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Chapter - IV
A Panoramic View of Indianness
(India: A Wounded Civilization & India A Million Mutinies Now)

India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) by V. S. Naipaul is the second

book of his ―India‖ trilogy, after An Area of Darkness, and before India: A

Million Mutinies Now. The work is based on the pathetic events of the

Emergency of 1975. It was written during his second visit to India. The work is

more analytical than any other works on Indian outlook and its manners. Same

time it reiterates and questions the feelings of Naipaul of his previous visits to

the Indian sub-continent. Indian culture has been wounded by many foreign

rulers and it has not yet initiated any policy to revive itself from the pathetic

situation. Naipaul captures the many facets of India by providing a true

description of contemporary India.

Naipaul basically is a descendant of Hindus who emigrated from India.

The work investigates about Indian attitudes and civilization itself. It portrays an

individual‘s intricate relationship with the country of his ancestors. Naipaul

desires that India comprehends its past and progresses towards its future. It is

unwise to waste time on repenting on the past instead of the nation should strive

forward to build a glorious future.

Naipaul has succeeded in capturing the simple manners of India. His

speculations are idle and presented as half comic but they push him deeper into

quietism. India is eternal and forever revives but it somehow doesn‘t look after

itself. It merges with the ideal of self-realization to one‘s own identity. In India
 Vijay 107

the past and responsibility were apparently unrelated. The economics tremble at

home when the price of oil rises which is a shallow of narcissism. It is a tough

human concern rather than the sentimental stumble of the hippies and others who

love India.

He found that India remained the same even after many generations. The

irrigation scheme had led to water logging and salinity because the nature of the

soil was not taken into consideration. The people of Rajasthan were self-

possessed and it took time for him to understand that they were peasants and

limited in number. There were model villages that began to see his ideas of

village improvement as fantasies.

Naipaul expressed that India had also been offered an enduring security

by its equilibrium to those who embraced its philosophy of distress. He added

that India had a great past in its civilization and philosophy and even in its holy

poverty. The country could detach itself from the rest of the world with these

aspects. India could be divided sometimes into two words like India and non-

India.

Naipaul has observed the crisis of Indian forms of government and the

country was not one country, but it had hundreds of little countries which are

equal to unity in diversity. This Indianness keeps the country together not by

economics but with love and affection. The development which he had invested

had not yet begun to show. The world outside India has to be judged by its own
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standards. Naipaul expresses that Indianness has to be experienced in the Indian

way.

He said that his ancestors had adopted the deity of the temple as their

own. India during the emergency was unchanging in the midst of world change.

For the Indian women a foreign marriage is seldom a positive act and it is more

usually an act of despair or confusion. Later it leads to casteless identity which is

the loss of community and the place in the world. She had been equipped with

two opposite worlds and moved without disturbance.

Naipaul reveals the lack of inclination towards scientific research and

inventions among Indians. He states that people aren‘t modest to meticulously

learn and experiment. It is swapped by deriding false pride. India depends on

others for new inventions and concepts in developing new technologies. There

has been a dearth of researchers in the nation. Indians are more inclined towards

manufacturing instead of research and design. There‘s little encouragement

being offered to inventors and researchers.

It‘s a pitiable thing that most of the research and development is based on

age old designs. And these archaic models are not applicable to the requirements

of contemporary India. He appropriately claims that hypocrisy and egotism are

preventing the nation‘s growth. He goes to the extent of saying that the

intellectuals of India lack of civic sense and they don‘t show any responsibility

towards society.
 Vijay 109

The constitution of India speaks for equality and fraternity. But people

separate themselves from others on the basis of caste, creed, ethnicity, language,

region and religion. This sort of thought process is strongly knitted in the minds

of people. India: A Wounded Civilization is a shock to the inert minds of India

because they are responsible for the underdevelopment of India. He quotes:

―Life goes on, the past continuous. After the conquest and destruction, the past

simply reasserts itself.‖(15)

R.K. Narayan (1906-2001) is considered as one of the greatest Indian

writers by Naipaul. Narayan has initiated a culture of writing novels in India

where the idea of the novel is considered to be new and little understood.

Narayan has established his fictional world during 1930‘s, even before

independence. He has never been a fictional writer and even a political writer of

the period. The world has grown larger around Narayan. Men are required to be

bigger when power has come closer. All his works narrate the fictional life of a

small South Indian town.

He believes that India would go on whatever the political uncertainties

after Mr. Nehru. Naipaul says that Narayan has joined the Boys Scout movement

led by Annie Besant, who has the larger idea of an Indian civilization. He says

that Narayan‘s India with its colonial apparatus has been like the Trinidad of his

childhood. As a writer Narayan has succeeded well but his comedy requires a

restricted social setting with well-defined rules. He manages to carve Indianness

in his novels so direct and light though he has succeeded in making those exotic
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manners quite ordinary. Naipaul stressed that Indianness had been seemed

accessible in the books of Narayanan but in India it remained hidden.

Naipaul continues with the greatness of ancient India stating that there

would have been a generation followed where ―men as easily replaceable as their

huts of grass and mud and matting (golden when new, quickly weathering to

grey-black)‖. (28) The greatest philosopher Sankaracharya has preached the

Vedanta on his all India mission. The greatest philosopher Sankaracharya has

preached the Vedanta on his all India mission. Naipaul says that Indianness is

eternal and forever regains consciousness. Indianness would somehow look like

individualistic and is free from all responsibility. Gandhi‘s civil disobedience

has been described in the novels of Narayan. Naipaul said that the madness of

man was relating with half with his own doing and lack self-knowledge.

Naipaul says that the protagonist of R.K. Narayan‘s Mr. Sampath (1949),

Srinivas‘ quietism is of karma, non-violence, and a vision of history. It is an

extended religious fable which is a form of self-cherishing in the midst of a

general distress. It needs the world but it surrenders the organisation of the world

to others. When Naipaul is in Bihar, his mind becomes despair which turns to

weariness and his thoughts become faded. Bihar is derived from the word

‗vihara‘, means a Buddhist monastery. It has been a cultural land of India for

centuries.

R.K. Narayan has established his fictional world that describes a small

South Indian town, people and their little schemes and the comedy of restricted
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lives and high philosophical speculation. The world has been larger to Narayan

with the freedom of India. His work, The Vendor of Sweets (1967) is strategic to

the bewilderment of today as Mr. Sampath (1949) who has the sterility of Hindu

attitudes at the time of Independence. In that there is stake into the world of

doing and at the end there is a withdrawal. Naipaul says that the first Indian

space satellite has been named after a medieval Hindu astronomer. He calculates

that India has developed atomic bomb proving the technological might of the

country since Independence.

Naipaul said that in India every man knows his caste, place, and each

group lives in its own immemorially defined area. The pariahs live at the end of

village. There is no change of living in that place for ages. People of northern

Bihar seem with the absence of intellectuality, creativity and administration. His

visit to Rajasthan is a prodigious enterprise. There are dams and a great

irrigation and retrieval scheme. It‘s been a land cut up and wasted by ravines.

The irrigation scheme leads to water logging and salinity. But the people haven‘t

utilized these facilities in their lives to develop.

He feels that the people of Rajasthan are self-possessed and believe

themselves as just peasants. They have always been content with fields, water,

crops and cattle which is the beginning and ending of their lifestyle. They‘ve

never targeted towards food and survival aspect which are fantasies in any

Indian village. The Indianness in the world has shrunken, and the human
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possibility has vanished. The people have retreated their knowledge of which

they are their caste, karma and their unshakable place in the scheme of things.

Naipaul remarks that each day the people perform the rituals at every

stage of their life because the life itself turns towards to ritual. He states that

Indianness has taught the vanity to all actions. Indianness has also offered an

enduring security in its equilibrium that balances the vision of the world.

Indianness with its great past and civilization, philosophy and poverty explains

this truth.

He stresses that India needs Indian forms of government because it isn‘t

one country but number of little countries. In the chapter ―shattering world‖

Naipaul makes a cry that India would go on to depart the equilibrium which still

exists in the present scenario. There‘s an examination that everything rests on

Gandhian ideology, the principle of non-violence. It has proved that the selfless

virtues of a religion can be turned to a great political strength. Gandhi has just

applied the virtues of Hinduism to the Indian freedom struggle. The same is the

case with the American legendary leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968).

He applied Christian virtues to fight against racial discrimination of

America. These great virtues haven‘t been of any use after Independence. The

ideal of Hindu self-realization has to take many forms even in worldly

corruption where there‘s no idea of contract between man and man. The trouble

of betrayal has started from the day after the Independence, or it took many
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forms since then. Gandhi has given the nation a new idea of itself, and given the

world a new idea of India.

Jaya Prakash Narayan (1902-1979), popularly known as Loknayak, has

once said that it‘s not the existence of disputes and quarrels that so much

endangers the integrity of the nation as the manner in which we consider them.

