V. S. Naipaul's Journeys: From Periphery to Center 9780231550253

Citation preview

V. S. NAIPAUL’S JOURNEYS

SANJAY KRISHNAN

V. S. NAIPAUL’S JOURNEYS From Periphery to Center

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Boston University Center for the Humanities in the publication of this book

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2020 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Krishnan, Sanjay, author. Title: V. S. Naipaul’s journeys : from periphery to center / Sanjay Krishnan. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019025485 (print) | LCCN 2019025486 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231193320 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231550253 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932–2018—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PR9272.9.N32 Z7494 2020 (print) | LCC PR9272.9.N32 (e-book) | DDC 823/.914—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025485 LC e-book record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025486 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Cover photo: Parkes Photographic Archive / © Alamy

CONTENTS

Abbreviations vii INTRODUCTION

1

EARLY WRITINGS: 1955–1961 1. MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT: MIGUEL STREET; THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 37 2. SELF AND SOCIETY: THE SUFFRAGE OF ELVIRA; A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS 52

THE MIDDLE PERIOD: 1962–1980 3. HISTORICAL IDENTITIES: THE MIDDLE PASSAGE; AN AREA OF DARKNESS 73 4. FANTASY AND DERANGEMENT: THE LOSS OF EL DORADO; INDIA: A WOUNDED CIVILIZATION; “MICHAEL X AND THE KILLINGS IN TRINIDAD” 91

VI

C ON T EN T S

5. AMBIGUOUS FREEDOM: “IN A FREE STATE” 6. TRUTH AND LIE: A BEND IN THE RIVER

123

139

LATE WORKS: 1981–2010 7. PRODUCTIVE DEFORMATION: THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL 161 8. LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND: INDIA: A MILLION MUTINIES NOW 187 9. CONVERSATIONS WITH THE FAITHFUL: AMONG THE BELIEVERS; BEYOND BELIEF 208 10. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS: HALF A LIFE; MAGIC SEEDS; THE MASQUE OF AFRICA Acknowledgments 245 Notes 247 Index 285

227

ABBREVIATIONS

Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q

Area: An Area of Darkness Believers: Among the Believers Bend: A Bend in the River Between: Between Father and Son Beyond: Beyond Belief Centre: Finding the Centre Enigma: The Enigma of Arrival “Free”: “In a Free State” Half: Half a Life House: A House for Mr Biswas Loss: The Loss of El Dorado Magic: Magic Seeds Masque: The Masque of Africa Masseur: The Mystic Masseur Middle: The Middle Passage Miguel: Miguel Street Mutinies: India: A Million Mutinies Now Overcrowded: The Overcrowded Barracoon Return: Return of Eva Peron Suffrage: The Suffrage of Elvira Way: A Way in the World Wounded: India: A Wounded Civilisation

V. S. NAIPAUL’S JOURNEYS

INTRODUCTION

F

E W MODERN writers have divided readers as fiercely as V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018). During his lifetime, Naipaul won numerous international awards, most notably the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Naipaul’s admirers point to the formidable scope of his nonfiction and draw attention to the fact that several of his novels have been hailed as masterpieces.1 He has also been referred to as the “first modern global writer.”2 By contrast, Naipaul’s detractors allege that his work reflects “the xenophobia and dehumanization that lay at the heart of colonialism,” and that his personal failings present an insurmountable obstacle to his canonization as a major author.3 These critics also accuse Naipaul of having exploited “the label of genius [to] get away with abusing women” and of being a bigot who profited from his talent for cynically composing “compulsively readable” stories about “vulnerable, broken people.”4 It did not help matters that Naipaul delighted in playing the troll, occasionally emerging from his home in the English countryside to feed the media with sound bites that seemed calculated to provoke outrage.5 By the time of his death, many in the media and at universities regarded Naipaul’s work as a platform for the reprehensible views with which he was personally associated.6 It is significant that Naipaul is the sole Nobel laureate of non-European origin whose work

2

IN T R ODUC T ION

is excluded from the most recent edition of the widely used Norton Anthology of World Literature.7 An editorial in the Guardian identified the broader problem as follows: “V. S. Naipaul, who has died at 85, exemplified a very current preoccupation: whether an author’s personality can be separated from his or her reputation as an artist.”8 Some of Naipaul’s defenders accordingly maintained that his “comments about Islam, women and Africa were often unjustified and untrue—but that can be acknowledged alongside his gifts.”9 Seeking to establish a clear distinction between the unpleasant individual and the accomplished writer, they contended that Naipaul was a great stylist and an experimenter with forms, someone who “never ceased to engage in a fearless—if fraught—conversation about belonging, identity, and the colonial past.”10 The anticolonial Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o similarly praised Naipaul as “a writer’s writer” who was “ruthless in his satiric portrayal of the self-image of this mimic ruling elite, which always looked to the West for validation, but to its own people with disdain.”11 Such divided judgments are further complicated by the different kinds of attention Naipaul commands in many parts of the world. Naipaul was the featured star attraction at international literature festivals held in Bali, Indonesia (at which he failed to appear), and Dhaka, Bangladesh, but withdrew from a writer’s conference in Turkey in 2010 after “a storm of protest in the country’s Islamist media.”12 At the 2015 Jaipur Literature Festival in India, Naipaul drew the largest crowd in the history of the festival, “more than Oprah [Winfrey], more even than Amitabh [Bachchan],” according to an exultant tweet by the festival’s organizer.13 And, at a 2011 conference in Port of Spain, Trinidad, a group of distinguished Caribbean scholars devoted themselves to teasing out the complex ways in which Naipaul’s writings had been shaped by his West Indian background.14 At this conference, the Trinidadian critic Rhonda CobhamSander explored how Naipaul had drawn on personal aspects of his past in ways that illuminated broader tensions in the West Indies.15 A nuanced assessment of the relationship between Naipaul’s life

IN T R ODUC T ION

3

and work can also be discerned in a statement made by the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh: “[Naipaul’s] views and opinions I almost always disagreed with: some because they were founded on truths that were too painful to acknowledge; some because they were misanthropic or objectionable; and some because they came uncomfortably close to being racist. . . . Yet he was writing of matters that no one else thought worth noticing; he had found words to excavate new dimensions of experience.” Ghosh added that an essay of Naipaul’s “has become so intimate a part of my experience that I cannot be certain where my memory ends and where Naipaul’s narrative begins.”16 For both Cobham-Sander and Ghosh, Naipaul’s writings shed an acute if discomfiting light on crucial aspects of their own formations. They imply, moreover, that the force of Naipaul’s literary excavations was linked to his defiance of approved ways of talking about postcolonial societies. In other words, Naipaul had affected them as deeply as he had because of, not despite, his tendency to give offense. It would not have been possible for Naipaul to have elicited such complex responses from skeptical close readers like CobhamSander and Ghosh had he felt mere disdain for his Indian and Trinidadian background or, conversely, had he been exclusively motivated by a desire to win fame and fortune in the metropole. Naipaul’s writings, therefore, demand a nuanced approach. While it is important to recognize their problematic aspects, I do not think we ought to dismiss them for this reason. In part, this is because much of what is uniquely insightful about Naipaul’s work is connected to what is problematic about it. It is in this entangled manner that his writings undertake a self-implicating and socially illuminating reflection on global cultures and histories. As such, I do not rely solely on the binarisms of “ideology critique” (this is the approach adopted by Naipaul’s detractors) but supplement them with close readings that pay attention to the verbal texture— not least the irony and ambiguity—of Naipaul’s writings. In order to respond fully to this texture, it is necessary to understand Naipaul’s personal background. Naipaul’s ancestors were peasants from North India who had been brought in the late

4

IN T R ODUC T ION

nineteenth century to work as indentured laborers on the sugar plantations of Trinidad, a small island in the mouth of the great Orinoco river of Venezuela. So Trinidad is not strictly of South America, and not entirely of the Caribbean. It was developed as a New World plantation colony, and when I was born in 1932 it had a population of about 400,000. Of this, about 150,000 were Indians, Hindus and Muslims, nearly all of peasant origin, and nearly all from the Gangetic plain.17

Naipaul’s Indian ancestors were latecomers to the colony and settled in areas that were relatively isolated from the rest of the population. Many Indians served out their five-year terms and then settled in the countryside.18 Naipaul’s father, Seepersad, was born to poor Indian peasants in Trinidad in 1906. Although he spoke no English in his early years and had little formal education, Seepersad’s luck improved when he married into a local family of conservative Hindu landowners called the Capildeos. Remarkably, Seepersad developed a desire to become a writer. In 1930, he began working as a correspondent on rural Indian issues for the Trinidad Guardian newspaper. Indians were regarded as a backward and violent group by the wider society. “In the Indian countryside of my childhood in Trinidad,” Naipaul writes, “there were many murders and acts of violence, and these acts of violence gave the Trinidad Indians, already separated from the rest of the island by language, religion, and culture, a fearful reputation.”19 Seepersad reported on unsolved murders, family feuds, and vendettas, but as someone who had grown up in this world, he came to see his role as that of an interpreter of the ways of country Indians for an urban, middle-class audience. He also discussed rural and small-town politics and the discrimination faced by Trinidad Indian students in India, criticizing those who took a hopeful view of repatriation.20 In his spare time, Seepersad composed short stories that evoked Indian village life in Trinidad during the first decades of the twentieth century.21 From the start, however, opportunities for his advancement as a writer were limited. Trinidad’s reading public was very small, and Seepersad lacked the wealth or social connections to take his writerly

IN T R ODUC T ION

5

ambitions further. He died at the age of forty-three a disappointed man. Naipaul was twenty years old and in England at the time. As a child, Naipaul came to identify with his father’s aspirations. He made Seepersad’s ambition to become a writer his own. Naipaul was aware of his father’s limitations as a writer, but he also came to believe that Seepersad’s talents had not been recognized because of his race and class.22 Naipaul’s entire adolescence was devoted, as he later recalled, to a “blind, driven kind of colonial studying,”23 which was aimed at winning the yearly colonial government scholarship that would enable him to leave the island and pursue his ambitions abroad. Naipaul won the scholarship in 1949. A year later, he left Trinidad to begin his studies at the University of Oxford. In 1955, Naipaul moved to London and married Patricia Hale, a fellow undergraduate from Oxford who was for many years his most important reader. During his first years in London, Naipaul was broke and desperate. He had attempted, without success, to write two novels. To his relief, Henry Swanzy, an Irishman who did a great deal to promote contemporary West Indian writing, offered him some freelance work at the BBC Caribbean Services program in London. Over a few weeks in 1955, working at a typewriter in the BBC freelancers’ room, Naipaul wrote a short story based on the street life in the mixed, workingclass Woodbrook neighborhood of Port of Spain, Trinidad, to which his family had moved from the country in 1938. After several weeks of writing, Naipaul completed a set of short stories, which he titled Miguel Street. He subsequently wrote three novels, from 1956 to 1960, benefiting from the fact that after the war smaller London publishing houses were interested in “work by fresh, vigorous, new voices from far corners of the Commonwealth.”24 Like other Caribbean writers of his generation, Naipaul got his start as a writer in London. However, several distinctive aspects of his work would soon become apparent. The first was his enduring productivity—averaging a book every two years for the next fifty years—and the second was his skepticism toward the rhetoric of anticolonial politicians. The impetus for both these features can be traced to Naipaul’s return to Trinidad in 1956. During this visit, Naipaul encountered a new kind of social unrest in his birthplace,

6

IN T R ODUC T ION

which gave him an idea of the kind of writing he might do. It was also during this visit that Naipaul first got an inkling, which he would take many years to piece together, of the actual reason his father’s career as a newspaper reporter had come to a sudden end. In subsequent years, Naipaul’s efforts to grapple with both events, each one traumatic in a different way, obliquely informed the personal and political dimensions of his writing. They contributed to Naipaul’s efforts to narrate his origins as a new kind of global writer. Given their crucial importance to Naipaul’s self-conception, I will discuss them in some detail. During Naipaul’s student years in England, the rhetoric of black and Indian politicians in Trinidad became increasingly racial in nature. The antagonism between the two main communities worsened in the years leading up to the country’s independence in 1962. Even though he was aware of this alarming trend, Naipaul seemed utterly shocked when he experienced it directly in 1956, upon his return to Port of Spain after being away for six years. The extent of Naipaul’s trauma can perhaps be explained by the fact that his attitude to Trinidad had, until this time, been as uncontroversial as it was unremarkable, reflecting the blasé attitudes of many educated colonials that they would seamlessly take over the smooth running of the government and economy from the departing colonial master.25 A few weeks before leaving England to visit Trinidad in 1956, Naipaul submitted the manuscript of Miguel Street to André Deutsch, a London publisher, who eventually published it. The stories in Miguel Street portray 1940s Port of Spain as a tolerant, easygoing, and politically somnolent society where the different races lived side by side in harmony. The spirit of these stories is very similar to that found in works by Naipaul’s predecessors, notably Samuel Selvon, Edgar Mittelholzer, C. L. R. James, and above all, Seepersad Naipaul.26 The Trinidad of Miguel Street resembles the safe, racially and culturally mixed place Naipaul remembered from his childhood years.27 There are other indications that Naipaul was feeling hopeful about the postcolonial future of Trinidad. In his review of his compatriot Sam Selvon’s novel An Island Is a World, which was broadcast on the BBC’s Caribbean Voices program several months before he left London to visit his birthplace, Naipaul emphasized Selvon’s

IN T R ODUC T ION

7

treatment of the “important theme” of building up “national feeling” in a racially diverse country like Trinidad. He concluded his review with a resounding affirmation of the “relevance for many of us” of Selvon’s capacious vision of an inclusive Trinidadian identity.28 And upon reaching Trinidad in 1956, Naipaul sensed nothing troubling at first. In fact, shortly after he arrived, he wrote a letter (dated September 1956) to his wife, Patricia Hale, suggesting they consider moving to Trinidad because “the wealth of the place” made prospects for employment better there than in England.29 However, Naipaul’s optimism did not last. Some weeks after his first letter, he wrote to Patricia again, this time to express outrage at the openly racist speeches he had heard from black politicians.30 Many decades later, Naipaul recalled that “much of the hostile feeling released by the sacrament on [Woodford Square, Port of Spain] would have focused on the Indians, who made up the other half of the [Trinidad] population. The town had been important to me. Its discovery had been one of the pleasures of my childhood. . . . Now on this return I felt it had passed to other hands.”31 Racial violence, which had seemed inconceivable to him and his family only a few years earlier, now seemed likely to erupt at any moment. Racially charged confrontations and violent incidents on a small scale were taking place daily on familiar streets and in public spaces. Indians and blacks in Trinidad were on the brink of a race war.32 Similarly threatening encounters took place before the 1961 elections.33 Then, between 1962 and 1965, there was an explosion of large-scale violence between Indians and blacks in neighboring Guyana.34 With apparently little warning, ethnic division had made itself the defining characteristic of politics in this part of the postcolonial Caribbean. Naipaul had a personal stake in the matter. He was a member of the largest ethnic minority in the country, and his private correspondence reveals his fears for the safety of his family. What had gone wrong? And what was it, Naipaul appears to have asked himself, about his education or sensibility that had blinded him to the tensions that had evidently been brewing between Indians and blacks?35 The racial hostilities of the 1950s forced Naipaul to admit that, despite being of the place, he really did not know much about it.

8

IN T R ODUC T ION

Naipaul’s experience of racial violence in his birthplace had a profoundly transformative effect on his worldview. Naipaul was by no means atypical in being shocked by the sudden turn of events. Millions of ethnic minorities across the decolonizing world of the 1950s and 1960s would experience similar feelings of disorientation and panic on the eve or in the aftermath of political independence.36 Globally, ethnic tensions became a defining trait of the postcolonial condition. Minorities discovered, often too late and at tragic cost, that the postcolonial state or the majority community could become the agent of mass killing (a fact that remains the case today).37 Like so many other elites of his generation, Naipaul had assumed that educated brown and black men would simply pick up and carry on the smooth running of affairs when the British administrators departed. He had no reason to suspect that the transfer of power might result in the disintegration of the social fabric of his birthplace.38 The unrest of the late 1950s and 1960s alerted Naipaul to the fragility of postcolonial societies, and he began to attend to the ways that people who had been subjected and exploited might themselves turn into agents of violence and oppression. This brings me to the second, and more intimate, element of Naipaul’s formation: his belated and gradual discovery, in the decade following his 1956 visit to Trinidad, of how his father had fallen foul of his own community some decades earlier. In different places, including Finding the Centre (1984) and The Enigma of Arrival (1987), Naipaul describes how his father’s story informed his own psychological makeup, his view of literary inheritance in the kind of society he was born into, and his deep yet ambivalent identification with the plight of marginalized groups. Less than a year after Naipaul was born, his father began reporting on a case of Indian farmers in rural Trinidad who refused to have their goats inoculated against an epidemic of paralytic rabies that was threatening livestock across the island. The farmers were poor, and the shots were not cheap: “twenty-four cents a shot, at a time when a labourer earned thirty cents a day,” Naipaul writes.39 Many farmers refused to inoculate their livestock, hoping instead

IN T R ODUC T ION

9

to ward off the terrible disease by offering a goat sacrifice to the goddess Kali. On June 7, 1933, in an article in the Trinidad Guardian, Seepersad Naipaul dismissed this ritual, undertaken by the farmers as a “charm against the disease,” as “superstitious remedies.”40 The article, which appeared with the headline “Superstition Hinders Anti-Rabies Campaign: ‘Fighting’ Disease by Goat Sacrifice [for] Female Deity Thought Offended,” got him into serious trouble with the rural Indians. Shortly after the article was published, Seepersad received a death threat written in Hindi. It stated that he would die in a week unless he himself undertook the very sacrifice he had criticized.41 Evidently, such threats were not to be trifled with: one white official working in the area had recently been poisoned to death after trying to enforce the law.42 Seepersad was familiar with the rural area from which the threat had originated; he had reported on the numerous local feuds that resulted in many tit-for-tat killings that remained unsolved. Having to travel to these areas as part of his job, Seepersad was clearly “terrified of what he saw as a murder threat.”43 Affecting bravado, he joked in print about the threat but went secretly to the Indian area and performed the ritual, hoping to placate his enemies. Seepersad’s capitulation became widely known, however. The humiliation became too much for him, and his work suffered. He became “unbalanced,” then lost his job at the newspaper: The [family] house where this terror befell him became unendurable to him. He left it. He became a wanderer, living in different places, doing a variety of little jobs, dependent now on my mother’s family, now on the family of his wealthy uncle by marriage. For thirteen years he had no house of his own.44

Seepersad bitterly suspected that someone in the “ruling circle” of his wife’s family of rural landowners had a hand in the threatening letter he had received. He had crossed the family by failing to report favorably on their candidate for a seat in the Legislative Council in the 1933 county election.45 Pursuing this story of family intrigue would take us too far afield, but it is significant that Naipaul described his mother’s

10

IN T R ODUC T ION

family as a “totalitarian organization.”46 For a brief time, Seepersad had been sustained by “an idea of vocation”: He wrote about Chaguanas [a town in Trinidad], but the daily exercise of an admired craft would, in his own mind, have raised him above the constrictions of Chaguanas: he would have grown to feel protected by the word, and the quality of his calling. Then the props went. And he had only Chaguanas and Trinidad.47

Ironically and tragically, Seepersad’s life became undone by the very forces of the plantation society from which he had sought escape by becoming a writer. Having suffered a breakdown and been dismissed from his job, Seepersad once again became dependent upon his wealthy relatives. His life had come full circle.48 Thus, whereas the events of the 1950s alerted Naipaul to the terrifying possibility of communal violence instigated by leaders of the racial majority, in subsequent decades he also became cognizant of the ways violence could be unfairly meted out by communities to one of their own. From these cases, Naipaul gained distinct but related insight into how victims of domination and exploitation—the black majority on the eve of Trinidad’s independence in the 1950s and the minority Indians on whom his father reported in the 1930s— could become perpetrators of violence. The first experience contributed to Naipaul’s becoming a critical observer of broader aspects of decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s; the second, and more personal, story influenced Naipaul’s views of the tension between individual rights and the demands of the community. Seepersad Naipaul came from the class of poor peasants from India who formed the majority of indentured laborers on the island. Indians worked on sugar plantations in conditions “which had not significantly changed since slavery; one set of serfs merely replac[ing] another.”49 During Seepersad’s childhood, many rural Indians regarded themselves as sojourners in Trinidad. They had taken on the ordeal of indenture in order to put aside enough money to purchase a small plot of land in their ancestral villages in India, where they eventually hoped to return. Thus, after they had fulfilled their contractual obligations, many wanted to be repatriated to India.

IN T R ODUC T ION

11

But repatriation turned out to be more complicated than it appeared. In 1931, a British-owned ship, the SS Ganges, had come to Trinidad with an agreement to take a thousand people back to India. In 1932, the year of Naipaul’s birth, news “that the Ganges was going to come again created frenzy in those who had been left behind the previous year. They saw this second coming of the Ganges as their last chance to go home, to be released from Trinidad.”50 Naipaul has written that many more wanted to go back to India than could be accommodated: Seven weeks later the Ganges reached Calcutta. And there, to the terror of the passengers, the Ganges was stormed by hundreds of derelicts, previously repatriated, who wanted now to be taken back to the other place [Trinidad]. India for these people had been a dream of home, a dream of continuity after the illusion of Trinidad. All the India they had found was the area around the Calcutta docks.51

Another group of Indians, brought to Trinidad just before indenture was abolished, were subject to an ironic fate of a different kind. As a consequence of agitation by anticolonial leaders in India, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi, who successfully portrayed indenture as a humiliation for all Indians, the British authorities abruptly ended the practice in 1917. These actions had an adverse effect on those who had just arrived in Trinidad. When they completed their term of unfree labor, they found themselves in legal limbo. The new law rendered them ineligible for protection, and they did not receive the compensation they had been promised by the plantation owners or the colonial state. Regarding these latecomers, Naipaul notes: The pledge of land or repatriation was dishonoured. . . . These people were absolutely destitute. They slept in the streets of Port of Spain, the capital. . . . In the colonial setting of Trinidad, where rights were limited, you could have done anything with these people; and they were tormented by the people of the town.52

In his Nobel Prize speech, Naipaul underscored the fundamental importance of these facts to his own development by recalling how

12

IN T R ODUC T ION

these “destitute” people, whom he saw as a child, made an impression on him.53 They had become permanent fixtures of the town, dressed in rags, often mentally disturbed, whom respectable folk avoided by navigating their way across Woodford Square in central Port of Spain. When he became an adult, Naipaul learned the stories of these people. He also discovered that, as a child, Seepersad had almost been taken to India in a Calcutta-bound ship like the SS Ganges. Seepersad’s father died in Trinidad in 1910, when he was four, and his mother’s relatives were too poor to support her and her four children. It was decided that they should make the journey to India, where it was hoped Seepersad’s mother would somehow find her way back to her family village. Seepersad’s mother’s application for repatriation was approved by the colonial authority. On the appointed day, she took her children to the immigration depot on Nelson Island, Trinidad. But little Seepersad was fearful of the sea trip. He “hid in one of the latrines overhanging the sea, and he stayed there until his mother changed her mind.”54 Seepersad’s mother resigned herself to staying in Trinidad. She became dependent on her relatives, who could not afford to keep the family together: The family was scattered. The eldest child, a girl, worked in the house of a relative; she never learned to read or write. The elder boy went out to work on the sugar estates for eight cents a day. The younger boy [Seepersad, Naipaul’s father] was spared for school. He was sent to stay with his mother’s sister, who had married a man who owned a shop and was starting a bus company. The boy went to school by day and worked until late at night in the shop.55

As Naipaul wrote years later, he only learned some of the key details of this story when he met his father’s dying sister in 1970 (almost a decade after A House for Mr Biswas, the novel based on Naipaul’s father’s life, was published). Naipaul learned to see something he already knew about his father in a new light—that Seepersad had been sent to a school so that he might follow in his father’s footsteps and become a pundit, a man learned in Hindu scripture and ritual.

