BOOKS

Outsider not quite at home

James Buchan

INDIA: A MILLION MUTINIES NOW by V. S. Naipaul

Heinemann, £16.95, pp.520

In V. S. Naipaul's last book, which describes a journey through the southern states of the US, there is a long and lyrical passage in praise of the poor whites known as rednecks. The passage was excerpted in the New York Review of Books and much admired by literary Americans for its novelty and passion:

'There are three of your rednecks fishing in the pond.' And I hurried to see them, as I might have hurried to see an unusual bird or a deer. And there, indeed, they were, bare-backed, but with the wonderful base- ball hats, in a boat among the reeds, on a weekday afternoon — people who, before Campbell had spoken, I might have seen flatly, but now saw as people with a certain past, living out a certain code, a threatened species.

This is also Naipaul's gift: to pick out an element from the everyday landscape that nobody had much noticed before or had taken for granted. It is an art that requires concentration and a certain boldness: the redneck passage teeters on the edge of the ludicrous. It also requires distance, and here Naipaul, over more than 30 years of writing, has made a virtue of being an outsider. Brought up in Trinidad, the grandson of North Indian Brahmins ex- patriated by the British to cut cane as indentured workers, Naipaul seems not to be quite at home anywhere: certainly not in the Caribbean, nor England, nor the US, not even India.

Of all these places, it is India that engages Naipaul, the country his family left behind, a hidden but capital source of customs and ideas, a place of pride and shame. In his 1962 book about India, An Area of Darkness, Naipaul spells out quite clearly what India once meant to him: 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 [i.e of his grand- parents] was made as a period of darkness, darkness which also extended to the land, as darkness surrounds a hut at evening, though for a little way around the hut there is still light.

The book he wrote (in London) is a good one, though it is infected by some of the cleverness of British English travel writing of the time. It annoyed many Indians in India and still does. Naipaul has now gone back to India to attempt, in his maturity, to bring more light into the darkness. A Million Mutinies Now is a book on which Naipaul obviously sets much store: perhaps the book he would like to be judged on, alongside A House for Mr Biswas and the best of the novels.

The book is loosely arranged as an account of a long journey, evidently made in 1989, to Bombay, then Goa, Bangalore and Madras in the south, then Calcutta, Lucknow and Punjab, finally Kashmir. Significantly, Naipaul avoids Delhi. Travelogue is mercifully kept to a mini- mum. There is an account of Bombay airport, some Brahminical horror at the dirt of India and some restrained and elegant description of places. But the bulk of the book consists of interviews with scores of Indians, of every degree between ex-Maharaja and Untouchable, recorded with very little overt intervention.

These interviews are themselves organ- ised, though lightly, to concentrate atten- tion on aspects of Naipaul's theme, which is the mutinies of the title: the growing

'It's after the 9 o'clock watershed!' particularism of India, the breakdown of old loyalties alongside a new consciousness of caste or class or religion. So Bombay is a city in which to consider Maharashtra chauvinism and the movement of Untouch- ables or Dalits; Madras a place to meditate on anti-Brahminism; Calcutta, the Maoist terrorists known as Naxalites; Lucknow, the decline in Muslim culture; Punjab, Sikh fundamentalism.

The approach works well because the interviews are so good. Naipaul has a peculiar ability to bring his people to life. Here is a typical passage, not startling, but efficient writing:

He had been one of the Viceroy's Commis- sioned Officers as they were called, and when he left the army he had the rank of

jemadar. As a kid, I used to admire him. I used to look forward to seeing him. He was

always well turned out. He had a lot of gifts for us — chocolates, canteen supplies. The only thing I didn't like about him was the smoking.

What looks so wordy and relaxed is, I suspect, contrived with some care.

But Naipaul's greatest gift is his talent for understanding how a person's view of the world enlarges and narrows, how time and the movement of generations change families. The best passages in this book describe places — the Lucknow bazaar, a Brahmin colony in Madras — where we would see just teeming people but Naipaul sees communities struggling to escape or accommodate change. Here is the Luck- now bazaar:

Rashid said, 'All the jobs here have this soul-destroying quality. They are doing it only because their fathers did it before them. They've probably never stepped out of the area. They listen to cassettes of film songs and religious songs, turned up loud, to distract themselves from the deadening labour, whether it's beating out silver foil or doing embroidery or brocade work. They drink a lot of tea in glasses. There is a reason for the tea-drinking. It kills the appetite. When they want to pee, they just go down and pee in the streets.'

The problem with this long book is its reticence. Its very title — with the clumsy 'Now' at the end, added as if metri gratia — suggests something tentative, not quite formed. The English reader will plough through 517 pages before he finds a judg- ment of the utility to Indians of British rule in India. Even then, Naipaul backs into it with what looks like excruciating embar- rassment:

The British peace after the 1857 Mutiny can be seen as a kind of luck. It was a time of intellectual recruitment. India was set on the way of a new kind of intellectual life; it was given new ideas about its history and civilisa- tion. The freedom movement reflected all this and turned out to be the truest kind of liberation.

I'm unconvinced by this. It is as if Naipaul cannot praise or condemn the British without compromising a strand in his nature.

More important, the book ducks one of the great questions of our era: will the ramshackle structure that is post- Independence India hold together or break up? Naipaul assembles mountains of evi- dence and hearsay, only to suggest, right at the end, that it probably may hold together. I feel that Naipaul is constrained from judgment, first by his fastidious sense of distance, his outsiderness, and then by his facility which permits him to set things down quickly and clearly before moving on to something else. This book should have been Naipaul's masterpiece. It is merely good.