India Through a Glass Darkly

...Such an arrangement might have avoided many of the regional conflicts that have since plagued India...

...When one finishes reading India: A Wounded Civilization, it is with a sense that there are strong personal reasons for the darkness of Naipul's view...

...Naipul grudgingly admits that Mohandas Gandhi possessed a clearer vision than most Indians...

...he implies that it was at least a pause in the downward course India has taken since 1962, when the Chinese invasion began to dissipate the euphoria of independence...

...no country was so easily raided and plundered and learned so little from its disasters...

...and that produced a nation far more politically progressive than those surviving models of traditional Indian government, She princely native states...

...In fact, Gandhi's personality—despite the author's rejection of what he regards as contemporary Gandhianism—overshadows the whole book...

...Further, he spent much of his time with the kind of middle-class Indians traveling intellectuals are confined to if they do not make a deliberate effort to get off the beaten track and into the less Westernized areas...

...As he himself says, "I am at once too close and too far...

...The same note has been struck by many commentators since Catherine Mayo wrote Mother India in the 1930s...

...At the same time, one has to remember that Naipul grew up in what is merely another area of the old colonial world, and while he never makes the comparison between India and his birthplace explicitly, it was probably never far from his mind...

...from his account, he does not seem to have talked to more than one politician opposed to the emergency that was in effect during his visit...

...It seems to be always there in India: magic, the past, the death of the intellect, spirituality annulling the civilization out of which it issues, India swallowing its own tail...

...Although his ancestors left the country a century ago for Trinidad, they retained many of their customs and beliefs...

...Religious obscurantism and caste customs continue to be powerful and negative forces as well...

...After nearly 30 years of power the Congress has, understandably, become the system...

...Apart from the fact that since this book was written events have ended Congress' 30 years of power, showing how deeply British democratic conceptions permeated the fabric of Indian society, the absurdity of the kind of generalization Naipul makes is self-evident...

...Nirad Chaudhuri is an obvious example of an Indian who has understood that "the faults lie within the civilization itself," and Chaudhuri is hardily alone, among both ordinary and educated Indians...

...The extent and the extremity of the author's rejection of everything Indian can be seen in the passage at the end of a vicious attack on the venerated religious leader and reformer Vinoba Bhave ("Bhave in himself is nothing, a medieval throwback of whom there must be hundreds or thousands in India...

...This is particularly the case in regions like the Punjab and Kerala, where the hold of traditional Hinduism has been challenged by rival traditions such as Syrian Christianity and Sikhism...

...It is true that because Naipul made his tour in 1975, long before the election in March of this year that unseated Indira Gandhi and her Congress party, the channels of information and opinion one normally taps in India were not so freely open as usual...

...Even the criticisms of contemporary Gandhiaos that fill so much of the book appear to be based mostly on hearsay and reading...

...He would also have us believe that no Indian is capable of escaping it, including those who imagine themselves to be liberated into some international current of thought: "A passionate Marxist journalist—waiting for the revolution, rejecting all 'palliatives'—told me that the 'workers' of India had to be politicized...

...Naipul's latest book, originally written as a series of articles for the New York Review of Books, is by no means as thorough as his previous account of his grand-fatherland, An Area of Darkness...

...It might also have provided a basis of rural initiative leading to something different than the present pattern of people fleeing to the cities from a debilitated countryside and creating a great mass of urban poor—likely to be the most disruptive element in the India of the near future...

...No Indian can take himself to the stage where he might perceive that the faults lie within the civilization itself, that the failure and the cruelties of India might implicate all Indians...

...Everyone in India," as he says, "is Gandhian...

...Another is the lack of independent leadership brought on by 30 years of Congress rule, which has resulted in the alternative administration of Janata gerontocrats now holding power with precarious unity...

...that made independence a certainty and set the British Empire on its way to extinction...

...And however strong the call of the past, the roads to the future have been left open...

...everyone has his own view of Gandhianism, as everyone has his own intimation of the Ramraj he offered...

...But it was Gandhi who in 1947 warned Congress of the corrupting consequences of becoming a Western-style party, and who proposed a caste-free, decentralized federation founded on the villages...

...Does it take in religion, the security of caste and clan, Indian ways of perceiving, karma, the antique serfdom...

...I am inclined to believe, moreover, that the world's largest democracy has greater potential resources for achieving ultimate success than do the small, often mutually hostile states of the Caribbean, with their limited economy and population pressures that in many cases are actually more urgent than India's...

...Even the Marxists, dreaming of a revolution occurring like magic on a particular day, of tyranny swept away, of 'the people' then engaging in the pleasures of 'folk' activities—the Marxist journalist's word: the folk miraoulously whole after the milennia of oppression—even the Marxists' vision of the future is not of a country undone and remade but of an India essentially returned to itself, purified: a vision of Ramraj...

...Not only—according to Naipul—is this condition omnipresent...

...Nevertheless, to the outsider this seems simply a gradation of desperate situations...

...Consequently, if the India he first visited in 1962 seemed "a very strange land," the feeling of a link must have been there, and behind that the feeling of despair at discovering the culture so sunk in peril and apparent inertia...

...But no Indian cares to take political self-examination that far...

...But where does the system begin and end...

...It is apparent, for example, that in gathering the impressions for A Wounded Civiliation he explored relatively few places in India...

...The difficulties undergone by Trinidad since liberation are not on the colossal scale of India's problems...

...India may well be the dark mirror where Naipul has seen much of his own world's future disturbingly reflected...

...Gandhi's declaration of the infamous emergency...

...the only serious problem faced by the India of today...

...Yet to say there is nothing else available to India besides stagnation, to suggest that every Indian is somehow infected by the torpor induced by a karma-ridden sense of existence, is to deny the urges that have wrought profound social changes during the past century (suttee, after all, did not revive when the British departed...

...India, runs their thesis, is a static culture whose religious attitudes trap it in a past the rest of the world has long outrun...

...But that alone cannot explain the blackness that still shadows his view of the country and its future...

...If it is ever to escape the dismal circle of fatalism and fatality, they believe, changes on a cataclysmic scale are needed...

...India remains one of a small number of former colonial territories that have succumbed to neither military rule nor unchallenged one-party domination...

...One can grant the point that Gandhi was an exceptional Indian largely because of exceptional experiences: his time in England, his introduction to the Bible and the writings of Tolstoy and Ruskin, his struggles in South Africa...

...they had to be told that it was the 'system' mat oppressed them...

...Naipul is probably right, too, that because three decades of controlling the government turned Congress into a political machine whose corruption infected ruler and opposition alike, it is impossible to revive Gandhianism, except as a kind of nostalgic game...

...Indeed, Naipul's pessimism is such that there are times when he appears to give tacit approval to Mrs...

...Thus V. S. Naipul in the first pages of India: A Wounded Civilization (Knopf, 224 pp., $7.95), his latest lament an the state of the land of his ancestors...