There‘s an older, deeper Indian violence which has remained untouched by

foreign rule. It became an invisible part of the Hindu social order, which is

disappearing in the general distress.

The untouchables are called as ‗walking carrion‘ by the ancient Aryans.

Gandhi along with other reformers, has sought to make the untouchables part of

the holy Hindu system. He calls them ‗Harizans‘, means children of God. Nehru

once identifies that there‘s a danger in Indian poverty which might defy the

nation‘s administration. It‘s evident and a proven fact that poverty is the root

cause for all evils. And the best of the kings and administrators have failed to

withstand the anger that fuels the revolutions. Gandhi made popular that poverty

was a political issue. It has seemed as another sort of distress which could be

inexhaustible for protecting the holy poverty of India.

Naipaul discusses bonded labour as another problem of India. Bonded

labour has been declared illegal. He could not herald the voice of all bonded

labour of many villages. An editorial in Deccan Herald of Bangalore publishes

the issue of bonded labour as, ―The system is as old as like itself…In the country

itself, the practice of slavery had attained [such] sophistication that the victims
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themselves were made to feel a moral obligation to remain in slavery.‖ Karma!

(48)

Naipaul observes that India has been learning new ways of seeing and

feeling. Vijay Tendulkar‘s play The Vultures (1961) explores the theme of

violence and discusses the morally distorted family structure of India. He‘s more

aggressive than R.K. Narayan and suggests that the loss of one kind of restraint

quickly leads to unraveling of the whole system. For both these writers the

country is the same but it has to change where people have become more selfish

and individualistic.

Indianness is less mysterious. The discovery of Indianness can be horrible

in human relationships like the discovery of West Indianness. Naipaul‘s version

of Indianness has appeared as a parody which is the old idea of itself. Parody

sometimes becomes unconscious mimicry. Naipaul quotes Jagan, a protagonist

of The Vendor of Sweets, who supports the nation‘s heritage and its great history:

Why do you blame the country for everything? It has been good

enough for four hundred years right from the heritage of

Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita. Here, I personally would like to

say that there was Indianness in ancient days which could be

documented by the whole civilizations around the globe like

Harappa and Dravidian. (43)

Naipaul projects that Indianness is precious to Hindus at religious theatre, a

demonstration of the workings of ‗Karma‘. It has been devalued as a reminder of

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one‘s duty to oneself and one‘s future lives. He has discussed the barriers of

Indianness and West Indianness which sounds impractical. It is a part of a

reworking of the Hindu system. Such ideas are accessible and fit into the

author‘s ideology. Naipaul says that India hasn‘t had the resources to become

self-reliant. The self-discipline is one of the Gandhian themes that India hasn‘t

been able to relate to religion and the independence movement. Indian identity is

synonymous to underdevelopment and fixed of its own background. The

problem with Naipaul‘s Indianness is that it can‘t be accommodated. It‘s

seemingly large, only answers a personal need. It also establishes Indian identity

as something dynamic, something that can incorporate the millions on the move.

Naipaul‘s nihilistic ideas towards religion are controversial. They have

been criticized and are aspects of debate among fundamentalists. He remains a

somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan because of comparing Islam to colonialism.

He bitingly condemned Islam and gives a controversial portrait of Pakistan in

Among the Believers (1981). Indian legacy can be observed in Naipaul‘s life

history and literary career.

Obviously, he has been aware from his childhood that the connection of

Trinidadian Indians with the land of their ancestors has been affected by the

passing of time and physical separation. Eventually, he becomes an agnostic

who finds that the religious rituals performed at home are odd and even

unpleasant. However, one of his first literary journeys takes him to India, in a
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clear attempt to trace his roots. It is noteworthy that Naipaul is convinced that

colonialism has created a historical vacuum in the Caribbean.

Naipaul permanently looking for roots has adhered with increasing

conviction to his Indian Background. He explains his writing on the land of his

ancestors by saying that he was close to India to his upbringing. He has grown

up in a very Indian household and that was the world for him. As happened in

subsequent journey‘s to the other regions in the world, objectivity fell prey to

anger and it was not uncommon for Naipaul to explore the ground that separated

him from Hindu Nihilism and chaos, to the extent of disclaiming his Indian

connections.

Naipaul‘s poignant affection to the land of his ancestors was not

detached. He dealt with the balance in India: A Million Mutinies Now, to mark

his partial reconciliation with the country. Reading Naipaul books on India, one

gets an impression that the author is somewhat disillusioned with Indianness. He

speaks highly of India‘s past legacies, but calls it a wounded civilization. India

has disillusioned many, and she continues to do so. In the recent times, the

British were first to get disillusioned, for they thought India would not be able to

hold her independence for more than a decade. The economists of yester years

have been established wrong by the latest development and progress made by the

country.

Officials from Foreign countries who live in New Delhi try to prove India

as an incredible nation. Because of globalization and western influences the

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threat of losing her identity has been looming large on India. It shouldn‘t

be forgotten that the nation was invaded many times than any other country in

the world. Unlike our Kebaya, Kain and Sarong, her Sari, Kurta and Pajama are

still as popular as the Western Outfits. The change in Indian continuity can be

found in the streets of large cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata and

so also in smaller cities and villages.

It is committed from the start to the preservation of Hinduism that had

already been violated. It has to culturally and artistically preserved and repeated.

Incredible India is not just a slogan adopted by the Indian Tourism Board, but a

fact that the entire world is confronted with. Like it or not the Incredibility of

India shall sooner or later affect us all. It may already have. What to make of it?

The automobile industry threatened by India‘s entry as the manufacturer of

world‘s cheapest car.

The environments are rightly cautioned because more cars on the road

mean more population. But, it is not just the automobile industry. India is a

threat to many other industries, several other sectors India is raising. And, these

are the people of the largest democracy on earth people who are free to talk, to

express themselves, to travel to any place and invest in any country unlike the

people of China who are deprived of many such rights. Indian at home and

overseas consists of one fourth of world‘s total population.

The number of the populations is incredible and the republic of India is

rising and her rise may fulfill the dreams of many Indians. Nehru, the first Prime
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Minister and the Architect of the Modern Republic dreamt of industrialization,

and his dream has clearly been fulfilled. So are the dreams of his grandson,

Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who worked hard to open up India to Modern

Technologies, Computerization and Foreign Investments. Later, Sri Manmohan

Singh who is then Minister of India dreams of economically strong India in the

1991. His dream too is coming true. No wonder he is so confident that in the

coming years, not a single Indian would be living under the poverty line.

The change in climate and its impact on Naipaul‘s last trip to India has

disillusioned him greatly about Indian growth and so called progress. It is not

just the Economic growth and material progress, but the growth of Human greed

and spiritual regression. The taste of wealth has not appeased its hunger, but has

made it greedy and wanting more and more. Religious rituals and traditions may

still be alive, but the spirit behind those rituals, the culture of spirituality is fast

diminishing. The trip finally led him to look into past and the present state of his

own country as India is not in a better situation. Naipaul saw the country as

courting ruin in attempting a half way sort of civilization, one with a Western

coating overlaying a core of Third World disorder. The Indianness he described

was one that an Indian would recognize as his own, but seen with a sensibility

farther toward India‘s ambitions at the time than India itself could attain. The

land of religious extremes and political upheavals, India is also the ancestral

home of one of the greatest writers, Sir V.S.Naipaul. In his Books, India: A

Wounded Civilization, An Area of Darkness and India: A Million Mutinies Now,

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Naipaul has documented the social and religious complexity of a country

whose mythic attraction to a generation of hippies and soul seekers masked the

dysfunctions of an ancient civilization unable to take its people into the modern

age.

His work contains many eloquent warnings of the dangers of misplaced

political passions. The Islamic revolution in Iran to take just one example, this

might appear to be a surprising volte face, especially when one considers the

horrific anti-Muslim program that followed Ayodhya, when BJP mobs went on

the rampage across India and Muslims were hunted down by armed thongs,

burned alive in their homes, scaled by acid bombs or knifed in the streets. By the

time army was brought in, at least 1,400 people had been slaughtered in Bombay

alone. It might seem unlikely that Naipaul would put himself in a position of

apparently endorsing an act that spawned mass murder or commend a party that

has often been seen as virulently anti-intellectual.

Narayan‘s novels are less the purely social comedies that had taken them

to be religious books but they were sometimes religious fables and intensely

Hindu. Indeed, one commentator in the times of India wondered if Naipaul had

not been misunderstood. Yet Naipaul‘s earlier statements, especially his remarks

that the first Mughal emperor Babur‘s invasion of India ―left a deep wound‖, are

consistent with ideas Naipaul has been airing for many years now.

In 1998, for example, he told the Hindu newspaper ―I think when you see

so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you
 Vijay 120

realize that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilization of that closed

world was mortally wounded by those invasions. The world is destroyed. That

has to be understood. Ancient India was destroyed.‖ Such attitudes form a

consistent line of thought in Naipaul‘s writing from An Area of Darkness (1964)

through to the present.