IN T R ODUC T ION

13

Quite by chance, then, Naipaul discovered how the idea of becoming a writer occurred to his father: It is only in this story that I find some explanation of how, coming from that background, with little education and little English, in a small agricultural colony where writing was not an occupation, my father developed the ambition to be a writer. It was a version of the pundit’s vocation. When I got to know my father—in Port of Spain, in 1938, when he was thirty-two and I was six—he was a journalist. I took his occupation for granted. It was years before I worked back to a proper wonder at his achievement.56

Naipaul’s own hope of becoming a writer “had been seeded in something less than half knowledge of my father’s early writing life.”57 Naipaul’s genealogy made him a peripheral writer in more than one sense. His own ambitions were intertwined with the very hopes that he had, as a young child, cherished for his father. Naipaul’s enduring, if deeply fraught, interest in the global periphery was not a bloodless affair. From the start, it was connected to his efforts to make sense of how he had been shaped by his past. The mature Naipaul would appropriate Seepersad’s story for himself. As with many things in his life, Naipaul worked it into an aesthetically complex story of inheritance. While one must be skeptical of Naipaul’s narrative when it veers toward self-mythologization, it is undeniable that his investment in his peripheral past was deep and complicated. To be sure, his writings reveal him to be working through this formative legacy in ways that are at times marred by the uneven historical development of which he was a product. Nevertheless, Naipaul’s critical observations about non-European societies, as well as those verbal statements in which he apparently repudiated his past, should be placed in the context of his serious writerly engagement with those worlds over the course of many years, not cast in the binary terms of celebration or rejection. ✴✴✴

It would be a long time before Naipaul formed a full picture of Seepersad’s story.58 For years, the young Naipaul was consumed

14

IN T R ODUC T ION

by a very different set of struggles, centered on establishing himself as a writer in London. Naipaul’s earliest publications, the first of which appeared in 1957, were fictional explorations of scenes from ordinary Trinidad Indian life. The tone and content of these works were comparable to those of other writers from British colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, who sympathetically described how non-European populations were successfully navigating the transition to modern forms of life. These stories were about marginalized peoples whose point of view had never been taken into account because the writers of colonial fiction had previously been European. Naipaul’s early works were well received by critics; he immediately gained a reputation as a comic writer with a superb eye and ear for the ways ordinary Trinidadians made sense of social and political change on the eve of decolonization. By the early 1960s, however, ethnic and racial politics had begun to cast a shadow over the future of independent nations like Trinidad. Political leaders who had made the injustices of the colonial past the basis of demands for political independence now exploited racial sentiments and identity politics. In this context, Naipaul began studying his people with a more coldly critical eye. He came to insist on the importance of describing how the structure of colonial societies, with its material and intellectual underdevelopment, impedes the efforts of postcolonial peoples to understand the forces by which they have been shaped. Looking back on the story of Seepersad, as well as the beaten-down people with whom he interacted as a journalist, we can form an idea of how Naipaul was persuaded that people with limited backgrounds were poorly equipped to reflect on how their choices were influenced by the deranging forces of the past. Furthermore, we can imagine the complex and divided form of identification that resulted from this insight, not least because Naipaul’s father—and, to some extent, Naipaul himself—had emerged from such a group. Naipaul’s explorations were prompted by a deeply personal or autobiographical impulse: a desire to understand how he and people with backgrounds like his had been for generations acted upon by wider forces they could neither describe nor analyze. His writing was motivated by a concern with the ways that such people (and he included himself in this group) might arrive at an unsentimental

IN T R ODUC T ION

15

understanding of their formation, which he felt was a precondition of genuine historical agency. Thus, writing became the means by which Naipaul sought to “work out a steady way of looking and acting” and to “make a whole of his life experience.”59 Naipaul went so far as to declare in his Nobel Lecture that “everything that is of value about me is in my books.”60 Put simply, he made his life the object of his work, using it as a prism or point of departure from which to explore the historical and psychological connections with other postcolonial peoples. Naipaul’s obsession with excavating and elaborating different aspects of his own formation led him from stories of small-town lives in colonial Trinidad to travel and research in the Caribbean and India and, beyond that, to many parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Over six decades, Naipaul experimented with different genres and voices—whose moods were by turns warmly sympathetic, detached, enraged, contemptuous, bitter, melancholy, and contemplatively accepting—to describe the lives of peoples who had been shaped by the legacies of colonialism, slavery, indenture, and displacement. And Naipaul invariably regarded his past, his life, as deeply embedded with the themes he wrote about: When I became a writer those areas of darkness around me as a child became my subjects. The land; the aborigines; the New World; the colony; the history; India; the Muslim world, to which I also felt myself related; Africa; and then England, where I was doing my writing. That is what I meant when I said that my books stand one on the other, and that I am the sum of my books.61

In the early 1960s, when Naipaul began writing about the wider world, very little had been published on so-called peripheral societies, particularly by people with colonial backgrounds. Naipaul was among the first to write about his own society and to bring that perspective to bear on other colonized places with similar histories, offering others a way to perceive connections between diverse colonial spaces. At the same time, many of the themes that Naipaul was among the first to explore, from ethnic violence and civil war to the self-destructive impact of religious fundamentalism, have become central questions of the global twenty-first century.

16

IN T R ODUC T ION

From the fracturing of central authority in South Sudan to the suffering of ethnic minorities like the Rohingya in Myanmar, Naipaul’s writings shed light on the human and historical dimensions of postcolonial instability that continue in our day. Unlike foreign news correspondents and commentators, Naipaul focused not on postcolonial politics but on intimate and historicized accounts of the aspirations and destinies of ordinary individuals affected by social upheaval. His writings illuminate our understanding of the complex origins and consequences of modernity in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Naipaul’s writing also provides postcolonial readers with vocabularies to navigate the continued challenges of social and political fracturing in the twenty-first century. Given its continued relevance, it is possible to see what was less clear in the headier days of decolonization—that Naipaul’s refusal to shy away from discomfiting aspects of postcolonial life was not an attempt to “blame the victim” but part of a scrupulous, if at times flawed, effort to grapple with the uneven consequences of the global transition to modernity. The twenty-first century has been described as the dawn of a “postAmerican” age, with once colonized or semicolonial territories styling themselves as regional or global superpowers-in-waiting. In this new setting, historical transitions will look very different than they did in the era of decolonization.62 Nevertheless, the need for historical reflection and awareness remains as acute as ever, particularly if the rise of new powers is to avoid the replication of old injustices, on the one hand, and old fantasies, on the other. Naipaul’s insights have a valuable, if cautionary, role to play in this phase of global history, not least because of the urgency with which they foreground the euphoria or triumphalism with which many false postcolonial dawns were greeted. Today, Naipaul’s writings are perhaps most valuable in their tacit illustration of why it is premature to celebrate technological or economic progress as it unfolds in contexts where critical reflection and historical understanding remain impoverished.63 This book is not focused on convincing readers that Naipaul’s insights were either absolutely right or utterly wrong. I steer clear of the tendency of admirers and detractors alike to be captured by what might be called the Naipaul myth.64 Naipaul’s “gift for provoking extreme admiration or equally pronounced indignation” is one

IN T R ODUC T ION

17

reason he was, at the time of his death in 2018, defined in the eyes of the public almost exclusively by this myth.65 Readings of Naipaul have accordingly been shaped by a desire to uphold or destroy what is assumed to be a “Naipaulian” vision of global realities. In the case of his detractors, the power of the Naipaul myth reveals itself in the widespread focus on “exposing” Naipaul’s underlying motivations. Reflecting a position that has become entrenched within academic postcolonial studies, for instance, Rob Nixon declared that the prizes and acclaim that Naipaul won in Europe and America were the reward for his cynical eagerness to denigrate non-European peoples.66 Nixon’s book, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (1992) is reflective of the extreme ways Naipaul’s work came to be appropriated by opposing factions of the “culture wars” that raged in the last decades of the twentieth century.67 Progressive academics like Nixon sought to overthrow established “Eurocentric” valuations in the academy. In this polarized setting, Naipaul’s evolving body of writing was characterized by some of his scholarly detractors as racist or as expressing nostalgia for European colonialism. It was implied, by Nixon among others, that Naipaul’s work was only admired by racist Westerners, whereas it was universally reviled in the non-West.68 One critic offers a snapshot of the manner in which Naipaul’s writings came to be interpreted by journalists and academics in purely ideological terms: Naipaul had long been controversial . . . for his unwillingness to blame the failures of Third World independence on colonial history alone. Then Irving Howe canonized him in a [1979] review of A Bend in the River at just the moment when Commonwealth literature began to think of itself as postcolonial, and at that point the rumblings of backlash became a roar. There must be something wrong with a writer who got so much approval from “Establishment” sources.69

On one occasion, the mere mention of Naipaul was enough to trigger a heated exchange between the Palestinian American critic Edward Said and the Irish diplomat and historian Conor Cruise O’Brien.70

18

IN T R ODUC T ION

In these arguments, consideration was rarely given to the fact that Naipaul had been writing about non-Western societies for some thirty-odd years and had begun doing so to make sense of his own peripheral formation, not to uphold a Platonic idea of Western civilization or, conversely, to attack multiculturalism. Naipaul the man, rather than his writings, came to be the object of critical judgment among his critics. One declared that Naipaul’s works “lend themselves to an indictment.”71 Another critic asserted that a “reading of Naipaul’s texts is, by definition, a political act.”72 No less an authority than Edward Said pronounced Naipaul “a witness for the western prosecution.”73 In contrast to previous decades, then, by the early twenty-first century the overwhelming consensus in English departments of Anglo-American universities was that Naipaul ought to be judged for his “programmatically negative representation of formerly colonized peoples.”74 The fact that Naipaul is no longer alive today makes the task of writing about him feel different, if not necessarily easier. Freed from the endless distractions he posed while he was alive, scholars and critics are able to concentrate on the significance of Naipaul the writer, not Naipaul the man. Naipaul the man has now been consigned to that ever-expanding gallery of dead authors, from Rousseau to Marx, from Brecht to Larkin, whose individual shortcomings are destined, with the passage of time, to find their proper, rather than determining, place in assessments of their work. Critics and literary historians can finally begin the task of forming a more complete picture of Naipaul’s development as a writer without having to worry about another round of his sensationalizing or selfsabotaging utterances. These circumstances provide us with an opportunity to bring new perspectives to the study of Naipaul’s art and thought, not least by attending to the complex ways his writing evolved and changed direction over the course of a long career. For these reasons, it is also time to look beyond the “programmatic” Naipaul conjured by postcolonialist evaluations, in order to examine how a reading of his works may offer fresh insights into the social and cultural challenges of the twenty-first century.

IN T R ODUC T ION

19

I situate Naipaul’s writings in the context of his beginnings as a writer who was born in and shaped by his experiences in the colonial periphery, not against the backdrop of the late-twentieth-century ideological debates that raged within the metropolitan academy. I concentrate on the way Naipaul’s obsession with his past and his meager cultural and intellectual resources formed the basis of a complex and historically dense artistic project. To this end, I have chosen to discuss those writings that best reveal Naipaul’s extraordinary scope as a writer and his evolution as a thinker, and to demonstrate how these features are embedded within a sustained reflection on his multifaceted past. My hope is that this book will pave the way toward more complex assessments of Naipaul’s work that are no longer defined by the aim of defending or denouncing the man on ideological grounds, but are instead informed by contextualized close readings of what he wrote. One of the many strengths of Patrick French’s The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is the judicious manner in which it describes and analyzes Naipaul’s shameful personal behavior, including his seeming willingness to sacrifice all personal relationships to his work. Despite French’s unsparing portrayal of Naipaul the man, however, he is equally mindful of the need to assess Naipaul’s work on its own terms. My aim in this book is to take French’s deeply researched insights into Naipaul’s life in a new direction. I focus on those aspects of Naipaul’s biography that shed light on the network of obsessions that came to dominate his writing over the course of sixty years. Throughout the book, I examine the different ways Naipaul’s manner of mining his own life story and history enables the reader to see, often in surprising ways, the connections between the writer’s subjectivity and that of peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. I also demonstrate how Naipaul’s narrative voices typically eschew outward displays of sympathy for the oppressed, preferring instead an entangled perspective from which his observations and reflections are derived. In my view, the continued appeal of Naipaul’s work to readers across the world lies in the way he modeled a style of peripheral reflection that people from quite different histories could recognize

20

IN T R ODUC T ION

or identify with and, consequently, draw upon to reflect upon their own pasts. As Naipaul confessed, it took him some time to realize that his formation made him better suited to writing about peripheral rather than metropolitan affairs. He was, after all, the scholarship boy who had worked very hard to live up to metropolitan notions of academic excellence. For a time, his admission to the University of Oxford seemed to him incontrovertible evidence of his having overcome the historically disorienting effects of his past. During his years at Oxford, Naipaul cultivated a “false” sophistication, which he believed would secure the metropolitan acceptance he craved: The idea given me by my education—and the more “cultural,” the nicest, part of that education—was that the writer was a person possessed of sensibility; that the writer was someone who recorded or displayed an inward development. So, in an unlikely way, the ideas of the aesthetic movement of the end of the nineteenth century and the ideas of Bloomsbury, ideas bred essentially out of empire, wealth and imperial security, had been transmitted to me in Trinidad. To be that kind of writer (as I interpreted it) I had to be false; I had to pretend to be other than I was, other than what a man of my background could be. Concealing this colonial-Hindu self below the writing personality, I did both my material and myself much damage.75

The Brazilian Marxist critic Roberto Schwarz has insightfully described how historical circumstances impose constraints on the formal choices made by writers from “underdeveloped” countries. But Schwarz also remarks that artists do not passively “register” these constraints. They give shape to the social processes (or the “preformed material”) that define them: “In shaping it, in turn, the writer superimposes form upon form, and the depth, force and complexity of the artistic results will depend upon the success of this operation, of this relation to the preformed material in which the energies of history lie.”76 Naipaul’s later work gains complexity and significance by virtue of his refusal to shape what Roberto Schwarz calls “preformed material” into fiction (a move more typical of other creative writers). He seeks instead to discover this material’s effects on the writer and the man,

IN T R ODUC T ION

21

something that “fiction by itself” would not have allowed him to do. Naipaul made his life story, and the insights he gained from his interactions with interlocutors, the frame through which form and meaning could be given to the myriad and disorienting events that had influenced his psychic and social formation. In doing so, Naipaul created an original form of postcolonial writing. Naipaul’s desire to comprehend the objective forces by which he was produced came to be mingled with an introspective account of how to revalue a painful or difficult past in enabling ways, notably by implicating him in the (de)formation he describes. Two very different stories from his late work A Way in the World (1994), “Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties” and “Home Again”, help us understand this fundamental aspect of his art. “Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties” relates to the 1937 oil field strike that some historians have described as the beginnings of popular politics in Trinidad.77 The story’s central figure is Foster Morris, a fictional left-wing English journalist famous for having written an optimistic account of the class politics surrounding the strike. The fictional Foster Morris was based on an actual man Naipaul had met, Arthur Calder Marshall, a friend and contemporary of Graham Greene and author of Glory Dead (1939), a well-reviewed work of travel writing that included a sympathetic account of the workers involved in the 1937 strike. Morris had also made a name for himself in the West Indies with his sympathetic depiction of the strike’s leader, Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler, which prompts Naipaul, in the fictionalized “Passenger,” to seek Morris out in the 1950s with the aim of hearing his personal impressions of Butler. An immigrant worker in Trinidad from the smaller and poorer British colony of Grenada, Butler was the most important radical black leader of the 1930s and a precursor of major political figures such as Eric Williams: This was the subject of Foster Morris’s book. He wrote about Tubal Uriah Butler and the people around him. He wrote of them with the utmost seriousness. He gave them families, backgrounds; he treated what they said without irony. Nothing like this had been written about local people before. He wrote of them as though they were English people—as though they had that kind of social depth and solidity and rootedness.78

22

IN T R ODUC T ION

Morris is also portrayed as having strongly anticolonial feelings. As such, Naipaul suspects that Morris was predisposed to representing Trinidad’s political culture as more developed than it actually was: It was well-intentioned, but it was wrong. . . . That idea of background—and what it contained: order and values and the possibility of striving: perfectibility—made sense only when people were more truly responsible for themselves. We weren’t responsible in that way. Much had been taken out of our hands. We didn’t have backgrounds. We didn’t have a past. . . . If you could look down at us from the sky you would see us living in our little houses between the sea and the bush; and that was a kind of truth about us, who had been transported to that place. We were just there, floating.79

Setting the fictional Morris up as a foil to his own views, Naipaul claimed that Morris’s analysis lacked a candid account of the fact that the rebellion was being led by Butler, a man who claimed to possess supernatural powers.80 Despite his apparent misgivings, Morris wrote as if the conditions for a real political transformation were in place. He effectively elided the distinction between backward and advanced capitalist contexts. When Naipaul meets him, Morris explains that he had chosen to falsify what he truly thought of Butler for political reasons: “You couldn’t go away and write that Butler was a crazy black preacher. That was what the oilfields people [i.e., the bosses] were saying.”81 Naipaul acknowledges that the colonial and business elites had deliberately recruited Grenadian rather than local Trinidadian laborers because, as an “isolated labor force in the oilfields,” they could be more easily exploited.82 These were also the years of the Great Depression. Before the Grenadian workers went on strike in 1937, Naipaul adds, their lives would have been especially hard.83 Nonetheless, from Naipaul’s standpoint Morris would have done West Indians a greater service had he pointed out that this anticolonial rebellion was being led by individuals who lacked the vocabulary, concepts, and historical understanding to lay claim to a new principle of authority. Had he done so, Morris would have equipped the colonized with the tools to

IN T R ODUC T ION

23

assess their situation, even if this would have come at the expense of straightforwardly affirming the obvious justice of their cause. Naipaul’s response to Morris also provides insight into how his efforts to superimpose literary form on the material conditions by which he had been shaped differ from academic approaches to postcolonial literature. Academic approaches often assume that one must “subversively scrutinize the colonial relationship” and affirm the claims of oppressed peoples.84 Insofar as Naipaul regards the colonized as agents in their own right, whose stories should be central rather than peripheral to portrayals of the colonial history, his approach is aligned with that of postcolonialist scholars. However, Naipaul crucially insists that literary writing not repress or falsify the circumstances in which many struggles from below were undertaken, even if they appear to compromise the moral justification of such struggles. The academic reflex of affirming peripheral resistance to a hegemonic “center” can be traced to a classic essay by the British cultural critic Raymond Williams titled “Culture Is Ordinary” (1958).85 Williams argues that despite being born into a working-class family, he was not intimidated by the prospect of studying at the University of Cambridge when he gained admission as a scholarship boy in the 1930s. Williams counterintuitively declares that his experience at Cambridge convinced him that his Welsh working-class culture and identity actually gave him an advantage over his upper-class peers, who took their superficial knowledge of cultural matters to be a sign of their cultivation. What the crowd of well-heeled undergraduates Williams encountered at Cambridge failed to realize, he argues, was that the essence of cultural strength lies in ordinary ideas, feelings, and values that disadvantaged peoples across the world have organically absorbed from their immediate surroundings. “I was not cast down by old buildings,” Williams writes revealingly, “for I had come from a country with twenty centuries of history written visibly into the earth.”86 Williams claims a ground and an orientation from an “earth” whose organic nature takes precedence over the artifice of mere “buildings.” He sought to redefine culture as a whole way of life, encompassing institutions, everyday practices, norms, and dispositions that derived

24

IN T R ODUC T ION

their moral compass from the at once unyielding, autonomous, and self-sustaining order of working-class identity. The character Foster Morris is clearly drawn from the same generation of British intellectuals whose formative influences lay in the 1930s, a decade in which economic depression had given rise to deep skepticism about the fairness of market societies and to an even greater awareness of the exploitation of British colonies around the world.87 A believer in the same egalitarian ways of thinking that underpinned Williams’s celebration of his working-class background, Morris dutifully sought, in Naipaul’s view, to project an equivalent “social depth and solidity” onto Trinidadian society when he visited it in 1937. Naipaul claims that in his desire to “applaud” the local population, Morris “failed to understand the nature of their deprivation. . . . He saw us as versions of English people and simplified us”:88 [Morris] couldn’t understand, for instance, that although Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler was a kind of messiah, though in the high moments of the strike educated people like lawyers attributed to him almost miraculous powers, and felt that where he led no harm could come, these very people felt at the same time, in their bones, that he was a crazed and uneducated African preacher, a Grenadian, a smallislander, an eater of ground provisions boiled in a pitch-oil tin.89

According to Naipaul, such sentiments hinted at the fractures within Caribbean society as a whole. Racial and ethnic differences appeared to play at least as important a role as an awareness of class distinctions. As a child, Naipaul had heard his aunt repeating “stories about the poverty and ignorance of the Grenadians” and their disgusting habit of eating “ground provisions [which] were tubers—yams, eddoes, cassava, sweet potatoes” cooked, it was commonly alleged, in tins that Trinidadians often used to store kerosene. The Grenadians were looked down upon by people in Trinidad for being “too poor to buy proper enamel or blackiron Birmingham-made pots, like the rest of us.”90 This “us” (like the earlier “us”) appears to encompass a multiracial Trinidad, even if the object of focus in this instance is an Indian woman who lived in the same house as Naipaul. Even for poor Trinidadians at

IN T R ODUC T ION

25

the time, the pitch-oil (or kerosene) tins symbolized the degradation of the Grenadian worker. By revealing an aspect of the social prejudices instilled in him through the behavior of a close family member, Naipaul offers a portrait of the fractures within the plantation society that shaped his experience. Naipaul had absorbed many of the prejudices of his society and in stories like “Passenger” he sought to excavate and bring them into the open as a way of concretely evoking the divided ways of seeing and feeling that prevailed in a specific time and a place. He implicates himself in the stories he tells, revealing the pervasive forms of belittling attitudes that exist in the postcolonial society, not merely to judge them but to gain access to the distinctive modes of thinking and feeling in his society. Recalling these factors in light of the racially divisive politics of his birthplace, Naipaul was less interested in affirming the ideas of tolerance and inclusion advocated by postcolonial critics than in subjecting himself and people with backgrounds like his to critical self-examination. Such examination was not motivated by the belief that the colonized were incapable of governing themselves or by nostalgia for colonial rule. Instead, Naipaul was building a story around his own memories and experiences to understand the forces that shaped him. To this end, he was willing to describe, even stage, odious feelings. This has troubled many readers, some of whom claim that Naipaul must be guilty of such sentiments himself. Throughout this book, I will be insisting on the critical distinction between those points at which Naipaul expresses racial prejudice and when he artistically draws on such feelings to implicate himself in the mixed emotions that prevailed in a time and place. I take it for granted that to closely read and contextualize how Naipaul imaginatively enters into and channels ugly feelings is not tantamount to justifying or excusing such sentiments. ✴✴✴

In this book, I have divided Naipaul’s career into three phases: 1955–1961, 1962–1980, and 1981–2010. If in the first phase Naipaul was learning his craft as a writer, I also argue that he did not

26

IN T R ODUC T ION

arrive at a fully self-implicating mode of representation—where he reveals himself to have been formed by the histories of prejudice he is describing—until the third, and last, phase of his career, although elements of it are discernible from the very beginning. Indeed, Naipaul’s study of his own past—undertaken in the wake of his belated awareness of the divisions in his birthplace—and his travels to some of the bleaker social and political landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s persuaded him for a time that peripheral societies like Trinidad were not equipped with, and had been denied the institutions needed for, an adequate grasp of modernity’s profoundly disruptive effects. The globalizing forms of colonialism and capitalism had diverted the social trajectories of the peasant formations of the precapitalist world. Such groups found themselves enslaved or colonized—in short, violently inducted into modern institutions of production and exchange. Although these peoples adapted to their new material conditions—some groups even became rich—they could not reclaim or assert control over their disrupted orders. The institutions and norms of colonized societies had been deranged by modernity. Derangement, as I am using the term, does not refer to a psychological state so much as a colonial disordering and reordering of existing institutions and norms whose underlying rationales were opaque to colonized populations. It is equally important to note that derangement need not imply that people existed in a state of prelapsarian harmony before they were colonized. Naipaul implies that the forms of social derangement and subjective disorientation in such societies could not be thrown off in the manner one might an alien or oppressive ruling power. In the wake of colonial modernity, forms of thinking and being underwent a fundamental transformation. Horizons of worldly involvement, conceptual frameworks, norms, and values were remade in uneven and contradictory ways that had a profoundly disorienting effect on the nonEuropean world. Naipaul’s emphasis on this derangement resonates with the anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s caution against underestimating the “difficulties that the battered social systems and frail economies of those former colonial societies impose upon their

IN T R ODUC T ION

27

children when they seek education, fame, and fortune—no matter how hard they work.”91 More than Mintz, Naipaul was interested in how this social fabric might itself shape the ways people come to see their possibilities. Fostering a critical awareness of this reality came to define Naipaul’s aims as a writer, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. In the final phase of his career (1981–2010), by contrast, Naipaul sought to soften and reevaluate the harsh realities exposed by the writing he did in the previous two decades. The stories of A Way in the World (1994) belong to the later phase of his career. In this work, Naipaul describes the individual dislocations and social rifts of peripheral societies, but he also expresses a great interest in imagining the forms that reconciliation between antagonists might take. “Home Again,” the volume’s final story, offers a counterpoint to “Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties” (the story featuring Foster Morris) in this regard. Like “Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties,” “Home Again” presents a fictionalized account of Naipaul’s encounter after many decades with a Trinidadian black man he had worked for in his younger days. Naipaul’s story explores how individuals from divided societies can try to enter into the perspectives of others, even if they find it impossible to completely overcome inherited misgivings and prejudices. Having described in many of his previous books how deeply racial hostility runs in the postcolonial society, Naipaul takes a modest step toward a “reconciliation of differences” in which the claims of nonidentity, rather than affirmations of identity or solidarity, prevail.92 Set in 1966,93 “Home Again” centers on Naipaul’s meeting with a fellow Trinidadian called Blair in Kampala, Uganda. Blair, a black man, was a civil servant in Trinidad’s Government House for whom Naipaul had worked for a few months in 1949, just prior to leaving Trinidad for Oxford. Blair was widely regarded as a rising star in the bureaucracy, and the teenage Naipaul viewed him as a charismatic man and a kind boss. However, that early association, which belonged to a happy time for Naipaul and Blair, both of whom seemed on the threshold of bigger things, was tinged with mutual suspicion when the two crossed paths again.

