India

...Moynihan, suspicious of certain pernicious tendencies in the nation's liberal elites, nevertheless nudged Nixon steadily in a liberal direction on social policy...

...Naipaul, not even born in India but in Trinidad, and whose two earlier books on his ancestral land (An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization) were fiercely critical of the country's rigid, caste-based politics, along with its filth, squalor, and poverty, was doubly offensive...

...In the twentieth century, the principles of the Enlightenment found architectural expression in glass houses and glass skyscrapers...

...The director, Sennett notes in passing, "had the grace to photograph a Japanese film crew also making a documentary...

...Christianity set the Western world on a "disastrous course in which the spiritual has become discontinuous with the physical...

...Some of the stories are fascinating...

...Two of them, Ruby Lee Daniels (now Ruby Haynes) and Uless Carter, eventually moved back south to Clarksdale...

...Nixon, Lemann says, believed blacks were inherently inferior to whites, but nevertheless made some important contributions to ameliorating the situation of those in the ghettos...

...They live in a subsidized housing development operated by a black man who got his start in the federal poverty program...

...Not only did community action not work...

...Certainly one of the most interesting parts of Lemann's book is the discussion ol ~ the Nixon-Moynihan relationship and its effect on the course of the nation's social policy...

...He was the antiGandhi...

...in his personal life and in his political program, he was his absolute opposite...

...Getting beyond the sadness requires a hardening which can also be painful...

...We were, in fact, sitting in America (enjoying the odd luxury) when he told me this...

...Naipaul is a fine writer with a wonderful subject...

...The world made visible through this window has been devalued in its reality...

...Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Lemann's book is that he follows his migrant subjects to the end...

...I will not pursue it," he announces without explanation...

...Another lives the life of a member of Chicago's substantial black middle class on the South Side...

...It is typical of his method that instead of discussing the phenomenon of "white lightning"--fires deliberately set by landlords who find it more profitable to collect insurance than rents--he describes a film about white lightning...

...He still regards "privatization" as the central theme of urban history, but he no longer cares to explore the political economy of cities or the ways in which it would have to change if cities were to become more convivial...

...It had to come as disturbance, as rage and revolt...

...Sennett's concluding commentary on this documentary offers a fair sample of his prose: "It arouses empathic concern from its very powers to disorient and to deny us our catharsis...

...As with most visitors to postindependence India, Naipaul's attention was captured entirely by the difficulties of life there...

...Although Periyar is practically worshiped today in many parts of Tamil Nadu, he is all but unknown in the rest of India...

...From the cacophony of voices that assailed him in the past, he is now able to identify separate individuals...

...And in India: A Million Mutinies Now, Naipaul at last attempts to give India its due...

...This subject is closed, as faras Sennett is concerned...

...Here Sennett's 336: Commonweal...

...Naipaul...

...But, in fact, to do anything less is to miss the magic and delight of the country...

...The ability to see what cannot be touched or heard creates a sense of unreality...

...This is the urban conscience of the eye...

...Just possibly, Nicholas Lemann's fine book may help us discover what that something ought to be...

...Renaissance designers like Sixtus V, who rebuilt much of Rome in the sixteenth century, had a better idea--the use of perspective to challenge viewers and disrupt their visual expectations...

...Reading this book is not u.nlike flipping through the pages of one of its endless articles on, say, electromagnetic fields, and wondering how on earth anyone can find so much to say on the subject, only to discover at the end that it is Part 1 of a threepart article...

...It is, however, the stories which are the 17May 1991:335 book's main flaw...

...The book is full of such information...

...When there is nothing left of New York to photograph, we can be sure that filmmakers will still make a point of taking pictures--graciously--of each other...

...Still, we can piece together an argument of sorts...

...The faceless, swarming masses which alarmed him so on previous trips have been reduced to manageably small groups...

...HERE'S MUD IN YOUR EYE TIlE CONSCIENCE OF THE EYE The Design and Social Life of Cities Richard Sennett Knopf, $24.95, 252 pp...

...And, like my husband, I can certainly understand...

...Three states are in the midst of civil war as increasingly violent secessionists press for their demands...

...As in his earlier work, Sennett explores the disjunction between the private and public words--the deplorable retreat, as he sees it, from the city's confusion, diversity, and excitement...

...We meet an aging astrologer, a struggling film writer, the editor of a popular women's magazine, and a host of others, all with their own complicated stories...

...The Enlightenment sought an "antidote to inward-turning subjectivity" in a kind of transparency, Sennett argues--an "open window" between the self and its surroundings...

...For humanitarians, India is a problem...

...The book is 520 pages long and, with good editing, could easily have been cut in half...

...For liberals, moral outrage is often more comfortable than intellectual stimulation and simple curiosity...

...They were so all encompassing it was nearly impossible to see anything else...