Naipaul‘s status as probably would dispute the greatest living writer of

Indian origin indeed some would go further and argue that he is the greatest

living writer whose fiction and non-fiction written over half a century forms a

body of work of great brilliance, something the Noble committee recognized in

2001 when it awarded him literature‘s highest honour, and singled out his

analysis of the Islamic world in his prize citation. Naipaul‘s credentials as a

historian are, however, less secure.

There is a celebrated opening sequence to Naipaul‘s masterpiece, India: A

Wounded Civilization. It is 1975, a full quarter century before he won the Nobel

and Naipaul is surveying the shattered ruins of the great medieval Hindu capital

of Vijayanagara, the city of Victory its 24 miles of walls winding through the

brown plateau of rock and gigantic boulders. He said that it is now only its

name as a kingdom and is so little remembered. It was itself a reassertion of the

past.

These days, he explains, this part of south India is just ―a peasant

wilderness‖, but look carefully and you can see scattered everywhere the

crumbling wreck age of former greatness: ―Palaces and stables, a royal bath the
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leaning granite pillars of what must have been a bridge across the river.‖ Over

the bridge, there is more: ―A long and very wide avenue, with a great statue of

the bull of Shiva at one end, and at the other end a miracle: a temple that for

some reason was spared destruction, and is still used worship.‖ (14) Then all

they are declared as national monuments by the Archaeological department.

Naipaul goes on to lament the fall of this ―great Centre of Hindu Civilization‖,

―then one of the greatest cities in the world which has been destructed by

Muslims.

It fell, according to Naipaul, because already the Hindu world it

embodied had become backward looking and stagnant: it had failed to develop,

and in particular had failed to develop the military means to challenge the

aggressive Muslim sultanates that surrounded it. It hardly innovated the

Hinduism Vijayanagara proclaimed had already reached a dead end. For

Naipaul, the fall of Vijayanagara is a paradigmatic wound on the psyche of

India, part of a long series of failures that he believes still bruises the country‘s

self-confidence. The wound was created by a fatal combination of Islamic

aggression and Hindu weakness the tendency to ―retreat‖, to withdraw in the

face of defeat. Naipaul states: ―To the pilgrims of Vijayanagar is its surviving

temple. The surrounding destruction is like proof of the virtue of old magic; just

as the fantasy of past splendor is accompanied within an acceptance of present

squalor.‖ (15)

Naipaul first developed the theme in An Area of Darkness. The great

Hindu ruins of the south, he writes there, represent the ―continuity and flow of
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Hindu India, ever shirking‖. But the ruins of the Taj and the magnificent garden

tombs of the Mughal emperors are to Naipaul symbols of oppression: ―The

hippies of Western Europe and the United States to have done so; but they

haven‘t.‖ He exemplify that the development of the country‘s spirit lay upon the

refining of a nation‘s sensibility. (27)

In contrast, the monuments of the Mughals speak only of ―personal

plunder‖ and a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered. He

compared the India with outside what he has seen the country has to be judged

by its own standards taken experiences from the past. So he stated: ―What keeps

a country together ? Not economics, Love, Love and affection. That‘s our Indian

way…. You can feed my dog, but he won‘t oby you. He‘ll obey me.‖ (34)

Nevertheless, he is entirely negative understanding of India‘s Islamic

history has its roots firmly in the mainstream imperial historiography of

Victorian Btitain. The Muslim invasions of India tended to be seen by historian

of the Raj as a long, brutal sequence of pillage, in stark contrast. Consequently

nineteenth century British historians liked to believe to the law and order

selflessly brought by their own ―civilizing mission‖. In Vijayanagara: A

Forgotten Empire (1900), the first characterized the kingdom as ―a resistance to

Islamic aggression.
 Vijay 123

This idea was eagerly elobarated by Hindu nationalist, who wrote of

Vijayanagara as a Hindu state dedicated to the peraervation of the traditional,

peaceful and ―pure‖ Hindu culture of southern India. It is a simple and seductive

vision, and one that at first sight looks plausible. The problem is that such ideas

rest on a set of mistaken and Islamphobic assumptions that recent scholarship

has done much to undermine.

―The Hinduism Vijayanagara proclaimed had already reached a dead end,

and in some ways had decayed.‖ (16) In this epoch for example, the Hindu kings

of Vijayanagara appeared in Hindu tradition but dressed in quasi-islamic court

constume. He explicated that what happen with Vijayanagara would be the same

other parts of country. Far from being the statement, backward looking bastion

of Hindu resistance imagined by Naipaul Vijayanagara had in fact developed in

all sorts of unexpected ways, adapting many of the administrative, tax collecting

and military methods of the Muslim sultanates that surrounded it notably

stirrups, horse armour and a new type of saddle, all of which allowed

Vijayanagara to put into the field an army of horse archers who could hold at

bay the Delhi Sultanese then the most powerful force in India.

A detailed investigation of Vijayanagara‘s monuments and archaeology

by George Michel over the past twenty years has come to the same conclusions

as Wagoner. The Survey has emphasized the degree to which the buildings of

sixteenth century Vijayanagara were inspired by the architecture of the Hindu

south with the arch and dome of the Islamicate north. Indeed some of the most
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famous buildings at Vijayanagara, such as the gorgeous fifteenth century Lotus

Mohall, are almost entirely Islamic in style.

Moreover, this fruitful interaction between Hindu and Muslim ruled state

was very much a two-way process. Just as Hindu Vijayanagara was absorbing

Islamic influencies, as a similar process of hybridity was transforming the

nominally Islamic sultanate of Bijapur. This was a city dominated by an

atmosphere of hereodox inquiry, whose libraries swelled with esoteric texts

produced on the philosophical frontier between Islam and Hinduism.

This creative coexistence finally victim, not to a concerted communal

campaign by Muslim states intent on eradicating Hinduism, but to the shifting

alliances of Deccan diplomacy. In 1558, only seven years before the Deccan

sultanates turned on Vijayanagara, the empire had been a prominent part of an

alliance of mainly Muslim armies that had sacked the Sultanate Ahmadhnagar.

That year, Vijayanagara‘s armies stabled their horses in the mosque of the

plundered city.

It was only in 1562, when Ramaraya plundered and seized not just

districts belonging to Ahmedhnagar and its ally Golconda, but also those

belonging to his own ally Bijapur, that the different sultanates finally united

against their unruly neighbor. The fall of Vijayanagara is a subject Naipaul

keeps returning to the destruction of the city meant an end to its traditions: ―The

largest crisis if a wounded old civilization that has become aware of its

inadequacies and is without the intellectual means to move ahead.‖ (18)

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Yet there is considerable documentary and artistic evidence that the very

opposite was true, and that while some of the city‘s craftsmen went on to work at

the Meenakshi temple of Madurai, others transferred to the patronage of the

sultanates of Bijapur where the result was a significant artistic renaissance. The

remarkable fusion of styles that resulted from this rebirth can still be seen in the

tomb of Ibrahim II, completed in 1626. From afar it looks uncompromisingly

Islamic, yet for all its domes and arches, the closer you draw the more you

realize that few Muslim buildings are so Hindu in spirit. Usually the austere

walls of indistinguishable from Vijayanagaran decoration, the bleak black

volcanic granite of Bijapur manipulated as if it were as soft as plaster, as delicate

as a lace ruff.

All around minars suddenly bud into bloom, walls dissolve into bundles

of pillars; fantastically sculptural lotus-bud domes and cupola drums are almost

suffocated by great starbursts of Indic decoration which curl down from the

pendetives like pepper vines. This picture of Hindu-Muslim hybridity, of Indo-

Islamic intellectual and artistic fecundity, is important, for it comes in such stark

contrast to the Naipaulian or BJP view of Indian medieval history as one long

tale of defeat and destruction.

Today most serious historians tend instead to emphasize the perhaps

surprising degree to which Hinduism and Islam creatively intermingled and

―chutnified‖ to use Salman Rushdie‘s nice term, and an important book has been

published that goes a long way to develop these ideas. Anyone wishing to

understand the complexities and fusions of medieval India would be well

 Vijay 126

advised to look at Beyond Turk and Hindu, edited by David Gilmartin and Bruce

Lawrence, (University press of Florida, 2000).

Their collection of articles by all the leading international scholars of the

period shows the degree to which the extraordinary richness of medieval Indian

civilization was the direct result of its multi-ethnic, multi-fertilization of Hindu

and Islamic civilization that thereby took place. The historians do not see the two

religions as in any way irreconcilable, instead they tend to take the view that ‗the

actual history of religious exchange suggests that there have never been clearly

fixed groups, one labeled ‗Hindu‘ and the other- both its opposite and rival

labeled ‗Muslim‘.