28

IN T R ODUC T ION

It was during the 1950s—after Naipaul left Trinidad—that Blair had become known as an Afro-Trinidadian nationalist politician with strong anti-Indian views.94 It is helpful to consider Naipaul’s description of how Trinidad’s first prime minister, Eric Williams, became a national leader: In 1956, six years after I had left the island, there arose a proper black leader, [Eric] Williams, a small black man with dark glasses and a hearing aid, stylish (a necessary quality) with these simple props, and soon overwhelmingly popular. He talked a lot about slavery (as though people had forgotten). By that simple means he made all island politics racial.95

Naipaul implies that in a context where color-consciousness prevailed among all the nonwhite groups who had suffered in different ways, the color of Eric Williams’s skin was as important as his invocation of slavery—both of which exist as “racial” signals directed exclusively at black people.96 In the mixed society of white, Asian, and black, Williams’s rhetoric of victimhood excluded nonAfrican groups.97 The political leaders of the Indian community were also behaving like racial leaders in the guise of national ones. When Eric Williams swept to victory in the tense election of 1956,98 Naipaul’s own ugly racial feelings manifested themselves in a letter he wrote to Patricia: I am not staying here much longer. If the election results were different, there might have been some point. But with the present government of noble niggers, all sorts of racialist laws might be passed; and life for minority communities could become tricky. Indians are talking of leaving; so are the Chinese. Because of its very smallness and unimportance in the world, the grossest injustices can be perpetrated here without people in England getting to know.99

If we permit ourselves the liberty of reading fiction back into fact, this letter reflects the resentment Naipaul might have felt toward Blair at the time of their meeting in “Home Again.” It also gives a sense of

IN T R ODUC T ION

29

racial prejudice running across both communities, undermining the possibility of sympathetic dialogue.100 Naipaul channels, through his racist language, wider sentiments and attitudes that are at work in fractured colonial contexts. His approach obliquely offers insights into forces that continue to threaten the social fabric of postcolonial societies today.101 Naipaul’s misgivings about meeting Blair only grow when he learns that Blair is in Uganda to study how much money is being smuggled out of the newly independent country. When Ugandan politicians spoke of “economic parasites” who were smuggling their profits abroad, it was an open secret that the Indian ethnic minority was being targeted. Naipaul felt that Blair’s work intensified the resentment poor black people felt toward the Ugandan Indian community: “The hate [for the Indians] was in the newspapers, in the parliament, in the compound, in the university. It was open; it was licensed; it brought about no retaliation. Expatriates dealt in it to show their own commitment to the country. Some political people saw it as part of the business of building socialism, and gave it a doctrinal gloss.”102 Naipaul constellates the racial context in Uganda in 1966 to Trinidad’s election violence in 1956: I hadn’t met Blair since 1950, and I didn’t want to meet him now. I didn’t like the politics he had gone into [in Trinidad after independence]. The almost religious exaltation of the early days of the black movement had given way very quickly to the simplest kind of racial politics. In Trinidad that meant anti-Indian politics and constant anti-Indian agitation; it was how the vote of the African majority was to be secured. Though I was no longer living in Trinidad, I was affected. I found when I met people I had known there, even people I had gone to school with, that the racial question couldn’t be ignored. There was a self-consciousness on both sides, a new falsity. And I found, with every visit I made to Trinidad, that I was more and more cut off from the past.103

Naipaul’s perspective is clearly aligned with that of the racial minority. He worried that Blair’s aims would result in more difficulties for the

30

IN T R ODUC T ION

Indian shopkeepers of Kampala, who, being demonized, were the objects of “hate.”104 Ultimately, however, what makes it possible for Naipaul and Blair to arrive at an understanding is their similar class background. In Naipaul’s description of the challenges that the decades-older Blair must have faced in order to make his way in the world, the frustrated efforts of Naipaul’s own father, Seepersad, are brought to mind: [Blair’s] education hadn’t been as straightforward as mine. He came from a poor family in a far-off country area and he had made a late start. That late start had put him at a disadvantage in the educational system. He had to go to rough elementary schools and then to “private” high schools run by people with the barest qualifications. He would always have been too old for the better schools, and he would never have had the clear vision of a way ahead that had been given to me at an early stage: elementary school, exhibition to a secondary school, scholarship to a university abroad. He would have always had to feel his way. And when, after all of this, he had entered the government service, just before the war, his prospects were still limited; the senior posts were reserved for English people.105

And when the two men do meet, the nervous hostility Naipaul feels quickly disappears when a contemplative Blair disarms Naipaul by telling a story about being surprised by his own unexpected display of prejudice toward a Japanese person in a Manhattan train station. Naipaul interprets this as Blair’s offer of an olive branch. Blair has anticipated, perhaps even mirrored, Naipaul’s anxiety about how their meeting would turn out. While Naipaul appreciates Blair’s roundabout, elaborate way of reaching out by signaling his own fallibility, he is aware that both of them cannot help seeing themselves and each other in the terms assigned by a deeply divided society. Each has been differently “interpellated” or inserted into a historical script that determines the frame in which individual choices are made.106 Naipaul is all the more appreciative of Blair’s self-deprecating remarks, which strike him as a ritual offering extended by the historical victor in recognition of the resentment that a representative of the defeated race must feel.

IN T R ODUC T ION

31

New layers of emotion and structure, all drawn from a storehouse of Trinidadian memories, are revealed in this highly nuanced narrative. Naipaul could not have been so moved by Blair’s generous gesture were he not, in some measure, still emotionally connected to his community of East Indians as well as a broader sense of a Trinidadian identity. Prejudice here is depicted not as something to be stamped out but as a material reality to be worked through. Both men tacitly own their racial views as grounded in historical realities and therefore not easily overthrown. This ugly aspect of the postcolonial condition is realistically explored, not repressed or merely denounced, by Naipaul perhaps because in his view it opens a path toward genuine reconciliation—literature representing in this instance a form of writing in which troubling emotions and ideas may be staged and explored in a frank but nuanced manner. Naipaul’s traumatic experience of racial tension in Trinidad in 1956 and his belated discovery of his father’s humiliation and decline serve as the points of departure of my understanding of his work. These events provide an orientation to the story that follows. I am not offering a psychologizing interpretation in which Naipaul’s controversial works are blamed on his childhood experiences. My interest is in the fact that these events influenced Naipaul’s deliberate decision in his adult life to reorient his writings toward an exploration of the disparate entities that contributed to his formation. He writes, in The Enigma of Arrival, of the moment in which he turned away from a focus on himself to the light that his own past shed on his understanding of the world: “I defined myself and saw that my subject was not my sensibility, my inward development, but the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in.”107 As noted earlier, the first phase of Naipaul’s career, 1957–1961, can be described as a period of apprenticeship, during which Naipaul discovered a set of simple themes and genres to describe Trinidad as it entered its transition from a colonial plural society into a majoritarian democracy. The years 1962–1980 see Naipaul adopting a tone of cold detachment; his vision darkens. His assessment of “half-made societies doomed to remain half-made,” taken from his 1974 essay on Joseph Conrad, belongs squarely to this period.108 His fiction and nonfiction

32

IN T R ODUC T ION

range across different social and historical settings for the first time in his career, establishing Naipaul’s claim to be the preeminent global writer of the postcolonial era: So, from the starting point of Trinidad, my knowledge and selfknowledge grew. The street in Port of Spain where I had spent part of my childhood; a reconstruction of my “Indian” family life in Trinidad; a journey to Caribbean and South American colonies; a later journey to the special ancestral land of India. My curiosity spread in all directions. Every exploration, every book, added to my knowledge, qualified my earlier idea of myself and the world.109

In the most intimate ways, Naipaul was shaped by the world he sought to describe. The works of the middle phase were distinguished by their acute observations and harsh judgments—these are the outstanding traits of works from the travelogue An Area of Darkness (1964) to his novel A Bend in the River (1979). By the end of the 1970s, however, Naipaul had exhausted this vein of writing, which typically privileged an observer desperately committed to comprehending the world, to “making a pattern” of his experiences in an objective manner. The third, and last, phase of Naipaul’s career is distinguished by a marked softening of tone and a willingness to incorporate more diverse voices and perspectives. If the preceding period was marked by a grim acceptance that the “world is what it is” (the opening line of A Bend in the River), in this phase, Naipaul is more interested in exploring how different individuals make “a way in the world” (the book title of a sequence of narratives published in 1994). Between 1981 and 2010, Naipaul also experimented with mixed forms. He sought to blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, autobiography, and history, in ways that enabled him to integrate and reconcile the diverse experiences of his own youth and middle age and to bring these into dialogue with other, often opposing voices. Naipaul began to write in ways that engaged with points of view that contradicted his own. He also moved toward an attempt to compare his formation with that of people from other places. The characters he describes in this late phase, particularly in nonfictional works such

IN T R ODUC T ION

33

as India: A Million Mutinies Now and Beyond Belief, are much more vivid than any in his earlier writings. In his fictional writings of this period, Naipaul develops an interest in how other individuals had been shaped by the dislocations of the past and how they engaged with and sought to reactivate aspects of their formation. He teases out similarities between himself and these other individuals in the most unexpected (and subtly comic) ways. In the chapters that follow, I examine how each book Naipaul wrote furthered the development of his art and thought. His writings had a visceral impact on non-Western readers. Michael Manley, the Jamaican intellectual who would become prime minister, wrote a letter to Naipaul after reading The Mimic Men (1967): “The handling of the theme of disorder set off echoes of a recognition even as it sounded warning bells.” Manley’s mother, the sculptor Edna Manley, also wrote to Naipaul: “I am very impressed. I have lived through some of what you write about.”110 For Western readers, Naipaul’s writings illuminated the perpetuation of an unjust world order for which they bore substantial responsibility.111 Whether or not readers agree with his conclusions, this book seeks to demonstrate that Naipaul’s account of the global condition was grounded in his own formation in the colonial periphery. Through his writings, he sought to connect his mixed and fractured past to that of other postcolonial peoples. Given the reflective and analytical character of Naipaul’s writing, one of its most valuable aspects is its ability to equip readers with a vocabulary through which they may learn to describe their condition with the aim of effecting change.

EARLY WRITINGS: 1955–1961

1 MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT Miguel Street; The Middle Passage

I

N 1938, when Naipaul was six, his family moved from the more racially homogeneous Indian countryside to the Woodbrook neighborhood in Port of Spain. Over the next eight years, they occupied two rooms in a house they shared with other members of Naipaul’s mother’s large extended family. As people who had been accustomed to open spaces, Naipaul’s family were likely to have felt cramped and unsettled in their new home, particularly given the proximity of unfamiliar sounds, sights, and smells. Decades later, Naipaul recalled that a boisterous Indian man who lived in the yard next door slaughtered goats every Sunday morning, then “hung the red carcase up, selling pieces.”1 At night, the family was subjected to the “thunderous soundtrack” of the open-air American cinema at the end of the road, which competed with the prostitutes in nearby bars for the attention of dollar-rich American sailors stationed at the naval base.2 Naipaul’s family behaved unobtrusively and tried to escape notice in their new surroundings, but they were being observed by the residents of the street. Returning from school one day, Naipaul overheard a neighbor express shock at the number of people crammed into their small house. Talking about this experience many years later with his biographer, Naipaul recalled the shame he felt at the time.

38

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

Life in their new urban surroundings, watching and being watched, felt alien to Naipaul and his family, and they maintained their “mental separateness” from the other residents.3 These early impressions indirectly informed many of the stories in his breakthrough book, Miguel Street, which he wrote in 1955. In this work, Naipaul discovered his comic voice. He also realized that he had stumbled upon his great subject: the fates of historically marginalized individuals in the colonial periphery. Having said that, Naipaul’s earliest effort to write about his society was marked by a lack of knowledge of its history. In subsequent decades, a better-informed Naipaul returned to examine different aspects of Miguel Street in order to clarify his own relationship to some of the real people on whom his fictional characters had been based. These exercises would in turn enable Naipaul to see the potential of a writing in a manner that explicitly combined autobiography with fiction: “As diarists and letter-writers repeatedly prove,” he wrote in 1984, “any attempt at narrative can give value to an experience which might otherwise evaporate away. When I began to write about [Miguel Street] I began to sink into a tract of experience I hadn’t before contemplated as a writer.”4 Set during the Second World War and its aftermath, the stories of Miguel Street center on individuals whom Naipaul had observed as a child from the veranda of his home.5 The reader learns of the hopes and disappointments of these individuals—among them, a poet, a carpenter, a mechanic, a pyrotechnicist, a sweeper, a brothel owner, a working mother with many children, a street preacher, and a schoolchild. The narrator of these stories is a fatherless working-class boy who lives on Miguel Street with his overworked and mostly absent mother. His failure to describe the context or the background of characters is somewhat disorienting for the reader at first, but this defect is compensated for by his vivid account of daily life, which includes humorous conversations that capture the cadence of the creolized English of the Trinidadian street. Through the young narrator’s observations, the reader senses that there exists an unchanging or monotonous quality to life in this society, and that it has constrained the individual development of the men and women who appear in the stories.

MEMORIE S OF UNDERDE V ELOP MEN T

39

As if unconsciously making up for their circumstances, some characters invent fantastic stories about themselves. A few even find people who are willing to partake of their fantasy. This social trait forms the backdrop to the first story of the collection, “Bogart.” Hence, the boy-narrator reveals his social innocence when he indirectly confesses to being unable to understand why an unfriendly and taciturn man called Bogart is an object of such admiration on Miguel Street: “What happening there, man?” [Bogart] would ask quietly, and then he would say nothing for ten or fifteen minutes. And somehow you felt you couldn’t really talk to Bogart, he looked so bored and superior. His eyes were small and sleepy. His face was fat and his hair was gleaming black. His arms were plump. Yet he was not a funny man. He did everything with a captivating languor. Even when he licked his thumb to deal out the cards there was grace in it.6

Like the narrator, the reader finds it hard to explain why Bogart’s sedentary habits, which include playing cards alone in his room all day, are imbued with a latent power and intelligence. It is only when Hat, the unofficial leader of the street, explains to the young narrator that Bogart’s morose listlessness and reclusive behavior are an expression of his worldly knowledge and experience, which he keeps to himself, that the reader begins to suspect that Bogart embodies the fantasy of someone who is able to leave and create a good life for himself elsewhere. Indeed, much of Bogart’s charisma derives from his supposed familiarity with places where existence is more varied and dynamic than Miguel Street, which is the only place that men like Hat can claim to know. One day, Bogart disappears from his rented room, leaving everyone mystified but not entirely surprised. When he reappears just as suddenly months later, he tells the men who congregate in his room an incredible tale about having worked as a cattle rustler in Venezuela. Bogart claims that he saved enough money to open several “highclass” brothels in Brazil and Guyana. His glamorous life was finally broken up by “treacherous” policemen who had previously accepted his bribes.7 When one of the boys expresses skepticism about the

40

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

story, Bogart takes offense and refuses to say another word, and Hat scolds the boy for his impertinence. Although Bogart’s tale only confirms the men’s view of his heroism, the narrator notices that after his return Bogart is not the same person as before. No longer placid and indifferent, he is constantly angry and becomes a “feared man on the street.”8 Then one day, to everyone’s shock, the police appear and arrest Bogart, charging him with bigamy.9 Hat learns that Bogart had not been in Venezuela, as he claimed, but in nearby Caroni, where he had made a local girl pregnant. “In Caroni they don’t make joke about that sort of thing and Bogart had to get married to the girl,” he observes ruefully. Because Bogart was already married to a woman in Tunapuna, he inadvertently fell foul of the law prohibiting bigamy. To make up for the shock of these revelations, Hat declares to the others that Bogart had abandoned his wives in Tunapuna and Caroni for Port of Spain because he wanted “to be a man, among we men.”10 Just as Hat had reprimanded the young boy for raising awkward questions about Bogart’s Venezuela adventure, he now falls back on an idea of male fellowship to salvage Bogart’s reputation. However, given that Hat’s professed admiration for Bogart had been based on the latter’s experience of the wider world, which implied something grander than the parochial fellowship of the street, it is more likely that he what he really seeks to protect is a fantasy of individual agency he had projected onto Bogart. On a different note, the reader finds it difficult to decide whether Bogart’s silences reflect a deep feeling or a kind of emotional blankness. Only at the end of the story does Naipaul suggest that Bogart’s restlessness and volatility are the result of unresolved questions about his past that he lacks words to describe, let alone analyze. The pathos of the short story “Bogart” lies, then, in its portrayal of an implied longing for a different kind of life, a desire all the more poignant because it is not elaborated by the young narrator, whose tone suggests that he too participates in the hopes that the street places in Bogart. In this sense, Bogart’s silences are echoed in the lacunae of the text itself. In the stories of Miguel Street, Naipaul was learning his craft. He vividly describes the young narrator’s impressions of people and

MEMORIE S OF UNDERDE V ELOP MEN T

41

artfully conveys the pathos of Bogart’s desire for a life with broader horizons, but he was not yet able to elaborate upon how such feelings or actions might be informed by the past. This is why Bogart’s motivations, as much as his fantasies and his disappointments, remain elusive even at the end of the story. The stories in Miguel Street avoid any mention of the “racial and social complexities” of Trinidad for the simple reason that Naipaul did not know enough at this time to flesh out the backgrounds of men like Bogart.11 More than a decade later, with travel and research, Naipaul was able to shine a light on some of the wider contextual forces at work in this colonial society. The reader of Finding the Centre learns, for instance, that, like Bogart, Hat was based on Port of Spain Indian men who lived on Naipaul’s street: Hat was our neighbor on the street. He wasn’t negro or mulatto. But we thought of him as half-way there. He was a Port of Spain Indian. The Port of Spain Indians—there were pockets of them— had no country roots, were individuals, hardly a community, and were separate from us for an additional reason: many of them were Madrassis, descendants of South Indians, not Hindi-speaking, and not people of caste. We didn’t see in them any of our own formalities or restrictions; and though we lived raggedly ourselves (and were far too numerous for the house), we thought of the other Indians in the street only as street people.12

Naipaul based the characters of Bogart and Hat on people he knew from his Trinidadian upbringing, descendants of indentured laborers from Punjab and South India respectively.13 Neither man had access to the languages and traditions of his ancestors. In the plantation society, Bogart had, in Naipaul’s peculiar formulation, become an individual “too soon.”14 Having “put as much distance as possible between himself and the people close to him,” Bogart found himself unsupported and adrift in society, lacking the coordinates that Naipaul deemed an essential component of material and intellectual development.15 In this sense, the stories of Miguel Street were written by an “innocent.”16 In A Way in the World (1994), Naipaul recalled that an

42

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

early reviewer (modeled on the Trinidadian historian and radical C. L. R. James) had described the characters in early works like Miguel Street as “impoverished” people on whom “history had played a cruel trick.” Continuing to paraphrase this reviewer’s account, Naipaul adds, “My characters thought they were free men, in charge of their own destinies; they weren’t; the colonial setting mocked the delusions of the characters, their ambitions, their belief in perfectibility, their jealousies. The books, light as they were, were subversive, the article said, and remarkable for that reason.”17 Naipaul’s response to the review is a disarming “Yes, yes, it was like that,” implying that he had been too absorbed by the surface details to probe more deeply into the lives of the individuals or their social conditions. It took a perceptive (Marxist) critic to read “through” the comedy and lightness of these stories to grasp their “subversive” quality, which had not been apparent to Naipaul himself until it was pointed out in the review.18 Naipaul is grateful for the critic’s insights, but looking back, he also suggests that had he been as historically knowledgeable or as sophisticated as the reviewer at the time, he would not have been foolhardy enough to write Miguel Street. In this sense, Miguel Street marks the earliest stage of the process by which Naipaul himself began to work toward becoming “capable of self-assessment.”19 Returning to the stories, we see other evidence of Naipaul’s lack of social historical knowledge. The reader is told nothing of the backgrounds of the two black men, Popo and “B. Wordsworth,” whose artistic aspirations incline them to value actions and objects in capacious, rather than merely instrumental, ways. The reader does not learn how these working-class men might have developed these attributes, which are nevertheless described as unusual. Wordsworth attends to “everything as though he were doing it for the first time,” as though “he were doing some church rite.”20 Popo is the carpenter who conveys the value of purposiveness without purpose to the young narrator by announcing that he is “making the thing without a name.”21 Popo, who never drinks in the morning, shows the narrator how the glass of rum he holds every morning symbolizes the aesthetic delight that he takes in ordinary things: “Boy, in the morning, when the sun shining and it still cool, and you just get up, it make you feel good to know that you could go out and stand up in the sun

MEMORIE S OF UNDERDE V ELOP MEN T

43

and have some rum.”22 The narrator also thrills to the company of the stoical and humorous B. Wordsworth, who goes from door to door trying to sell his poetry despite being rebuffed. When asked whether the initial B. stands for Bill, Wordsworth says that it stands for “ ‘Black.’ Black Wordsworth. White Wordsworth was my brother. We share one heart. I can watch a small flower like the morning glory and cry.’ ”23 Despite the fact that Popo and B. Wordsworth do not find the means to develop their ideas and ultimately fail in different ways, they serve as role models who impart valuable lessons to the narrator. A few other characters who seek a more inclusive vision of society make an effort to improve the manners of the street kids. Titus Hoyt, the tireless evangelist of education and the most the public-spirited character in Miguel Street, regularly writes letters to the editor of the local newspaper, sets up a club for the street, and pays the bus fares for several boys to visit Fort George, where he delivers an impromptu lecture on the history of the island. When the narrator asks him if the French invaded Trinidad in 1803, Hoyt ignores the fact that Trinidad was a slave colony and, striking a Churchillian note, declares, “No, they didn’t attack. But we was ready, man. Ready for them.”24 A seeker of enlightenment, Hoyt is an optimist who aspires to knowledge and goes about trying to improve existing institutions. Despite his somewhat quixotic aims, he is recognized for his decency. By contrast, a character like Man-man, a street peddler who becomes mentally unbalanced and turns to religion after his dog dies, is a little frightening. Man-man had not always been a troubling a character. In the period when his dog was alive, he impressed the narrator as someone who took quiet pleasure in subverting norms under the cover of absolute conformity, in this case adopting the persona of a well-bred Englishman who does not speak grammatically correct English: And Man-man, looking at me solemnly, said in a mocking way, “So you goes to school, eh?” I said automatically, “Yes, I goes to school.” And I found that without intending it I had imitated Man-man’s correct and very English accent.25

44

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

When Man-man’s dog dies, however, he turns into a street preacher and gains a following by making political speeches with apocalyptic overtones. He claims to be in regular contact with God—“What he tell me about you people wasn’t nice to hear”—and warns of a total social breakdown. God vouchsafes Man-man a vision of “father eating son and mother eating daughter” if Trinidad wins political autonomy.26 Although everyone believes Man-man is mad, people also “weren’t sure that Man-man wasn’t really right.”27 One day, Man-man stuns everyone by announcing his plans to have himself publicly crucified and stoned. Whereas Titus Hoyt’s effort to create a shared identity through a study of the past is aimed at breaking down ethnic divisions, Man-man’s move reinforces religious identity by appealing exclusively to the emotions of Christians. In the racially mixed society, his outlandish behavior troubles nonChristians like Hat, who fear that the mimic crucifixion will inflame religious tensions. Man-man is arrested. Although he ends his life in a mental institution, there was a brief period when many people regarded him as a leader. Man-man’s early popularity suggests that his enthusiasm struck a chord with ordinary people, who, faced with poverty and hardship, found solace in his passionate appeals, even if his political objectives were never made clear. Stories of material difficulty are everywhere in Miguel Street, and though the popular appeal of potentially demagogic leaders like Man-man cannot be underestimated, the narrator concentrates on how individual tenacity is the more typical response to privation. He recounts touching stories about frustrated women (including his own mother) who toil to make up for their unreliable and incompetent male partners. In Popo’s words, “Women and them like work. Man not made for work.”28 The narrator is exercised by the creativity such individuals display in adverse circumstances. Most notable is the overworked Laura, who startles the men on the street with her angry but evocative use of foul language. Her eloquent curses, like those of Shakespeare’s Caliban, draw attention to their form as much as their content. The people she curses do not take offense but pause in wonder at the poetry of her imprecations. The street learns, for instance, that in Laura’s lexicon, “stale bread” stands for (the equally poetic if more literal) “thin arse”

MEMORIE S OF UNDERDE V ELOP MEN T

45

man. She threatens one of her children with a beating so violent he will “fart fire.” Her colorful use of the English language also serves as a counterpoint to that of the exquisitely well-mannered and Panglossian Titus Hoyt. Having many mouths to feed, Laura knows that there will be no relief from the drudgery of work. The seven fathers of her eight children abandon her, but instead of complaining, she trains her children to be self-sufficient in the hope that they will not repeat her mistakes. However, Laura’s hopes are dashed when her eldest daughter becomes pregnant. The narrator now hears in Laura’s wails a concession of defeat; she is a broken woman. “You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait,” is Hat’s quietly sympathetic comment on Laura’s fate.29 It speaks to the sense of solidarity in defeat that occasionally brings the street together. For all the residents’ difficulties, the narrator declares that they see themselves as a community made up of complex individuals with distinct personalities: “A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say ‘Slum!’ because he could see no more. But we, who lived there, saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else.”30 Such awareness does nothing to alter the fact that bad influences are all around and the street boys have to work at keeping them at bay. The garbage collector Eddoes—euphemistically described as a “cart driver”—is admired by the narrator for his gentlemanly demeanor. Eddoes takes pride in his work and tells the boys that he often comes into professional contact with doctors and lawyers, who regard him as their friend. He claims wealthy people do not just give him valuable things; they take him into their confidence. A shared spirit binds the stories of Eddoes to those of Elias (the perennial exam-taker) and Titus Hoyt. Democratic sentiments—including equality, dignity, a sense of fellow feeling—are cultivated in a gradual way through good manners. As the stories progress, however, Naipaul becomes more interested in using individual stories to explore how the spirit of democracy takes hold in uneven, sometimes self-destructive, ways in this “prepolitical” context.31 In “Caution,” Bolo’s efforts to educate himself

46

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

about world affairs have an unexpected and disturbing outcome because of his lack of formal education. When the reader meets him, Bolo is an advocate of self-improvement, like Titus Hoyt: “It have a lot of people who think they could kick people around. They think because we poor we don’t know anything. But I ain’t in that, you hear. Every day I sit down and read my papers regular regular.”32 At first Bolo believes that the newspapers expose the conspiracies of the rich and powerful. However, for reasons that remain unclear, over time he becomes convinced that the newspapers are themselves part of the global conspiracy that he alone knows about. Bolo’s effort at self-improvement takes place in a context where public institutions remain undeveloped. As he grows increasingly discouraged, he turns away from his aspiration to understand world politics and alights upon a firm belief that everything is a racket that the powerful have set up for their selfish benefit. Bolo’s erstwhile desire for freedom and justice is suddenly overwhelmed by a fierce hostility toward the powerful, who he believes are in the business of tricking and exploiting poor men. In such circumstances, there is no meaningful difference between being informed and being duped. Bolo holds to this position so completely that he refuses to believe that he has actually won a newspaper lottery: I said, “But it really draw, Mr Bolo.” He said, “How the hell you know it draw?” I said, “I see it in the papers.” At this Bolo got really angry and he seized me by the collar. He screamed, “How often I have to tell you, you little good-fornothing son of a bitch, that you mustn’t believe all that you read in the papers?”33

Showing an awareness of state-led campaigns of Cold War disinformation, Bolo says of the Americans: “These people is master of propaganda.”34 He refuses to believe anything, least of all that the Second World War has ended. Only when the Americans dismantle their Port of Spain army camps in 1947 does Bolo reluctantly change his mind.

