All my life I have had to think about ways of looking and how they alter the configuration of the world.
— V. S. Naipaul (2007: 2).
Abstract
Of the very few writers who could grasp the heart and mind of post-independence India, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul was the foremost. In and to India, he was an outsider–insider. Born and socialised as a child in colonial Trinidad, rejecting his Brahman and Trinidad background, and settling down in England, Naipaul honed an astute skill for observation and conversation to become one of the best writers in the English language in the twentieth century. Drawing from his three long sojourns in India—1962–1963, 1975–1976, and 1988–1990—he wrote three non-fictional books on India: An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). Based on a sociological reading of this trilogy, this paper discusses the seminal original insights of Naipaul on the unfolding of India since independence.
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Notes
I had the good fortune of editing, along with S. L. Rao, V. M. Rao, M. V. Nadkarni, and R. S. Deshpande, a collection of 31 reminiscences by colleagues, friends, and kin who were associated with the late V. K. R. V. Rao during his time, particularly in his life-long mission to nurture social science in the country and build centres of excellence in social science research (see Rao et al. 2008).
These three books were together published under the title The Indian Trilogy by Pan Macmillan India (see Naipaul 2016). For ease of citation, I have indicated the source of the quotations in abbreviations of the three books—AD, An Area of Darkness; WC, India: A Wounded Civilization; and MM, India: A Million Mutinies Now—and given the page numbers of all quotations from the consolidated volume, The Indian Trilogy.
Besides the Indian trilogy, the last of Naipaul’s novels, Magic Seeds (published in 2004), begins in India; its central character Willie Chandran provides the link to Naipaul’s penultimate novel, Half a Life (published in 2001).
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language.
Longue durée is a standard term of reference in the work of the Annales School of French historiography, which the French historian Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) helped to establish. For an excellent analysis of longue durée in historiography and the social sciences, see Braudel (2009). Naipaul was not a historian and he did not belong to this school; but his interpretations are indelibly rooted in the epistemology of longue durée, in ‘the long shadow of Indian history with the legacies of empire’ (Theroux 2016: xii).
Girmitiya is derivative of girmit, which is the corrupt form of the English word ‘agreement’ in Bhojpuri and Hindi (see Lal 2017). It refers to person(s) who entered into an agreement to be indentured as labourers and emigrated to colonies, mainly English, but also French and Dutch, which in Trinidad was in operation from 1845 to 1917 (see Jayaram 2022b: Chap. 2).
The immigration authorities had been advised against recruiting Brahmins as they had been found to be trouble makers on the estates by organising protest against the estate management.
Jussodra, who had also been to Trinidad and returned with Capildeo Maharaj on his second visit, and whom Naipaul met in his maternal grandfather’s ancestral village during his first visit to India, in 1962–1963, however, tells a different story (see AD, 280–281).
The only other person in Naipaul’s immediate family to have visited India before him was his elder sister Kamla Naipaul (1929–2009); she was a student at Benares Hindu University, Varanasi, during 1949–1953. His mother Droapatie (Capildeo) Naipaul (1913–1991), who ‘never read anything [he] wrote’ and ‘took all on trust’, visited India in 1977, 15 years after his own first journey (Naipaul 2007: 124).
In a letter to his father, Naipaul wrote, ‘I don’t want to break your heart, but I hope I never come back to Trinidad, not to live, that is…Trinidad, as you know, has nothing to offer me’ (Naipaul 1999 [Oxford, 28 September 1952]: 198).‘You were born in Trinidad?’ Bernard Levin asked in an interview in 1983. ‘I was born there, yes’, came the reply, ‘I thought it was a great mistake’ (quoted in French 2008: xv). Naipaul rather harshly dismissed Trinidad as a ‘half-made society’ that is ‘doomed to remain half-made’ (1980: 207).
V. S. Naipaul is not alone in such ambivalence towards India. Other Indo-Trinidadians like, Peggy Mohan, who now lives in India, mentions that an Indo-Trinidadian visiting India has ambiguous appearance and has anxieties about how s/he will be viewed and treated (2007: 233). In her autobiographical narrative, the Indo-Trinidadian journalist Ariti Jankie Jagirdar, who has dual homes—one in Trinidad and the other in India—writes about ‘the mysteries of the so familiar yet so strange land’, India (2022: 2).
This ‘India’ in Trinidad is well captured in Naipaul’s first four novels—Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, and A House for Mr Biswas (see Jayaram 2022a).
Farrukh Dhondy mentions that his grand-uncle conceded that ‘the book may have some passing truths in it but it was “the gutter inspector’s report”’ (2002: 48). Dhondy recalls that ‘People spoke of the book and its author as people of faith must have in the past spoken of Judas, of Mir Jaffar, of the ignorant and terrifying vandalism of Timul-i-Lang’ (ibid.: 47).
‘Looking and not seeing’, is how Naipaul describes the Indian way (2007: 75–126).
Miłosz notes that those with a ‘captive mind’ are, ‘more or less consciously, victims of a historic situation. Consciousness does not help them to shed their bonds; on the contrary, it forges them’. He calls this ‘enslavement through consciousness’ (2001: 191).
Naipaul’s first introduction to the real India was through the ‘paper work’ that he had to complete, the ‘proper channels’ he had to follow, the different offices he had to visit, and stand before the officials—all this to obtain a permit to retrieve two of his liquor bottles from the customs!
In his Foreword to the book, Nichols describes it as a ‘record of over a year’s intensive study of modern India’ (1944: 7); reading between the lines, I guess he was in British India during 1943–1944.
On this, there is a pithy but profound observation in An Area of Darkness: ‘Mimicry conceals the Indian schizophrenia’; ‘the Indian self-violation’ is ‘part of the mimicry of the West’ (AD, 234, 236). Related to this, Naipaul refers to ‘the psychological damage caused by the continued official use of English’ (AD, 234).
Quoted in Naipaul’s conversation with Farrukh Dhondy at the Jaipur Literature Festival (see India News, 12 August 2018, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/beta-leave-india-to-indians-naipaul-was-once-told-by-mother/story-nWccdXZS1olv1yDzkuIJkI.html) (accessed 7 August 2022).
The salient feature of the ‘general awakening’ in India, according to Naipaul, has been that ‘everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups’ (MM, 963).
Among his non-English-knowing interviewees, Naipaul had to depend on translators familiar with the local language/dialect. He highlights the resulting difficulties and the loss in translation; a familiar problem in the use of the interview method.
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This forms the text of the ISEC Golden Jubilee Lecture delivered at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, on 29 September 2022.
N. Jayaram is a former director of the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru.
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Jayaram, N. Understanding a wounded civilisation: a sociological reading of V. S. Naipaul’s Indian trilogy. J. Soc. Econ. Dev. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40847-023-00307-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40847-023-00307-3