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Part two could have ended
peaceably, but it was not to be. Not because Naipaul again upbraided
Hinduism, which he did at times, in bits and pieces, to excoriate the
religion as a matter of routine, but this time as he dared to pontificate, he
committed a factual blunder, along with inadequate interpretation and
analysis.
The best literary attribute and expected, of Naipaul, is his ability to
describe, his uncanny knack of painting the ambience, the men, the women, and
he marvels in that endeavour. The sarpanch of the village which is contiguous
to Poona, the landlord Patel, his graduate daughter, the temple architecture,
the pathways, seem to be painted exquisitely and being screened in front. A
Nobel Prize winning litterateur indeed. I owe him a spectrum of words, a
learning which I possibly couldn't have mastered by cramming the GRE Word
List: runnel, starveling, shimmered, mattock, restaurateur, seraglio,
wickerwork, rutted.
Naipaul hit the bull's eye when he observed [page 75]: 'the Patel ruled by
custom and consent', and hopefully by consent he meant
Gramscian hegemonic consent, where the authority of the ruler is beyond
question and cannot be defied because he has already been 'deified'. With the
Zamindari system in India still ruling the roost in many regions, Naipaul's
remark can be considered to be astute and analytical. Power structure
prevailing in India's rural backyard centred around the rural gentry, from
the time of the Guptas up to the British, through the Mughals, and
beyond.
The worst however came just before intermission. Pages 78 to 82, of a 161
page book, turned out to be the playground for Naipaul where he donned the
role of a security-analyst, political scientist, sociologist as well as
historian. Why is he so prone to committing factual blunders? My question
remains unanswered. If it is told to me that it was a printing error, then
the Editorial Board ought to be held culpable. Naxalite movement began in
Bengal - fine, in 1968 - the gaffe.
Sir Naipaul, it was 23 May 1967, when a 'policeman named Sonam Wangdi was
killed in an encounter with armed tribals', that the Naxalite movement
kicked off, writes Sumanta Banerjee in the Wake of Naxalbari. Sir
Naipaul, the movement was locally led - as you weirdly and without any
substantiated database argue to the contrary, with Kanu Sanyal and Jangal
Santhal as couple of names to quote. Sir Naipaul, you probably again go awry
when you claim that the tea plantation labourers of North Bengal were not
part of the movement. The workers of the tea plantation farms were being
organised by local communist groups, reports Banerjee, between 1955 to 1957.
I fully agree that Sumanta Banerjee is not a Nobel Prize Winner, but his
qualitative arguments and reportage aside, the faux pas on 1967 / 8, can
still be accepted at Naipaul's end without any loss of self-esteem.
Mr Naipaul, by terming the indentured labourers of the tea plantation farms
as 'far-off aboriginal communities, pre-Aryan people...', you are
oversimplifying the history of the sub-continent and treading the Western
line of historiography, especially insofar as India's antiquity is concerned.
Mr Naipaul, by dismissing the Indians in not having a sense
of social enquiry - cunningly setting the backdrop by cutting apart Narayan's
novels and his calibre as a novelist and in the larger perspective, Indians'
capability of writing novels and analysing society, you have flawed, dwarfed
yourself as an author, derogated yourself as an intellectual and guillotined
yourself at the altar of human knowledge.
If History was still 'outside Indian tradition' in 1975, as he claims, then how
would he explain the rise of the Subaltern Studies Group in the late 1970s
and early 1980s?
Mr Naipaul, Naxalite movement in
its initial avatar just didn't fall through because there was a lack of
understanding of India and Indian history by the Indians or the
revolutionaries - which agreeably is an infinitely unbounded subject and
needs to be cultivated continuously. Naxalite movement crumbled because of
poor organsiation, improper leadership, lack of arms and ammunition in the
insurgent camp, concerted police and army action, among others. And if it is
being suggested by you that emulating a 'foreign' ideology is a sign of lack
of ingenuity on the part of the Indians, then what would you comment on the
French Revolution - the stalwarts of which were inspired by the American
revolution. Would you write-off the 'Bolivarian' Revolutions in Latin America
since they absorbed the ideals of the French and the American examples? How
your thought process would churn by looking at the Vietnamese revolution? Should
Lenin be reprimanded for reading a Marx?
