The Pioneer, 15 January 2002