An Area of Darkness book by V.S. Naipaul ( 1964)
Rating 2
(1=Bad, 2=Ok won’t recommend, 3=OK time pass, 4=Good, 5=Very good don’t miss)
Where to Read/Listen: Audible

#bannedbooks

This is part travelogue, part connected short stories, part book reviews and partly just incoherent ramblings of an old man with no real point to be made. The travelogue and short stories parts the author’s style reminds one of Basheer and R.K. Narayan where there are great descriptions and details to make the scene come to life in our imagination. But, in the ramblings part it seems as if Narayanan or Basheer grew old and lost their ‘plot’.
In his ramblings he reviews the Bhagavad Gita, Gandhi, Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Jane Austin and E. M. Forster.
But not everything is incoherent though. For example Gandhi claimed to be guided by the Geetha throughout his life. The author points out some incompatibilities in the philosophies of Gandhi and The Gita. Gandhi strived to bring about equality of the castes while the Gita may be used by some to reaffirm caste differences as ordained by God. The author gives a nice explanation for Gandhi’s view / use of Gita.

This book was banned for its negative portrayal of India and its people.The part about the ludicrous bureaucracy, caste issues etc in the early period after independence has been written by many including Sasi Taroor (albeit in a way to blame the British for everything). This is a rare book talks about the practice of defecating anywhere. Today such practices have been changed but not many people felt comfortable talking about until we had #swachbharat.

A small caveat: I may have written this review a little incoherently (but passionately!), right after finishing this book. Credit where it’s due, I do appreciate that Naipaul’s writing has an almost lyrical quality and his humour does shine through intelligently. He also hits the nail on the head with the uniquely Indian denial and doublethink of finding joy and meaning in despair.

Owing to all of this, I was almost tempted to give him 3 stars. But as I go on to write below, much of this book is the literary version of trolling.

Naipaul values all that is Western with the same blindness as his rejection of all that is Indian; it amazes me how he criticises some “broad-minded” Indians in the book for a similar sin without a lick of irony. It’s also important to mention the book is set in a time when India is barely on its feet with its newfound independence. Equally important - Naipaul is a highly unreliable narrator who has admitted to having no interest or appreciation for Indian languages or culture and clearly exhibited anger management issues.

Many of his criticisms do hold water even today. Indian readers when confronted with these, tend to either ignore them with brazen, jingoistic pride. Or they over-correct and chastise their people for their inadequacies. And very often as an Indian, if you’re not seen doing the latter, you’re accused of being the former.
But it’s not his stern - albeit self-admittedly unoriginal - remarks on India’s poverty, the caste system and the complicated relationship with its colonial past, that come across as offensive. It’s that every description is so mean-spirited and exaggerated, it rings falsely hollow. Sentence after sentence, full of negativity, eventually numbs the reader, no matter how sharp the words.

For once Goodreads reviews are on my side - he’s a pompous coconut who doesn’t deign to understand his culture and has nothing to offer but Orientalist critique.

V. S Naipaul has always been a controversial figure. Whether it is for his rude behaviour towards fellow writers at conferences or his show of support for India's Hindutva ring, Bharatiya Janata Party or his admission in his autobiography that his callousness killed his wife, this Trinidadian author has always been some sort of an enfant terrible of English literature. For all his genius, he also remains a vilified figure in India and not without reason. The Area of Darkness, when it was published in 1964, created an uproar among Indians and was intensely criticised for its unkind, deriding and supercilious view of India.

Naipaul's literature, much like his personality demonstrates a certain extremism -where there are few or no grey areas. And that is most evident in The Area of Darkness. (His subsequent work, India; A Million Mutinies Now was a far more objective and detailed read -in many ways, this is his best book, apart from A House For Mr Biswas). The book is about how Naipaul built a 'mythical' image about India staying in Trinidad (Naipaul's grandfather was from India and they re-located to West Indies - in a small British colony called Trinidad) and how his one-year visit to India shattered his childhood image of the country. The entire experience is a deeply personal one -- and Naipaul himself behaves like a rather fussy, ungenerous foreign-returned guy(he was just about 30 years old) who criticises the loss of his 'imagined world' without bothering to delve into the reasons for it. This was a plundered country that was struggling to fight its colonial past and tackle some enormous problems at hand.