Intermission. Naipaul, as a master story-teller knew where to pull down the
curtains for an interlude, and how to charge up the battery of climax, by
needling the dying body-social called India.
It's sickening, not disheartening. It's severely disturbing. It's nauseating,
with the persistently consistent way in which Naipaul moves on, tearing apart
India with his double-edged sword. India and the Indians, if they emulate the
West in the context of modernity, would be lampooned as copycats. India and
Indians, if they attempt to invent succour by unraveling their past - which
Naipaul disbelieves they can in the archaeological or historical or
sociological sense, would be chastised to have acted in an antiquated fashion.
'Hindu India, decaying for centuries, constantly making itself archaic, had
closed up......', Naipaul's inexorable march in torturing and tonsuring India
and Indians, post intermission, goes on. The author's diseased analysis
reaches a crescendo when he refers to Dr Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst, to
bolster his argumentation - as Kakar is quoted to generalise, without any
sense of logic, as if only to steer Naipaul's distorted ratiocination to its
irrational destination, that 'his Indian patients, men and women, cannot
describe the sex act, are capable of saying, it happened'. And the harangue
continues, the lack of ability of Indians to chronicle their tales of sexual
interactions, the lack of Indians to absorb the coitus and paint a picture of
it is corroborated by citing a novel called Samskara by Naipaul's literary
favourite U R Anantamurti and its pious Brahmin, who fails to appreciate how
it feels like to copulate with a fleshly low-caste woman.
The pinnacle is reached, of denigrating Indians. Naipaul applies intellectual
stealth and hypocrisy to achieve it by citing ideas and observations of
Indians, one a doctor and the other an author, roasts and murders Indians by
terming their thought-process to be worn-out and Indians being imbecile to
the extent of failing to detail the most basic exercise of human beings - the
very act of procreation. The works of the two other 'Indians', Kakar and
Anantamurti, who are skillfully yet bluntly used by Naipaul, are his
favourites because their arguments, at least the portion of what he quotes,
beautifully upholds his demented notion of a caste-dishevelled,
inward-looking, backward-moving retrograde India. Sir Vidiya has not read or
heard about Kamasutra and he showcases his literary musculature to the maximum
to annihilate any corpus of composition of India's past or present which
aspires to 'describe' the act of sex. Sir Vidiya, interestingly is still
alive to watch videos being posted online by Indian actors, detailing the
bedroom actions, providing him titillation - something he so poorly needs at
this stage of his life.
Naipaul gouges out the eyes, cuts the limbs, castrates and finally
disembowels the Indians by positing 'youthful' examples - a fourth year
graduate at National institute of Design, a second year girl in the printing
department, an America-returned would-be-entrepreneur - yelling through his
chain of words and phrases that the next generation of Indians are equally
worthless as their predecessors - nincompoops not to have a knowledge or vision
about India and severely handicapped in ingenuity, however enthusiastically
bubbling with regressing cognition. Dollar-bribed literature reached its
zenith at page 110 with Naipaul's jeremiad against Indians reaching the
cremation ground.
Naipaul doesn't visit the
Indian Institute of Technologies. Though he knows Bangalore, he doesn't move
into the campus of Indian Institute of Science. He 'analyses' the Chawls of
Bombay, but wipes out from his narrative the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
Naipaul maps a non-euclidean geometry of India, carefully avoids the straight
line and takes the geodesic instead. He doesn't fail, but deliberately
absconds meeting statistician-cum-historian D D Kosambi, as that would
definitely have pushed him harder into his fraudulent analytical domains to
eke out a repugnant theory to prevaricate about India's past and the lack of
historical approach of Indians.
