India
Naipaul, V. S.
ost-independence India is a more ir tempting subject for critics than for admirers—never more so than in the wake of recent violence and resurgent Hindu chauvinism. Her failures and contradictions,...
...These include, among other things, Sikh and Muslim disaffection in the Punjab and Kashmir, anti-Brahmin bitterness in the South, the still unresolved plight of the "scheduled" Harijans (better known to American readers as Untouchables, and still treated as such by most other Indians), the ambiguous status of Indian women, and the pervasive corruption of the Congress party, which has dominated Indian political life in the forty-four years since independence...
...In a telling description of his feelings on reading the 1858-59 Indian diary of Sir William Russell, the quintessential Victorian war correspondent, he confesses: It is hard for an Indian not to feel humiliated by Russell's book...
...She was paying a state visit to Washington to deliver one of her periodic lectures on international etiquette...
...But I will always think of poor Rajiv as having ended his days still trapped in a political elevator of his mother's making...
...her considerable economic, social, and intellectual achievements, and the enduring richness of India's many uneasily co-existing cultures are less obvious at first glance...
...before the British raj was established, in 1858, anarchy and despotism had been pervasive...
...Certainly, he is less pessimistic than in his two earlier works...
...Chaudhuri deserves the last word on the subject...
...While it barely scratches the surface of its subject, that is more than can be said of many a weightier, more pretentious volume...
...injust six months in 1976, two million people were sterilized, many if not most of them against their wishes...
...Gandhi's 1975 State of Emergency...
...Biswas, Naipaul could do a lot with some of the picaresque characters he has met in his travels in India and, a few years earlier, in Dixie (see his uneven but intelligently appreciative A Tian in the South...
...In An Area of Darkness and India- A Wounded Civilization, he emphasized the squalid...
...In form, it is a loosely strung-together series of interviews and impressions gathered over months of travel from the Tamil south to high Kashmir, a rambling Decameron of a book, insightful, entertaining, and only occasionally repetitious...
...For most of the years since the British granted Indian independence in 1947, the "world's largest democracy" has been ruled by three generations of a single dynasty, father Jawaharlal Nehru, daughter Indira Gandhi, and grandson Rajiv Gandhi...
...T he man who has come closest is I probably that magnificent if irascible Bengali autodidact and man of letters, Nirad C. Chaudhuri...
...It was her government that initially gave covert support to both Sikh extremists in the Punjab and Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and Southern India, the groups responsible for their respective assassinations...
...P overty aside, many of India's most glaring problems are of human devising...
...A Million Mutinies Now, the solid wins out, albeit narrowly...
...In his desultory way, using his characters as vehicles, Naipaul touches on a few of the million mini-mutinies he perceives as permeating India...
...If India...
...some might even argue that it is not yet quite a nation...
...One regrets that Naipaul, with his eye for telling detail and ear for revealing dialogue, has for the time being set aside novel writing...
...Naipaul senses this without quite coming to grips with it...
...24.95 Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 39...
...TO WHICH YET EVERY ONE OF US THREW OUT THE CHALLENGE: `CIVIS BRITANNICUS SUM' BECAUSE ALL THAT WAS GOOD AND LIVING WITHIN US WAS MADE, SHAPED, AND QUICKENED BY THE SAME BRITISH RULE 0 INDIA: A MILLION MUTINIES NOW V. S. Naipaul/Viking/521 pp...
...Three decades after his maiden journey he seems more at home with his subjects and himself...
...Rajiv's elevator got stuck, and the program had to be postponed until the dauphin could be rescued...
...Since 72 percent of India's 850 million people live in the countryside, and since 64 percent cannot even read, this is an introduction not so much to a nation as to a relatively small elite—one with few ties to an Indian majority which, if not silent, is at least cut off from the "modern" Indian economy, culture, and political life...
...Even the tradition of "maintaining law and order" and the independent judiciary to insure it were not indigenous...
...P erhaps too much so, since almost all of the Indians we meet in Naipaul's company are, by the standards of their country, privileged...
...it has been four years since The Enigma of Arrival, and that was more of a fictionalized memoir than a full-blown novel...