Perhaps, indeed it is as Naipaul points out that there is not a single

medieval Sanskrit inscription that identifies ―Indo-Muslim invaders in terms of

their religion, as Muslims‖, but instead they refer more generally in terms of

―linguistic affiliation, most typically as Turk, ―Turushka‖. The import of this is

clear that they hung together which express later the philosophy of Sufism. He

says that the fundamentalist fervor that has marked the western image of the

region.

Consequently, the early 1960‘s until only few years ago, Indian history

textbooks emphasized the creation in medieval India of what was referred to as

he ―composite culture‖. This cultural synthesis took many forms in Urdu and

Hindi were born languages of great beauty that to different extends mixed
 Vijay 127

Persian and Arabic words with the Sanskrit derived vernaculars for North

India. Naipaul quotes: ―You must go to that ashram near Poona, the Parsi lady,

back for a holiday from Europe, said that at lunch one day in Bombay. They say

you get a nice mix of East and West there.‖ (51)

Similarly, just as the cuisine of north India combined the vegetarian dal

and rice of India with the Kebab and roti of central Asia. The music is the long

necked Persian lute was combined with the Indian vina to form the sitar, now the

Indian instrument most widely known in the west. In architecture there was a

similar process of hybridity as the great monuments of the Mughals reconciled

the styles of the Hindus with those of Islam, to produce a fusion more beautiful

than either.

These Nehruvian era textbooks were the work of left-learning but

nonetheless internationally regarded scholars such as professors Romila Thapar,

Satish Chandra and Nurul Hasan of whom Naipaul does not appear to think

much. In the same 1993 Times of India interview in which he defended the

destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, he remarked that ―Romila Thapar‘s book on

Indian History is a Marxist attitude to history, which in substance says: there is

the way the invaders looked at their actions. They were conquering, they were

subjugating.‖

The new set of far right-wing history textbooks recently commissioned by

India‘s National Council of Education Research and Training at the behest of the

BJP government such as that on medieval India with its picture of the period as
 Vijay 128

one long Muslim led orgy of mass murder and temple destruction are no doubt

more to Naipaul‘ s taste. Thanks partly to the influence of the earlier textbooks

on generations of students, there is still a widespread awareness in India of the

positive aspects of medieval Islam aspects noticeable by their absence in

Naipaul‘s oeuvre.

It is widely known, for example, that Islam in India was spread much less

by the sword than by the Sufis. After all, Sufism, with its holy men, visions and

miracles, and its emphasis on the individual‘s search for union with God, has

always borne remarkable similarities to the mystical side of Hinduism. Under

Sufi influence it was particularly at the level of village folk worship that the two

religions fused into one, with many ordinary Hindus visiting the graves of Sufi

pirs whom are still considered to be incarnations of Hindu deities while Muslim

villagers would leave offerings at temples to ensure the birth of children and

good harvests.

To this day, Sufi dargahs still attract as many Hindu, Sikh and Christian

pilgrims as they do Muslims. Yet, Sufism clearly central to any discussion of

medieval India, barely makes an appearance in Naipaul‘s work. ―Islam is a

religion of fixed laws,‖ he told Outlook magazine. He clearly exposes the idea

that ―There can be no reconciliation with other religions‖. The history of Indian

Sufism in particular abounds with attempts by mystics to overcome the gap

between the two great religious and to seek God not through sectarian rituals but

through the wider gateway of the human heart.

 Vijay 129

In Beyond Belief (1998) Naipaul writes of Indian Muslims as slaves to an

imported religion, looking abroad to Arabia for the focus of their devotions,

which they are forced to practice in a foreign language ―Arabic‖ they rarely

understand. He seems to be unaware of the existence of such hugely popular

Indian pilgrimage shrines such as Nizamuddin or Ajmer Sharif, the centrality of

such shrines to the faith of Indian Muslims or the vast body of vernacular

devotional literature in Indian Islam, much of it dedicated to the mystical cults of

indigenous saints. Also notably absent in Naipaul‘s work is any mention of the

remarkable religious tolerance of the Moghals: neither Akbar nor Dara Shukoh

makes any sort of appearance in Naipaul‘s writing, and his readers will learn

nothing of the former‘s enthusiastic patronage of Hindu temples or the latter‘s

work translating the Gita into Persian, or writing The Mingling of Two Oceans

(2007), a study of Hinduism and Islam which emphasizes the compatibility of

the two faiths and speculates that the Upanishads were the source of

monotheism.

Accordingly, Naipaul explains that such views pertaining to complex

ideas force them to retort of Indian sensibility. They are far from exceptional and

most Moghal writers show similar syncretism tendencies. The greatest of Urdu

poets, Ghalib, for example, wrote praising Benares as the Mecca of India, saying

that the he sometimes wished he could ―renounce the faith, take the Hindu rosary

in hand, and tie a sacred thread round my waist‖.

 Vijay 130

Similarly, he continues to talk of Mughal architecture as entirely foreign a

carry-over from the architecture of Isfahan, ignoring all the fused Hindu

elements that do so much to define its profound Indianness: the jails, chajjas and

chattris, quite apart from the fabulous Gujerati- Hindu decorative sculpture that

is most spectacularly seen at Akbar‘s capital, Fatehpur Sikri. While architectural

historians see a remarkable fusing of civilizations in Mughal buildings, Naipaul

thinks ―India hadn‘t only making itself archaic again, intellectually smaller,

always vulnerable.‖ (18) That destruction of Hindu monuments did take place is

undeniable, but in what circumstances, and on what scale, is a matter of intense

scholarly debate. Perhaps the single most important essay in Beyond Turk and

Hindu (2000) is Richard Eaton‘s fascinating account of temple destruction.

Eaton writes that he can find evidence for around only 80 desecrations

whose historicity appears reasonably certain, and these demolitions tended to

take place in very particular circumstances; that is, in the context of outright

military defeats of Hindu rulers by one of the Indian Sultanates or when ―Hindu

patrons of prominent temples committed acts of disloyalty to the Indo-Muslim

states they served. Otherwise, temples lying within Indo-Muslim sovereign

domains, viewed as protected state property, were left unmolested.‖ It is of

course the history has an elementary knowledge towards technology which

keeps the student and teachers encourage the absuridity of one‘s tools even in

elementary vision and Indian countryside. ―It explained his frenzy. His ideas was

one in which India couldn‘t be accommodated.‖ (71)

 Vijay 131

William Darlrymple, in his opinion especially about Naipaul‘s remarks

says that Babar‘s invasion of India ―left a deep wound‖, are consistent with

ideas. He has been fishering for many years now for example, he told The

Hindu: ―I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the tenth century or

earlier disfigured, defaced, you realize that something terrible happened. I feel

that the civilization of that closed world was mortally wounded by those

invasions … the Old World is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient

Hindu India was destroyed. ―Indeed Indo-Islamic states involved themselves

directly in the running of their Hindu temples, so that, for example, ―between

1590 and 17354, Mughal officials oversaw the renewal of Orissa‘s state cult, that

of Jagannath in Puri.

None of this should be read in any way as challenging Naipaul‘s

importance as a writer: his non-fiction about India is arguably the most brilliant

body of writing about the region in modern times, and it is precisely because of

this that it is important to challenge his errors. In the current climate, after the

programs of Gujarat and the inaccurate rewriting of textbooks, Naipaul‘s

misleading take on medieval Indian history must not go uncorrected. He quotes:

―But it was middleclass burden, the burden of those whose nationalism ..

required them to have an idea of India. Lower down, in the chawls … needs

were more elemental: food, shelter, water, a latrine. Identity there was no

problem; it was dismay.‖ (71)

 Vijay 132

We do not then the long night of Gujarat will ever end. Its history will

reappear again and again, not just as nightmare but as relived experience, re-

enacted in endless cycles of retribution and revenge, in glory spectacles of blood

and death. India renaissance has always been taken to mean a recovery of

suppressed or dishonored exalting of the old ways. According to Naipaul the

stability of Gandhian India is an illusion and India will not be stable again. He

bitterly criticize that the crisis of India is not of Political but it is decaying the

civilization.

India: A Million Mutinies Now

V. S. Naipaul presents a panoramic view of Indianness during 1988 -1990

in his noteworthy work, India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). It depicts trivial

struggles occurred at that moment through the stories of common people. This is

the third book on India and the work encircles most of India through Naipaul‘s

observations visiting the places and through the stories of people he met. Most of

the people whom he interviewed in these stories happen to come from small

towns or villages and succeeded in settling down metropolitans.

In a way, it is not the first hand depiction of rural India, but an indirect

presentation of Indianness. In the event of encountering the same platform as

journalists - the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of African

nationalism and the resurgence of Indianness, his observations seem shrewd, his

perceptions are more sensitive and books have a great impact on people.
 Vijay 133

Most people opine that Naipaul‘s An Area of Darkness is an exceptional

work that does not reflect the trash ideas of foreign journalists in the 1960s. In it,

the author refers to R.K.Narayan‘s texts as a skylight to comprehend some of the

aspects of the Indian spirit and, in addition, references are given to the historic

invasion of India by the Muslims, saying that indeed Naipaul does not write in

an historical vacuum having vast knowledge.