...In fact, some of the million mutinies are far from little...

...but these buildings, intended to reveal the inner and outer worlds to each other, actually made them mutually remote and inaccessible...

...And when he is not encouraging lengthy, rambling monologues, we are often treated to lengthy, seemingly irrelevant descriptive writing...

...Naipaul is the perfect recipient for such information...

...Among its many pressing problems is an underclass about which something must be done...

...Jo McGowan hen my husband (who is from India) and I were courting and I was trying to learn all I could about his country, he told me not to bother with V.S...

...We meet Namdeo Dhasal, the founder of the Dalit Panthers, a militant organization of "untouchables," formed on the lines of the Black Panthers...

...America, which was so radically changed by the black migration, can neither return to the way it was nor settle into comfortable middle-classness...

...Independence brought about a "liberation of spirit...that could not come as release alone...

...He gathers it all in lovingly, caressing each minute detail, and presenting it all, verbatim, it would seem...

...But Naipaul seems content to listen, tape-recorder switched on, mind turned off...

...His work has become increasingly abstract and speculative over the years...

...It is through the particular and the specific that Naipaul now wishes to view India...

...These details, the significance of which is by no means self-evident, push the crisis of urban real estate speculation into the background...

...To treat it as an interesting, lively place, sparkling with debate, controversy, and brilliant ideas seems elitist and paradoxical...

...Christopher Lasch rained as a sociologist, Richard Sennett began his career, more than twenty years ago, with solid, rather conventional studies of class structure, social mobility, and urban neighborhoods...

...Even with the best will in the world, it's hard not to have strongly negative reactions to the sadness India seems to specialize in...

...With misplaced concreteness, he tells us that the movie was screened at a "film-editing studio near Orso's Italian Restaurant on Forty-sixth Street," that the room was "filled with perhaps forty people, many of them from the documentary film world," and that he himself helped to write the script...

...Still, he could use a more diligent editor...

...Their "worship of the domestic" made them indifferent, like their Christian predecessors, to the need for cities that were architecturally "stimulating...

...Instead they surrounded themselves with "bland, neutralizing spaces...

...Naipaul has traveled exhaustively throughout India, conducting in-depth interviews, generally through interpreters...

...A book that resorts so often to this kind of language, rejects "linear narrative," and ranges all over the map without regard to chronological order is not very easy to summarize or even to read...

...In the nineteenth century, a secularized version of Christianity led middleclass people to seek a "secular sanctuary" in the privacy of their families...

...Many (not all) of the people he interviews are indeed interesting, but even interesting lives need to be selectively presented...

...My favorite is the account of the Dravidian Progressive Movement, a political party in Tamil Nadu whose history is far more compelling than I had realized just having read newspaper accounts of its activities...

...Few things irritated him as much as Indians who sat in England or America enjoying its luxuries while criticizing India for its shortcomings...

...Periyar, its "prophet," as he is referred to, was a contemporary of Gandhi and outlived him by many years...

...Indeed, describing the speeches of a political leader, Naipaul could be writing about himself: "...words seemed to have been loved for their own sake, and...speeches, in order to be relished, had to be spun out, conceit upon conceit...

...His latest study of the city, written under the influence of literary postmodernism, is irritatingly diffuse, vague, and esoteric--almost ethereal in its complete disregard of commerce and industry, poverty and crime, politics and government, or any of the other concrete, material forces that shape city life...

...perhaps they are meant to assure us that even though New York is falling apart, there will always be someone on hand to film its collapse...

...Naipaul Viking, $24.95,520 pp...

...He was a fierce atheist and a dedicated political worker...

...The movement toward privatization, according tO Sennett, started with Christianity, which erected a "wall between inner and outer life...

...In Punjab alone there were over four thousand politically motivated killings last year...

...They seem to believe that one cannot understand them without knowing their entire history, their relationships with obscure aunts and uncles, and where they fit in a larger picture...

...Most Indians love to tell stories...

...The man is also a poet of some note, and Naipaul provides an interesting aside on the differences between literary and street Marathi...

...After we had been in India about a year he said he hated to admit it, but Naipaul might have been right...

...Many of the revolts are the result of a heightened consciousness--the women's movement, the organizing of untouchables, the rationalists--and while their presence makes life even more chaotic and unpredictable, they are, to Naipaul, the surest sign of growth, restoration...

...i NAIPAUL LOOKS AGAIN INDIA A Million Mutinies Now V.S...

...And it ran the poverty program afoul of powerful and politically important local leaders like Chicago's Mayor Daley...

...it probably was unworkable...

...Naipaul writes for the New Yorker, a magazine not noted for its conciseness...

...We get page after page of one person talking--"Get to the point," I kept muttering...

...India was now a country of a million little mutinies...