MEMORIE S OF UNDERDE V ELOP MEN T

47

Bolo’s paranoid reading of the colonial state and the Cold War context may well contain more than a grain of truth. However, because he lacks the ability to frame and interpret information correctly, his actions become self-destructive. Failing to learn how to correctly interpret the ways that truth is produced, lacking access to institutions and social practices that could rein in his febrile imagination, Bolo graduates into a conspiracy theorist. Despite his earlier promise as a critical thinker, Bolo shares the melancholy fate of the collection’s other characters, who are unable to realize their potential. Naipaul’s fascination with the disoriented historical transition of a dislocated peasantry, symbolized above all by Bogart, gave him a point of entry into the life of the street. In his autobiographical Finding the Centre (1984), Naipaul describes how he tracked down the real Bogart many years after the publication of Miguel Street. On one level, this was an act of piety toward the actual person who had inspired Naipaul’s first successful literary character. More significantly, it revealed the type of character that interested Naipaul as he sought in later years to decipher the histories and cultures of diverse parts of the world, and how individuals in the colonial and postcolonial world negotiated the difficult passage from country to city and from premodern to modern conditions of life. The real Bogart ultimately left Trinidad and moved to Venezuela, where Naipaul found him in 1977.35 Naipaul learned that Bogart was a shopkeeper in a run-down village on the island of Margarita, just north of the Venezuelan peninsula. When they met, the real Bogart appeared to Naipaul nearly as remote and impenetrable as his fictional counterpart in Miguel Street. What is most noteworthy about their encounter is not the insights that Naipaul gained into Bogart’s character so much as Naipaul’s belated realization that their shared background was the real basis of his fascination with Bogart. Even his apparently critical assessments of Bogart’s actions are therefore informed by a deeper filiation, as seen in the moment when both men reveal their ambivalent identification with traditional TrinidadianHindu practices. This acknowledgment of a shared background informs Naipaul’s view that the ritual chanting Bogart engaged in was an expression of a “nullity,” or subjective disorientation, because it had never been sustained by the deeper meaning that only a

48

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

collectivity—even one as oppressive and “wretched” as Naipaul’s extended family in Port of Spain—could provide.36 Naipaul empathized with Bogart’s need for “the consolation of hallowed ways,” but he also believed that Bogart had paid a high price for escaping “too soon” from the tutelage provided by the clan or kin group.37 Like Bogart, Naipaul had sought to escape the stifling ways of the extended family but only ended up doing so after it had equipped him with certain reflexes or dispositions that would benefit him in later years. Naipaul’s description of his encounter with Bogart in Centre is historically nuanced and informed by internal tensions. He suggests in this later work that when he wrote Miguel Street he had lacked the ability to adequately convey the character of the “real” Bogart. This was partly because the only literary tradition Naipaul knew at the time was that of the European novel. Naipaul’s turn to nonfiction to portray the “real” Bogart (in Centre) as a way of offering context and depth to the “fictional” Bogart (of Miguel) underscores the fact that the literary tradition Naipaul had studied, and upon which he sought to build his career as a writer, presupposed social norms and structures very unlike those associated with the “peasant dereliction” extant in parts of colonial Trinidad.38 European novels came buttressed with a wealth of historical and sociological knowledge that the European novelist took for granted: The novel was an imported form [in Trinidad]. For the metropolitan writer it was only one aspect of self-knowledge. About it was a mass of other learning, other imaginative forms, other disciplines. For me, in the beginning, it was my all. Unlike the metropolitan writer I had no knowledge of a past. . . . And the plantation colony, as the humorous guide books said, was a place where almost nothing had happened. So the fiction one did, about one’s immediate circumstances, hung in a void, without a context, without the larger selfknowledge that was always implied in a metropolitan novel.39

Naipaul’s came to believe that his stories about his childhood environment lacked the “larger self-knowledge” that was taken for granted in European novels.40 In passages such as these, Naipaul intimated that as an author he shared the “limited social background” of his characters.41 To make up for this lack, Naipaul began traveling to

MEMORIE S OF UNDERDE V ELOP MEN T

49

different parts of the Caribbean in an effort to comprehend aspects of his own past, or as he put it, “to fill out my world picture.”42 Beyond the Caribbean, travel also became Naipaul’s way of forming a mental picture of the different societies in Asia and Africa to which he felt historically connected. Throughout Naipaul’s career, travel and historical research complemented his efforts to expand his understanding of his past through the writing of fiction. Fiction “by itself” would not have taken him to this this “larger comprehension.”43 It was travel that gave Naipaul an insight into the distinct fates of low-caste Indians who ended up in different parts of the Caribbean. In The Middle Passage, an account of Naipaul’s 1961 visit to several countries in the West Indies, we sense the aura of the fictional cart-driver Eddoes of Miguel Street hovering over the actual South Indian street-sweepers Naipaul observed in neighboring French Martinique. It was only when he visited Martinique that Naipaul realized that the confident and self-possessed Eddoes he had invented was grounded in Port of Spain’s peculiar history. From his close observation of low-caste South Indians in French Martinique, he was able to draw recursive insight into the fictional character he had created in a state of relative ignorance. In this way, Naipaul’s discovery of facts that were not available in books would enrich the next phase of his creative development: I had never known there were Indians in Martinique beyond the usual businessmen from Trinidad. I had never known that in the French islands, as in the British, indentured Indian immigrants and some Chinese had replaced slave labour after emancipation, and that seventy thousand or more Indians had come to Martinique. Unlike the Indians in British Guiana, Trinidad and Surinam, they came from South India, many from the French Indian colonies. They did not flourish. As one Martiniquan said to me, with disgust and pride, “They died like flies.” Some of the survivors emigrated to Trinidad and settled in west Port-of-Spain. Only four or five thousand remained in Martinique, laborers on the sugar estates of the north, sweepers in the city, and they made no mark on the society; no Indian even opened a shop. It might be that their numbers were too small.44

50

E A R LY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

Naipaul infers that Indian sweepers did better in Trinidad than in Martinique because the Indians in Trinidad were internally diverse and numerous enough to “re-create an India in miniature, with the basic Hindu-Muslim antagonism, Shia and Sunni divisions among the Muslims and a complex if rapidly disintegrating caste system among the Hindus.”45 In colonial Port of Spain, these social structures were simultaneously reproduced but also hybridized in flexible ways that gave a degree of political and economic mobility to lowcaste South Indians like Eddoes. Such prospects were, in Naipaul’s view, unavailable to the Indian community in French Martinique. Naipaul argues that “it might be that unlike these [Trinidad] Indians, the Martinique Indians came from a single depressed Hindu caste”:46 There is the remarkable fact that just as in India the sweepers’ settlement is separated, perhaps by a river, from the town, so in Fort de France [Martinique] the Indian sweepers are separated from the rest of the town by a canal. It is also to be noted that among those who emigrated to Port-of-Spain there was a tradition, now lost, of road-sweeping; and they have proved the most assimilable of Trinidad Indians. It is easy to see how such people, without the traditions, aptitudes and drive of other castes, would be helpless; or how any small, alien impoverished group would remain submerged in Martinique, where society was as rigidly organized as Indian society but where standards were incomprehensible and beyond attainment.47

Although the fictional Eddoes of Miguel Street is descended from the same “low Hindu caste” as the actual South Indian sweepers Naipaul observed six years later in Martinique, the latter—unlike Eddoes, who is portrayed as a glamorous and politically assertive figure by the impressionable child narrator of Miguel Street—were helpless “without the traditions, aptitudes and drives of the other castes.”48 Naipaul’s interest in the subtle similarities and differences between disadvantaged groups in different places arose from an exploration of places and groups both familiar and new to him. He developed this approach to peripheral spaces over the course of the next six decades

MEMORIE S OF UNDERDE V ELOP MEN T

51

in ways that arose from the interanimating insights of his fiction and nonfictional writing. In Miguel Street, we see Naipaul beginning to discover his material and taking his first, mostly intuitive, steps toward forming a connected picture of the complex, multifaceted colonial situation by which he had been shaped. In his early works, he grappled with subjects that kept him close to his social origins. As I show in the next chapter, Naipaul did so through closely observed accounts of the uneven ways small-town and rural Indians had been inducted into modernity. This phase of early self-education culminated in the journeys Naipaul took in 1961 in order to write The Middle Passage: I was a colonial traveling in New World plantation colonies which were like the one I had grown up in. To look, as a visitor, at other semi-derelict communities in despoiled land, in the great romantic setting of the New World, was to see, as from a distance, what one’s own community might have looked like . . . to have an intimation of a sequence of events going far back.49

In the years after writing Miguel Street, Naipaul was at pains to evoke a sense of people descended from these “unprotected” members of a globally displaced peasantry. He felt it necessary to learn the “art of self-assessment” and to form a picture of the world.50 This was, in his view, the first and most important task for the writer from the periphery. It also forms the starting point from which I elaborate the development of Naipaul’s art and thought.

2 SELF AND SOCIETY The Suffrage of Elvira; A House for Mr Biswas

A

T FIR ST glance, it might seem surprising that very little of the shock and outrage Naipaul displayed in his personal correspondence of 1956 found their way into the two novels he wrote upon his return to London from Trinidad: The Suffrage of Elvira (1959) and A House for Mr Biswas (1961).1 The simplest explanation is that Naipaul was still learning his craft as a writer of fiction. He did not know how to treat the unfolding political crisis without first acquiring more historical knowledge. During his childhood and adolescence, Naipaul shuttled physically between two mutually exclusive worlds—the closed Hindu extended family, with its links to the countryside, and the racially mixed, elite world revealed to him as a scholarship boy.2 The former was self-segregating, whereas the latter introduced him to cosmopolitan values. The two worlds did not mix, and as a child Naipaul moved daily between them—home and school, two mutually uncomprehending cultures. Naipaul grew up knowing the world of his community better than that of wider Trinidadian society and history. The letters he exchanged with his family during his undergraduate years at Oxford seem to have been typical of those written by inhabitants of other “plural societies” in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, populated

SEL F A ND S O CIE T Y

53

by linguistically and ethnically diverse communities that mostly interacted only in the marketplace.3 The forms of civic association and consensus that developed in these social formations, many of which were plantation colonies, were fragile at best. Civility and tolerance between groups, most of which had not entirely shaken off their peasant roots, were based on mutual incomprehension and indifference, based more on a feeling of separateness than on rivalry. These were all traits that gave colonial societies their segmented character. For Naipaul’s family, racial separateness was deemed a necessary means of maintaining group identity. The fear of ethnic or racial admixture was an obsession among many Indians, who were a minority in Trinidad. In a September 29, 1951, letter to his son, who was then an undergraduate at Oxford, Seepersad Naipaul complained that a niece named Phoolo had been “going around with a dougla [a person of mixed Indian and African ancestry] with the straight intention of marrying him,” while another niece was seeing a Muslim:4 These girls have become so ultra-modern that they make no distinction between Negroes, Mussulmans or any other people. Deo says without the semblance of a blush, there’s nothing bad or ugly in a Hindu girl marrying a Negro boy. Her actual words: “What does it matter as long as you can be happy?” As to Muslims: “Why they are only human.” A week ago Phoolo brought in a young black-as-coal (I assure you I do not exaggerate) dougla . . . When both your mother and I observed that the man—the Dougla that is—was dougla, Deo insisted that he was all right, a pure Indian of Madrasi parentage. . . . Deo is in love with a Mussulman named Isaac Mohammed, a drummer in the Indian orchestra that plays for Radio Trinidad.5

Seepersad was himself a victim of racial discrimination; his words belong to a tradition of mutually belittling talk engaged in by members of historically subjected groups. This is not to excuse such sentiments, of course, but rather to situate Naipaul’s development as a writer within a social context in which members of some groups engaged in prejudicial talk about one another.6

54

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

In a letter written to his sister when both of them were studying abroad, Naipaul echoes his father’s attitudes in passing: “Just in case you haven’t, you must hear now that Deo is chasing penniless men, Phoolo niggers and Tara douglas.”7 Caryl Phillips has rightly denounced the racial prejudice that Naipaul displays in some of these letters.8 At the same time, Caribbean writers have suggested that such behavior was widespread among all the racial groups.9 If indeed different communities were in the habit of discriminating against others on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, skin color, or some other category, then Seepersad’s views seem to be typical rather than exceptional. Such talk may have formed part of a reservoir of mutual belittlement—manifested in jokes and stereotypes— that was widespread. In other words, Naipaul’s prejudices could well be reflective of broader, socially recognizable attitudes among the colonized.10 Writing about the ways he was implicated in this broader fabric of prejudice, Naipaul recalls how, as a young boy growing up in 1940s Port of Spain, Trinidad, he did not feel “at all linked” to newly arriving communities from India: “The Gujerati and Sindhi merchants were as foreign as the Syrians. They lived enclosed lives of a narrowness which I considered asphyxiating. They were devoted to their work, the making of money; they seldom went out; their pallid women were secluded; and all day their houses screeched with morbid Indian film songs. They contributed nothing to the society, nothing even to the Indian community.”11 Naipaul also points out that his perception of the self-secluding Sindhis and Gujeratis mirrored the way Trinidadians in general regarded his own community, which had arrived in the nineteenth century. At other times, Naipaul’s recollections suggest something more interesting: in a poor colonial society like his, stereotypes served as the means by which groups became legible to one another and tenuous solidarities were fostered. In his 1956 letters, Naipaul raged against the racial slurs that black politicians were directing at the Trinidadian-Indian population in their speeches. He made no mention in these letters of that older history of casual denigration.12 Naipaul did not grasp how the “prepolitical” forms of ethnocentric prejudice and mutual belittlement in which the inhabitants of the plural society had long indulged might,

SEL F A ND S O CIE T Y

55

in an age of mass politics, fuel racial tensions.13 The normalization of such attitudes, which was given cover if not legitimacy in the language of anticolonial nationalism, prepared the way for the further intensification of racial politics. It disabled the population from a necessary stocktaking of the society’s central fault lines as it moved toward independence and majority rule. Naipaul’s enraged letters, which at times echoed the very racism he denounced, reflected a historically new kind of disorientation that he never acknowledged or indeed wrote about. The colonized intelligentsia of Naipaul’s generation had no historical precedents to draw upon. Hardly anything was known about the impact that mass politics or nationalist ideology would have on colonized societies agitating for political independence. Closer to home, little had been written about the character of rural or small-town Trinidad and the impact of the historical transition to modernity. Naipaul’s relative lack of knowledge is reflected in his reliance on caricatures of Indian characters in his early fiction. It accounts for his delight when he came across a person in Trinidad who resembled Ramlogan—the name of a fictional small-town shopkeeper in The Mystic Masseur (1957)—whose stereotypical traits exceeded the exaggerated ones Naipaul had given his fictional predecessor. This “reallife Ramlogan,” as Naipaul excitedly wrote to his wife Patricia Hale, “vowed eternal support to my uncle, assured him that the election was won; yet all along he was for the other candidate, as we discovered only on election day!”14 After promising Patricia he would take her to meet this charming rogue the next time they were in Trinidad, Naipaul mentions that traveling to country villages in Trinidad has given him an idea for his next novel. He describes this Trinidad as “a land of pure gold” from a writing point of view.15 In his 1956 visit, Naipaul gathered material about semi-rural Indian life that he was eager to transform into fiction. His next novel would center on a corrupt election campaign in Elvira, a small-town central Trinidad. The Suffrage of Elvira, which tells the story of a TrinidadianIndian businessman’s successful effort to win a local election in 1950, stands out for its hilarious depiction of ordinary people’s cynical attitude toward democratic politics on the eve of Trinidad’s independence from colonial rule.

56

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

The contrast between Miguel Street and The Suffrage of Elvira is striking in several respects. The stories in Miguel Street are distinguished by their quiet pathos. Although humorous, the underlying mood is melancholy and sympathetic. The narrator is drawn to stories of individuals whose aspirations for a better life are informed by their longing for creative self-expression rather than wealth or power. Their often fragile psychological state is treated with gentle irony. The characters in Suffrage, by contrast, appear devoid of inner lives and are exclusively motivated by a desire for material gain. Dress and mannerisms are described in great detail, whereas introspection is largely absent. The narrator’s amorality reflects the superficial and briskly vulgar traits of the inhabitants of Elvira. In an interesting reversal, the country people of Elvira are mostly cynical and materialistic, whereas the city folk of Miguel Street are often described as idealistic. Accompanying this new mood is a concentration on visual elements. Domestic interiors as well as built and natural landscapes are described in Suffrage with a detail that is largely absent in Miguel Street. When the victorious Harbans Singh reluctantly visits Elvira shortly after winning the election on a populist platform, his constituents already have trouble recognizing him because the visual markers by which they knew him have vanished: He wasn’t the candidate they knew. Gone was the informality of the dress, the loose trousers, the tie around the waist, the open shirt. He was in a double-breasted grey suit. The coat was a little too wide and a little too long; but that was the tailor’s fault. Harbans didn’t wave. He looked preoccupied, kept his eye on the ground, and when he hawked and spat in the gutter, pulled out an ironed handkerchief and wiped his lips—not wiped even, patted them—in the fussiest way.16

The novel winkingly dispenses with the need to pay lip service to anticolonial nationalist nostrums about the good society that would be created with the passing of the colonial era. No one, least of all the cynical residents of Elvira, believes in such foolish talk. Suffrage disarmingly illustrates how local people regard the democratic system as something that is to be exploited for personal gain: “Democracy had come to Elvira four years before, in 1946; but it had

SEL F A ND S O CIE T Y

57

taken nearly everybody by surprise and it wasn’t until 1950, a few months before the second general election under universal adult franchise, that people began to see the possibilities.”17 The locals matter-of-factly assume that blacks will vote for black candidates and Indians for Indian candidates. Harbans Singh is therefore certain that he will win “the Indian vote.” It shocks him to learn that an Indian teacher named Lorkhoor is campaigning for Preacher, a black candidate. “ ‘But I is a Hindu,’ ” Harbans cries, clearly hurt. “ ‘Lorkhoor is a Hindu. Preacher is Negro.’ ”18 Just as democracy is understood to be a way for individuals and groups to enrich themselves, the narrator of The Suffrage of Elvira never challenges the belief, taken for granted by the novel’s characters, that the appeals to ethnic and racial identity are normal in a democracy. No one spends time thinking about his or her civic obligations. No one considers why it might be worthwhile to foster a commitment to liberal norms and values. When wider conceptions of belonging are invoked, they conceal sectarian or ethnocentric agendas. The only character who expresses reservations about the new spirit of democratic self-expression is Mrs. Baksh, the redoubtable wife of the Indian-Muslim tailor Baksh, who is working for Harbans’s campaign. Mrs. Baksh fears that the newfangled talk of equality and brotherhood will only serve to undermine the social fabric. She does not understand politics, but she knows enough to be alarmed by the fact that people get so worked up at rallies. She warns her husband, “Is this election sweetness that sweeten you up, Baksh. But see how this sweetness going to turn sour sour.”19 Mrs. Baksh’s prophecy does not quite come to pass, but there are scenes in The Suffrage of Elvira where the anger and mutual incomprehension that make this one of Naipaul’s funniest novels also threaten to result in physical violence. A hostile exchange ensues between Mr. Cuffy and the Mahadeo when an ailing black man unexpectedly dies under the latter’s watch. Mr. Cuffy suspects foul play on the part of the Indians on Harbans’s inept campaign team, who had gambled that pretending to minister to the needs of a sick black man would win some black votes.20 Unfortunately for the team, the man in question was more ill than they realized, and Mr. Cuffy angrily alleges that the Indians working for Harbans’s election campaign were not negligent so much as witch doctors using their traditional “obeah” to kill black people.

58

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

Suffrage does not merely concern itself with observations about the tensions between the black and Indian communities. It also explores the contradictions that run through this “crazily mixed up” society. For instance, Dhaniram is a Hindu priest given to humming Christian hymns, a remnant of his Canadian missionary school education (“Jesus loves me, yes I know,” is one of his favorites). Dhaniram is not untypical of the townsfolk in regarding religions as different types of insurance policy: Everybody, Hindus, Muslims and Christians, owned a Bible; the Hindus and Muslims, looking on it, if anything, with greater awe. Hindus and Muslims celebrated Christmas and Easter. The Spaniards and some of the Negroes celebrated the Hindu festival of lights. . . . Everybody celebrated the Muslim festival of Hosein [the Shia commemoration of the assassinated grandson of the Prophet Muhammad].21

Nonetheless, as the exchange between Cuffy and Mahadeo suggests, the easygoing mixed religious practices seem also to have facilitated the emergence of a more worrying, sharp-edged social climate in which stereotype risks being confused with knowledge. The Trinidadian political scientist Lloyd Best, a contemporary of Naipaul, called The Suffrage of Elvira “the most important of Naipaul’s novels.” Best thought that Naipaul had “founded a whole new school of empirical political science” by revealing “ ‘how the society worked, as distinct from how people thought it ought to work. In those days, that was almost impossible with the colonial film on your eyes. People couldn’t tell perception from reality, and he was absolutely lucid as to how the political system actually worked, and how people actually behaved.’ ”22 ✴✴✴

By the end of the 1950s, Naipaul ceased writing stories that celebrated or satirized the mixed-up, “hybridized” Caribbean cultures as ends in themselves. He embarked on a search for more historically textured and self-conscious ways to describe his society. The result

SEL F A ND S O CIE T Y

59

was A House for Mr Biswas (1961), a novel that brilliantly memorializes the types of family and communal life that Naipaul had known as a child and that had long ceased to exist by the time of the novel’s appearance.23 Naipaul explored how characters simultaneously formed by the plantation culture of colonial Trinidad and traditional Indian culture navigated their uneven transition into modern forms of life. The novel’s first hundred pages offer a vivid portrait of rural and small-town individuals in Trinidad going about their lives in the first decade of the twentieth century. Unlike Suffrage and Masseur, in which simple actions were superimposed upon an inert background, in this work Naipaul explores the kinds of individual consciousness that emerge in dynamic relation to social circumstances.24 This new phase in Naipaul’s development is rooted in highly visual descriptions of the several worlds of Trinidadian town and country, plantation and village. In the opening section of the novel, only halfironically titled “Pastoral,” the landscape of the plantation, interiors of peasant homes, and even physiognomies of people are described in exhilarating detail. Eight and eleven years old respectively, Biswas’s older brothers Prasad and Pratap had already begun to work, joyfully cooperating with the estates in breaking the law about the employment of children. They had developed adult mannerisms. They spoke with blades of grass between their teeth; they drank noisily and sighed, passing the back of their hands across their mouths; they ate enormous quantities of rice, patted their bellies and belched; and every Saturday they stood up in line to draw their pay. Their job was to look after the buffaloes that drew the cane-carts. The buffalo pleasance was a muddy, cloyingly sweet pool not far from the factory; here, with a dozen other thin-limbed boys, noisy, happy, over-energetic and with a full sense of their importance, Pratap and Prasad moved all day in the mud among the buffaloes.25

This description of the child laborers’ perspective on prestige and social hierarchy—the buffalo gang ranking higher than the grass gang—takes us immediately into the world of the plantation as a

60

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

complex social institution. Equally striking is the longer passage from which this quotation is drawn, which testifies to the way Naipaul sought to reconstruct a vanished world through a painstaking realism. He was, in this way, paying obliquely homage to his father’s pioneering descriptions of rural Trinidad life several decades earlier. Naipaul’s description of his father’s stories in The Adventures of Gurudeva could also be applied to House: “There is the same eye that lingers lovingly over what might at first seem nondescript. Landscape, dwellings, people: there is the same assembling of sharp detail.”26 Unlike Seepersad, however, Naipaul was more informed about the very distinctive ways individual and historical development were distorted by the plantation society. All social institutions existed as byproducts of this economic monoculture. Naipaul reveals how individuals formed by the plantation economy absorbed the cultural norms and ideals of the industrializing West in constrained ways. House begins by describing how Biswas is born into a social order defined by the colonial plantation economy, which places severe constraints on the possibility of social and individual development: And it was to be the grass-gang for Mr Biswas. Later he would move to the cane fields, to weed and clean and plant and reap; he would be paid by the task and his tasks would be measured out by a driver with a long bamboo rod. And there he would remain. He would never become a driver or a weigher because he wouldn’t be able to read. Perhaps, after many years, he might save enough to rent or buy a few acres where he would plant his own canes, which he would sell to the estate at a price fixed by them.27

At the start of the novel, it appears that Biswas will, like his peasant forebears, grow old and die in this static and unchanging universe. From this standpoint, the breakup of the family following his father’s untimely death makes it possible for Biswas to escape the plantation culture of the countryside. He is eventually sent to a school in the market town of Pagotes, where he learns to read. It is also in the process of being inducted into modern institutions that Biswas encounters social prejudice for the first time. The first

SEL F A ND S O CIE T Y

61

incident occurs with a Hindu convert to Christianity, and the second with an Indian-Muslim: “How old you is, boy?” Lal, the teacher at the Canadian Mission school, asked, his small hairy hands fussing with the cylindrical ruler on his roll-book. Mr Biswas shrugged and shifted from one bare foot to the other. “How you people want to get on, eh?” Lal had been converted to Presbyterianism from a low Hindu caste and held all unconverted Hindus in contempt. As part of this contempt he spoke to them in broken English. “Tomorrow I want you to bring your buth certificate. You hear?” “Buth suttificate?” Bipti [Mr Biswas’s mother] echoed the English words. “I don’t have any.” “Don’t have any, eh?” Lal said the next day. “You people don’t even know how to born, it look like.”28

Unlike in Suffrage, ethnic tensions assume an intracommunal form in House. Prejudice here is an attribute of fully formed individuals— rather than a reflection of communal identity—with specific histories of grievances and is based on a greater degree of familiarity with the “other.” Lal’s recent conversion to Christianity from a low Hindu caste is one clue that his gratuitous insults have their source in old wounds. Similarly, Ghany, the Indian Muslim commissioner for oaths, reacts with strained familiarity to the two Hindu women who come to him to apply for a birth certificate: F. Z. Ghany carried the rest of his office equipment in his shirt pocket; it was stiff with pens, pencils, sheets of paper and envelopes. He needed to be able to carry his equipment about; he opened the Pagotes office only on market day, Wednesday; he had other offices, open on other market days, at Tunapuna, Arima, St Joseph and Tacarigua. “Just give me three or four dog-case or cuss-case every day,” he used to say, “and I all right, you hear.” Seeing the group of three walking Indians file across the plank over the gutter, F. Z. Ghany got up, spat out the matchstick and

62

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

greeted them with good-humoured scorn. “Maharajin, maharajin, and little boy.” He made most of his money from Hindus but, as a Muslim, distrusted them.29

