Riddled with some outstanding passages Naipaul starts off Part One (A Wounded Civilization) this the second of his famous/infamous trilogy of sorts bemoaning the wretchedness of India with the resolute faith in his thesis that India is not only decrepit in so many ways it was destined to decrepit and also designed to remain decrepit. There is at times yearning for some idyllic early Aryan past which was followed by a millennium of darkness and decline - a monochromatic and now increasingly belligerent and weaponized assertion which more fuels a generation of younger Hindutva writers of fiction and fiction disguised as non-fiction and which is contradicted by scholarship and popular writing Indian and non-Indian that points to vast and multifarious growth, cross-fertilization, productivity and indeed light, during this darkness - and after an admittedly on part of Naipaul (grudgingly one can tell) despotic colonial interregnum which nevertheless had invaluable boons to offers he hastily adds, the rot only deepens post partition.

Naipaul finds even the triumph of Hindu culture in Vijayanagar regressive and insipid what to say of Muslim invaders thereafter. Though to give him credit he finds suffering and caste exploitation to be mainstays of Indian society from even earlier times. Several of his observations about the modes and magnitude of this exploitation may be unpalatable but they are brutally true. It is in his exegesis of the complex, multi-textured, and often beguiling narratives of history that one is lost as to what exactly does he ascribe it all to - happenstance, culture, dialectical materialism, natural order of things, eugenics, or something else. Certainly colonialism and post-colonialism make an appearance in passing. Is the Indian path-dependent when it comes to retreat, surrender and decline? Ridiculous as it may seem we cannot tell and the very last possibility appears to what he seems to be most inclined towards. He refers multiples times in this part of the book to two novels by R.K.Narayan finding therein evidence of the quintessential Hindu approaches to the changing world.

Part 2 (A New Claim on the Land) is quite brilliant because Naipaul describes much more than he theorizes, conjectures, generalizes, imagines, surmises and concludes - the depressing contrast of the skyscrapers and chawls & squatters settlements on the one hand and irrigation cooperatives in bursting Bombay on the one hand and small village tiers of power and control in broken and arid Maharashtrian country on the other. His description of the Naxalite Movement though is sketchy and dismissive. And definitely not prescient as he appears to have written it off though that is not what eventually transpired as we well know.

Part 3 (Not Ideas, But Obsessions) is where Naipaul shows both sides of his writing - at one level he is lucid, poignant, brilliantly deconstructive, irreverent, and capable of writing truly magical sentences (I have to hold a pencil to underline); at another level he is acerbic, dismissive, grossly generalizing, reductionist, pessimistic, misanthropic and downright insulting. At one level he narrates uncomfortable truths and if the modern purveyors of Hindutva were to go through his thorough dressing down of all they they weave their fantasies around they would have rather depressing season. But at another level after floundering here and there (having brutally disabused the reader of any notion that Indian civilization was ever truly capable of growth and its intelligentsia having the potential for brilliance and innovation or it ever will be) he fails in putting down his finger on why how and why it is so distinctly designed to be doomed. Race and some better sense of a regional racial identity and not religion, regionalism or caste is what he feebly mentions a few times but does not quite elaborate. And the manner he mentions it sounds rather ominous given the racism, toxic nationalism and insularity that has come to grip the world since he wrote this in the mid-1970s.