...V. S. Naipaul, cosmopolitan man of letters by vocation, 'llinidadian by birth, and Indian by descent, has written three books on his ancestral land, sometimes stressing its squalid, sometimes its solid sides...
...As Ved Mehta wrote in The New India: [India] had no tradition of parliamentary democracy, of general elections, of civil liberties...
...If he is still capable of work on the level of A House for Mr...
...Rajiv, presumably the last of a spent political line, was more sinned against than sinning, a sacrifice to his mother's dynastic arrogance and the opportunism of a Congress party leadership that used the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty as both the key to winning over an ignorant electorate and a protective shield behind which they could continue to play corrupt politics as usual...
...He can also now afford to travel first class, and has easy entree with the political, business, and cultural elites of India's big cities...
...Given—to use one of Naipaul's favorite phrases—the still "raw" nerves of many Indian intellectuals, only a few of the wisest among them have been able to accept the British role in the genesis of modern India...
...As for Rajiv, having met him more than once, I cannot help but think of him as an amiably weak victim of others'—and mother's—ambitions...
...Incompetence, corruption, and caste, religious, linguistic, and regional animosities continue to undercut a shared sense of nationhood...
...On the basis of insight as well as seniority, Mr...
...that it will have a larger idea of human association, and that out of this larger idea, and out of the encompassing humiliation of British rule, there will come to India the ideas of country and pride and historical self-analysis, things that seem impossibly remote from the India of Russell . . . For all its faults, it was the relatively conscientious, humane British administration of India, and the exposure it gave educated Indians to concepts of Western jurisprudence, commerce, technology, representative government, and nationalism, that made an Indian nation possible...
...At 59, and at the height of his fame if not of his powers, Naipaul is a very different person from the professionally obscure and emotionally insecure young writer who first set foot on the Subcontinent in 1962...
...A Million Mutinies Now is not a serious analysis of India, it is an Aram Bakshian, J1: writes frequently on Indian history and literature His chronicle of the former princely state of Hyderaba4 'Shadow of Empirn" was published in the January 1989 issue of History Today...
...This may be due as much to changes in the author as to changes in India...
...Is V. S. Naipaul optimistic about India...
...This is an embarrassment to many modern Indians, who would like to credit all of their country's virtues to an ancient, mythic past and blame all of their current ills on the relatively short span of British rule...
...T here is little grounds for confidence in India's political future and yet, considering the pre-colonial history of the Subcontinent, it could be considerably worse...
...Our first encounter took place in the early 1980s, during Indira's last term as prime minister...
...On that occasion he emerged unscathed, smiling sheepishly...
...Her failures and contradictions, and the sheer humbug of many of India's political pretensions are glaring...
...Ironically, both mother and son were the victims of Indira's particularly nasty brand of divide-and-conquer politics...
...In India...
...India is not yet quite a democratic nation...
...Between 30,000 and 250,000 political prisoners were arbitrarily seized and held incommunicado during Mrs...
...engaging look at a number of interesting Indians...
...Even in normal times, legitimately elected state governments are routinely disbanded and subjected to "direct rule' from New Delhi at the slightest prime ministerial whim...
...Taken from the dedication page of his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, it could serve equally well as an acknowledgment of the source of many of modern India's finest qualities: TO THE MEMORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN INDIA WHICH CONFERRED SUBJECTHOOD ON US BUT WITHHELD CITIZENSHIP...
...Now in his nineties, he continues to write and enlighten...
...The day she was to speak at the National Press Club, her heir-apparent in tow, the Press Building was in the midst of a massive renovation...
...He no longer sees India as a "wounded" or decayed civilization, rather as a teeming, seething nation in the making, troubled and turbulent, but vital...
...Part of the humiliation the Indian feels comes from the ambiguity of his response, his recognition that the Indian system that is being overthrown has come to the end of its possibilities, that its survival can lead only to more of what has gone before, that the India that will come into being at the end of the period of British rule will be better educated, more creative and full of possibility than the India of a century before...
Vol. 24 • August 1991 • No. 8