However, it is important to note that the narrator’s tone suggests his relish for the nuances of such encounters, which give texture to everyday interactions in this place and time. The portrayal of Ghany’s prejudice toward Tara and Bipti is relaxed, not critical. After all, Ghany’s disregard is mirrored by the indifference displayed by the two women toward him and are oblivious to the fact that he “can follow” their conversation in Hindi.30 In his classic exploration of how a historical mode of understanding became widespread in the wake of the French Revolution, Georg Lukács asserts that “according to the new interpretation the reasonableness of human progress develops ever increasingly out of the inner conflict of social forces in history itself; according to this interpretation history is the bearer and realizer of human progress.”31 Despite the suffering such “conflict” engendered, Lukács implies, commercial society would have been experienced by European townsfolk as an advance over agricultural society. It was in the urban areas that the social contradictions brought systemic forms of injustice into view. This “modern” consciousness has been absorbed by Lal and Ghany, albeit in a way unlike that described by Lukács. Lal and Ghany equate the extractive practices of the plantation economy, as well as its lack of institutions, with modernity. Their idea of superiority lacks both the forms of historical dynamism existing in the metropolitan core and access to the tools with which to reflect on the underdeveloped material conditions by which they have been shaped.32 In this sense, Lal and Ghany assert their “individuality” in ways that reflect the limited conditions of the plantation society. If his father’s untimely death spares Biswas the fate of the illiterate small farmer with no choice but to sell sugar cane to plantation owners at prices fixed by them, it nonetheless appears that an educated Biswas is fated to become a man who resembles Ghany or Lal. Although Biswas has left the plantation, his arrival in the market town of Pagotes heralds little more than the possibility of a limited consciousness akin to that of Lal and Ghany. At this point in the novel,

SEL F A ND S O CIE T Y

63

Biswas subsists in a state where the desire for progress has taken hold in the absence of the institutions necessary for its realization. There is a metafictional dimension in which the novel reflects on this historical constraint at the level of literary form. An aspiring writer (and acquaintance of Biswas) named Misir disparages the absurd stories that rural Indians apparently like to tell. This reflects their false beliefs, Misir believes. “No once-upon-a-time-there was-a-rajah nonsense [for me],” he tells Biswas. Having dismissed myths, folktales, and fairy stories as nonsense, Misir declares that only realism interests him. Biswas is suitably impressed—realism’s prestige has, after all, moved in lockstep with capitalism’s global spread. But there is a twist. Misir’s stories are not realistic so much as melodramatic: “Misir’s first story was about a man who had been out of work for months and was starving. His five children were starving; his wife was having another baby. It was December and the shops were full of food and toys. On Christmas Eve the man got a job. Going home that evening, he was knocked down and killed by a motorcar that didn’t stop.”33 Misir’s stories do not presuppose a context in which, in the words of Erich Auerbach, “all the human figures and all the human events in his work appear upon a ground politically and socially disturbed.”34 Growing up in a plantation society, Misir clearly belongs to the disturbed world in the broadest sense of the word, but he has no understanding of how to integrate these wider processes or their local ramifications into the portrayal of individual fates. Misir’s artistic efforts are undermined by his lack of knowledge of the historical ground presupposed by novelistic action. His stories are shaped by a context where modernization exists in the absence of the tools with which individuals might undertake a reflection on modernity.35 Development is a central theme in House. But the novel’s exploration of the growth of the individual’s mind, like its depiction of the community’s transition from country to town, is complicated by the fact that there is—before the Tulsis appear—no framework by which Biswas can form an idea of individual autonomy or development. This is why the first hundred pages of House have, despite their brilliance, the desultory quality of a picaresque novel. Indeed, there are times when Biswas’s encounters uncannily begin to resemble those in Miguel Street, a work that was modeled on the episodic

64

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

Lazarillo de Tormes (an early Spanish novel Naipaul translated while he was at Oxford). In these early sections, Biswas’s development results from discrete interactions with a series of minor characters (like Misir) who appear briefly before disappearing altogether. The section titled “Before the Tulsis” describes a period when Biswas’s efforts result only in inconclusive encounters that contribute nothing to the development of plot or character: being apprenticed to Jairam; working for Bhandat in the rum shop; visiting Dehuti and Ramchand; sign-painting with Alec. At this point, there appears no way for the narrative to break through this impasse, which in turn accounts for the picaresque aspect of the first hundred pages of the novel. The plot here remains disconnected, to recall Lukács’s characterization, from the social forces of history. This sense of disembeddedness is itself a symptom of the fact that knowledge exists in an uneven, even distorted form in the plantation economy. Key scenes reveal the disjunction between Biswas’s efforts to educate himself—or what his schooling with Lal has taught him to desire—and actual conditions in colonial Trinidad: [Mr Biswas] stayed in the back trace and read Samuel Smiles. He had bought one of his books in the belief that it was a novel, and had become an addict. Samuel Smiles was as romantic and satisfying as any novelist, and Mr Biswas saw himself in many Samuel Smiles heroes: he was young, he was poor, and he fancied he was struggling. But there always came a point when resemblance ceased. The heroes had rigid ambitions and lived in countries where ambitions could be pursued and had a meaning. He had no ambition, and in this hot land, apart from opening a shop or buying a motorbus, what could he do? What could he invent? Dutifully, however, he tried. He bought elementary manuals of science and read them; nothing happened; he only became addicted to elementary manuals of science. He bought the seven expensive volumes of Hawkins’ Electrical Guide, made rudimentary compasses, buzzers and doorbells, and learned to wind an armature. Beyond that he could not go. Experiments became more complex, and he didn’t know where in Trinidad he could find the equipment mentioned so casually by Hawkins. His interest in electrical matters died, and he contented himself with reading about the Samuel Smiles heroes in their magic land.36

SEL F A ND S O CIE T Y

65

“Equipment” here gives rise to desires that cannot be realized in colonial plantation society.37 Biswas even subconsciously recodes Smilesean realism into the genre of fantasy, as is implied by “magic land.” And Samuel Smiles’s stories of English upward mobility end up disorienting Biswas as much as Misir’s underdeveloped realism, where historical causality was subsumed into blind fate. The narrative of House is at an impasse here, caught between the Scylla of Smilesean realism and the Charybdis of Misir’s melodrama. This obstacle, which is both formal and historical in nature, is overcome only with appearance of the Tulsis, a family of orthodox Hindu landowners in rural Trinidad. With five daughters of marriageable age, Mrs. Tulsi searches for impoverished upper-caste Hindu men to whom they can be married without the need for a dowry. These men are then turned into dependent workers for the Tulsi family. Thus the Tulsis have no compunction about exploiting Biswas (they hire him as a sign-painter, but do not pay him for the work he does) or of manipulating his feelings (they coerce him into marriage). Taunted by the Tulsis, Biswas reactively discovers his worth and sense of purpose in a process reminiscent of what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche hypothesized as the “slave revolt.”38 Biswas gains self-awareness not from his own desires, which remain obscure to him, but by rejecting the Tulsis’ programmatic efforts to browbeat him into accepting his status as a dependent. Biswas finds his purpose and meaning, and correspondingly the novel its narrative logic, by honing the intellectual tools that enable him to overturn the values of the self-absorbed and unreflective Tulsis. Biswas ultimately charts a path to individuality whose values are distinct from those of false role models like Lal, the schoolmaster, or Ghany, the commissioner for oaths. In the first half of the novel, the Tulsis represent a placeholder for the colonial order, which lies concealed behind the normalized rules of the plantation economy. The Tulsis possess a visibility and an apparent stability that no other group can claim. It is only by negating the values of the Tulsis that Biswas is able to articulate what he truly feels and believes. In this way, he fabricates an “inner” self and, over time, a sense of independence of thought and creative thinking. It is against this hard won struggle that Biswas’s aspiration for a

66

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

house reveals itself as something more than an emblem of materialism. The house to which he returns near the end of his life after being discharged from the hospital is a physical space that mirrors his interiorized subjectivity. The objects he sees in it represent indices of his development as a person; they enable him to reflect “with pleasure, surprise, disbelief” on “every relationship, every possession” that had previously been obscured by the crowded and harried conditions in which he had been placed for much of his life.39 Biswas’s attitude to the commodities in his home is not an expression of reification; it enables him to reflect on his own achievement and to grasp it in relation to the human relationships and historical process with which it is intertwined.40 It might equally be argued that, far from merely oppressing Biswas, the Tulsis facilitate his rise by forcing him to define himself against their values. Mocking Biswas’s clichéd expressions about “paddling his own canoe,”41 the Tulsis inadvertently goad Biswas into action, crucially paving the way to an elaboration of the novel’s key theme of individual development in a peripheral space.42 By showing how Biswas is unable to define himself independently of his struggle against the Tulsis, the reader learns that his development is intertwined with, rather than simply opposed to, the group. The comedy of the novel lies in its unsentimental yet sympathetic portrayal of the uneven nature of Biswas’s development as a character. When he joins a modern-sounding group of “protestant Hindu missionaries” from India who preach that “caste was unimportant, that Hinduism should accept converts, that idols should be abolished, that women should be educated,”43 Biswas does so in order to challenge the master morality of the Tulsis, who are upper-caste orthodox Hindus.44 He receives his comeuppance, however, when Seth, who is part of the ruling circle of the Tulsis, correctly surmises that Biswas is, for all his reformist rhetoric, just as likely to be scandalized by the prospect of black converts to Hinduism as the Tulsis: “I hear they have made some creole converts. Brothers for you, Mohun!”45 With the Tulsis on the scene, the brilliant descriptions of the early sections coalesce around a plot in which the development of self arises out of the tensions engendered by social constraint. The demands of a collective order that privileges conformity are set against the

SEL F A ND S O CIE T Y

67

individual resistance they engender. House represents an important advance in Naipaul’s formal sophistication as a writer. Characters in this novel possess a greater depth than those in Suffrage because they are more closely integrated with their “historical moment.”46 In House, historical underdevelopment is depicted as a dynamic condition in its own right; it is not condescendingly portrayed as inert or unreflective. Thus, when Biswas and Shama, his wife, are set up in the shop in the dismal surroundings of the Chase, it is Biswas, not Shama, who feels completely overwhelmed with fear. Biswas had clamored for the opportunity to run a small dry-goods store far away from the Tulsis, whereas his wife Shama had dreaded being separated from her sisters and her family. The derelict condition of the shop turns out to be far worse than anything either Biswas or Shama had imagined. Whereas Biswas is now paralyzed by despair, Shama briskly springs into action: And in the end it was Shama who gave him comfort. For presently she stopped crying, gave a long, decisive blow to her nose and began sweeping, setting up, putting away. He followed her about, watching, offering help, glad to be told to do something and enjoying it when she reproved him for doing it badly. . . . Till the last she had protested at leaving Hanuman House, but now she behaved as though she moved into a derelict house every day. Her actions were assertive, wasteful and unnecessarily noisy. They filled shop and house; they banished silence and loneliness.47

In another example of how character is more effectively integrated with context in House, the scene reveals how Shama’s fortitude arises from her knowledge that she is supported by her family. Conversely, she derives her sense of purpose and identity from her loyalty to the spirit of this collective order. Drawing strength from the knowledge that she is merely physically, not spiritually, separated from the Tulsis, Shama accomplishes results that the individualistic Biswas, overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenges he faces on his own, cannot. Other movements subtly undermine the novel’s general tendency to affirm the individual at the expense of the group. Shama is belittled

68

E A RLY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

for possessing no identity apart from the one she has been designated. She is described as someone who merely wants to be “taken through every stage, to fulfil every function, to have her share of the established emotions.”48 However, the reader is also able to enter into Shama’s secret pride at organizing the blessing ceremony for her house and store at the Chase, and at being made, if briefly, the center of her family’s attention: “[Shama’s] hair was still wet from her ritual bath and she was dressed in white from top to toe. She looked like someone waiting to be sacrificed and Mr Biswas thought he could detect pleasure in the curve of her back. Her status, like Hari’s, was only temporary; but while the ceremony lasted, it was paramount.”49 In such scenes, the traditional pleasures are neither disparaged nor treated perfunctorily but lingered over and conferred a pathos that serves as a counterpoint to Biswas’s hostile viewpoint. Thus, despite the fact that House is typically read in terms of Biswas’s efforts to escape the stifling order of the rural plantation or the communal extended family, the reactionary values of the Tulsis are not simply attacked: for all their oppressive energy, their presence cushions the violent dislocations attending the transition from the country to the city. The richness of the narrative lies in portraying the enraged Biswas’s inability to grasp this objective fact without downplaying the stultifying conformity demanded by the Tulsi order. When Biswas suffers a mental breakdown at Green Vale, he is nursed back to mental health by the Tulsis. Displaying little gratitude, Biswas leaves for Port of Spain, hoping that it will provide him with recognition because it is a place “made up of individuals.”50 But although Biswas lands a job as a reporter on the Sentinel newspaper, he remains as poor as ever. Feeling frustrated, he writes a number of darkly funny articles that suggest his unhappiness at being disabused of his naïve fantasies about individualism. When the body of a missing American explorer to the Amazon is found, Biswas composes an article mockingly addressed to the dead man’s children. “Well, I have news for you, kiddies. Daddy is on his way home. Yesterday, he passed through Trinidad. In a coffin.”51 Revealingly, Biswas imagines the children to be living “somewhere in America in a neat little red-roofed cottage.” The pleasure he takes at the disruption of an

SEL F A ND S O CIE T Y

69

imagined domestic idyll hints at a resentment that supersedes any sympathy he might feel for the children who have, like him, lost a father early.52 At other moments, the cruel and anarchic humor of Biswas’s early articles reflects his unhappiness at being “trapped” by his obligations to his children. The story, headlined “Four Children Roasted In Hut Blaze,” recalls Biswas’s unstable state during the period leading up to his breakdown, when “he decided that he had to get rid of Anand and Savi himself, in such a way that the children would never know who had killed them. All morning he was possessed of visions in which he cutlassed, poisoned, strangled, burned, Anand and Savi.”53 Despite these troubling moments, during his time at the newspaper, the troubled Biswas gradually learns to embrace his role as a father. It is also during this phase that he transmits his literary ambition to his son, Anand, which makes for an enduring connection between the two, drawing them closer together even as it creates new tensions. This development in their relationship is subtly illuminated by a sequence of events following Anand’s near-drowning at Docksite. They reveal how the fraught bond between Biswas and Anand is mediated through the written word rather than direct communication between father and son. Biswas writes an angry article in the Sentinel denouncing the absence of warning signs at Docksite, and Anand produces a powerful school essay describing his close shave with death, which Biswas recognizes as a sign of his son’s literary talent. Reading Anand’s composition, Biswas “wished to be close to [Anand],” even though he cannot bring himself to say this directly to his son, who in turn seeks to punish his father by refusing to discuss his essay.54 Feeling rebuffed, Biswas’s “hurt turns to anger,” and he gives Anand a “savage” beating.55 This raw display of how Biswas’s fragility triggers violent behavior reveals the uneven nature of his development. Traumatized by such behavior, Biswas’s daughter Savi wishes at such moments that she could to “go back to Hanuman House.”56 At such moments, the narrator, though squarely on Biswas’s side throughout the novel, also shows consideration for the collective order that sustains the lives of individuals in colonial Trinidad. Biswas admits to himself during his period of convalescence, “He remained in the Blue Room, feeling

70

E A R LY W RI T ING S: 19 5 5 –1961

secure to be only a part of Hanuman House, an organism that possessed a life, strength, and power to comfort which was quite separate from the individuals who composed it.”57 In one of the final scenes of the novel, this insight is underscored through the use of Proustian technique. Studying in a library in a northern land, the “endpaper” of a dusty book Anand touches releases a memory of “balloons powdered with rubbery dust.” His solitary act of reading is suddenly overwhelmed by the clamor of the extended family that sustained him as a child: “In a northern land, in a time of new separations and yearnings, in a library grown suddenly dark, the hailstones beating against the windows, the marbled endpaper of a dusty leather-bound book would disturb: and it would be the hot noisy week before Christmas in the Tulsi store: the marbled patterns of oldfashioned balloons powdered with a rubbery dust in a shallow white box that was not to be touched. So later, and very slowly, in secure times of different stresses, when the memories had lost the power to hurt, with pain or joy, they would fall into place and give back the past.”58 Biswas’s entry into Hanuman House resembles the process by which “foreign” elements gradually undermine the splendid isolation of the Tulsis, who are, unbeknownst to themselves, already in search of a way to capitalize on the emerging forms of modern society in Port of Spain. In this way, Biswas acts as a bearer of a new kind of historical reasoning, at once skeptical and irreverent but also psychologically and materially dependent on the order it seeks to challenge. In Naipaul’s earlier works, characters barely develop and subsist as extensions of their environment. In Suffrage, the cynicism, greed, and ambition of Elvira’s residents are never explained or contextualized but are simply taken for granted. In an important departure for Naipaul, the development of characters in House takes place in dynamic relationships with a context reimagined as “disturbed ground.”

3 HISTORICAL IDENTITIES The Middle Passage; An Area of Darkness

I

N 196 3, the Trinidadian intellectual and political activist C. L. R. James wrote a letter thanking Naipaul for his glowing review of James’s autobiographical study, Beyond a Boundary.1 In the book, James argued that the ethos underpinning the game of cricket had imbued West Indians with a public spiritedness through which a democratic culture grounded in fairness and civility might be established across the region. Somewhat surprisingly for a political radical, James declared that, thanks to cricket’s widespread appeal, the English public-school code, to which he had been introduced by colonial education, had been imparted to the West Indian masses. James argued that cricket was more than a game; it had contributed to feelings of national community that were grounded in highminded ideals such as restraint and fairness, not racial, linguistic, or territorial identity. Naipaul expressed his approval of James’s sentiments: “To be a nationalist, Mr James says elsewhere, you must have a nation. The African in Africa had a nation; so had the Asian in Asia. The West Indian, whatever his community, had only this ‘system’ [of values].”2 An optimist at heart, James was a radical anticolonial thinker thirty years older than Naipaul. Both men were born and raised in Trinidad, and both had been educated at Queen’s Royal College,

74

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

the oldest secondary school in Port of Spain. In the 1963 appendix to the revised edition of his 1938 classic The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, James praised Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas—together with George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and Wilson Harris’s Guyana Quartet—as a novel that powerfully imagined a hopeful future for the region. The rift between the two men came into the open later that year, when James wrote Naipaul to criticize his recently published The Middle Passage, an account of his 1961 visit to Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts, Anguilla, and Martinique. There was nothing factually inaccurate in what Naipaul had written, James conceded, but the work omitted much that was positive about West Indian culture and society. And whereas he lost no opportunity to attack his fellow West Indians, James pointed out, Naipaul seemed curiously blind to the many shortcomings of European civilization. By the time Naipaul began writing The Middle Passage, he believed that Trinidad was teetering “on the brink of racial war,”3 a prospect that he, a member of a racial minority, viewed with growing concern. Whereas in earlier works like The Suffrage of Elvira Naipaul had turned “crookedness” into material for lighthearted comedy, The Middle Passage marks a radical departure in treating this attribute as an ominous portent of demagoguery resulting in mass violence. While Naipaul was visiting Trinidad in 1956, the first major crisis in the newly independent Congo erupted with the announcement by leaders of the copper-rich Katanga region that they wished to break away and form their own nation. The newly elected prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, accused Belgium, the former colonial authority, of cynically facilitating the unrest in order to secure its commercial interests. Lumumba pleaded for United Nations intervention to prevent the fragmentation of his newly independent nation, but he had by this point alienated powerful Western nations. These events paved the way for Lumumba’s overthrow (and, tragically, his assassination), after which the Western powers installed a military dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.4 Lumumba’s death led to protests in the West Indies, where they acquired racial overtones. Naipaul observed that the “eruptions were widespread, and represented feelings coming to the surface in Negro communities throughout the Caribbean.”5 Although Naipaul

HI S TORIC A L IDEN T I T IE S

75

believed that the grievances behind these protests were legitimate, he also believed that they had been exploited by unscrupulous local agents and were contributing to the further erosion of Trinidad’s fragile social fabric. In his view, ethnic minorities were in danger of becoming convenient scapegoats. Although Naipaul’s favorable review of James makes clear that he believed in the importance of newly independent societies building institutions that fostered civic ideals, he also became convinced that the nationalist feelings in whose name such ideals were invoked were being deployed in ways that threatened the safety of minorities. In the decade following the 1961 publication of A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul began exploring newly decolonizing societies with a sensibility that swung between fear and outrage at the ways anticolonial rhetoric could be repurposed to serve demagogic or unscrupulous political agendas.6 Naipaul’s anger at the perceived loss of his birthplace led to harsh public declarations that alienated an audience inclined to view decolonization as an act of moral rebalancing rather than a political process fraught with danger.7 “I’m speaking with a lot of bitterness. And much unhappiness. Because it is not pleasant to see the place where you were born destroyed. . . . There are no institutions, nothing to refer to any longer. You cannot refer to any idea of law, or honesty about public money or the rights of men, because racialist politics in a way rejects all these values.”8 Troublingly, Naipaul’s expressions of outrage at postcolonial racism echoed aspects of the very racism that he condemned. This is evident at the start of The Middle Passage. The year is 1960, two years before the collapse of the West Indies Federation and the inauguration of formal independence in Trinidad and Tobago. The twentyeight-year-old Naipaul boards a train that is taking passengers from London to Southampton, where they will embark on their voyage to Trinidad. On the train, Naipaul sees many working-class black families, whom he describes in a disdainful tone seemingly calculated not to endear him to the reader. He describes his passing encounter with one black man: From the next compartment a very tall and ill-made Negro stepped out into the corridor. The disproportionate length of his thighs

76

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

was revealed by his thin baggy trousers. . . . He went to the window, opened the ventilation gap, pushed his face through, turned slightly to his left, and spat. His face was grotesque. It seemed to have been smashed in from one cheek. One eye had narrowed; the thick lips had bunched into a circular swollen protuberance; the enormous nose was twisted. When, slowly, he opened his mouth to spit, his face became even more distorted. He spat in slow, intermittent dribbles; and when he worked his face back in, his eyes caught mine. I felt I had attracted his malevolence. And thereafter I couldn’t avoid this Negro with the ruined face. I went to the lavatory. Our eyes met, twice. I went looking for a buffet car. I saw him. There was no buffet car. On the way back I saw him.9

Was this description an expression of Naipaul’s displaced rage, a gratuitous way of insulting poor Trinidadian blacks, the putative base of the racial leaders recently elevated to power? This man, whose appearance suggests that he may well have been a victim of violence, is transformed into a placeholder for the mob. Rather than repressing the widespread nature of racial hostility and resentment, Naipaul seems determined to foreground his subjective feelings, an act that has caught the attention of more than one critic.10 Naipaul’s exchange of looks with the Negro was written a few months after the racially charged Trinidad elections of 1961, in which “Indians expressed as much ethnocentric chauvinism as Creoles, each threatening the other with domination.”11 By drawing attention to his complicity with racist attitudes, Naipaul paves the way for the reader to grasp the all-pervasive nature of racialized feeling in Trinidad during this period. In The Middle Passage, encounters between people from different groups are poisoned by racial feeling. Thus, Naipaul’s deplorable racist comments convey the depth and intensity of racial feeling widespread at the time. Far from rejecting his past by “ventriloquizing” an English identity, as some of his critics have suggested, Naipaul reveals himself to be immersed in Trinidad’s politics of decolonization.12 Soon after the ship begins its voyage, Naipaul is again involved in a racial confrontation. When he tries to interview several workingclass black passengers on the ship, the “leader” of a group of black

HI S TORIC A L IDEN T I T IE S

77

emigrants stops Naipaul and accuses him of being a racial troublemaker from Kenya: I attracted the attention of the emigrants’ leader, a tall highbottomed brown-skinned young man. “Don’t tell him nothing,” he said, running up, some of his flock at his heels. “Don’t tell him nothing. What he want?” [The emigrants’ leader] was an educated man. He travelled first [class]. He spoke very quickly. “What you want? Why you discouraging the poor people?” He didn’t give me a chance to speak. “The poor people just come on board the ship and you discouraging them?” “I wasn’t doing nothing, and he came up and start asking all sort of question. Why I was going to England and things like that.” This was from the God-inspired baker. “What happen, man?” “We pick up a propagandist.” “A propagandist?” “You come from Kenya, nuh?” the leader asked. “I bet you come from Kenya.” “He call me a nigger,” a man said.13

Just as things are about to get out of hand, the hapless Naipaul is rescued from the crowd by a white missionary, who ushers him back to the safety of first class.14 The entire scene is staged as a comedy, albeit one with menacing undertones. When the ship arrives in Port of Spain, Naipaul’s show of disdain conceals a deeper feeling of dismay and alienation: “The city throbbed with steel bands. A good opening line for a novelist or a travel-writer; but the steel band used to be regarded as a high manifestation of West Indian Culture, and it was a sound I detested.”15 As Naipaul confessed many years later, his dislike of the steel band had its roots in Trinidadian cultural politics. The steel band, Naipaul wrote, was exploited as an expression of a subtly racialized “national culture” by populist leaders of the 1940s. One of these was Albert Gomes, a white man who opportunistically bolstered his popularity

78

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

with poor blacks by adopting “anti-Indian” stances.16 Gomes declared that Indians were not properly Trinidadian because they remained aloof from expressions of the “local culture,” of which the steel band had become a symbol.17 Old racial wounds were reopened in the novel context in which Naipaul wrote The Middle Passage. Naipaul did not wish to speak of them because he was temperamentally averse to invoking the language of victimhood. But his inability to find an adequate analytical or rhetorical register to communicate his consternation only made matters worse. It could be said that the sneering passages that have justifiably provoked accusations of racism reflect a rage that Naipaul did not know how to channel, as seen in this declamation, which reads like a parody of rhetorical exercises Naipaul might have studied as a teenager at Queen’s Royal College: “How can the history of this West Indian futility be written? What tone shall the historian adopt? Shall he be as academic as Sir Alan Burns, protesting from time to time at some brutality, and setting West Indian brutality in the context of European brutality? Shall he, like Salvador de Madariaga, weigh one set of brutalities against another, and conclude that one has not been described in all its foulness and that this is unfair to Spain? Shall he, like the West Indian historians, who can only now begin to face their history, be icily detached and tell the story of the slave trade as if it were just another aspect of mercantilism? The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievements and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies.”18 The next paragraph begins “In the morning I was calmer,” suggesting that Naipaul felt sheepish afterward. Even so, he offers no explanation for his pompous outburst or, for that matter, why it was not simply deleted from the final draft of the book. He retains the passage, as well as its half-hearted disavowal, as if unsure what to do with his mixed emotions. More than twenty-five years later, Naipaul reflected on the inadequacies of The Middle Passage: The rawness of my nerves as a colonial traveling among colonials made for difficult writing. When, the traveling done, I went back

HI S TORIC A L IDEN T I T IE S

79

to London with my notes and diaries, to do the writing, the problems were not resolved. I took refuge in humor—comedy, funniness, the satirical reflex, in writing as in life so often covering up for confusion.19

What was the nature of this confusion? The main problem was that Naipaul had difficulty settling on a tone and vocabulary to address his private grief and outrage at the destruction, by the rise of racial politics, of an older, multiracial, multicultural idea of Trinidadian society. Not yet thirty years old, Naipaul was also writing for the first time about a “fear” that the stable social institutions in Trinidad might unravel.20 In nearby Guyana, “the party which had come to power so completely in 1953 split in 1955 along racial lines, Indians on one side, Negroes on the other.”21 Naipaul had not always had an inflexibly bleak view of Caribbean politics. For a brief moment, it had seemed that a cosmopolitan nationalist vision, rooted in strengthening the rights and opportunities of the working poor, was possible, but it had been snuffed out. Naipaul writes with undisguised admiration for the nonracial politics of Indo-Guyanese politician Cheddi Jagan’s Communist Party, which swept to power in 1953 through an “extraordinary alliance” of Africans and East Indians.22 But the principled Jagan was not allowed to assume power. His democratically elected government was overthrown by a coup engineered by Britain and the United States. As a result of the coup, and with Forbes Burnham installed as head of state, Naipaul wrote, Guyana went back to its “more instinctive racial ways.”23 Naipaul believed that this neocolonial arrangement was maintained through American interference and “rigged elections” designed to keep Jagan out of power. Over time, the state was turned into a “racial tyranny” by the “African-controlled government.”24 Naipaul feared that Trinidad’s social institutions might be undermined in similar fashion. The black leader Eric Williams capitalized on this by depicting the politics of the Indian-led People’s Democratic Party (PDP) as “communal” in nature, manipulated by “Brahminical” and Hindu chauvinists.25 Williams effectively split the Indian vote in the 1956 election, pulling Indian Christians and Indian Muslims toward the black-led People’s National Movement (PNM).