Though written during the Emergency the Emergency remains a side theme and he finds it hard to condemn and a natural outcome of the failure of not just Indian politics but Indian imagination. His primary preoccupation in this section is the life and politics of M.K.Gandhi whose South African apartheid influenced politics he admires but whose transformation into Mahatma he moans and considers a cop-out. He finds the latter to be a retreat into superstition, inaction, self-defeatism, fatalism, lack of propensity to take on the hard challenges of contemporary life, and the fantasy of a glorious past that he finds to be a recurrent theme in Indian history and a fatal flaw of the Indian psyche. One is at times persuaded - especially when he quite splendidly deconstructs Gandhi's career and politics - but one can't help but noting how his broad sweeps ignore multiple facets of Indian intellectual thought and social progression. This does not persuade as an intellectual history or astute sociological and political insight because Naipaul's method tends to cover up a more comprehensive and deeper assessment with outstanding rhetoric and turn of phrase. He gets so carried away by the latter - as he keeps repeating the same observation and ever so many new and glorious ways - that his belief in what he believes become self-evident and incontrovertible. 'A Defect of Vision' is the chapter he starts off with. Then he moves on to how almost all Indian thought and civilization - which he blames constantly on invasions but then he hardly finds anything worthwhile pre-invasions as well; and very rarely does he mention the Aryan invasion and its impact on Dravidian civilization - is weak and defective mimicry and synthesis in 'Mimicry and Synthesis."He finds no renaissance but dull, debilitating continuity in 'Renaissance or Continuity." And before that he appears to paradoxically both mock and bemoan a bygone time in 'Paradise Lost.'

One instance of where one gets some vague idea of what would have been renaissance rather than continuity is when he says: "Gandhi, the South African, was too complex for India. India made the racial leader the mahatma."

His castigations are complete and absolute.

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

"The racial sense, which contains respect for the individual and even that concept of 'the people', remains as remote from India as ever."

"Gandhi swept through India, but he has left it without an ideology. He awakened the holy land; his mahatmahood returned it to archaism; he made his worshippers vain."

His wit is at its biting best when describing Vinobha Bhave, Gandhi's successor.

"He is in the old Indian tradition of the sage who lives apart from men, but not so far from them that they are unable to provide him with a life-support system."

"Gandhi took India out of one kind of Kal Yug, one kind of Black Age; his success inevitably pushed it back to another."

"It is what Gandhianism was long ago reduced to by mahatmahood: religious ecstasy and religious self-display, a juggling with nothing, a liberation from constructive thought and religious burdens. True freedom and true piety are still seen to lie in withdrawal from the difficult world. In independent India, Gandhianism is like the solace still of a conquered people, to whom the state has historically been alien, controlled by others."

"India is without an ideology - and that was the failure of Gandhi and India together. Its people have no idea of the state, and none of the attitudes that go with such an idea: no historical notion of the past, no identity beyond the tenuous ecumenism of Hindu beliefs, and, in spite of the racial excesses of the British period, not even the beginning of a racial sense. Through centuries of conquest the civilization declines into an apparatus for survival, turning away from the mind ..."

Naipaul is impressed by RSSS and its grassroots work and grappling with contemporary issues in its encounters with it. He often mocks brilliant white homespun cotton wearing Congress Wallahs with their fake modesty, ineffectualness and caprice. Towards the end of his life he was also quite taken with Hindutva politics and BJP of course except quite paradoxically a lot of what he admired can be seen today as highly anti-intellectual, unscientific, yearning for a mythical past, superstitious and fascist. Towards the end of the book he surmises.

"The past can now be possessed only by inquiry and scholarship, by intellectual rather than spiritual discipline. The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill."

Well the past is definitely killing as we speak. Naipaul in my final analysis is clear and zealot in his castigations but confounded in his rationale and justifications of the same. Often he is brilliant astute and incisive but as often just bitter and dismissive. This is nevertheless perhaps his best non-fiction and relevant equally to those on the other sides of the border when it comes to religion and religiosity being abused to escape from hard battles for betterment of the people.

The book might be a depressing read for people from the newer generation of India, who haven't experienced the darkness of the old India in it's entirety but it's important for us to hear this.

Hooter: A pessimistic view of India of the 70s

Naipaul is honest about the fact that he doesn't relate to India but he does relate to it and this covers a variety of thoughts and experiences he goes through while reading contemporary Indian authors, folks he meets as he goes across India and current affairs at that point in the 70s. Not sure if he is cleansing his links with India - an association he is forced to have due to stereotypes but probably can't fit himself into that label.

