Expatriate
John Grigg
India: A Wounded Civilisation V. S. Naipaul (Andre Deutsch, £3.95) V.S. Naipaul's maternal grandfather left a village in what is now Uttar Pradesh and went as an indentured labourer to Trinidad, where in due course he settled and prospered. Thirteen years ago his grandson described, in An Area of Darkness, his own return to the village and his reaction to India generally. A year's travelling in the country — his first direct experience of it — had convinced him (or so he said) of his 'separateness' from it, and had made him 'content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors'. Even then one could doubt the accuracy of his self-knowledge. Was he — a distinguished member of the Indian Diaspora — really so detached in mind and spirit from what is, after all, one of the world's great mother-countries? Was it only 'duty' that took him back to his ancestral village? Was it not also a natural curiosity, and an equally natural desire for roots? And why was he at such pains to explain that the village was a village of brahmins?
His new book on India, written after a visit during Mrs Gandhi's spell of personal rule, removes all doubts about his position. Far from being detached he is clearly obsessed with India, and his obsession gives added power to his writing on the subject, while to some extent distorting his vision. Whereas An Area of Darkness was largely descriptive, India: A Wounded Civilisation (a shorter book) is a brilliant but emotionally charged polemic.
The main target of his attack is Hinduism, Whose general effect upon the Indian mentality he regards as negative and enfeebling. The result is 'intellectual second-rateness', and the fact that India 'now has little to offer the world except its Gandhian concept of holy poverty and the recurring crooked comedy of its holy men, and which, while asserting the antiquity of its civilisation (and usually simply asserting, without knowledge or scholarship), is now dependent in every practical way on other, imperfectly understood civilisations'. He sums up his argument in a striking formula: 'The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past Will kill.'
Yet on Mr Naipaul's own evidence Indian life is not exclusively static or parasitic. In a Bombay squatters' settlement he meets a technician who, as a boy, had migrated to the big city from a country village (the sort of movement which is only possible because India, unlike China, is a free country). At first he may only have had 'floor space in somebody's room', but then he `had found a small job somewhere and had gone to night school'. His big break was getting into Air India, ..'the least bureaucratised of Indiant organisations', where he was encouraged to become a technical apprentice.
This man is not an isolated instance, but typical of many — indeed millions — of Indians `on the move'. Mr Naipaul finds 'a new country, a new continent' on the plateau around Poona, where industrialists and technicians are building for the next century: Their confidence, in the general doubt, is staggering. But it is so in India: the doers are always enthusiastic. And industrial India is a world away from the India of bureaucrats and journalists and theoreticians.
But Mr Naipaul is contemptuous of 'intermediate technology' and contrasts the dynamism of the cities with the traditional pattern of life in rural India, with which Gandhi largely identified himself.
Gandhi is presented as a great leader who gradually degenerated into `mahatmahood' after his return to India from South Africa in 1915. In South Africa, according to Mr Naipaul, he became creative and revolutionary because the conditions there aroused 'his racial sense, his sense of belonging to a people specifically of the Indian subcontinent'. But the racial sense is 'alien to Indians', and back in India his 'racial message always merged into the religious one', so that he left India without an ideology.
This view of Gandhi's career seems to me oversimplified as well as mistaken, reflecting a crucial flaw in Mr Naipaul's view of India and the Indian national consciousness. It must be tempting for him to believe that Gandhi was a different and better man when, like himself, he was a 'colonial', living outside India. But in fact Gandhi was no more (or less) revolutionary in South Africa than he became after his return home. He evolved in South Africa a philosophy to which he remained true for the rest of his life, and it was far from being a racist ideology. Insisting that means were no less important than ends, he compromised with Smuts in South Africa just as he later compromised *With the British in India, and in both phases of his career his inspiration was more religious than political.
But his was a comprehensive religion, embracing Christian and Islamic ideas in the concept of a reformed Hinduism. Thus it served, as an ideology of race never could have served, to bind Indians together in a national movement transcending all barriers. India is divided by race as much as, if not more than, by caste and creed, and what Mr Naipaul regards as a weakness in Gandhi was in fact, surely, one of his strongest points. His ideal of a united India bridged the gulf between Aryans and Dravidians, as it bridged that between Hindus and Muslims, and that between caste Hindus and Untouchables.
Of course it will take generations for his ideal to triumph, and before he died he had to witness terrible setbacks. But the essen tial validity of his idealism (ideology is a nasty and confining word) should not be judged by those setbacks, not should it be judged by the activities of his disciples and would-be imitators. In his own time he concentrated upon giving the vast majority of Indians who lived in villages an urge to improve themselves, and the minority of town-dwellers a sense of identity with the villagers. Hence the symbolism of the spinning-wheel and khandi.
In any ancient and complex community (and few are more ancient or complex than India) the forces of change have to be balanced by forces of stability and continuity. To amend Mr Naipaul's formula, the past must be seen to live or the future will never be born. Of that truth Gandhi was instinctively aware and his genius was at once conservative and radical-reformist. Gandhianism is not only, or even primarily, what Mr Naipaul calls it — 'the solace still of conquered people'. Above all, it is the spirit of liberation from foreign and domestic chains.
Mr Naipaul's belief that the political institutions of independent India were alien to the country and therefore unworkable led him to assume that Congress could never lose an election. But after his book was written the Indian people sprang a big surprise on him, as on their rulers. Perhaps his obsession with India will in future define itself more clearly as ancestral pride, and less as the love-hate of an expatriate.
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