80

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

What he had as a child regarded as Trinidad’s social equilibrium— mutual indifference and tolerance between different groups— had, in a postcolonial age, turned into hostile forms of knowledge production. In later years, Naipaul would come across cases where history was put to political use in Uganda, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and many other multiracial societies fractured by race or ethnicity. But in The Middle Passage, Naipaul had only begun to discern this emergent postcolonial reality. He could not find a way to analyze it with equanimity. Attempting to denounce the racialized “contempt” he claimed to oppose, he ended up echoing it: The Negro . . . has a deep contempt for all that is not white, his values are the values of white imperialism at its most bigoted. . . . The Indian despises the Negro for not being an Indian; he has, in addition, taken over all the white prejudices against the Negro with the convert’s zeal and regards as Negro everyone who has any tincture of Negro blood.26

The hyperbolic cruelty here may have been a misplaced effort to disguise his distress at the utter transformation of the political landscape of his birthplace. Naipaul masochistically quotes the Victorian traveler James Anthony Froude’s racist portrayal of Trinidad: The two races [Indian and Negro], Froude observed in 1887, “are more absolutely apart than the white and the black. The Asiatic insists the more on his superiority in the fear perhaps that if he did not the white might forget it.” Like monkeys pleading for evolution, each claiming to be whiter than the other, Indians and Negroes appeal to the unacknowledged white audience to see how much they despise one another. They despise one another by references to the whites; and the irony is that their antagonism should have reached its peak today, when white prejudices have ceased to matter.27

Naipaul’s rejectionist tone conceals his disorientation at the loss of a Trinidadian social order he had known as a child. The disappearance of that Trinidad provoked in him an ugly display of outrage. Expressions of disdain and rejection were Naipaul’s way of deflecting grief.

HI S TORIC A L IDEN T I T IE S

81

Naipaul blamed both the Indian and the black communities for stoking the fires of racial hatred. This was his way of evading the question as to whether his inability to find an adequate language of analysis had anything to do with his uncomfortable closeness to, rather than distance from, the attitudes he described. Even if Naipaul had been able to identify these varied, self-subverting promptings in The Middle Passage, it is not evident that he could have afforded to spell them out without encumbering the book, which was positioned as a travelogue for Western readers. As a young writer from the periphery, Naipaul’s first objective was to establish his credentials with his metropolitan readership. The last thing he wanted was to have his judgments attributed to psychological factors or a lack of knowledge. Yet it was precisely these questions that he needed to learn to explore in a historically situated manner. ✴✴✴

This discovery of a reflective style would be the breakthrough of Naipaul’s subsequent work, An Area of Darkness (1964). Soon after completing The Middle Passage, Naipaul realized that “in order to do more of this kind of writing, it was necessary for me to acknowledge more of myself.”28 In his next work, instead of affecting detachment, he had to find a way to make the biographical details of his own life the point of departure for historical analysis: In traveling to India I was traveling to an un-English fantasy, and a fantasy unknown to Indians of India: I was traveling to the peasant India that my Indian grandfathers had sought to recreate in Trinidad, the “India” I had partly grown up in, the India that was like a loose end in my mind, where our past suddenly stopped. There was no model for me here, in this exploration; neither [E. M.] Forster nor [ J. R.] Ackerley nor [Rudyard] Kipling could help. To get anywhere in the writing, I had first of all to define myself very clearly to myself.29

In Naipaul’s mind, the word “India” existed as a set of contradictory associations. It was, on one level, the difficult place his ancestors had left in the hope of making a better life in Trinidad. It also existed

82

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

as a comforting fantasy of home, derived from fragments of a world that his grandfather had sought to reproduce in the Trinidad countryside. These layered and contradictory associations contribute to the depth and complexity of An Area of Darkness. The referential stability of “Trinidad” in The Middle Passage had never been in question. In contrast, “India,” as Naipaul writes at the start of An Area of Darkness, did not signify an actual place so much as a set of obscure and unreliable memories. Naipaul had no archive from which to reconstruct this world because nothing had been recorded by those who recreated “India” in the sugar plantations of Trinidad. To bring that reality closer, Naipaul called up childhood memories of unused or broken objects that had been carried from India to Trinidad, metaphorically leaning on them to yield insights about the past. These objects served as a means to probe memories, fleeting impressions, and half-forgotten encounters for concealed meanings and significations. Although many of the “Indian” objects that Naipaul saw in his grandmother’s house in Chaguanas were broken or no longer in use, they had not been discarded. These became for Naipaul a synecdoche for India, a remote experience of India—string beds, brass vessels, unusable wooden printing blocks, broken harmoniums, brightly colored pictures of deities on pink lotus. Looking back, Naipaul also realized that that these objects also stood in for a vague idea of “home” that had grown within 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 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 light was the area of my experience, in time and place.30

Naipaul draws on a metaphor: if the “light” connotes all those things he could recall, the “area of darkness” stands for that all-important larger area surrounding the light, a barely understood but generative abyss from which the small patch of light emanated.

HI S TORIC A L IDEN T I T IE S

83

It is important to recognize that for Naipaul this darkness is active, not inert. It is not imbued with negative connotations. Darkness is not opposed to light, as the primitive is to the modern, or ignorance to knowledge. Memory is akin to the stream of light that emerges from a deeper and richer darkness that is the real source of his habits, reflexes, and unacknowledged attitudes. This darkness is both temporal and spatial. It is both “the time the transference was made” and the featureless “land” that gave Naipaul’s family its objects and habits. The darkness, then, is for Naipaul the unplumbed source from which emerge the memories by which he is influenced: “And even now, though time has widened, though space has contracted and I have traveled lucidly over that area which was to me the area of darkness, something of darkness remains, in those attitudes, those ways of thinking and seeing, which are no longer mine.”31 Naipaul also uses “darkness” to connote the manner in which India—imagined as a “featureless area of darkness”32—simulated a “private world” that, for a time, gave Naipaul’s Indian community a false sense of security that it was not “yielding” to the encroachments and “seepage” of the wider society. Here, “area of darkness” connotes inertia, and the sense of security that comes from feeling—before the walls inevitably crumble—of being enclosed and protected from outsiders in an alien land. In this way, Naipaul found himself excavating the ways of “thinking and seeing”33 by which he had been shaped. Growing up in an orthodox Hindu community in Trinidad, he had unconsciously absorbed what he took to be Indian values and attitudes. Naipaul’s excavation of his “identity” entailed turning it away from the idea of something inherited or possessed into something that was a result of critical reflection: That this world [the Indian community in Trinidad] should have existed at all, even in the consciousness of a child, is to me a marvel; as it is a marvel that we should have accepted the separateness of our two worlds and seen no incongruity in their juxtaposition. In one world we existed as if in blinkers, as if seeing no more than my grandfather’s village; outside, we were totally self-aware. And in India I was to see that so many of the things which the newer and

84

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

now perhaps truer side of my nature kicked against—the smugness, as it seemed to me, the imperviousness to criticism, the refusal to see, the double-talk and double-think—had an answer in that side of myself which I had thought buried and which India revived as a faint memory. I understood better than I admitted.34

It was precisely such a refusal or inability to “see” that enabled Indians like Naipaul’s grandfather to survive in the plantation society of the New World. Naipaul belonged to a later generation and “could not deny Trinidad” in the same way. But to his surprise, he realized that he too had been shaped by the same reflex of not-seeing— avoidance as a strategy of survival.35 Thus, Naipaul’s investigation into the area of darkness offers him a way of comporting himself to the real India that he is about to visit. By examining his formation through the theme of an area of darkness, he also discovers a reflective language. He discerns a link between his own “double-sided” seeing and the sensibility of the Indians he encounters. Naipaul is a “remote descendant” of that old country, from which he has inherited the ability to subconsciously block out aspects of reality that disturb his equanimity. He discovers that he has been shaped by this reflex in more ways than he had been ready to acknowledge. Naipaul traveled to India in 1962 in order to describe this aspect of his social formation. But he is overwhelmed by shock at the poverty and dereliction he witnesses: I had seen Indian villages: the narrow, broken lanes with green slime in the gutters, the choked back-to-back mud houses, the jumble of filth and food and animals and people, the baby in the dust, swollen-bellied, black with flies, but wearing its good-luck amulet. I had seen the starved child defecating at the roadside while the mangy dog waited to eat the excrement. I had seen the physique of the people of Andhra, which had suggested the possibility of an evolution downwards, wasted body to wasted body. Nature mocking herself, incapable of remission. Compassion and pity did not answer; they were refinements of hope. Fear was what I felt. Contempt was what I had to fight against; to give way to that was to abandon the self I had known.36

HI S TORIC A L IDEN T I T IE S

85

Naipaul examines his responses with more candor and clarity here than in The Middle Passage. The repetition of the words “had seen” suggests a Naipaul unable to tear his eyes from scenes that he found deeply troubling. His response to those sights, which was closer to fear than to pity, appears to stand in for an indictment of the kind of society that fails to be sufficiently outraged by such degradation to bring about structural change. Empathy for such suffering, Naipaul suggests, is possible only where one does not feel despair. He revolts (a term he gets from Albert Camus) against the normalization of such degradation—something he accuses well-heeled Indians of—and fights against feeling contempt toward a social order that provides cover for such norms. In The Middle Passage, outrage had resulted in contempt. In this scene, Naipaul resists allowing his temperament to completely get in the way of observation and self-examination. The emotional tone of the passage suggests that Naipaul does not just fear for the fates of the people he sees. He is touched by a desire, no doubt irrational, to protect himself from being contaminated by the acceptance of such degradation. Naipaul’s desire to reject this aspect of his own heritage is all the more marked because it stirs up awareness of his affiliation—given his upbringing—with such reflexes. Something of the history that made such inhuman attitudes acceptable must have informed his formation. The mixed, self-implicating emotions of this passage come to a head with the psychologically compensatory “contempt.” Does the feeling of contempt, as well as the desire to fight against such a feeling, originate in a connection he feels to the poor people—who must remind him of his ancestors who were forced to leave India for Trinidad—or with the educated folk who accept such a state of affairs? Naipaul does not elaborate this aspect of his feelings, but the passage exemplifies why An Area of Darkness is a more internally divided work than A Middle Passage.37 Naipaul’s exploration of Indian indifference to the degradation of fellow human beings brings to mind the “separateness of vision” that defined his own upbringing in Trinidad. As noted earlier, Naipaul had been brought up to participate in modern institutions while maintaining an inner self that maintained a separateness from wider Trinidadian society. The matter went beyond ideology;

86

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

it is best described as hardwiring. Naipaul believed he saw this psychological reflex at work in India. He argued that such an attitude of disconnection from the wider society was an impediment to the creation of civic values: a modern society could not arise in India unless Indians, through a process of reflection and self-criticism, submitted to “a revolution of the mind” in which “the habit of contemplating man as man,” or human equality, was made into reality rather than maintained as rhetoric.38 In Trinidad, caste had functioned among Hindus merely as an identity marker. In India, caste was the central way society ordered itself. Naipaul was shocked by the extent to which caste functioned as a tool of oppression in India, as well as the role it played in contributing to what he saw as the mental stultification of both masters and servants in that country.39 Human interactions in India were interpreted in accordance with conceptions of social function.40 Excellence or individual merit could not be rewarded because the person who executed his duties well was, in his own eyes as well as in the eyes of society, doing no more than carrying out his preordained function. Naipaul relied on his sense of the absurd to explain why something that the “outsider” instantly sees—the dirtiness of India’s physical environment—completely escapes the eye of the Indian person: You cannot complain that the hotel is dirty. No Indian will agree with you. Four sweepers are in daily attendance, and it is enough in India that the sweepers attend. They are not required to clean. That is a subsidiary part of their function, which is to be sweepers, degraded beings, to go through the motions of degradation. They must stoop when they sweep; cleaning the floor of the smart Delhi café, they will squat and move like crabs between the feet of the customers, careful to touch no one, never looking up, never rising. In Jammu City you will see them collecting filth from the streets with their bare hands. This is the degradation the society requires of them, and to this they willingly submit. They are dirt; they wish to appear as dirt.41

The image of the sweepers as invisible crabs illustrates a naturalized schema premised upon a routine denial of human equality. It is not enough that the sweepers be regarded as filth; they are required to

HI S TORIC A L IDEN T I T IE S

87

“performatively” reaffirm their degraded status by displaying their servility through their actions and demeanor. Naipaul builds on this insight to point out what it reveals about Indian psyches. To the Indian, Naipaul claims, the hotel is clean because the cleaners have performed their ordained function, not because the place has actually been cleaned. The hotel has been cleaned by definition, and the guests are satisfied for this reason, despite the fact that the hotel remains as dirty as ever. Naipaul contends that the Indian failure to remark this distinction serves a deeper social function: This society maintains and reproduces its sense of order through the naturalized abasement of its most vulnerable members. Cleaning, therefore, serves as the means to a self-abasement that restores or maintains Indian society in its psychic equilibrium, a sense that all is right about the world. This is why Indians can, with all honesty, reject the outsider who points out that the hotel has not actually been cleaned. “In India,” Naipaul writes, “the easiest and most necessary thing to ignore was the most obvious.”42 This oppressive state of affairs is so completely normalized, Naipaul argues, that only an outsider can perceive it. One such outsider was Mohandas Gandhi, whose many years in South Africa gave him a “critical, comparing” way of looking that was wholly alien to Indian society. Thus, Gandhi give[s] as much emphasis to the resolutions passed at a Congress gathering as to the fact that the Tamilian delegates ate by themselves because they would have been polluted by the sight of non-Tamilians, and that certain delegates, forgetting that there were no excrement removers at hand, used the verandah as a latrine. . . . This is what Gandhi saw, and no one purely of India could have seen it. It needed the straight simple vision of the West.43

In An Area of Darkness, Naipaul follows Gandhi’s lead by claiming that he did little more than record the disjunction between what he and Indians saw. Naipaul also clarified what he took to be the task of the writer by contrasting it with Indian writers he admired, particularly R. K. Narayan. Naipaul claims that Narayan “write[s] from deep within

88

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

his society”44 and, for that reason, refuses to produce the questioning attitude that is typical of the Western novel form. Narayan’s novels do not partake of social inquiry but are instead marked by the selective way of looking that distinguishes Hindu self-absorption. It was only when he arrived in India that Naipaul realized that he had misread Narayan all along: What had seemed speculative and comic, aimless and “Russian” about Narayan’s [Mr Sampath] had turned out to be something else, the expression of an almost hermetic philosophical system. The novel I had read as a novel was also a fable, a classic exposition of the Hindu equilibrium, surviving the shock of an alien culture, an alien literary form, an alien language, and making harmless even those new concepts it appeared to welcome.45

Although it superficially resembles European realism, then, Narayan’s work is premised upon a falsification of social reality, “incorporating and nullifying”46 the European form in order to produce a representation of reality that conformed to a defined ontological or religious schema. Narayan’s serene tone speaks to the absence of the inner agitation that corresponds to an understanding of the novel as a product of “disturbed social ground.”47 Naipaul declares that “the India of Narayan’s novels is not the India the visitor sees. He tells an Indian truth. Too much that is overwhelming has been left out; too much has been taken for granted.”48 Quoting Albert Camus’s The Rebel, Naipaul contrasts Narayan’s writings to his own work by obliquely reminding the reader of the underlying vision of A House for Mr Biswas: “the novel is born at the same time as the spirit of rebellion and expresses, on the aesthetic plane, the spirit of rebellion.”49 ✴✴✴

One Indian commentator recalls that, at the time, Naipaul was attacked for “giving a bad impression of the country.”50 Others, like the Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel, praised Naipaul’s “special gift for the telling detail and penetrating observation,” but objected to his

HI S TORIC A L IDEN T I T IE S

89

contemptuous tone.51 Such criticism—that Naipaul disqualified himself because he did not display sympathy in the approved ways— would dog him throughout his career. Notwithstanding such tonal shortcomings, Naipaul had stumbled on an approach that drew upon the subtle connections between his own psychological formation and that of the people he met. For the first time, Naipaul implicated himself in the situations he described. Keeping his own underdeveloped formation in view, along with his concomitant efforts to examine and overcome it, Naipaul claimed that he was not insulting Indians so much as making them aware that they lacked an epistemic or conceptual framework to reflect on their formation—a framework that had been made available to Naipaul as a consequence of writing Area. His critics were therefore wrong, in Naipaul’s view, to see Area as an attack on India rather than an exercise in historical reflection. He implicitly argues that a writer can do no more than model a kind of transformation by communicating his experiences truthfully, making available a style of critical thinking that is focused less on expressions of solidarity or sympathy (Ezekiel’s criticism remains the one most often echoed by Indians) than on establishing a standpoint from which to articulate resistance to an unsatisfactory state of affairs.52 Travel to India gave Naipaul the beginnings of the vocabulary and style he needed to explore his own historical deformation. By reflecting on his own past, he found a way to describe how he had begun making a way in the world, to adapt the title of one of Naipaul’s later books. It is in this sense that Naipaul would imagine others like him capable of taking first steps toward historical reflection, as is the case with Salim, the hero of A Bend in the River (1979), who discovers his critical, comparing eye by analyzing and reflecting upon (rather than condemning) an orientalist depiction of a dhow pictured on a postage stamp in colonial Zanzibar. The confessional aspects of An Area of Darkness make it a more intimate work than The Middle Passage. Naipaul often implicates himself in the situations he describes; having condemned the Indian failure to see, he notes that the same failure lies very much at the heart of his own formation. At other moments, he implies that such ingrained

90

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

habits may have enabled him to survive his discouraging early years in England. Although Naipaul judges India harshly in this work, he later claimed that the predicament he described could be overcome once it was confronted directly.53 As he noted in an interview, Area is necessarily an “optimistic” book simply by virtue of the fact that he, a man descended from a group of disadvantaged Indians, had written it. That such a person was capable of producing such a work meant that others from the same background must also be capable of acquiring the set of critical skills it displays.54 Setting aside the validity of this claim, and quite apart from whether Naipaul had been too negative in his portrayal of India, in Area he had for the first time drawn upon his own peripheral formation to elaborate his vision of a complex society other than his own.

4 FANTASY AND DERANGEMENT The Loss of El Dorado; India: A Wounded Civilization; “Michael X and the Killings in Trinidad”

N

A IPAUL H A D gained a reputation as a writer who denigrated non-European peoples, but he declared that his “brutal” analyses were aimed at equipping postcolonial societies with tools to grasp the nature of their predicament.1 He claimed that he hoped to disabuse formerly colonized peoples of their investment in claims of identity that substituted self-destructive fantasies of strength or unity for an objective study of the past. In his view, writers who studied the past dispassionately were unlikely to alter readers’ sensibilities so long as ethnonationalism, with its exclusionary ideology of race and culture, remained the dominant idiom of collective selfexpression in newly independent countries. Trinidad in the 1960s, Naipaul declared, was “corrupted by a fantasy which is their cross.”2 What does it mean for a society to be “corrupted by fantasy”? The Loss of El Dorado represents Naipaul’s most sustained attempt to explore this question by means of an excavation, at once imaginative and historical, of how events in Trinidad’s past had contributed to its habit of self-deception in the postcolonial era. Trinidad was discovered in the early sixteenth century by Spanish and English adventurers who were searching for a fabled city of gold known as El Dorado. Native populations were enslaved and collectively tormented to serve this European delusion. Ironically, over

92

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

time, they too became possessed of this way of thinking and began to echo the language of their masters. In an audacious move that speaks of a novelist’s rather than a disciplinary historian’s instincts, Naipaul implies that the collective Trinidadian tendency to “fantasy” was shaped by the violent influences of this past. Looking back on The Loss of El Dorado more than a decade after its publication, Naipaul described its themes as “[the European] discovery, the New World, the dispeopling of the discovered islands; slavery, the creation of the plantation colony; the coming of the idea of revolution; the chaos after revolutions in societies so created.”3 The thesis of Loss of El Dorado is that the social character of Trinidad became indelibly marked by the European fantasies its founding was meant to serve. He wrote The Loss of El Dorado in order to identify and comprehend the pattern of self-destructive actions into which Trinidad had been forced by tragic events in its past.4 If the sources of this historical disordering could be identified, he seemed to suggest, a path to an alternative collective future might be charted.5 The Loss of El Dorado (1969) is the result of archival research Naipaul conducted in the British Library. Its narrative is organized around two pivotal moments in the history of early Trinidad. The first is the sixteenth-century English and Spanish dream of discovering El Dorado, the mythic land of gold. The second is nineteenth-century Britain’s effort to bolster its strength in South America by fomenting a revolution against the Spanish Empire during the Napoleonic wars.

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Trinidad entered historical records as the nearby launching point of the Spanish and English search for a land of gold, the fabled El Dorado, which was rumored to be located in neighboring Guiana. Naipaul outlines this rumor as follows: There had been a golden man, El Dorado, the gilded one, in what is now Colombia: a chief who once a year rolled in turpentine, was covered with gold dust and then dived into a lake. But the tribe of the golden man had been conquered a generation before Columbus

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

93

came to the New World. It was an Indian memory that the Spaniards pursued; and the memory was confused with the legend, among jungle Indians, of the Peru the Spaniards had already conquered. Always the Indians told of a rich and civilized people just a few days’ march away. Sometimes there were pieces of gold, finely worked; once a temple of sun was found in the jungle; once a crazed explorer returned with a tale of an enormous city of long straight streets, its temples full of golden idols.6

The Spaniards became obsessed with an Amerindian story and made it their own. Over time, different groups of conquered and enslaved Indians learned to feed versions of this story back to the Spaniards, who, disregarding the circular traffic upon which such stories were based, took them as independent proof of the existence of El Dorado. As a consequence of the circulation of countless reports and stories about the city, European fictions had come to infect the Indian imagination. Tormented by the alien men who were gripped by these fictions, the Indians incorporated into their myths and legends the accounts peddled by the Europeans. The so-called contact zones of West and East became the sites where historical disorientation fed on itself, creating an echo chamber in which lunacy was reinforced. In their search for independent clues to the location of El Dorado, the Europeans only caught the Indian echoes that the former had set in motion. Over time, Naipaul suggests, even the Indians came to mistake these lies for truths. The epistemic fractures introduced by the European delusion came to be the ground upon which local truth was constituted. What had been the peculiar trait of the adventurers came to inform the manner in which reality was experienced and narrated by conqueror and enslaved alike. “The legend of El Dorado, narrative within narrative, witness within witness, had become like the finest fiction, indistinguishable from truth.”7 Such stories even gave rise to an early form of realism, ostensibly focused on empirical truth. Naipaul points to the proliferation of official letters, records, descriptions, journal entries, and maps that constituted the archive of a collective fantasy.