He points the social evils that exist in India and generalises that as common place , he takes extreme yet valid points of views of what is wrong with India and makes it sound like that is the norm. e.g.-insinuating all Indian women commit sati, poverty is a fashion statement hence Indians will never rise up etc. Taking exceptions and making them the rule is the disconnect I have.
There are aspects of modern day India in his assessment of media being hand in glove with the government - complaints you hear even today. He talks of high level of intolerance in Indian society , something you hear even today. He also paints a very pessimistic picture of individuals specifically Gandhi and Bhave. Beyond a point, you wonder - is there anything about India that Naipaul finds positive and that imbalance is what put me off about this book. Or maybe just rename the book to "India - Everything that is wrong with it" to set expectations for the reader.

A fascinating view of India during the Emergency in 1975-1976. Naipaul has a very negative view of India and its obsession with Gandhism. A good quote that sums up his viewpoint is ‘Gandhi swept through India, but he has left it without an ideology. He awakened the Holy land; his mahatmahood returned it to archaism; he made his worshippers vain.’

Although the eight essays in this book were published 40 years ago their relevance can still be seen today in India. Bonded labour or slavery still exists, the caste system still exists and thrives as well as the poverty in the rural areas. The examples he gives of trying to bring modern technology to India and the reluctance to change is still evident in 2018. However, India is changing albeit slowly.

I was surprised to see Balzac and his novel Cousine Bette mentioned in the final essay as I just finished it a week ago. The context was about work and duty. The problem with India from these essays is your caste defines who you are and your place in society and status with no real way to escape it.

This is a book about India, but it could be about "oriental fatalism" more generally, which Naipaul never ceased to notice or despise. Naipaul criticizes the psychology of Hinduism from the perspective of someone who is culturally Hindu himself. He engages in his usual curmudgeonly tourism and shares his lacerating observations. The medieval squalor of Indian life is depicted in evocative terms. There are also extended attacks on Gandhi and certain Indian literary figures of the 1970s. The British are praised for intellectually stimulating India during their colonial enterprise. The world Naipaul is describing already seems to have been superseded.

I didn't like this book at first since it seemed to be irrelevant to present circumstances. After awhile though, its significance began to dawn on me. This is a book about one type of Hindu, or one type of Asian, killing another type. Naipaul hates what he sees as the decadent spirituality of India. He wants a new Hindu Indian, who is a man of action rather than one of Gandhian spirituality and self-cultivation. The latter, it is argued, has resigned Hindus to centuries of defeat, subjection, casteism and acceptance of suffering. Rather than a type of stoicism, spirituality is merely the minimum psychological tool for a defeated people to survive. He cherrypicks history to paint as bleak a picture as possible and has total faith in the West, which admittedly was still at its unchallengeable apex during his early lifetime. He did not see the good or the possibilities that may exist or had existed within a non-Western people. Nonetheless, as always, he was correct that something was wrong.

Naipaul wanted Hindu Indians to leave behind spiritual nonsense and stir to material action, rational calculation and race consciousness. Reading this book helped me understand Naipaul's own later support of Hindu nationalist movements, including violent ones. He laceratingly criticizes the traditional Hindu way of life and thought, in a way that would probably have struck some as offensive. For all his venom, it's intended as constructive criticism. He painfully wanted Hindus to thrive as a powerful modern people, rather than as bearers some ancient civilization. It seems like people did listen to him in India. They changed, and are changing. "The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill," Naipaul wrote. There can be no continuity with any imagined antique harmony. I am starting to think that is a good message for Muslims to reflect on as well.

The Gandhian world that Naipaul loathed so much is in its death throes. In many ways Naipaul was really under-recognized as an anti-Gandhi. Some of his criticisms are no doubt true. But I feel that the jury is still out on his total hatred for metaphysics and embrace of Western materialism. If the process of psychological Westernizing the people of India and Asia ultimately leads them to material death — either through ecological collapse or nuclear annihilation — in my view that will be an important judgement to take into consideration.

Naipaul explained why India was still backward long after independence

I read this interesting book, India: A Wounded Civilization by V. S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian-born British writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.