.....readers can read the rest on my blog, www.sandyi.blogspot.com

V.S. Naipaul caustically spins out, at arm´s distance, in silky, spidery prose, his accumulated frustrations, bitterness and resentments. Born in Trinidad, the grandson of a brahmin immigrant, he exemplifies the constant, dull, poignant unease of flimsy, shallow postcolonial roots triply severed from a childhood in Trinidad, a garbled, crumbling heritage from India foisted on a child that knew no better and a half-hearted yearning for an England that never was:

To me as a child the India that had produced so many of the persons and things around me was featureless, and I thought of the time when the transference was made as a period of darkness
[...]
And even now, though time has widened, though space has contracted and I have travelled lucidly over that area which was to me the area of darkness, something of that darkness remains, in those attitudes, those ways of thinking and seeing, which are no longer mine [...]
I came to London. It had become the centre of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. London was not the centre of my world
[...]
But we did not take a houseboat. Their relics were still too movingly personal. Their romance was not mine, and it was impossible to separate them from their romance. I would have felt an intruder [...] I was not English or Indian; I was denied the victory of both.

One feels Naipaul´s grim, tight-lipped incantation "I shall go to India, I shall not like it, I will expose and destroy whatever childhood fantasies about India still lurk in the dark recesses of my makeshift patchwork identity". So the nameless, phantom-accompanied, narrator spends a year in India; after a few cautious, desultory sniffs around New Delhi, he flees into glorious, poisonous seclusion at a lakeside hotel in Kashmir -that seems to be the main extent of his exploration of India. To escape the invasion of the hotel by a rich brahmin family in the clutches of a worldly holy man, he goes on a himalayan pilgrimage to Amarnath Cave to see a "massive ice phallus", but in a typical twist of the novel, at the mouth of the cavern:

Individual advance or retreat was impossible; a woman was sobbing with terror. I climbed up and held on to the iron railing: I could see only crowd and a low rock vault blackened by damp or incense. I climbed back down again [...] No sight of the god, then, for me: I would sit it out.

Suddenly, Naipaul sets everything aside and inserts a prolonged, fascinating and twisted literary reflection on Fantasy and ruins trying to pin down exacty what British Empire meant for England, for Trinidad and for India:

With one part of myself I felt the coming together of England and India as a violation; with the other I saw it as ridiculous, resulting in a comic mixture of costumes and the widespread use of an imperfectly understood language.

In a whirlwind of endeavour, the narrator ushers in Kipling, undermines him with an observation by Ada Leverson and a dismissive, cutting remark by Somerset Maugham, trips us up on E. M Forster, bedazzles us with a brief aside on British travel-writing in the nineteenth century, berates G. M. Trevelelyan for setting aside a mere page and a half to how the possession of an empire influenced British attitudes in the nineteenth century in his work on English Social History, "regarded, I believe," stage-whispers Naipaul with heavy irony "as a classic.":

So, at the height of their power, the British gave the impression of a people at play, a people playing at being English, playing at being English of a certain class. The reality conceals the play; the play conceals the reality.

Now Naipaul is getting into his stride, and his alter ego lashes out at what he considers are feeble, "stupefied" Indian attempts to adopt alien art forms:

...perhaps the British are responsable for this Indian artistic failure, which is part of of the general Indian bewilderment, in the way the Spaniards were responsible for the stupefaction of the Mexicans and the Peruvians.

He dismisses Indian novels in one fell sweep:

Indian attempts at the novel further reveal the Indian confusion. The novel is of the West. It is part of that Western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now. In India thoughtful men have preferred to turn their backs on the here and now and to satisfy what President Rahhakrishnan calls ´the basic human hunger for the unseen´. It is not a good qualification for the writing or reading of novels.

saving only R. K. Narayan:

Indian failings magically transmuted [...] forever rescued by his honesty, his sense of humour and above all by his attitude of total acceptance

and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala ("And she is European", he adds sardonically).

His resentment propels him into becoming a coy sidekick to a hate-filled, racially intolerant, increasingly violent Sikh, from which he finally, reluctantly and relievedly separates. Finally, after his lengthy procastrination, he crosses India to half-heartedly visit his grandfather´s home village in Uttar Pradesh and even before setting his foot in the town he is bidding it good riddance:

One journey remained, and for this I had lost taste. India had not worked its magic on me [...] it was closing up again, as fast as I withdrew from it [...] In a year I had not learned acceptance. I had learned my separateness from India, and was content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors.

So he buffers himself with IAS officials and in a week long visit to the area, reduces his visit to his ancestors´village, where he still has distant family, to a mere day and a half. So ends his trip to India, as, in my opinion, it started:

...in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight[...]It was a journey that ought not to have been made

Only in Arthur Koestler´s The Lotus and the Robot does one find such a violent reaction against India, and Koestler is reacting against what he perceived to be sham spirituality, against nonsense and filth dressed up as religious sentiment; in Naipaul, his narrator twin seems to be in complete, preemptive denial of anything that could tie him to India.

In short, be forewarned, to read this book is to be reeled into a brilliant dew-dropped web in the centre of which lurks a quivering, poisonous, alienated spider.