The nonfiction has the quality to draw two extreme responses. The first

response is that his most Western admirers opine that he is an attentive observer

who can delve deep into a society and identify its fault-lines within a short span

of time. There is some dream about India and Indianness in his head. In between

he does the lowest kind of job in presenting the details about India. He does not

recall this period of his life as wholly negative but praises about how the scene

would be presented and what details would be highlighted. He realizes he is

outfitted for better things, but he does not want to do them. The stories, however,

do provide an insight into the minds of Indians. On one hand, they simply relate

the Indian life and on the other hand they reflect the Western. It is considered as

a unique part of the book which demonstrates the Indianness.

Things have changed in India recently, especially after economic

liberalization of 1991. But the psyche of the Indian people need more time to

adapt them to it. It is observed that India has taken much time to mingle with

western countries‘ folk. For Indian readers, the book provides an unbiased

account of the people from different states and their struggles. It certainly
 Vijay 134

changes their prejudices about different provinces demonstrating the diversity in

unity. It never extends a feeling of separation from their possession towards

motherland.

The work provides for non-Indian readers an imprint that surpasses the

barriers of time, when V. S. Naipaul depicts a picture of culturally diverse India.

Bombay was scrupulously dry and of spirit was attacked by the customs officers

in white, who beckoned a dejected looking man in blue to seal them in his very

presence. The man in blue undergoes a manual labour that degrades labour with

slow bliss. India practices the concept of dignity of labour since ages. It is said

that there has been no general search which has passed without any doubt. He is

blame for having no loyalty to his home country and his ethnicity.

His experience in Bombay was to be exhausted. A flight of steps

remained and there is much to develop when we compare with western

countries. India was an ordered even luxurious country. The design was

contemporary but there is hidden truth people who belong to this country had

always been struggling with poverty. The walls filled with maps and coloured

photographs. This was only the outside appearance of Indianness. In his article,

―Aesthetics, Nationalism, and the Image of Woman in Modern Indian Art‖,

Kedar Vishwanathan discusses how developments in visual culture impacted

India‘s configuration as nation. Between 1880-1945 in Bombay (Mumbai) and

Calcutta (Kolkata) a burgeoning visual culture developed in service of anti-

colonial nationalism.
 Vijay 135

The method to imagine a nation free of colonial rule, in particular images

of women proliferated in private and public spaces. Among this one of the

crucial development was the reformulations of modernity based on an

ambivalent combination of British and Indian vernacular art. Vishwanathan

imparts on how the female was objectified for the cause of imagining an Indian

nation and he examines the influence of political movements such as the Raja

Ravi Varma Printing Press, The Calcutta Art Studio, and the Bengali neo-

traditionalists.

Naipaul constructs an inquiry into the connections and relationship

between colonial administration and the Indian populace prior to the onset of

elite anti-colonial nationalism in order to understand Indian modernity and the

shift in vernacular and visual aesthetics. He gained some knowledge towards the

developments but he had not satisfied with that Indianisation. It is the sense of

being between of two or more cultures i.e. Indianness and West Indianness.

Naipaul scanned and studied all variants of this emerging contemporary

Indianness and West Indianness. What they also have in common is a concern

with the consequences of exile, cultural, Diasporas and dislocation. He explores

some of the representations of how the exilic experience interrupts the

development of identity in the postcolonial world.

The identities of ‗displaced‘ people must endure constant change in order

to adjust to the new spaces into which they move, both literal and metaphorical

and the cultural continuity provided by psychologically satisfying stories about

 Vijay 136

the past is typical. His study therefore shows the need to retell the lost pasts of

their characters, the trauma that evokes into the new histories to which they give

birth.

These themes generate new histories which subvert and enrich formal

closure for the narratives of history which determine the identities of nations.

Arundhati Roy shows that the social fragmentations are not only the result of

cultural hybridity, but also of historical ―lag‖ (Bhabha in Attwell 1993), to use

Bhabha‘s term. The God of Small Things (1998) explores the consequences of

colonialism within the contexts of three historical moments: 1947, 1969 and

1992. Each of these ―moments,‖ like Pratt‘s ―multi-layered, multi-

dimensional.… overlapping circles‖ (122), looks backwards and forwards

simultaneously.

The second is the view of his critics dub him as an Uncle Tom figure

whom the West loves because he calls the Third World names and fourth world

generations. According to this view, Naipaul‘s principal regret in life is that he

was not born white. He hates the Blacks of Trinidad where he grew up and

judges countries by their ability to adopt Western standards and values. The title

of the book is apt for its acute content and full of love.

Naipaul deftly writes about the mutinies within and without in modern

India he portrayed all these issues in his India: A Wounded Civilization. He used

the best way to describe the struggle than to pick characters from different walks

of life, explore them objectively and incisively and even a reader cannot miss his
 Vijay 137

love for the country and a passionate desire to learn more about a struggle that

India has faced many years.

Naipaul satirizes the Indians insistence on carrying out their older caste

system within themselves while they resent colonialism and post colonialism. It

is clear that even after having lived in England for many years, he, still, has

not the Indians insistence on carrying out their older caste system within. This

book to is stripped free of pessimism towards Indianness for which Naipaul

seems to be criticized all over the place. This book is recommended to anybody

who really wants to know well about India.

It is to say that the travel writing is a genre of literature but the fact is

quite different they are reflections and replications of contemporary socio-

cultural and ethnic societies in which they were inscribed. It gives immense

details about contemporary India and its past that is not a primer to Indian

civilization, and explores its deep and critical, analytical and theoretical

appreciation. India remained a special and isolated area of ground which had

produced his grandfather and others he knew who had been born in India and

had come to Trinidad as labourers. They carried no mark of indenture and even

of having been labourers.

Naipaul‘s masterpiece on India read for any Westerner seeking a deeper

understanding of Indianness of Naipaul as West Indian. He is the Kipling

infused with Indianness, with admiration for he was a great tribute to both

England, his home India, the home of my ancestors. Naipaul tells the story of
 Vijay 138

this incredibly complex country person by person, through in depth interviews of

his subjects‘ not merely on politics, culture or religion but on their personal

lives.

Naipaul narrates the stories of a wide range of characters as secretary to a

prominent businessman, members of the Bombay underworld. The characters

and the stories are linked with real life. It had been a preparation of slow journey

which impressions varied and superficial especially for the West Indianness. The

Changes from the Mediterranean winter to the study high summer of the red sea

had been swift. He tells the story of Amir, the descendant of the Raja of

Mahmudabad, now living in the palace his ancestors have got from the British,

lost after Partition, and regained after he becomes a successful Muslim politician

in a Hindu area.

The story of Kakusthan, a modern man who returns to tradition and the

life of a pure Brahmin, in a ghetto is surrounded by a Muslim neighborhood. The

story of Ashok, who has rejected an arranged marriage, manages to break into

marketing as a career, and now struggles with the decline of the genteel, Anglo

business world he has grown up in. Naipaul states that men have been

diminished and deformed begged and have whined.

Naipaul has a great knack of digging out the details of everyday life

what his people ate, wore, above all where they lived often in tiny

rooms with wife and children. The iconography of Hinduism is a powerful

vernacular and aesthetic for the mobilization of the community. He imagined the
 Vijay 139

Hindu nation because of the prevalence of commonly and easily understood

iconography.

These images were circulated in public spaces, such as bazaars, that

would-be frequented by different castes/classes of people. Importantly, this

circulation within the subalterns and elites produced a horizontal axis of

nationalism and not a vertically tiered elite nationalism and thus it enabled the

sharing of information across classes‘ and across literate and illiterate groups for

the purpose of community mobilization.

Commercial distribution channels of printing material, that comprise of

images, and texts were received by buyers across India. He firmly deals with

great appreciation of the notion of caste, very much embedded in the society and

culture for religious and non-religious in the same manner. He begins to

appreciate the struggle of everybody in India which common for everyone,

especially those who live in cities.

In spite of that, the book is full of stories about struggle against tradition,

to preserve tradition between castes, between Hindu and Muslim and of

struggles to find a job, to find housing, to choose a career. Unfortunately,

Naipaul fails to interview women with the ease he has interviewed men in this

traditional society and women appear only as shadowy wives and mothers in the

narrative.
 Vijay 140

The author, Naipaul lived most of his life in India and felt that he noticed

the things which he had come to take for granted the Indianness. In this book,

Naipaul takes the reader through an enthralling journey through India of the late

1980s and early 1990s. Naipaul can really look deep into people‘s lives, facets

and their backgrounds. This book illustrates the most interesting and insightful

picture of India.