It is nonetheless, nothing outlandish to deduce that many Indians prefer the
Occident - their lifestyle and to some extent, accept their superiority. To
some extent, this is an after-effect of Imperial domination close to 200
years. And why fully blame Indians with regard to this - most colonial
countries, in South Asia, South-East Asia, Africa have followed similar
footsteps. That however does not and shouldn't exonerate the Indians from the
entrapment of Gramscian hegemony,
Adding to Literature, Sex, Politics, Ideology, Naipaul comes up with
Architecture and Painting - reflecting the decadent state of affairs of India
and Indians. Just to speak of painting, Naipaul surely needs a crash course
on Indian painting since 1947 - and which has been in no way merely a mugged
up Western concept - with post-colonial, pseudo-realist and post-minimalist
approaches being few to be mentioned. Naipaul for the second time twists the
finger of the Indian journalist as he comments: 'Indian journalism developed
no reporting tradition...'[page 117].
However, he gives a passing credit
to Illustrated Weekly of India as it contained a series of articles against
caste oppression in Hindu India and to Economic and Political Weekly as it
carries leftist tinge. He dismisses the Indians [page 116], 'India by itself
could not have rediscovered or assessed its past' - which makes me wonder as
to who Rakhaldas Banerjee was or who was Ramesh Chandra Majumdar or Jadunath
Sarkar, to name a modest three. Naipaul safely does not mention S N Bose or
Meghnad Saha or C V Raman and Indian Association for the Cultivation of
Science - lest he has to dive into ignominy of swallowing his theories of
garbage of ‘dumb Indians without ingenuity’. He leaves the
interpretation of Emergency open, by telling the readers that curb on constitutional
freedom had made Indian journalism more interpretative! [page 119]
I trudge on, rather studiously, to Chapter 7, 'Paradise Lost'. Nothing seems
left to be discovered - mighty and high, is there anything more grotesque -
not about India, but about an individual - who claims to possess Indian
ancestry and who revels in systematic butchery of Indians with his pen -
mighty and high.
Yes. Naipaul attempts to teach Indians to unlearn the 'political'. As he
writes, or is dollar-bribed to write, during Emergency, without deliberating
on the issue would have implied nullity. So he becomes a pulpiteer, pierces
the sword into Jaiprakash Narayan's concept of Total Revolution, finds out
justification for Indira Gandhi's Emergency by ridiculing a lady in Delhi and
her political husband (belonging to the opposition) for aspiring to keep her
servant 'close' to her residence and hence lamenting government's decision to
smash his house and forcing him out in the open in the rains. Naipaul asserts
that one month notice was served upon the individual before demolishing his
house.
Jaiprakash Narayan talks about 'government from below' - a de-facto
establishment of local-self government and election of legislature at state
and central levels with a bottom-up approach. I am awaken, amidst somnolence:
Naipaul compares JP's Total Revolution as 'emotional outburst' - still fine,
considering the political chaos accompanying the movement; as Naipaul terms
JP's assurance of Swaraj as Ramrajya, I cleanse the lens of my spectacles -
to reread. He has to bring in religion - Hinduism - and this time he does it
by positing Gandhi and Vivekananda and in the most disingenuous way
connecting JP's Swaraj with Gandhi's Ramrajya. Gandhi had been earlier
criticised for his lack of languidness in writing - which can very easily be
accepted considering the fact that an author of Naipaul's calibre will always
see Gandhian ability of writing as a diminutive variety.
Nevertheless, from which angle Naipaul saw Ramrajya of Hindu religious type
being offered by JP bemuses us all. Naipaul clearly and amazingly sees the
revolution to have failed, all revolutions to have failed in India, Maoist,
Constitutional, non-Constitutional, since Indians are a failed set of beings
- as they are within the cocoon of a failed religion called
Hinduism.
As I turn page 140, I wonder if Naipaul would have been better-off spending
few sessions with Dr Sudhir Kakar of JNU - the psychoanalyst.