The book was first published in 1976. The author tries to answer this question: why India remained so backward nearly three decades after its independence from British rule in 1947, two years ahead of China's.

There are basically four factors that have kept India backward: 1. Hindus religion, 2. the polarization of the rich and poor, 3. lack of education, enlightenment and intellectuals among its vast population, 4. the incompetent governing of India government.

Hinduism, especially its caste system, divides people into castes so people accept without resistance the reality however miserable it is. The system covered the majority of Indian population and played an important role at the time when the author wrote this book. The author believed that many India's deep-rooted ideas and ideology had hindered the development of Indian civilization and social progress. He believed Hinduism is one of the most important reasons for the decline of Indian civilization.

Throughout history, India has been conquered and occupied many times by foreigners like Arabs, Muslims and British. The author concludes, no civilization is so lacking in resilience; no country is so easily invaded and plundered, and never learns a thing from these disasters. This ancient civilization is wounded by itself. Therefore, even after winning the independence from the British, India simply does not have the intelligence to govern an independent country.

The author paints a rather unflattering picture of India. That's why he is not well-liked in India. Since this book was first out in 1976, I'm not sure how much has been changed since then.

The book reminds me of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I'm amazed at the power of ideas and ideology and how something spiritually poor keeps people materially poor in India. I strongly recommend this book.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/naipau...

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. Naipaul came to write this book on his third visit to India, prompted by the Emergency of 1975.

This one is my first book of the author and I have no prior knowledge about the author in terms of his literature and literary traditions.

The main theme of the book is that Indian Hindus are a self-engrossed society. We are not outward-looking and want to remain that way. We are so satisfied with our stability that when an attack comes from outside, be it military or cultural, we just don’t know how to defend ourselves. The wound is self-inflicted. He has used novels of RK Narayan, Vijay Tendulkar, and Samskara by U.R. Ananthamurthy. He then went on to discuss his experiences in a Rajasthan village, Mumbai slum, a village in Maharashtra, an election campaign by old Gandhian in Ajmer, and dialogue with various types of men and women. Then he analyses Gandhi and his successor Vinoda Bhave in detail.

In the initial parts, I realized that he is too negative about Indians and Indian Society and did not like him. But as the book went on, I could get his points better. As he sees, we live in a glorious past and loathe the present. This has restricted us in our thinking. We are not adventurous and innovative. He is not critical of Indian culture, but he is critical of us who took it at face value. He said that poverty was glorified in India and went on to give examples of it. Individuals are so entangled in the cast, rituals, and a fixed way of life that they cannot think beyond. He has been really brave to raise questions about Gandhi and Vinoda Bhave. He did not question the intentions of Gandhi and his role in the Independence movement, but his lack of observation and vague idealism are the targets. He was surprised to see that in ‘Experiments of Truth’ when Gandhi describes his move to London, he didn’t describe his ocean voyage which must have been an experience in itself. When he is there in the richest city in the world for the first time, even then he did not describe the city, or his feeling over there. He is just interested in discussing his personal way of life. This clearly demonstrates a lack of connection with the world. A leader who wants to lead a nation ahead of all nations must be able to examine various aspects of other societies.

Somehow, his narration sent me to Sanjeev Sanyal’s comment in ‘The Geographical History of India’. He said that in the early parts of the second millennia, Indian society went rigid. Suddenly, a civilization of explorers banned ocean voyages calling it against religion. Sanskrit which derived its richness from various languages was made still. The country which was a world leader in science, literature, architecture, and arts suddenly became still.

Though Naipaul says that the trouble didn’t come from successive invasions but from the weakness within. There is a lack of observation in our society. Despite being free, we are still using borrowed Western institutions because we don’t have the capability to make new ones as we don’t observe, don’t analyze, and we are not creative.