He focuses on what he represents in terms of ideology and literature in a

postcolonial context, and also explores the historical and social dimensions of

India. It is an attempt to relate to the author‘s world-views and ideological

orientations of Indianness and West Indianness. It is very beautiful to explore the

dialectical interplay between the political import and the aesthetic qualities in

India: A Million Mutinies Now. Since Naipaul‘s defense of neo-colonialism is

the basis of this novel, the term can be related to it. Naipaul has travelled quite a

distance from his origins. He has also moved away from the piercing, humorous,

rooted world of his early work.

Naipaul‘s later novels, in particular, his non-fiction, takes his sensitive

eye, and his undoubted mastery over the graceful sentence and the telling detail,

elsewhere. This is a bleak, unhappy place having darkness rules. If there is light,

it only exposes wounds. In short, there is chaos, no spark, and no ember of hope.

Naipaul experiences much pain and fear while writing about Indianness and

West Indianness. In Naipaul‘s world, these areas of darkness serve as a perennial

foil to the refined, cultivated European ethos. Naipaul places himself outside
 Vijay 141

these struggling; developing worlds. Everyone in India has close affiliations to

state, home town, religion, caste which are missing from his life.

Naipaul‘s book, India: A Million Mutinies exclusively presents some

redeeming signs of change in his work. Earlier in the work, A Wounded

Civilization, Naipaul stated that there was no civilization, it was ―so little

equipped to cope with the outside world. There was no country was so easily

raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.‖ (7-8) In his book,

Naipaul is able to see the extent the country had been remade which India had

been restored to itself, after its own equivalent of the Dark Ages after the

Muslim invasions and the detailed, repeated vandalizing of the North and the

shifting empires and the wars in the 18th century anarchy apart from that details.

It is observed that the country is full of the signs of growth, in the form of

an ―Indian, and more specifically, Hindu awakening‖ (161), where Hindu

civilization can be restored. What happened in Ajodhya on December 6, 1992,

and what has happened in other parts of the country since then, has not seemed

like any sort of civilization.

But Naipaul saw the destruction of the Babri Masjid as a welcome sign

that ‗Hindu pride‘ was at last reassert in An Area of Darkness (1964). Naipaul

has left an almost confessional record of his cultural disinheritance and its

implications to him as one who has become an outsider to the heritage of his

origin.
 Vijay 142

Naipaul‘s visit to India confirms his fear whether land of his childhood

must forever remain under a severely imposed artistic control or not. He firmly

says that India must continue to exist as a land of myth, a featureless and

uncontoured memory of things lost to time and intellectual abstraction,

struggling to achieve the objectivity of communication. He could not identify the

destiny of his own origin in Indianness.

Naipaul expressed that the ending of colonial order created hopes and

ambitions for the newly independent countries, but optimism was relatively

short-lived. According to Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman the extent to

which the Western colonial powers had not relinquished control became clear:

―This continuing Western influence, located in flexible combinations of the

economic, the political, the military, and the ideological is called

neocolonialism‖, which is another manifestation of imperialism. (3)

This is an important definition for understanding Naipaul‘s defense of

neo-colonialism. The loss of Indianness implies the loss of content, and the

survival of the forms of a culture so attenuated in a new land as to render either

meaningless except as materials for comic analysis. In this novel, Naipaul

sketches the Hindu society in Trinidad and elsewhere in the form of West

Indianness that is reduced to caricature and is extremely ritualized by the

externals of social action.

Nevertheless, such a situation defines the ambivalence of the East Indian

personality and its idiosyncratic human temperament, whose very duplicity is

 Vijay 143

turned to advantage in the manipulation of circumstances and in the strategies of

survival. The tragic commitment to reality yields place to a pragmatic concern

for the immediate contingencies of existence which reveals the Indianness.

The cultural displacement of the East Indianness implies his intellectual

rejection of Indian ways and moral. But their persistence in the sub-conscious

reflexes of personality cannot be wished away by brandishing the western ways

of thought. The resulting conflict leads, on one hand, to a contemplative irony in

regarding East Indian manners and morals, while on the other hand, it takes the

writer to the brink of terrifying self-perception. The oppressive fears and

darkening despairs which Naipaul describes in Area of Darkness does not seem

to be strange to a reader of his fictional work preceding it. Most critics dismissed

his books as farces and his characters as eccentrics.

Naipaul‘s writings suggest the story of an extraordinary self-conscious

man who has chosen to travel through the chaotic, cruel, and yet elusive territory

of darkness with the hope that he might, ―at some future time,‖ triumph over it.

One of the attributes of the abandoned men in the world of Naipaul is of his

―Indianness and West Indianness‖. True to his faith, his novels, short stories,

travel books, and discursive writing carry this undeniable burden of darkness and

loss.

Naipaul relates that, as a child, he saw India scattered about him in

physical objects string beds, drums, mats, brass vessels, and all the paraphernalia

of the prayer room, and all of them in varying states of dereliction because there
 Vijay 144

was no one with the necessary caste skills to repair them. He is among those

British writers, novelists, storywriters with Indian origin who have exploded the

world by their extraordinary views and conceptions.

Naipaul‘s novel is written in biographical form. This work has many

parallels with Naipaul‘s own life and experience. The novel deals with the effect

of writing and the experience of being a writer on a man‘s life and in his own

country as an outsider. He observers and assimilates the situations and explore

them systematically with his Indianness and at the same time he follow the

globalization concept to reveal the West Indianness through this novel. The fact

is that he is neither fully in the world of his past, nor can he be a familiar to his

country with its completely different landscape one which is covered with

Indianness and West Indianness, means that he can juggle these two

backgrounds and these two landscapes while never truly being a part of either.

He can exist within different landscapes and can become an actor upon them

rather than merely an object against the landscape of his background. It is this

ability that Naipaul weaves into his writing, giving it its power to stand on his

countryside to judge in a critical way. His approach to Islam and Muslim

fundamentalism in non-Arab lands has almost shocked the world creating critics

like Salmon Rushdie and a large number of admirers. It has also coincided with

the September 11, 2001 tragedy in New York bringing about a universal

applause for The Enigma of Arrival (1987). His two other books, Among the

Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998) justifies it. Horace, the Secretary of
 Vijay 145

the Swedish Academy realized that the decision might seem to be political in the

context of the recent tragedies in America and elsewhere.

He mentioned the view of Naipaul that what he is really attacking to

Islam is a particular trait that it has in common with all cultures that conquerors

bring along, tends to obliterate the preceding culture. Naipaul does not blame all

Muslims, he criticizes only fanaticism and colonialism of existing world. Thus,

through his different works, he is presenting the upheaval in the world caused by

colonialism. Naipaul is concerned with the ‗calamitous effect‘ of Islam on the

converted people. The Editor of The Hindustan Times dated October 6, 2001

has quoted in his editorial: ―The distinguished writer has said that to be

converted, you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. It is a fact that

extremists rule most of the Muslim countries, but all Muslims cannot be

blamed‖.

In his article ‗No horrors in the Name of God‘ published in The

Hindustan Times dated 10-3-2002, Salman Rushdie condemns Naipaul that he

makes himself a fellow traveller of fascism and disgraces the Nobel award.

Amitav Ghosh admires Naipaul for the authenticity of his views both in his

fictional works like Miguel Street, The Suffrage of Elvia, The Mystic Masseur, A

House for Mr. Biswas, The Mimic Men, Mr. Stone and the Knight’s Companion

and In a Free State and non-fictional works like An Area of Darkness, and India:

A Wounded Civilization. Naipaul has also made astonishing comments like that

India had no intellectuality to read his books forty years ago.

 Vijay 146

His views have been considered politically incorrect in western literal

circles. Regarding the sale ability of books one book of Arundhati Roy and the

Books of Rushdie and Vikram Seth have become more popular, only the

controversy regarding his views on Islam has brought him into the limelight. S.

Prasannarajan has proclaimed in his article ―Sir Vidia‘s Shadow‖ published in

India Today dated Nov. 2001 that Naipaul is not in search of truth. According to

him, Naipaul goes on ―to deliver wisdom, much to the pleasure of those who

appreciate refined imagination and much to the indignation of those who have

not the mental refinement to know him and this is truth‖ (7). Scholars like

Martin Amis and Elizabeth Hardwick appreciate Naipaul for his vision of life.

Martin Amis in ―The Observe‖ observes that he remains our most exhilarating

explorer, with a corpus of travel writing, which now surpasses that of D.H.

Lawrence or Graham Greene. Elizabeth Hardwick admires him for ‗profound

knowledge of the world‘. His book, Among the Believers is based on his travels

to four Muslim countries like Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, which

indicates his ideas of third world and fourth world statuesque.

He aims at understanding Islam in its truest sense and wanted to see Islam

in action. Here he closely connected with Muslims to show them that they are

not the rebels but human beings. This kind of affection he developed in the

minds of the reader by his works. Naipaul has made friends with Muslims like

Ahmed for the same purpose and come to find out about this application of Islam

to institutions, to government and to law. Naipaul travels to the holy city of Qom
 Vijay 147

and to the far-off city of Mashhad in order to know the political and religious

condition.