Vilifying Gandhi and his mahatmahood is still acceptable, as such analysis
borders the zone of critical thinking. But to write that Gandhi 'left India
without any ideology' [page 146] is tough not to be taken amiss. Naipaul's
venom towards India and Indians has been systematically directed towards its
pantheon of leadership - specifically Gandhi - by cooking up the
latter's hidden follies of being caste-affected, burdened with an
anachronistic worldview of anti-industrial posture, pursuing his status of
being the mahatma with a zero-like ideology. The assassination of Gandhi
takes place for the second time, at least - after Godse, Naipaul carries it
out with his incisive phraseology by deconstructing the singular, simple
interpretation of Gandhian simplicity and truthfulness, as if every truth of
Gandhi, for Gandhi and by Gandhi was residing at the apex of untruth; as if
every bit of Gandhi's Weltanschauung is a
reflection of India's perceptive ideology and has to be decoded in the
backdrop of post-truth.
Naipaul had to lambaste Vinoba Bhave, innovate the punchbag in him - as he
emulated Gandhi, and according to his own words, more than typified Gandhian
way of life, and puts across Bhave as 'not a particularly intelligent man'
and 'his political views come close to nonsense' [pp 146-7]. This approach
was nonetheless natural and expected of Naipaul -as he had to debase India
and Indians - so Gandhi and hence Bhave had to be beaten to unconsciousness
and then asked by the author: 'Do you have any ideology?' The
answer would obviously be nothing.
Naipaul surely would have been charged with blasphemy if he were a Pakistani
citizen. He narrowly escapes the fatwa for two
reasons: there is no such authority or precedence in Hinduism and there
is no such culture in Hinduism and in that sense, this is a dead religion -
which does not retaliate against its molesters. His book is not banned and he
sails through to receive the Nobel later.
"Get the children out into the fields, among the animals: it was, after
all, the only education that the god Krishna received." [page 149]
Again, to mock at Bhave's educational status is still a matter of criticism
which can be accepted in an argumentative stupor, but shouldn't a giggle at
one of the avatars of Hinduism be a reason enough to raise furor?
Indians belch, Indians fart - yes, they do. My question is nobody else does?
Naipaul doesn't? In 1975-6 if rural Indian gentry take pride in a graduate
daughter, then how do they err? Isn't Naipaul also a graduate? Indians make
merry in festivities, they shout, they sing, they dance, at times they go
berserk. My question is nobody else does? The Englishman doesn't? The
American yankee doesn't?
Bhave is tortured by Naipaul with burning
incense sticks - the former's last fast was against cow-slaughter - his
Bhoodan movement was a fiasco, a mere symbolism suffocated within the
everlasting yoke of casteism and rural hierarchy. Naipaul's veritable misuse
of the word 'cow' with all its concomitant sense to hit 'Hindu India' below
the belt so spookily mirrors the contemporary 'liberal' and 'left-of-the-centre'
interpretations of the 'present cow'. There is no other animal in India - no
Tiger, no Lion, no Elephant, only the cow and it has to be targeted.
Indians are obedient, without any thought-process, without any civilisation,
mere dehumanised, de-civilised robots, clinging onto their dead past. This is
the crux of Naipaul's 161 page book - a gist which is repeated, reiterated
and reverberated methodically by the author in a meticulous fashion page
after page, paragraph after paragraph. An artist could be so engrossed in
shaping up and then polishing a damaged image to perfection - a sculpture
impaired flawlessly and permanently to make it appear a ghost, to create a
spectre of nothingness of Indians - only Naipaul could excel in this
craft.
Naipaul suggests, in his vainglorious attire, that 'the past can now be
possessed only by inquiry and scholarship, by intellectual rather than
spiritual discipline' [page 161].
Yes, Indians need more consciousness toward cleanliness. Yes, Indians need to
be more industrious. Yes, Indians need to develop their education system,
their healthcare apparatus. And yes, Indians ought to be aware of their
civilisation through the prism of scientific knowledge and leap forward to
establish a greater civilisation for the future.
India and Indians are working towards the goal - with all muscles flexed and
guns blazing. Naipaul's spectre of a 'decadent cow-ennobled Hindu India'
simply doesn't haunt Indians, who in the 21st century, have not only ignored
such preposterous theories, but are confident and conscious enough about
their potential. India’s civilization is not wounded. It is empowered;
it is dynamic and ever-growing.
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