Though at many places, it can be said that he has presented outside or superficial view of Indian society, without living it based on seeing it, not observing it (applying the same standard which he applied during his narration). One can say that once you are attacked and unable to defend yourself, you tend to withdraw yourself to the safety of a shell like a tortoise. Self-inflicted injury is acceptable, but the series of foreign invasions seem to be negating an obvious factor. While analyzing a society at present, examining its past is equally important which I found missing in the discourse.

A book worth reading, and I hope that I could finish the trilogy.

Naipul has an interesting viewpoint on India having lived there as well as Britain and Windies for big chunks of his life. He feels that India has let others write its history and needs to step up and make its own destiny. It is also interesting for me reading this 40 years after it was written - with the relatively recent internet economy, outsourcing, rise of education and other large trends which have helped India take these steps towards self-actualization.
He is quite critical of India at times especially discussing post-Partition issues of religion and caste. I would be really interested if he updated the book with a 5-10 page reflection on new directions for the country.

In my work I interact with a lot of programmers who have a different (younger) take on Indian issues, more often focusing on South India (Telegu, Tamil usually). It reminds me what a kaleidescope of personalities and multi-faced culture the country is composed of!

The second in the India trilogy, I enjoyed every page... Some hard-hitting facts, some even relevant today...

In the forward, Naipaul identifies himself to be of the New World, having been raised in a far more homogeneous Indian community in Trinidad, than the isolated countrymen Gandhi met in South Africa in 1983. He also admits to have been washed clean off many religious attitudes, which according to him, are essential in understanding Indian civilization. This book is a collection of 8 essays in 3 parts, on his experiences and observations about the mainland, during Internal Emergency(1975-1977).

With this knowledge at one’s disposal, though rude and harsh from an average Indian perspective, these essays offer good critique on life during Emergency period and Indian democracy in general. In the introductory essay he aligns his first Indian visit with what he had learned about the country from RK Narayan‘s 1949 novel ‘Mr. Sampath‘. His Indian experience becomes less accessible and overwhelming, as he finds everyone politically nonchalant like the titular character of book. He then associates his observation with the repeated conquests of land in past and its tendency to respond by retreating to archaism, even though it provides no substitute for modernities like like Press, Parliament or Courts. He further effeminates ‘Non-violence’ as a means of securing undisturbed calm and reduces it to an excuse for non-doing, non-interference and social indifference. Also contradictingly, he is somehow unable to appreciate any effort for individual and collective (abolition of privy purses and titles, a female prime minister addressing the nation about living in the present without sweeping away the past) advancements, and write them off as mock aggressiveness and mock desperation. Still, in Naipaul’s denial of Hindu response to the world, in its comedy and irony, this reader found a mysterious reverence towards something he couldn’t comprehend.

In the second essay, he brings our attention to another novel by Narayan– ‘The Vendor of Sweets’. Here I found myself aligning with the author, in his complaint of using elated visions of eternity as cheap escapism from ones duties, a concept highly misrepresented in Hesse‘s ‘Siddhartha’. I was ‘hear, hear’ with his viewpoints, in blind acceptance of suffering as ‘karma’ for what one has done in past lives, though he was using it for emphasizing the elegiac fixation of India in its past. Our newfound romance soon found its grave, when he started hyphenating ‘Karma’ as the classical Hindu retreat, who got nothing to offer, when his world shatters. Still, under the light of then deified poverty with Gandhian-ism, it wasn’t difficult for me to agree with the existence and acceptance of antique violence and caste system, justified by the twisted philosophy of past life redemption.