Naipaul attends a political and religious meeting on the Muslim Sabbath

at the university where women in chaders. The thousands flock to hear the call

of the revolution mingled with the call to worship Allah. He has tried to

understand the ‗threads of meaning, clues to the pattern. He goes to Pakistan to

find out logical answers but in vain. But he continues his journey.

Naipaul, though he is confused, did not turn away his tired eyes. He asks

questions and he presents the full richness of his own confusion. Having limited

understanding of Islam, he starts studying the essential core of Islamic faith, the

Islamic law and tenets in the life and institutions of the Muslims. However,

Naipaul fails to get the correct picture of Islam in these countries because they

are passing through Military rule. People have no freedom to live as they want.

Naipaul has commented on Islam as ―This late twentieth-century Islam

appeared to raise political issues. This political Islam was rage, anarchy. This

has raised controversies, because Islam is ever the same. According to Naipaul,

―Islam suppresses women‖ (331). But it is also controversial that Islam did was

to remove the stigma of ‗wickedness‘ and ‗impurity‘ that the ancient religions

had associated with woman. Furthermore, his concept of Muslim fasts is based

on blasphemy.
 Vijay 148

The Islamic ideology has a universal appeal for its principles of love and

humanity. Flora Lewis also finds out that there is a new realization in the last

two centuries during which the Muslim world had been oppressed, suppressed,

colonized, remained backward and lost its initiatives. Naipaul comes to an end

and a new era of unity and inward strength based on the broad teachings of Islam

has dawned on the great Islamic community. Naipaul seems to be ironical and

contemptuous regarding the fresh exuberance and the resurgence in Islam. His

observations regarding the cruelty of Muslims have created a lot of controversy

in the world.

Furthermore, being a non-believing and non-sympathetic outsider, he has

failed to evaluate Islam like a believing and sympathetic insider. However, his

concept of Islam has brought about a mixed applause and fruitful controversy.

Naipaul himself has said that his work aims at social comment and criticism. Of

course, he does not seek to produce documentary propaganda but views the act

of literary creation as being deeply involved with the desire to furnish a critique

of social phenomenon.

In Beyond Belief, a travel sequel to Among the Believers, Naipaul

reminisces about his excursions among the converted peoples and the real life

stories collected in four Islamic countries: Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran and

Malaysia. Beyond Belief reiterates a major theme: Political philosophy cannot

and should not be combined with the religious faith. The confluence of Islamic

faith that Naipaul‘s observations have done little to change the living standards
 Vijay 149

of people. In Iran, for instance, a country dominated by mountain ranges, deserts

and the ideas of extremist fundamentalism and faith, the revolution led by

Ayatollah Khomeini in the name of religion not only failed to uplift the country

but shelled the young and innocent Iranians to death. They became forced-

martyrs. The peoples of the Islamic countries, according to Naipaul, are poor,

fragmented, backward, dispirited and confused. Neither the advocates of the

religion nor the rulers of the state could bring them a positive difference. Even

the benefits of science could not project the dark spots of these countries.

Beyond Belief is a compilation of interviews, interspersed by the author‘s

remarks and judgments.

The book is not entirely unbiased. One could almost listen to anti-Islamic

thoughts of the author, not in whispers, is revealed. The book can mislead the

wider non-Islamic readership into the belief that Islam is a backward religion,

that Islam advocates terrorism and religious fanaticism that Islamic peoples are

averse to progress and lead miserable lives, that they have no forethought that

they are incapable of competing with the rest of the world.

The book emphasizes the already dominant opinion of many that behind

every turbaned Muslim, there lives a potential suspect, a terrorist. Mr. Naipaul‘s

narration is at times pretentious, especially in the concluding paragraphs about

the landscapes of Iran. Why should Mr. Naipaul use the standards of the West as

a comparative scale when there is little in common between the two? Mr.
 Vijay 150

Naipaul‘s deductions are the result of mere observation and self-taught theories,

which turn out to be incorrect.

It is expected from Mr. Naipaul, a powerful representative voice of the

Third World, is a deeper enquiry, a search below the surface and into the truth. It

is possible, going by the ethics of beliefs visit a country, select men and women

at random, interview them and gather enough material to create a book that

supports pre-formed hypothesis.

In order to lay more emphasis on the struggle for recognition, Naipaul

was indirectly guided towards its ethical values in terms of self-knowledge, self-

respect and self-esteem, leading to an opening up of the ‗misrecognized‘

identities. Though he cautions his readers not to arrive at any conclusions based

on his work but it is easier to jump than to think.

It is illogical to resort to random sampling as a method to categorize

people. People cannot be categorized from their behavior. History has taught that

hatred towards a particular community is a dangerous feeling that brings out

horrifying consequences. Naipaul represents India not only as friendly outsider

who criticize India rationally but also as insiders who defend India‘s culture and

civilization in the West. Through his writings, he acquires the status of India‘s

spokesman in the West. Terrible accounts of brutality, genocides, and

annihilations, which is resulting out of the feeling of hatred. It is better to be

uneducated than to be ill-educated.

 Vijay 151

In order to discover the reality of the Islamic societies hidden behind the

giant purdah, vulnerable to be perfectly misunderstood, there is a need to be

willing to travel beyond our accumulated beliefs. People witness dejected and

innocent people, who are struggling to tear from their past, yearning sincerely to

embrace an unrealized dream peace. His dream is towards universalization of

Indianness and West Indianness in his thought and action but he fails to move

this ideology through his works.

Arundhati Roy also supports the idea of the universality in her only novel,

is a supposed to claim over its Indian character, as the Indian background is

large and all encompassing. She underlines the idea of offering the novel to its

readers, who are afterwards free to understand it in their own way, to personalize

their reading of the book as they wish: I think that a story is like the surface of

water. And you can take what you want from it. But she feels irritated by this

idea, this search. What do we mean when we ask, ―What is India? What is

Indianness? Who is Indian?‖ Do we ask, ―What does it mean to be American?

What does it mean to be British?‖ as often? She doesn‘t think that it‘s a question

that needs to be asked, necessarily. She doesn‘t think along those lines, anyway.

There is absolutely no way one could draw a line around it and say, ―This

is India‖ or, ―This is what it means to be Indian.‖ The whole world is seeking

simplification. It‘s not that easy. I don‘t believe that one clever movie or one

clever book can begin to convey what it means to be Indian‖ (Reena, ). In this
 Vijay 152

work, he mentions the Human Rights in the 21st Century on which the human

rights project is based and exposes the ‗dark side‘ of the problems.

Naipaul examines the larger context within which human rights have

taken shape, interrogates the assumption that human rights are universal,

challenging its neutral and inclusive claims, and unpacking the liberal subject on

which the human rights project is based and its correlating assumptions about the

‗Other‘ who needs to be contained. He makes some faltering proposals as to how

its dark side is exposed.

Hence, Naipaul unfolds the normative claims on which the human rights

project is based and exposes its dark side. Naipaul would locate the Indian

identity of a culture not only in its traditions and practices but also the effects

and the imprints it bears upon the society around which it is thriving. Naipaul is

not only a writer who demonstrates a clear, uncluttered style and a rare lucidity,

but he has thoroughly and meticulously drawn on the work and theories of

consummate minds in the field of literary theory, including Frantz Fanon, Homi

Bhaba, and Jacques Derrida. He is able to explore the displacement and

acculturative experience of exile, which thousands, if not millions, of fellow

world citizens confront in our planetary community today.

Naipaul felt that even at the moment of his birth, on an island thousands

of miles away from the homes of his fathers, he was already an exile. In

whatever place he came to rest, he could never consider himself to be at home.

Even when, as a freelance writer, he traveled to India in the early period of

 Vijay 153

decolonization, he did not recognize that country as truly a part of him, despite

the fact that it had such a large role in his history.

Naipaul more often than not takes the biographical form as the basis of

his novels, unlike Mukherjee, he does not see any positive aspect to the roles that

the colonial subject is forced to play. Rather, the conventional fictional-

biography form allows him to describe a metaphorical journey, a constant search

for an identity that is impossible to find.

Naipaul‘s novels seem to wind in and out of the different cultural

positions that are available to a young man of his ethnicity and social position,

seeing them as insufficient. The one role that Naipaul truly does recognize as

worthwhile is that the writer who makes a concerted difference to the cultures he

represents and the writer who can exceed the poverty of present-day. Naipaul is

able to write about the notion of displacement with the power and the resonance

that their backgrounds as exiles can produce in his works. He is not simply

producing an artistic product in which the characters can be considered fictional

representations and the plots merely narratives which are rolled out for the

entertainment and aesthetic pleasure of the readership. Naipaul represents the

real world in his novels in relation to the history of post-coloniality. It is an

attempt to reach out to the truth of the world. In the system of nationality and

identity, the exile holds the position that Derrida has called variously, but

meaning a similar thing difference, the supplement, the ―question of the ‗yes‘‖

and the trace.