94

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

Naipaul wonders if there had been an element of self-awareness in the conqueror’s lunacy. Given the enormous investments and the careers made (and unmade) by the search for El Dorado, was Amerindian participation in the derangement a part of the social contract instituted by the colonizer? Conversely, was willing submission to the lunacy of the powerful necessary for the enslaved to survive the hellish conditions the Spanish had created? This was the true romance of the New World, serving as template for the collective self-deception that would recur over the centuries to come. Naipaul describes the intolerable conditions the Indians faced. Caught between the competing demands of the Spanish and the English, when they were coerced into serving one party, they made enemies of the other. Nothing could be done to satisfy either tormenter, both of whom sought to enslave or exterminate them. By 1595, the Spanish governor Antonio de Berrio had divided up Trinidad among his soldiers, enslaving the local leaders and torturing and enchaining those who resisted. Arwacas Indians, who were cannibals, were brought over from the mainland and “resettled in Trinidad to ‘eate out and wast those that were naturall of the place.’ Two Indians had been recently hanged and quartered for trading with English ships.”8 When Sir Walter Raleigh, representative of the English Crown, raided Port of Spain in 1595, he massacred all the Spaniards he could find.9 Simple reason dictated his decision. Had he failed to do so, Raleigh pithily remarked, “I should have savoured very much of the asse.”10 Raleigh then went on to trumpet England’s role as liberator of the Indians: He called the chiefs and spoke to them through one of his interpreters. I made them understand that I was the servant of the Queene, who was the great casique of the North and a virgine . . . she had delivered all nations about her, as were by [the Spaniards] oppressed, and having freed all the coast of the Northren world from their servitude, had sent mee to free them also, and withall to defend the countrey of Guiana from their invasion and conquest.11

Guiana was to be the freed territory from which Raleigh launched his search for El Dorado.12 Spain took the English raid on Port of

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

95

Spain to be confirmation of what the Spanish had known all along, “another proof of the existence of El Dorado.”13 In other words, Raleigh’s raid strengthened Spain’s belief that there was gold in the region. This was one of many circular processes through which the Europeans fed each other’s fantasies, all the time dragging the Amerindian peoples toward a slow death. (Centuries later, the English would again promise freedom from Spanish rule; this time, duplicity took the form of the prospect of national liberation.) If fiction shaped reality, reality could also shape fiction. Naipaul connects the El Dorado story to the emergence of literary realism, which traces its origins to this region in the early modern era. He proposes a brief but suggestive account of how realism might have originated in the historical disordering inflicted upon the colonial periphery. In contrast to canonical European accounts of the “rise of the novel,” which emphasize the Enlightenment ideas and practices associated with the bourgeois print culture, empiricism, and scientific rationality in the European metropole,14 Naipaul proposes that the primal scene of realist representation can be found in the sustained interpenetration of cruelty and lunacy that took place in the global periphery. At the end of the sixteenth century, English sailors from the Edward Bonaventura landed on the island of St. Helena (“not an earthly paradise, as is reported”15). Exploring the island, the sailors found a “chapel” in which they heard someone singing: They pushed the door open and saw a naked man. He was very frightened. He thought they were Portuguese and were going to kill him. He was an English tailor who had gone to sea and had fallen ill. He had been set down in St Helena and had lived there alone for fourteen months. He spent his days in the chapel, hiding from the sun. When he understood that the newcomers were his countrymen, “what betweene excessive sudden feare and joy, he became distracted of his wits, to our great sorrowes.” Forty goatskins were drying in the sun. “For want of apparel” they made him “two sutes of goats skinnes with the hairy side outwards, like unto the savages of Canada.”

96

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

He was still alive when the Edward Bonaventura came into the Gulf of Paria, but perhaps dead when after eight days the ship with the starving crew went out again through the Dragon’s Mouth, a ghost ship already, its journey soon to end in mutiny, derangement, mystery.16

The story is recorded in Hakluyt’s Voyages and went into the making of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe more than a hundred years later.17 Naipaul suggests that Crusoe may be a composite of different historical figures, of which the crazed tailor is one. Other stories relating to the early years of Trinidad also served as inspiration for the realist novel. The other model for Crusoe was Antonio de Berrio, the shipwrecked governor referred to earlier. Naipaul believed that Defoe used the island of Tobago as the model for Crusoe’s island. Like Crusoe, Berrio felt sufficiently anxious to require his men to “make a written declaration of their loyalty” when a rival leader arrived to claim Trinidad.18 But such proclamations of sovereignty were belied by the fact that these men “never had enough to eat. They were also in danger of being eaten. Man-eating Caribs were increasingly on the prowl.”19 Comedy, albeit of a grim kind, is never far from Naipaul’s mind as he piles on examples of absurdity and lunacy in his account of the early years of Trinidad’s founding.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY In 1797, some two hundred years after Raleigh departed, the English would be back—yet again as liberators. Invoking the French Revolution, they spread word that they planned to liberate all the slaves in the Spanish territories and that they wanted to support nationalist movements across the region. The British wanted to foment revolution in these Spanish territories. They hoped to enhance their imperial power by bringing the new ideology of free trade to the region; their aim was to make Port of Spain into a “great British trading port of an independent South America.”20

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

97

But there was a complication: “Trinidad, the base for revolution, was at the same time being established as a British slave colony.”21 Naipaul elucidates the cynical maneuvering of imperial Britain: To undermine the authority of its rival imperialists, Britain propagandized for the spirit of liberty and free trade. Yet even as it urged the slaves to rise up against their masters, Britain relied on brutal methods of maintaining order in its own colonies. In Trinidad specifically, the British ruled over “an empire of plantations and Negroes, the whip, the branding-iron, the knife (for cutting off Negro ears), the stake and the torture cells of the Port of Spain jail.”22 Freedom served as a distant echo of an equally elusive dream of an earthly paradise two centuries earlier. In both cases, vulnerable groups were tragically drawn into fantasies promulgated by powerful and unscrupulous forces. Naipaul explains how the British drew upon the rhetoric of liberty to encourage unrest among vulnerable populations in the Spanish colonies. These populations were abandoned to their fates soon afterward, when such agitation ceased to be useful to Britain’s campaign against Spain. In Naipaul’s recounting, new complications arose for the British side in the nineteenth century. He focuses on the scandal that ensued from the arrest and torture of Luisa Calderon, a thirteen-year-old slave girl, in early-nineteenth-century British Trinidad, which brought tensions between metropole and colony to a head. Calderon was subjected to torture on Christmas Day in 1801 at the direction of the British governor of Trinidad, Thomas Picton. Governor Picton, appointed to administer Trinidad at a time of global political unrest and tight budgets, resorted to brutal punishments to maintain law and order. Many years later, he would be hailed the “saviour of the colony” for his effective disciplinary rule of the island.23 In 1800, however, this was not so. At the time, Picton had fallen out of favor with the liberals and enlightened thinkers who were on the political ascendant in London. Received opinion had it that London wanted to turn Trinidad into a colony of free settlers and a base of free trade. Picton was thought to be an ally of the slave owners, not the reformers in favor of free trade. A growing line of argument among the reformers was that slavery was expensive and morally objectionable. In their view,

98

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

free labor could be more cheaply imported; a memorandum on “free Chinese immigration” was widely read.24 Moreover, it was clear that free trade succeeded best in circumstances where wage labor, rather than slavery, enabled markets and consumerist values to take root. This ideology was in keeping with the British state’s aims during the Napoleonic wars, which were to destabilize the Spanish as much as the French empires. Realpolitik and morality were nicely aligned for the British elite. Things looked very different in the faraway colony of Trinidad. Picton needed the support of the slave owners to maintain order in Trinidad, which was underfunded by London and therefore insecure. It made no sense for Picton to support the English reformers in Trinidad—who clamored for the changes authorized by the metropole—because they were opposed to the slaveholders, whom Picton leaned on for help in maintaining law and order in Trinidad. At this point, relying on the backing of the French plantation owners, Picton rewrote the laws to tighten his hold on the reins of power and to bolster the power of the slave owners. Whereas the Spanish code “had reduced a Negro to his needs,” Picton altered it to ensure that “the new code was concerned only with the needs and fears of the Negro’s owner.”25 By doing so, Picton made enemies of the English reformers on the island, many of whom were supporters of the French and American revolutions. This group challenged Picton’s authority and appealed to London to have him replaced. In response, Picton decided to punish the members of this group “through their negroes.” (Like their political adversaries, the liberals were also slave owners). Dawson, a “Liverpool Negro-shipper,” learned that his “devout Negro” slave Goliah had been arrested on his way to church. Some days later, Goliah was found “under the gallows in the jail-yard, ‘dreadfully mangled from his hips up to his shoulders, having been unmercifully flogged with a driver’s whip, which cut huge lumps of flesh from his body.’ Goliah was taken back to the plantation; he revived just to speak a few words to his master; a few days later he died.”26 The Courant, the local Trinidad newspaper, barely mentioned such incidents, no doubt because the arbitrary execution of slaves

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

99

by the British state was not considered news. “In its obliqueness was a type of truth,” Naipaul remarks witheringly. He notes that slaves in Trinidad were treated as cruelly as ever despite Britain’s official policy of liberating South America and freeing its slaves. In Trinidad, neither the slaves’ suffering nor their voices could be made to count in the brutal circumstances resulting from the fight between the European slaveholders and reformers. This was the setting for Naipaul’s account of Luisa Calderon’s torture. The slave girl was exploited in the fight that broke out between Governor Picton and the liberal reformist opposition in Trinidad. Luisa was falsely accused of theft by a free mulatto woman in Port of Spain. She was then arrested and taken to jail, where she was tortured for several days. As Luisa’s story became known, the English opposition on the island worked feverishly to draw attention to the young girl’s arrest. London took notice. Picton found himself charged with a crime; his trial became a public event. Pictures of Luisa Calderon and the implements used for her torture were sold in London. Naipaul dryly notes the metropolitan double standard evident in the public outrage directed at Picton: “Slavery existed; it had made many people rich. Yet it was clear that Picton was being tried for being governor of a slave colony.”27 Picton had carried out the will of the British state. For all his personal cruelty, he was a “victim of people’s conscience, of ideas of humanity and reason that were ahead of the reality.”28 More importantly, Naipaul argues that the slave girl Luisa Calderon had been made a pawn in the quarrel between two powerful entities. History had forced Luisa into an absurd situation; her arrest led to her fate being worked out neither in terms that she understood nor, following her ordeal, in ways responsive to her needs. Her voice could not be heard because it was drowned out by, and subsumed into the agendas of, bigger players.29 Naipaul argues that the lesson to be drawn from Luisa’s fate is how the powerless are woven into the selfaggrandizing fantasies of the powerful. Instead of merely rejecting this appropriation as morally unjustifiable (which Naipaul believes it is), we need to grasp that this is how power operates. Because there is no “outside” to this space of operation, Naipaul suggests

10 0

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

it is important for the subjected to learn how to make their voices fully conversant with the codes of power rather than insist that there ought to exist institutional spaces outside them. Naipaul devotes a great deal of space to narrating the disappearance of the “faceless” and “silent” underclass,30 but he also points out that such groups lacked the means to take stock of their vulnerable state. In Loss, Naipaul seems to warn against the possibility that historically disadvantaged people can directly seize control of the historical narrative by an act of political will. There can be no clean break with the past, least of all through declarations of solidarity between or within oppressed groups. Such actions, Naipaul believes, will likely result in further disorientation and self-destructive actions—thereby prolonging the agonies of the past. The only way people in similarly vulnerable situations might have an opportunity to prevent such outcomes is if they have access to the institutional means to overcome their ignorance by learning to correctly describe the disorienting effects of the past and to draw adequate lessons from it. In his view, the tutelary function played by civic and educational institutions is indispensable to any lasting and productive change. An adequate perspective on their past could emerge only by working through the complex weave of the kind of society that had been produced in Trinidad. Naipaul suggests that the tools of social remaking and resistance lie in critical reflection that must ultimately rely not on the distracting demand for historical justice or on the elusive desire to remake society on utopian grounds, but on the more modest acquisition of the tools of access to the discourse of civil society. Having exposed the complex and hypocritical motivations of both the liberals and the reactionaries, the radicals and the slave owners, Naipaul nonetheless falls back on a realistic attitude. For all their flaws, Naipaul argues, the liberal reformers were the bearers of a flexible kind of thinking and seeing that could form the basis of historical agency for the colonized. In the conclusion of The Loss of the El Dorado, Naipaul tellingly gives up the ironic tone that had guided much of the work. He claims that in a society like Trinidad, the moment of hope came and faded

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

10 1

very quickly when the “early English immigrants” came in the late eighteenth century: In the Spanish-French-African city of planters, launch-captains, soldiers, slaves, whores, keepers of grogshops and retail shops selling salt, tobacco and dried meat for peons, the early English immigrants had been new and startling. They were too grand for the setting: they looked absurd, ignorant and gullible. They were distinguished not only by their wealth and commercial adventurousness . . . and the other emblems of a finer domestic selfcherishing, but also by their intellectual liveliness. They dominated naturally. This liveliness—the threat of letters to London lawyers and newspapers, the affirmation of rights and freedoms—was a carry-over from the metropolis.31

This group represented a force opposed to that of the entrenched authority of the planters. However, the vigor of the new English forces in Trinidad was not to last. They too were worn down by the mediocrity and corruption of the place. Things did not improve in the manner suggested by the ideologues of historical progress; the nineteenth century came to be defined by bureaucratic rationalization. Slow decline and degradation followed as even these new forces were absorbed by the emergent colonial culture that arose in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars: In the slave society, where self-fulfillment came so easily, this liveliness began to be perverted and then to fade and the English saw their pre-eminence, more simply, as a type of racial magic. The shifting of Empire to the east, the emigration of the ambitious, was a further intellectual depletion. . . . [These were people] who had ceased to assess themselves by the standards of the metropolis and now measured their eminence only by their distance, economic and racial, from their Negroes.32

As the empire grew, English intellectuals—who had a generation earlier defended universalist principles—became mere mouthpieces

10 2

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

of imperial ideology. Luisa Calderon’s forgotten story coincided with a period of transition in which enlightened values gave way to an empire solely concerned with mundane matters: The 19th-century writers who came, Trollope, Kingsley, Froude, came as tourists from a leading industrial country to an imperial outpost heroically manned. Imperial history, honouring Picton [the reactionary], suppressing Fullarton [the reformer], had already become selective and anachronistic. Trollope was worried about the labour shortage; Kingsley wrote about the vegetation and with tenderness about the people; Froude wrote anxiously about race and the Empire. None questioned the lesser life of the agricultural colony, which made nothing, imported everything, where it had begun to be felt that education was an irrelevance, something for the ambitious poor, that the rich, the white or the secure needed only to be able to read and count.33

Naipaul claimed he had achieved a greater historical awareness through the writing of The Loss of El Dorado, and he hoped to transmit this new view of the past by which he had been made to his fellow Trinidadians. “Ever since I had begun to identify my subjects,” Naipaul writes in the Enigma of Arrival, “I had hoped to arrive, in a book, at a synthesis of the worlds and cultures that had made me. . . . I felt in [The Loss of El Dorado] I had made such a synthesis.”34 The tragic fate of the Chaguanes Indians, who lived in Trinidad before they were probably massacred by the Spanish, held a personal interest for Naipaul. Following the extermination of people like the Chaguanes, the land was remade as a plantation society, worked by slaves brought from Africa. This “derelict” land of rural Trinidad was the place to which Naipaul’s ancestors were transported. Indians from the “ancient, distressed Indo-Gangetic plain” were shipped in to replace black laborers on the sugar estates.35 “The Indians were people to whom authority had always been remote; they had little sense of history, were governed and protected by rituals which were like privacy; and in the Trinidad countryside they created a simple rural India. They were an aspect of the colony. The colony became an imperial amalgam, the Empire in little.”36 And so, as the Empire consolidated itself,

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

10 3

it found itself hardening from “above” and “below.” While the colonial authorities concerned themselves primarily with revenues and security, the members of Naipaul’s rural Indian community remained backward, their benighted state testifying to the termination of the enlightened spirit in which nineteenth-century colonial reform had been initiated. Naipaul seems to extrapolate from the historical events of the past to produce a thesis about the cultural logic of the colonial space. Working with a novelist’s imagination, he relies on his reading of the two moments in Trinidad’s past to posit a sweeping frame of interpretation in which, he thinks, the logic and structure of the society is laid bare. The stern judgment in Loss appears to result from Naipaul’s treatment of Trinidad as a “character” in a novel, whose actions are the result of a trauma it suffered in its youth. At such moments, Loss resembles less a history than a narrowly focused and deterministic account of how the colony’s origins in fantasy and cruelty shaped the identity and culture of modern Trinidad. Thus the 1801 official torture of Luisa Calderon by the colonial state after she confessed is, with all its horrors, a precursor of the cruel practices that would go on in modern Trinidad.37 At least this appears to be Naipaul’s judgment: The severe, judicial whipping of children continues to be one of the solemn dramas of Trinidad backyard life. A badly beaten child is said to be “blessed.” This is from the French blesser, to wound; but the word is spoken as an English word and has the associations of church, sacrament awe. A blessing is an occasion for stillness. The blesser is handled with care by his womenfolk; while the mood of stillness lasts he is a man apart, fragile, touched by an unnatural and even divine frenzy. For the blessed child there is special affection and a special food of love: butter in hot sugared milk. The mood of stillness becomes a mood of sweetness: it is known that after a blessing everyone is closer. The drama that has been enacted . . . both in its master-slave reality and its man-child mimicry—is, of course, the drama of the plantation whip, transmuted into a dream of community. In the Negro kingdoms of the night the role of the Grand Judge, who punished at night as the overseer punished by day, was important.38

10 4

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

Naipaul has been criticized for one-sidedly emphasizing negative aspects of Trinidadian life.39 It is said that he revels in such portrayals because he is self-loathing or a racist. However, it is also possible to argue that Naipaul unearths “negative” aspects of the past with the critical aim of revaluing ways of thinking and feeling that have become normalized. From this perspective, Naipaul’s descriptions are informed by a desire to activate new lines of thought and action, not, as his critics imply, because he seeks to denigrate non-European cultures. Naipaul’s Loss can be recognized as his effort “to have a new vision of what one had been born into, and to have an intimation of a sequence of historical events going far back.”40 Naipaul’s single-minded way of excavating the past can be faulted for producing a univocal narrative that is at times lacking in nuance. Motivated in part by what he saw as the alarming rise of identity politics, Naipaul wrote a work in which the historical story sometimes seems to be driven by an underlying didacticism. Helen Hayward has observed one of the ways in which “a novelist’s rendering of history” can fall prey to tendentiousness: The events [Loss] narrates are made vividly present by the use of telling detail and in novelistic fashion. Naipaul gives an impression of effortless ease in his reconstruction of events . . . there is no room for uncertainty as to what occurred, and the motives of the various participants are seemingly transparent to him. . . . The parts hang together, in so far as they do hang together, not by means of plot, but by virtue of the metaphoric consonance implied by collocation: British plans to stir up revolution in Spanish-America likened to the pursuit of El Dorado— both are chimeras, motivated by greed, and are doomed to remain ineffectual. This can lead to the impression that, for all the disjunctions, Naipaul’s rendering of history fits together almost too well.41

Such lapses, at once formal and intellectual, nonetheless reveal how, at this point in his career, Naipaul regarded himself as engaged in equipping historically vulnerable subjects with a language to describe their historical predicament. More broadly, Naipaul’s own skepticism about talk of racial or ethnic solidarity arose from his deeper conviction that the postcolonial epoch had resulted in the

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

10 5

substitution of one set of oppressors for another. In the tea gardens in the north of India, created during colonial times with aborigines serving as laborers, Naipaul observes how, since independence, the British management had been replaced a group of well-heeled Indians who had acquired the mannerisms of their racially alien precursors. Meanwhile, the aborigines remained in their same position, still known as “tea workers.” The racial hierarchy of the colonial period had been replaced by a caste-like hierarchy in the postcolonial era: Indian caste attitudes perfectly fit plantation life and the clannishness of the planters’ clubs; and the Indian tea men, clubmen now in the midst of the aborigines, have adopted, almost as a sign of caste, and no longer with conscious mimicry, the style of dress of their British predecessors: the shirt, the shorts, and the socks. The tea workers remain illiterate, alcoholic, lost, a medley of tribal people without traditions and now (as in some places in the West Indies) even without a language, still strangers in the land, living not in established villages but (again as in the old plantations of the West Indies) in shacks strung along the estate roads.42

Naipaul was one of the first postcolonial writers to think about global parallels between different groups of unprotected and exploited peoples. He discerned the historical similarities between these aboriginal peoples in South Asia and the Amerinidians to whom the Spanish conquistadores in sixteenth-century Trinidad referred to as “Indians of work.” It is also difficult to miss the connections between the aboriginal tea workers in India and Naipaul’s indentured ancestors in Trinidad. Occupying a position long inhabited by other aliens, the conquistadores of modern India are the upper-caste Hindus dressed in their peculiar shirts, shorts, and socks. Significantly, Naipaul is not primarily focused on this easily caricatured social type but on the more serious “absurdity” of the victim, who is in no position to give an account of his dispossession. Naipaul’s prose rebels against being placed in this position of not-knowing and not-seeing. In this it is likely that his perspective on Indian history and society is partly framed by his own New World formation.

10 6

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

INDIA: A WOUNDED CIVILIZATION Emboldened by what he had accomplished with The Loss of El Dorado, Naipaul turned his attention to South Asian history. India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) recalls Loss in its exploration of how events in the distant past establish a social and intellectual framework that continues to influence contemporary behavior. A parallel between the two works can be seen in how the two old societies, as imagined by Naipaul, responded to “conquests and defilements.”43 In Loss, Naipaul describes how the conquered Amerindians had absorbed and been inducted into the fantasies of their conquerors. In Wounded, Naipaul argues that the Indian response to conquest was a kind of denial—a deeper retreat into a fantasy of an unchanged archaic order, as symbolized by “empty rituals” and “old magic.” Unlike the Amerindians, who had been dragged into an alien fantasy in which they were forced to participate, Indians had found a way of ignoring a painful reality by retreating into a fantasy of a changeless eternal order. Whereas the Amerindians were tragically compelled to embrace an outsider’s delusion, the Indians had closed themselves off and turned inward, with disastrous consequences for their intellectual and cultural development. Indians held to archaic rituals as a way of coping with being conquered and defeated; they had effectively “retreated,” making themselves “intellectually smaller, always vulnerable.”44 Both Loss and Wounded can be read as Naipaul’s seeking to equip defeated peoples to whom he felt connected with ways of looking that would enable them to comprehend their predicament. At the start of Wounded, Naipaul offers a revealing anecdote of the prevalence of self-defeating forms of social action. Naipaul learned that a temple that had been defiled by British soldiers during the Second World War was being renovated and was about to have its deity newly installed. It was 1975, a time of political crisis. Naipaul writes: A twelve-lettered mantra will be chanted and written fifty million times; and that is what—in this time of Emergency, with the constitution suspended, the press censored—five thousand volunteers are doing. When the job is completed, an inscribed gold plate will be

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

10 7

placed below the new idol to attest to the creation of its divinity and the devotion of the volunteers. A thousand-year-old temple will live again: India, Hindu India, is eternal: conquests and defilements are but instants in time.45

Naipaul implies that this “retreat” into archaism is symptomatic of Indians’ willful turn away from reality, which can only be understood through historical study. Naipaul brings up a journey to a historical site some two hundred miles away from this temple, also in the south of the country. There Naipaul sees the ruins of the “great Hindu kingdom of Vijaynagar46 . . . established in the fourteenth century; it was conquered, and totally destroyed, by an alliance of Muslim principalities in 1565. The city was then one of the greatest in the world.”47 While he is taking in the ruins, Naipaul is struck by the sight of a “temple that for some reason was spared destruction four hundred years ago.”48 He is equally struck by the fact that the people who enter the temple do so in a spirit altogether alien from his: It is for this that the pilgrims come, to make offerings and to perform the rites of old magic. Some of the ruins of Vijaynagar have been declared national monuments by the Archeological Department; but to the pilgrims—and they are more numerous than the tourists—Vijaynagar is not its terrible history or its present encompassing destruction. Such history as is known has been reduced to the legend of a mighty ruler, a kingdom founded with gold that showered from the sky, a kingdom so rich that pearls and rubies were sold in the market place like grain. To the pilgrims Vijaynagar is its surviving temple. The surrounding destruction is like proof of the virtue of old magic; just as the fantasy of past splendor is accommodated within an acceptance of present squalor.49

The chanting of mantras in the first temple unfolded in a manner that bore no relation to the emergency in which the nation was engulfed. The survival of the second temple was treated as a “miracle”—not matter for historical inquiry, but something to be unreflectively celebrated. Naipaul offers these anecdotes as

10 8

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

expressions of intellectual stultification. In each case, when confronted by the realities of the present or the past, the pilgrims pointedly turned away and reasserted older habits and traditional forms of perception. These were the traits of an “underdeveloped ego” that had come to be embedded in Indian habits and practices, according to the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar. According to Kakar, the underdeveloped ego has difficulty undertaking objective analysis, or analyses in which the objects are studied “as something in their own right.” Because Indians were conditioned to regard the external world “as good or bad, threatening or rewarding, helpful or cruel, all depending on the person’s feelings at the moment,” circumstances made it difficult to foster modes of reasoning that were objective. Kakar noted in a letter to Naipaul, “We Indians . . . use the outside reality to preserve the continuity of the self amidst an ever changing flux of outer events and things.”50 Such aversion to empirical reality, Naipaul implied, was a consequence of civilizational retreat that had been abetted by Hindu practices and beliefs. If these traits had formed as a result of “conquests and defilements,” Naipaul was far less interested in denouncing the conquerors than in analyzing the long-term effects such events might have had on the conquered. Naipaul repeatedly argued for the need to cultivate the tools to assess those purported effects. He criticized those who turned away from reality in one of two ways—as pilgrims or as ethnonationalists, who claimed a “golden age” that existed in India prior to such conquests. These, he argues, were two different forms of unhistorical and unreflective thinking. As with other works like Loss, Naipaul appeared to be saying in Wounded that the ability to describe and assess the deforming effects of the past is a precondition for healing self-inflicted civilizational “wounds” and, by extension, for achieving an intellectual renaissance. However, instead of fostering the conditions in which such critical labor might be undertaken, the nationalist movement had “merely proclaimed the Indian past; and religion had been inevitably mixed with political awakening.”51 As a consequence, Indian elites superficially grafted foreign ideas onto an Indian framework that lacked the wherewithal to face the challenges of modernity.