The third essay – ‘The Skyscrapers and the Chawls’, is Naipaul‘s ‘Maximum City’. His experiences in Bombay had made him render the city in an image of Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, but with a crowd that never truly dispersed. Unable to understand the prevailing street culture, he then goes back to the mistake of relating individual Identity with set of beliefs, and concludes that people are burdened with a nationalism, which, after years of subjection, badly demanded an Idea of India. This underlying narrative prevailed in the essay that followed where he defined Naxalism as ‘an intellectual tragedy of middle class, incapable of generating ideas of its own, borrowing someone else’s idea of revolution’. His next essay, ‘A Defect of Vision’ tried to define Gandhian philosophy as a negative way of perceiving the external world. Naipaul argues Gandhi’s experiments and discoveries and vows as means for answering his own needs as a Hindu, for defining ‘the self’ in the midst of hostility, and not of universal application. He then puts forward an amazing review for U.R. Anantamurti’s novel, ‘Samskara’ to substantiate this fierce inward concentration of ‘Hindu nationalism’. Gist of both could be better summed up in Sudhir Karkar’s words – n  “We Indians use the outside reality to preserve the continuity of the self-amidst an ever changing flux of outer events and things”n. I wish I could prove Naipaul wrong after what is almost half a century, but Indian Politics still remain narrow, and based on caste and religion as he accuses it to be, back then.

Remaining portions of book are more or less variegated accounts of Emergency Period, from freedom of Press to Poverty, with the underlying idea of ‘modernity’ or ‘Indian-ness’ being a facade. But he offered a commendable perspective on clamorous religious excitation of Indian political programme. Gandhian-ism in modern day is reduced to Mahatma-hood: religious ecstasy and self-display, and escape from constructive thought and political burdens. Like a solace for conquered people, alienated by the state, he argues. I thoroughly enjoyed his well-researched last essay, where his pet punching bag was Bhave, for overdoing everything and making Gandhi a figure like ‘Merlin’. Yet, by the end of the day, to Naipaul, India is without an ideology, locked in by fantasies of Ramraj (Rule of Ram: an Indian utopia), spirituality and return to village, where everyone is paralyzed with obedience as demanded by ‘dharma’.

The communal accord of history moves along the lines of identifying India primarily by her religious identities, and is uprooted on the colonial assumption of them being fundamentally in conflict. And there are historians who produce voluminous reports in this line, using the century old Colonial pretext of Imperial powers being the anointed benign saving medium. I remember reading an essay associating Naipaul’s acceptance in the New World over n  Desanin, for his West appeasing narrative, and though farfetched, this book inclines me to buy that argument. No matter what he had experienced over the visit, the good, the bad and the ugly of a young nation in its worst period of democratic history, Naipaul was hell bent on finding a way back to his personal clincher – title of the book.

In the first essay, Naipaul mentions about a middle class rich girl he got to meet during a Delhi dinner party, who is married to a foreigner and living abroad. To him, she was in a state of despair and confusion, of having lost her place in the world, not having a caste or a community. And he was amazed by her calmness on return to India during the chaotic Emergency, like its world’s deepest order, where everything is fixed, sanctified and secure. If I may go off the reservation and be a condescending critic as this book was, I found Naipaul jealous of above trait and rather frustrated in his inability to understand the civilization he draws bloodline from, and yet, utterly helpless in being drawn towards it time and again.

This maybe his coping mechanism.

Still, one cannot categorize this book as an archaic critique on antique mind-sets, without ignoring the relevance of harsh truths, however little and offending they might be. Especially in our present day ‘triggered’ generation, filled with internal anxieties about food eaten, places of worship, sexual preferences, and intolerance towards everything they can’t agree with. But marginalizing a whole civilization solely on their basis and laxity towards everything otherwise, is where author and this reader part ways.

This is the second book of Naipaul’s ‘India trilogy’; and, while the first book was more in the line of a conventional travel memoir – albeit with scattered observations and insights on the Indian way of life – this book almost dispenses with the travel aspect completely. Instead, Naipaul here seems to have completed a particular journey of disillusionment, and the text is almost wholly given up to an extended meditation on India’s civilizational arrest.

The book opens with Naipaul visiting the ruins of Vijayanagar, the erstwhile Hindu kingdom, and a rallying point for the current day Hindu nationalist movement. The treatment of Vijayanagar acts a synecdoche for the rest of the book; Naipaul notes that even during its’ heyday in the 14th and 15th centuries, its art and architecture were only heavy-handed copies of previous Hindu glory further back in time. The decline of Indian civilization has very long roots indeed.