 Vijay 154

The term ‗local people‘ now increasingly is used by ethnographers

instead of primitive or tribal is misleading in interesting ways and calls for some

unpacking. ‗Local‘ refers to the rootedness of a people. The opposite of ‗local‘

implies essentially two oppositional identities: the negative constitutes identities

of ‗displacement‘ or ‗uprootedness‘ while the positive end of this spectrum is

represented as unlimited, cosmopolitan, universal or belonging to the whole

world.

Thus, Naipaul who invokes the authority of medieval Islamic texts is

taken to be ‗local‘ while the Western journalist who invokes the authority of

modern secularism can claim to be ‗universal‘. Yet both are located in universes

that have rules of inclusion and exclusion. Immigrants who arrive from South

Asia to settle in Britain or America are described as uprooted, while English

officials who lived in British India were not. An obvious difference between

them, of course, is power that the former became subjects of the Crown, the

latter its representatives.

Naipaul said that the epic scale and geographic scope of the novel raise

even more interesting questions, questions related to what it means to a history

and the millions of community that of time and the fluid movement into and out

of it of diverse and accommodating populations regularly erupts into the most

agonizing sectarian violence. India: A Million Mutinies Now suggests that

assassins and martyrs have played, over time the role in India, is both a

destructive and productive one. Even in other writings, India: A Wounded

 Vijay 155

Civilization, and A Thousand Mutinies, Naipaul traces all the contemporary

problems of India to its encounter with Islamic civilization. Thus, the whole of

the Mughal period Naipaul considers a negative and unfortunate, not to say

shameful, episode in Indian history.

As a Brahmin he feels duty bound to be in the forefront, as a historic and

religious duty, to defend Indian culture and Hinduism. It is ironic that so

cultured and articulate a person as Naipaul should be completely oblivious of the

self-evident truth that civilizations are always and foremost hybridities, enlarged

and enriched by encounters with the ―others‖.

Naipaul‘s perceptions and views are reminiscent of nineteenth century

European intellectuals who believed in the putative uniqueness of European

culture, and ultimately, civilization. Like these European scholar supremacists,

his views are tinged with elements of racism. He forgets that Indian Muslims are

racially and ethnically of the same stock as his Brahmins and other castes, and

that Urdu, the language of the Muslims of both India and Pakistan is like Hindi,

the flipside of Sanskrit, the one enriched by Sanskrit borrowings and the other by

the rich assortments from Arabic, Persian and Turkish.

In his defense of what he perceives to be Indian, Naipaul is just playing

revisionism. As a deracinated Indian, Naipaul has every reason to go back to his

roots, either by maintaining strict vegetarianism or indulging in dilettantism by

acquiring a collection of Indian Art. By his own admission, he has had very little

interaction with Muslims to be able to understand them. This goes back to his
 Vijay 156

earliest experiences. His community and family in turn built a cordon sanitaria

around his life to keep off unwelcome influences in his life.

R.K. Narayan has observed, although Naipaul wrote funny stories about

funny people with funny skin colours, the underpinnings of his writings remain

Hindu mythology. This is the least remarked aspect of Naipaul‘s writing,

whether fiction or non-fiction. Naipaul‘s redeeming aspect for the award of the

Nobel is the celebration of the writer as an iconoclast and as a recluse dedicated

to his pursuit. He has contributed in no small measure to the perception of

English as a global language, not tied to a particular ethnicity but a fit idiom to

carry a significant portion of a contemporary universal civilization that Western

civilization has been claimed for it. His works at times helped to extend the

boundaries of the English canon as then understood.

Naipaul‘s view of place in terms of the binary oppositions between the

colonial and metropolitan places is discussed in relation to the sense of

displacement that is generated by his colonial upbringing. He deconstructs

boundaries and asserts the entitlement of the displaced and the marginalized to

the land and its representation. What Edward Said suggests here is that the

production of any intellectual or cultural work is conditioned by what he calls

‗situational complexity‘, meaning the correspondence of culture, history and

geography. (458)

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin use the term ‗dislocation‘

to refer to such cultural and psychological effects of displacement. Dislocation is

 Vijay 157

used to describe the experience of those European settlers who left their ‗home‘

in order to live and work in the colonies, but found lack of fit between their

language and the land in which they settled. While combining the psychoanalytic

theories of Jacque Lacan with Henry Lefebvre‘s theory of space, he explains

how the production of subjectivity coincides with the production of social forms

in the colonial spaces. The critique of knowledge formation and unequal power

relations based on geographical and spatial marginalization are the themes of the

novels of Naipaul. He studied the ways in which the knowledge of division

between lands, cultures and people generated by the ideology of Eurocentrism

contributed to the justification of colonial and imperialist practices.

Michel Foucault‘s identification of the convergence of power and

Knowledge has been the main intellectual influence for the postcolonial critique

of unequal power relations on the basis of geographical divisions. In The Eye of

Power and Questions on Geography, Foucault gives an insight into the manner

in which geographical knowledge produces power relations.

Naipaul says that there is a cultural diffusion operated as a reciprocal flow

of culture from center to periphery and back again. There was also informational

cultural flow, from Indianness, which permeated London or West Indianness.

Similarly, ideas of the Enlightenment such as liberty, self-governance, and

individual rights seeped into the urban cosmopolitan loci of India. It was in these

urban, soon to be colonial, metropolises that reformist movements started, anti-

colonial nationalism erupted, and the symbol of the woman became the
 Vijay 158

contested site of modernity between the colonial government and the nationalist

movement (Bayly, Guha and Spivak, Chatterjee). During this early period of

cultural and administrative exchange, the British colonial administration rested

on the principles of the ‗civilizing mission‘. The mission would reform activities

to the modern institutions of the enlightened empire and formulate new

educational curricula based on the Macaulayan model that would reform Indian

sensibility by producing subjects loyal to the empire, who were ―Indian in blood

and color, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect‖

(Macaulay, 27). Timothy Weiss interprets Naipaul‘s approach to India as, an

‗idea‘ rather than observation of place, saying that for Naipaul ‗India is not

precisely a place, but an idea, a state of mind‘ (18). Here, there is a need to add

that Naipaul‘s ‗idea‘ of India is closely connected to Naipaul‘s idea of

postcolonial places in general. Indianness is as homeliness here is comparable to

the idea of Caribbean homeliness pictured in Naipaul‘s earlier novels.

Naipaul views Indianness as lacking direction towards progress. The

identity of these places is directed by traditional forces such as casteism and

authoritarianism that not only restrict the agency of the colonial subjects for

personal or national growth, but also resist transformation of the corrupt and

passive system. Thus, Naipaul implies that, given that places cannot be easily

transformed, individuals can only choose their habitats.

Naipaul depicts radicalism as a paradoxical outcome of an expansive

rights culture in global times. The Indian masses had awakened to history, to its
 Vijay 159

ravages and injustices, yet as Naipaul diagnoses in his non-fictional account:

India: A Million Mutinies Now, this awakening had been not entirely felicitous:

To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to

begin to see oneself and one‘s group the way the outside world

saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of

this rage. There had been a general awakening. But 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. (420)

The ―million mutinies,‖ as Naipaul characterizes them, signaled an ambivalent

mass awakening, because the individual mutinies were initiated and

paradoxically undermined at once by the pervasive doctrinal, religious, and

regional radicalisms that fed into these mutinies, ―the beginnings of self-

awareness. The beginnings of intellectual life already negated by old anarchy

and disorder‖ (517). In a conversation with Roger, Willie warns of this radical

rise of the untouchables: In many parts of India it‘s the big issue nowadays.

What they call the churning of the castes. I think it‘s more important than the

religious question. (60)

Naipaul, as his lecture on the Universal Civilization suggests, culture is

an important factor in the advancement of societies and the empowerment of the

poor both in the idea of Indianness and the West Indianness. For the postcolonial

world, it proves indispensable because a history of conquests and colonialism

 Vijay 160

and continuous warfare, both internal and external, has left a profound

effect there, so that any talk of cosmopolitan globalist needs to take into account

the enduring disparities between Western modernity and the cultures of others or

the other.

It is considered one or two travel pieces written in the past forty years by

writers, for example, from Indianness, or of Indian origin. R.K. Narayan, in his

My Dateless Diary begins a section devoted to describing New York with

blanket generalizations that the Americans like to know how far they are being

liked by others. They have a trembling amity lest they should be thought of

badly. We Indians are more hardened, having been appreciated, understood,

misunderstood, represented, misrepresented, rated, and over-rated from time

immemorial both in factual account and fiction. (37)

Here, in his classification of Indians, Naipaul highlights the repetition of

representation of Indians ―from time immemorial‖. However, he does not

subvert the tendency to generalize; rather he indulges in it himself. In fact, he

sees the need to ―appreciate‖ such traits in order to ―understand the country and

its people‖. In this case, generalizations seem part of non-further troublemaking

the well-established link between postcolonial Western theories.

***