Naipaul is in search of these roots. There are several references in the text to India’s impotence in the face of the changing world; and Naipaul, an intellectual himself, notes that this impotence manifests itself as an intellectual vacuum - what he cruelly calls India’s intellectual ‘second-rateness’. India does not have any especial gift for synthesis, as her defenders are wont to proclaim; rather, in keeping with their status as a subjugated people, Indians have been intellectually parasitic on the world. Unable to produce any guiding idea for its own people, India's conspicuous ‘lack of an ideology’ means that Indians rely on other, imperfectly understood cultures for their tenacious sustenance upon the world stage.

While he does not use the exact term, what Naipaul has diagnosed here is a subcontinental-wide form of psychological regression; in fact, he even reproduces the words of the Indian psychoanalyst, Sudhir Kakar, who offers a psychological diagnosis of civilizational mediocrity. For the most part, Indians have an ‘underdeveloped ego’ with the corresponding ‘tenuous grasp of reality’ that this implies. The subjectivism of most Indians, with all the connotations of primitive magic and fantasy that this brings along in its' wake, is a negative achievement, countenanced by the general failure to engage with reality. Naipaul quotes Kakar's speculation that this failure is due to the absurdly over-regulated social sphere in which most Indians live – responsibility for reality is constantly outsourced and travels increasingly diminished across an endless chain, leading to a people in permanent paralysis and tragically unaware of their own mediocrity.

Thus, wounded and threatened by the churning and vibrant outside world, Indians refuse to move forward and instead take refuge in a glorious past of which too they have little real understanding. This is the tragedy of India’s intellectual myopia – and leads to Indians as a people, and India as a polity, simply outsourcing the running of the world to others.

This stunned and insecure worldview is perfectly represented by the novelist RK Narayan. I remember scattered remarks in ‘An Area of Darkness’, that testified to Naipaul’s admiration of Narayan; but here, it seems that the admiration has become much more mixed. Narayan’s self-contained world, with the gentle humour that can only survive in such a severely circumscribed world, has a touch of the didactic eternalism so dear to the Hindus; and Naipaul concludes, that for all its humanity and lightness of touch, Narayan’s novels represent a deeply Hindu response to a world that has passed it by, and, in so doing, has injured it. It is the forced adoption of calm in the face of defeat, it is playing dead.

The figure of Narayan also plays a double role in Naipaul’s reckoning – he is a figure of interest not only in the context of his novels and what these represent, but also himself as a novelist. Naipaul observes – and it is an observation that he had made in his earlier book as well – that the novel, being a form of social inquiry, is something quite removed from Indian sensibilities. Narayan therefore represents the pathos of engaging with the outside world, but in a half-hearted manner – India’s sole remaining genius seems to lie in importing foreign ideas and modes of world-engagement into her own depleted milieu and contorting them until they fit, null, alongside the nullity that is her own.

The intellectual mediocrity of the subcontinent is further exemplified by what the country has done to its Gandhian legacy. It seems that Naipaul has a mixed opinion of Gandhi himself. On the one hand, there are remarks of admiration for the man’s greatness of spirit as well as the genuine complexity of his personality that refuses to succumb to caricature. On the other hand, Naipaul glumly speculates that Gandhi’s appropriation of the ancient Hindu virtue of quietism into a project of national awakening, was ultimately a null venture; the India which he awakened was an India of ‘far older defeat’, and the qualities he called up in service of the awakening were qualities which were the handmaidens of that defeat and, after Gandhi himself disappeared, would inevitably lead India back to her deep sleep once again. The caricaturing of the Gandhian legacy – captured in Naipaul’s brutal description of Vinoba Bhave, a figure whom I had only vaguely known – is symptomatic of Indian lethargy, but is the harbinger of a much more troubling civilizational attribute. Even India’s one resurgence on the modern world stage, the Gandhi-led awakening, was forced to look backwards to India’s past. It seems, Naipaul is saying, that any Indian renaissance or revival can only take the form of a looking back. The civilization is too depleted of spirit to look forward.

It is fair to say that Naipaul locates India’s continuing defeat in Hinduism; or, more accurately, in the Hindu psychology of which the religion is only the manifestation. Naipaul has already shown his cards, declaring that a century of his forefathers being uprooted from Indian soil, had been enough of a time period to cleanse him, personally, of many of the old Indian religious attitudes; and he caustically remarks that, without the filter of these attitudes, without the filter that is, of some element of fantasy or magic, the filth and squalor of India is intolerable. Some of the attitudes that Naipaul locates and which he viciously castigates include; the virtues of quietism, of blind obedience, social indifference and apathy, the bracketing of the world not as a place for action and of individual heroism, but only as a stage for the impersonal calculus of karma; a sense of history, insomuch as it can be said to exist in Hinduism, that is primitive and which only lends itself to a perspective of history as an extended religious fable and nothing more. In sum, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, for all the soaring heights of Hindu speculation, the religion has degenerated considerably into (or perhaps, has always been) a barbaric process of primitive magic and equally primitive wish-fulfillment; and further, more generally, that the entire religious edifice, distilled into the typical Hindu psychology and ‘way of life’ is only an exhausted religious response to worldly humiliation.

There are other cruel, almost uncalled-for, criticisms of certain typical Indian attitudes and behaviours: Naipaul takes issue with the uniquely subjective manner in which most Indians perceive the world, whereby the latter is only encountered insomuch as it affects the inner emotional state. This ‘negative way’ of perceiving is allied to the underdeveloped ego, and mitigates against curiosity, objective engagement with the world, and effective action. This distinct lack of curiosity about reality means that the desire of India’s leaders at Independence, to inculcate the spirit of scientific temper, has been reduced to a shameful mockery. Naipaul notes that most Indians who make contributions to global science do so outside India – and, what is more worrying, are almost expected to do so. There seems to be an acceptance of the fact that India itself will not nurture scientific curiosity and will not reward it. The scientists who have made their contributions and then return to India resume their place in the stifling matrix of stagnation that is the subcontinent, and their brilliance evaporates under the pressure-cooker of India’s over-regulated social space. The merit they had attained previously under the aegis of their own efforts, now can be had simply by playing one’s circumscribed role in the implied eternity of Hindu life.

Hinduism subtracts brilliance and energy from its adherents, Naipaul seems to be saying, and substitutes crude and readymade pleasures on their behalf. The paralyzing effect of Hinduism means that ‘men do not actively explore the world, but are instead, defined by it.’ But this permanent Hindu immobility means that India invites disasters again and again.

In conclusion, I thought that this was a very sobering and especially brutal look at India and Indians. I did not intend this review to be as long as it turned out - but Naipaul's observations evoked a deep and painful dialogue within me. With the previous book, I had come away with a sympathy for Naipaul’s analyses and yet maintained a sense of unfairness at the harsh criticisms he was making. In the span of years that has passed since then, however, it really does seem to me that Naipaul is by and large correct in his analysis of Indian civilization; my protest dies under the weight of facts. Again, to return to the previous book, I had come away enraptured with Naipaul’s prose; here, my enthusiasm has considerably waned. Not to say that the writing isn’t decidedly above-average – after all, if the skill of a writer is measured by the ability to match words to needs, Naipaul exceeds exceptionally. No one can accuse him of hiding shoddy perception with flowery language. Rather, the language is as unfeeling and brutally exact as the observations. My complaint would be rather that it seems quite uninspired in spots, there is a certain rigidity about the prose that betokens a lack of vitality – almost as if the prose was in response to the devitalized country he was sojourning in.

A strongly recommended book for people interested in India and who care about it.

The author casts an analytical eye over what he saw as Indian attitudes especially during his sojourn between 1975-76. While his insight into our over-glorification of our past achievements as well as a bid to return to so-called past halcyon days is bang-on, he appears to have missed out significant green-shoots among the educated liberal population. As a result, this work turns out to be overly critical of India and Indians.