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

10 9

“The freedom that came to independent India with the institutions it gave itself were alien freedoms, better suited to another civilization; in India they remained separate from the internal organization of the country, its beliefs and antique restrictions.”52 Naipaul’s claim was that until the lasting effects of historical conquest and reordering were squarely confronted, Indian society would remain mired in different ways of affirming the past, as opposed to creating the institutions and analytical tools that would “provide it with the intellectual means to move ahead.”53 In the same way that Naipaul regretted the destructive effects of the Spanish conquest on Amerindian culture and society in Trinidad, he regarded the Muslim conquests in a purely negative light. Given the accusations of Hindu chauvinism that would be leveled at him decades later, it is worth pointing out that Naipaul did not express nostalgia for Hindu India before the Muslim invasions. He emphasized that Hindu culture as he found it lacked the requisite tools and institutions to bring about the universalist forms of critique and historical reasoning that would enable it to assess the effects of the past and build reflective institutions adequate to future challenges. Naipaul writes, “While [Hindu] India tries to go back to an idea of the past, it will not possess that past or be enriched by it. The past can only be possessed by inquiry and scholarship, by intellectual rather than spiritual discipline. The past has to be seen as dead; or the past will kill.”54 Naipaul does not categorically reject all aspects of Hindu thought or philosophy in Wounded. He argues instead for styles of thinking that adapt such motifs in a historically self-conscious and critical manner: The key Hindu concept of dharma . . . combines self-fulfilment and truth to the self with the ideas of action as duty, action as its own spiritual reward, man as a holy vessel. And it ceases then to be mysterious; it touches the high ideals of other civilizations. It might be said that it is of dharma that Balzac is writing when, near the end of his creative life, breaking through fatigue and a long blank period to write Cousine Bette in eight weeks, he reflects on the artist’s vocation.”55

110

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

However, the debased manner in which key concepts like dharma came to be understood was a result of its history: Through centuries of conquest the civilization declined into an apparatus for survival, turning away from the mind (on which the Gita lays such stress) and creativity (Vinoba Bhave finding in Sanskrit only the language of the gods, and not the language of poets) stripping itself down, like all decaying civilizations, to its magical practices and imprisoning social forms.56

When Wounded was published, many Indian readers felt that it expressed contempt for Hindu India. One contrarian critic remarked, “If an Indian reviewer does not brand Naipaul’s book as anti-Indian and therefore totally untrue and undependable, he is likely to be called a renegade, a brown sahib. Even so, there is no gainsaying the fact that India: A Wounded Civilization is an astonishingly accurate analysis of the Indian character.”57 What seems astonishing, then, is how Wounded went from being denounced by one group of Indians in the 1970s as the work of an antiHindu “brown sahib” to being denounced by twenty-first-century critics as an apology for Hindu chauvinism and Islamophobia.58 Before we can understand how this remarkable reversal came about, it would be helpful first to summarize Naipaul’s argument about the South Indian kingdom of Vijayanagar. In Wounded, Naipaul begins by repeating a number of historical facts: that the kingdom of Vijayanagar was founded “in 1336 by a local Hindu prince who, after defeat by the Moslems, had been taken back to Delhi, converted to Islam, and then sent back to the south as a representative of the Muslim power. There in the south, far from Delhi, the converted prince had . . . [defiantly] declared himself a Hindu again, a representative on earth of the local Hindu god.”59 In other words, the kingdom had been established in a reactive manner. The Hindu prince had first been converted to Islam but, upon his return to his place of birth, had proclaimed his independence by invoking something akin to a religious “identity” as an expression of his distinction from and opposition to his erstwhile Muslim patrons. Vijayanagar’s subsequent failure to contribute much by way of ideas and reforms was

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

111

a symptom of the fact that it was from its inception committed to a reified Hinduism and was “itself a reassertion of the past.”60 Naipaul suggests that even though the kingdom lasted two hundred years, it was always embattled and could never shake off the defensive crouch into which it had been forced by circumstances. This defensiveness also had adverse consequences for the kind of society that developed within Vijayanagar. The peculiar conditions of Vijayanagar’s founding and the hostile pressure to which it was subjected were reflected in the rigidly orthodox, closed kind of Hinduism practiced by the society. In these sections of India: A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul’s tone recalls the clipped, monologic tone of The Loss of El Dorado: Vijayanagar was committed from the start to the preservation of a Hinduism that had already been violated, and culturally and artistically it preserved and repeated; it hardly innovated. Its bronze sculptures are like those of five hundred years before . . . the Hinduism Vijayanagar proclaimed had already reached a dead end, and in some ways had decayed as popular Hinduism so easily decays, into barbarism. Vijayanagar had its slave markets, its temple prostitutes. It encouraged the holy practice of suttee [widow sacrifice] . . . and Vijayanagar dealt in human sacrifice. Once when there was some trouble with the construction of a big reservoir, the great king of Vijayanagar, Krishna Deva Raya (1509–1529) ordered the sacrifice of some prisoners.61

Because of the reduced conditions in which it was practiced in Vijayanagar, Hindu practices and customs grew barbaric.62 These were the origins of the already wounded civilization whose ruins would nonetheless impress Naipaul when he visited India in 1975. So how did Wounded come to be perceived as an anti-Muslim tract? In an influential article published in 2004, William Dalrymple charged that this work expressed Hindu nationalist and Islamophobic ideas, with which, he added, Naipaul had come to be associated in the wake of the Hindu nationalist destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992.63 Although Naipaul did not endorse the destruction of the mosque, he had shockingly failed to condemn the

112

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

actions of the extremists. Projecting Naipaul’s controversial public statements in the 1990s onto works he had written decades earlier, Dalrymple declared that Naipaul had written Wounded and An Area of Darkness in order to blame Muslim rule for India’s “wounds”: “For Naipaul, the Fall of Vijayanagara is a paradigmatic wound on the psyche of India. . . . The wound was created by a fatal combination of Islamic aggression and Hindu weakness—the tendency to ‘retreat,’ to withdraw in the face of defeat.”64 In order to interpret Wounded as a defense of Hindu extremist ideology, Dalrymple had to ignore the fact that the central aim of Naipaul’s analysis in that work was to call for Indian selfexamination, not Hindu revenge for Muslim rule. While Naipaul is not sympathetic to the period of Muslim rule in Wounded, he also does not devote any space to attacking it. Instead, it is clear that his focus is on identifying and arresting the “intellectual depletion” that apparently arose from the inadequate Hindu response to these conquests.65 There is also no evidence in Wounded to support Dalrymple’s claim that “[Vijayanagar] fell, according to Naipaul . . . because in particular [it] had failed to develop the military means to challenge the aggressive Muslim sultanates that surrounded it”.66 Naipaul does not mention, let alone lament, the fact that the Hindu kings had failed to adequately “develop” their military strength. Put simply, military issues form no part of Naipaul’s discussion in India: A Wounded Civilization. Dalrymple implies that Naipaul uses the word “retreat” to denote a cowardly backing away from a physical battle. But this is not the case. Naipaul’s use of the word refers instead to an intellectual retreat and, more broadly, to a withdrawal from worldly reality by Hindus. Primary responsibility for the “intellectual depletion” in the country lay, therefore, with Hindus. Naipaul was concerned not with blaming the Mughals but with taking stock of India’s selfinflicted wounds. This is evident from his description of the temple activities in the crucial scene-setting anecdotes of Wounded, which concentrate on the shortcomings of Hindu India. Muslim violence or destruction is peripheral to Naipaul’s discussion of the two Hindu temples he visited.

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

113

Dalrymple’s polemic does not assess Wounded on its own terms so much as make it a foil to his multiculturalist vision of the Indian past. Vijayanagar’s history, he argues, expressed the values and institutions of the hybridized civilizations of premodern India. In these contexts, Hindus assimilated and synthesized Muslim values and practices and did not hold themselves apart from it. Dalrymple invokes Salman Rushdie’s word “chutnification” to underscore the point that Vijayanagar was a culturally mixed, rather than an exclusively Hindu, civilization. My concern here is not whether Dalrymple’s or Naipaul’s vision approximates more closely to a correct understanding of the Indian past. What interests me is how Dalrymple’s laudable affirmation of cultural hybridization and syncretism as a tacit rebuke to Naipaul’s Wounded actually prevents him from grasping the book’s central point. His invocation of proliferating differences and cultural mixture completely ignores Naipaul’s insistent focus on the need for historical reflection and critical self-examination. It is also no substitute for these practices. Dalrymple overlooks the fact that Naipaul, a writer rather than a professional historian, was drawing on the fall of Vijayanagar as a device to imagine the social and cultural consequences of a failure to cultivate critical and historical thinking, not endorsing the fantasy of a pristine Hindu past.67 He curiously faults Naipaul for failing to cite in Wounded a scholarly essay that was published in 1996, nearly twenty years after Naipaul’s book appeared. Dalrymple also declares that all historical scholarship on Vijayanagar prior to 1996 is “mistaken and Islamophobic.” He claims that previous generations of Vijayanagar scholars, on whom Naipaul had necessarily relied, reflected the racism of colonial historians and Hindu nationalists peddling “a simple and seductive vision” of the Indian past.68 Even if this were the case, it does not seem fair to single out Naipaul, an interested outsider, for blame. The issue here is not whether there is value to the vision of a hybrid Indian past that Dalrymple wishes to defend. There is. What is troubling is Dalrymple’s effort to read Wounded, and even An Area of Darkness (1964), as Hindu nationalist documents69 and to label Naipaul a racist for his differing vision of that past.

114

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

Naipaul’s last book on India preceded by a decade the shifts in scholarly consensus on the nature of Muslim rule that began to take hold around 1990. As summarized by Barbara and Thomas Metcalf, this new consensus was that the primary aim of Muslim rulers was to expand their territorial power on the Indian subcontinent, not spread their religion.70 In recent decades, philologists and historians have also begun to focus on the ways Mughal rule enabled the emergence of syncretic and inclusive forms of religious and cultural expression in India prior to the onset of British rule.71 The point of view espoused in Dalrymple’s essay owes everything to this paradigm shift which, as noted earlier, did not begin to take hold until after Naipaul’s last book on India appeared.72 Dalrymple’s accusations aside, Naipaul’s three books on India do not evince hostility toward Islam in India. When he visited India again in 1989, the new question that exercised Naipaul was the political self-assertiveness he witnessed among traditionally subordinated groups. India: A Million Mutinies Now (1989) collects Naipaul’s interviews with Indians from different parts of the country during the late 1980s. The book begins with Naipaul’s being mystified, then enraptured, by the sight of a large procession of self-contained Dalits (Untouchables) commemorating the death anniversary of their leader, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. Dismissing a middle-class Indian man who complains about the Dalits and who regards the street procession as a sign of the country’s decline, Naipaul, describes the mass celebration as a symptom of a wider “freeing of new particularities, new identities” across India. For the Naipaul of the late 1980s, the Dalits, like the forces of Hindu nationalist groups like the Shiv Sena, represented one of the many “million mutinies” he observed at work across India. These were the plural social and political forces “from below” that were working in tandem or tension with other groups to shake up frozen hierarchies, which Naipaul regarded as a necessary if insufficient condition for a renaissance in India. In the decades after 1990, however, after the last of his three books on India had been published, Naipaul made a number of contradictory public statements, as Dalrymple correctly points out in his essay.73 Naipaul expressed admiration for Jawaharlal Nehru

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

115

for not abusing his power during his years as prime minister and for doing much to support liberal institutions such as a free press and an independent judiciary. At the same time, Naipaul referred to Hindu nationalism as “a creative force” and a “necessary corrective to the history we have been talking about”.74 It appears that by the 1990s, Naipaul had grown confident that the liberal center was strong enough to check any unruly forces, thereby enabling the million mutinies of “creative” forces to bestir the stagnant order without undermining liberal institutions. The later Naipaul’s politically motivated claim that the Muslim invasions had had only a negative effect on Hindu society was justifiably taken by his critics as reflecting sympathy for Hindu nationalism. While this reflected a lamentable narrowing of Naipaul’s focus from historical reflection to political partisanship, for our purposes—which is to look at the writer’s evolution—it is important to keep in mind that Naipaul had been criticized for the opposite reason earlier. Indeed, when he had written critically about caste (An Area of Darkness) and about retrograde Indian practices (India: A Wounded Civilization) in previous decades, he had been branded anti-Indian, anti-Hindu, and a traitor.75 Naipaul had also castigated the Hindu right’s invocation of the authority of the past in Wounded as a symptom of the stultification it sought to overcome. These positions were ignored by his detractors, who projected onto his earlier work perceived sentiments that they objected to in his later statements. The political commentator Pratap Bhanu Mehta has offered a suggestive assessment of the nature of the controversy that Naipaul provoked at the end of the twentieth century. Mehta argues that Naipaul “failed to recognise that Hindu nationalism was an insidious form of collective narcissism that would provoke violence.” But it is equally true, he continues, that “Naipaul is hated because he said something many thought but would dare not say: that large numbers of people, including many politically committed secularists, saw elements of catharsis in Hindu nationalism”:76 The Indian secular narrative had become too wedded to a historical narrative according to which it could not be the case that Hindus and Muslims had deep conflict, temples could not ever really have

116

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

been destroyed for religious reasons. Naipaul’s claim was that this was a repressive narrative that would generate its own pathologies. It made Enlightenment values precariously hostage to getting history right; as if to say that if indeed there had been conflict in the past, the current conflict would be justified. His claim was that Enlightenment values could not rest on historical myth-making. You should be allowed to say that temples were indeed destroyed. But acknowledging this and moving on was a far healthier psychological state than a discourse where that thought could only be repressed and produce its pathologies in turn. Converting the religious-secular divide into a debate over history was to miss the point. The terrain of the conflict was entirely psychological.77

Mehta concludes that whereas Naipaul had powerfully exposed the negative effects of such repression, he had in the end fallen prey to the toxic myth that secularist disavowal had unwittingly abetted: “The proper critique of Naipaul is not that he got history wrong. Having interestingly plumbed the depths of the psychology that animates movements like Hindu nationalism, he became so enamoured of what he found, that he became blind to its effects.”78 A native of India then living in London, Farrukh Dhondy recalls how Naipaul’s description in 1975 of the improvements that had been carried out by “fascist” Sena activists in a Bombay slum filled him with horror, particularly because Naipaul’s words were written during the darkest days of the Emergency, when constitutional rights had been suspended by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Unlike Naipaul, Dhondy had no “premonition or idea that this movement was a symptom of something larger.”79 Naipaul sensed that the Shiv Sena, a group denounced as xenophobic thugs by most educated middle-class people, signaled a new kind of movement. Eschewing the ideals of democracy, the Sena, Naipaul believed, conceived their idea of good governance from notions of community and self-help. Naipaul was not, as Dhondy persuasively argues, a supporter of the Shiv Sena. He did not support their fascism or the invocations of a glorious Hindu past. Nevertheless, Naipaul saw in this group a social dynamism that he believed to be absent in the inert middle classes. Unlike their complacent social betters, these were

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

117

“unaccommodated men”—an allusion to A House for Mr Biswas— who had fled rural landlessness and had evolved a “philosophy of community and self-help” in Bombay.80 Naipaul was “enamored” by this vision of marginalized people asserting their agency in adverse conditions. He describes them as “men rejecting rejection,” a phrase that would reappear more than two decades later in Naipaul’s largely admiring discussion of Dalit (or Untouchable) self-empowerment in India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).81 In sum, Naipaul’s willingness to overlook the dangerous ideology underpinning the actions of the Shiv Sena men—on the grounds that they were possessed of a forward-looking energy—represents a form of moral and intellectual obfuscation that is all the more significant for not being directly addressed. ✴✴✴

The work that Naipaul did between the publication of The Loss of El Dorado and India: A Wounded Civilization underscores how urgently he believed that postcolonial societies needed to go beyond the rhetoric of anticolonialism toward developing new and different tools of intellectual analysis. In a series of nonfictional pieces, Naipaul made this point by illustrating how historically victimized postcolonial peoples were being led astray by self-appointed revolutionary leaders. “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” an essay Naipaul wrote in 1972, explores the life and career of a Trinidad-born political leader who came to be known for his racialist views.82 Born Michael de Freitas, also known as Michael Abdul Malik, Michael X was the son of a Portuguese shopkeeper and a black woman from Barbados. Moving to London as a young man, de Freitas cleverly reinvented himself as a revolutionary and celebrity figure who, as Naipaul describes it, perfected a discourse of racial blackmail. He soon found that he could count on the support of wealthy liberal patrons, including the ex-Beatle John Lennon. With a typically selfimplicating touch, Naipaul notes that de Freitas regarded himself as an aspiring novelist. But de Freitas’s true creative skill lay in manipulation not of the written word but of the populist ideas he learned to craft in ways that appealed to both wealthy white and poor black

118

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

audiences. Coming to prominence in the late 1960s, when antiestablishment feeling was cresting, de Freitas peddled slogans and revolutionary claims before left-wing English intellectuals. Some of these thinkers and journalists gave Michael de Freitas the publicity he sought by reproducing his exaggerated claims about the size of his organization and his projects.83 Naipaul saw similarities between himself and de Freitas (whom he also referred to as Malik). Both men were Trinidadians who had found wealthy and influential patrons in the metropole. Both were products of the picaroon society Naipaul describes in The Middle Passage and had been forced to make their way in the world with intelligence as their only capital. Their public statements were touched by a mixture of provocation and camp. But there were differences. Unlike Naipaul, who only saw himself as a writer, de Freitas had political aspirations. He became a racial leader in Trinidad of the sort that Naipaul, as a racial minority, was quick to recognize and fear. De Freitas was also adept at mimicking Western-style ideology critiques. Studying his use of language, Naipaul became interested in how De Freitas was able to adapt metropolitan discourses to peripheral contexts in ways that gave audiences the illusion of feeling empowered even as they were being misled: Revolution, change, system: London words, London abstractions, capable of supporting any meaning that Malik . . . chose to give them. There were people in London who were expecting Malik, their very own and complete Negro, to establish a new government in Trinidad. There had been a meeting: someone had made a record. The new government was going to underwrite the first International University of the Alternative, “the seat of the counter-culture of the Alternative.” Words, and more words: “I cannot go into details,” Malik had said. “But I can say this. The new university will be an experimental laboratory of a new and sane life-style.”84

Naipaul’s mistrust of the metropolitan revolutionary follows a predictable pattern: he is a person given to self-deception or idealistic sentiments who, drawing on false historical models, ends up making things worse for the poor people he seeks to liberate.

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

119

Naipaul returned to this figure in his later nonfiction. He wanted to examine how the colonial encounter had produced a distinctive type of intellectual fraud and political con man, someone who drew on his historical victimhood to win the support of guilty—and wealthy— white liberals in London and New York. In his examination of Michael de Freitas and his fantasy of becoming a political leader, Naipaul also discerned similarities with the practices of earlier fantasists and manipulators he had written about in Loss: Antonio de Berrio, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Francisco Miranda. For all their ideological differences, Naipaul saw them as Malik’s spiritual precursors, men who advanced their own interests by making false promises to their followers and patrons.85 Malik styled himself as a black power leader in Trinidad. In the United States, Naipaul argued, black power was a movement that sought to represent the demands of an impoverished and historically disenfranchised minority. Trinidad was a black-majority nation where elected black leaders already occupied the highest official positions. But such differences did not matter to Malik or his followers, who “want[ed] something more than politics. Like the dispossessed peasantry of medieval Europe, they await crusades and messiahs.”86 Naipaul regarded Malik as someone who had distorted the possibilities and pathways opened up for him by colonial education and empowerment. In his writings of this period, Naipaul wanted to contrast such an individual with others who had put their experiences of the colonial encounter to more productive use. He alights on a period—roughly the first half of the nineteenth century—when the colonized were able to exploit “contact” with the colonial institutions and leaders in order to expand their moral and intellectual horizons. In “A Second Visit,” his 1967 essay on India, Naipaul gives a more precise formulation to this idea. In the early nineteenth century, Naipaul argues, British colonialism, in Trinidad as much as India, was, from an educational standpoint, a progressive institution. Through the ideas Europeans brought to the colonies, Indians learned of cosmopolitan ideals, including respect for individual rights, the rule of law, and training for historical reflection. Some Indians realized early on that they would benefit greatly from contact with the British, not because they believed in the inherent superiority of European

12 0

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

civilization or because they sought to enrich themselves, but because they grasped the importance of availing themselves of the intellectual tools they would require to become agents, rather than remain victims, of the global order. Naipaul regarded Rammohun Roy (1772–1833), the Bengali reformer of the early nineteenth century, as an important member of this forward-looking group. Roy spoke favorably of this generation of British officials and scholars: “Forty years of contact with the British,” Roy declared, “would revivify Indian civilization”: [He] spoke before the period of imperialist and racialist excess [of late-nineteenth-century colonialism]; the technological gap was not as wide as it later became; the West, to the forward looking Indian, was then less the source of new techniques than the source of a New Learning. But the gap widened and the mood changed. The independence movement turned away, as it had to, from people like Roy. It looked back to the Indian past. It made no attempt to evaluate that past; it proclaimed only glory. At the same time the imaginative probing of the West was abandoned.87

Early colonial rule was, for all its many wrongs, a time when exchange was possible between colonial officials and their Indian wards, through the capacious vision of human association made possible by the European Enlightenment. Naipaul associates this phase of colonial rule with the introduction of new ideas, not merely the acquisition of machinery and technical skill.88 The new learning enriched the ideas and values of people like Roy and contributed to creating a class of thinkers in the colonial world that was able, for the first time, to grasp the concept of a historical transition to modernity.89 Correctly or not, Naipaul was willing to subordinate all other concerns to this makeover, without which genuine agency was, in his view, unrealizable. In Naipaul’s view, conditions changed as colonial rule became a more formal and hierarchical affair, because of the widening knowledge gap and hardening racial ideology. Indians, for their part, were dazzled by the utilitarian aspects of colonial rule, chiefly its machinery and technical skill. In the eyes of the natives, the West gradually

FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

12 1

became synonymous with its “institutions and technology,” which were copied and unreflectively applied.90 Historical transition came to be seen as merely a matter of “catching up.” This philistinism became an irreducible part of all anticolonial and postcolonial thinking, across the world. What might have occasioned a genuine Indian engagement with the past gave way instead to a closed thinking in which modernity became synonymous with economic development. Technical modernization would become synonymous with modernity. Most significant is Naipaul’s claim that the possibility of a new kind of thinking—the ability to reflect on the present and to evaluate the past—was not communicated to Indians. The value of such thinking was soon lost to all but a tiny fraction of the country and could not be communicated to the larger society. Providing a glimpse of his own understanding of Indian history, and of colonial history in general, Naipaul suggests that those who came after Rammohun Roy were no longer capable of evaluating the Indian past in ways that had been open to a previous generation. The old cosmopolitan and enlightened practices, once encouraged, were now replaced with a debased ideology, and the new bureaucratic rationality redefined “culture” as the possession of a “folk.” Over time, the colonial master’s desire to keep the natives tied to their customary space was then reabsorbed as “native tradition” by the protonationalists who took up against the British. Roy could only be recast as an elitist and an apologist. By the same token, self-assessment was sidelined for a new project of cultural self-assertiveness in ways that would find its most extreme manifestations in identity politics. For different reasons, this new spirit was embraced by colonizers and colonized alike. Unable to make proper contact with the English in the hierarchical colonial society, failing to develop their own practices of critical reflection, the colonized elite of India could not sustain the development of adequate tools for historical thought. Naipaul writes of a revealing encounter: “A scholar in Delhi reminded me that Macaulay had said that all the learning of India was not worth one shelf of a European library. We had been talking of aboriginal Africa, and Macaulay was brought in to point out the shortsightedness of a certain type.” Later it occurred to Naipaul “that Macaulay had not been disproved by the Indian revolution.

12 2

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

He had only been ignored.”91 Naipaul diagnosed the groupthink displayed by the professor as a symptom of a deeper malaise in which moral or ideological posturing was mistaken for critical thinking. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, defensive affirmations of past “glory” would, just as regrettably, continue. So long as laziness of this sort prevailed, Naipaul suggested, the need to learn how to “evaluate the past” would not be addressed.92 Naipaul believed that the ability to candidly describe the possibilities as well as the deformations of the past was the best way to arrive at a much-needed “revolution of the mind.”93 Identifying the disorienting effects of the past, as well as the self-deceiving attitudes they bred, was, in Naipaul’s view, the first and most important task of the postcolonial intellectual. This idea of revolution had little in common with the one advertised by the likes of Michael Abdul Malik, for whom revolution began in a declaration of strength and adequacy. During the 1970s, Naipaul returned obsessively to this theme in different settings. He wanted his writings to help clarify how postcolonial societies might be able to furnish their young with vocabularies with which to evaluate the past. When he visited the Congo in 1971, Naipaul was struck by the “intelligence of the students” he met in a Kinshasa college.94 He feared, however, that the immense potential of these young people would go unrecognized and that they would not find the guidance and nurturing they desperately needed: “So here was another feeling about Africa: that the individual, awakening to history, discovering injustice and the past, discovering ideas, was not supported by his society.”95

5 AMBIGUOUS FREEDOM “In a Free State”

N

A IPAUL WA S the first writer to focus on the experience of decolonization as an interconnected, global phenomenon. He believed that he was among the very few writers trying to capture how societies were being made and unmade in ways that were new and unfamiliar. In 1966, Naipaul spent a year as a fellow at Makerere University in Uganda’s capital city, Kampala. Toward the end of his stay, the Kabaka (or constitutional monarch) of Buganda’s official residence was attacked by the armed forces of the newly independent country, and the king narrowly escaped capture by scaling his compound wall.1 The attack on the Kabaka’s residence had ethnic overtones. It was ordered by the country’s president, Milton Obote, who was on his way to becoming an autocrat. The military assault was led by one Colonel Idi Amin, who would depose Obote five years later in a military coup. Amin went on to rule Uganda with extreme brutality from 1971 to 1979. Together with Obote, Amin undermined the social fabric of the ethnically diverse country and destroyed its national economy. Notwithstanding the personal shortcomings of individual actors like Obote and Amin, for many postcolonial subjects the rise of such leaders was an indication that the euphoria of independence had given way to concerns about the integrity of political leaders and then

12 4

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

to fears of civil unrest and social fragmentation. Some political actors argued that in societies marked by widespread poverty and illiteracy and the absence of strong institutions, democratic elections tended to exacerbate societal divisions without necessarily conferring greater legitimacy on the state. One proponent of this view, Nigeria’s General Babangida, justified the 1983 military coup he helped engineer in the following way: We in the military waited for an opportunity [to overthrow the elected government of Shagari]. There was the media frenzy about how bad the election was, massively rigged, corruption, the economy gone completely bad, threat of secession by people who felt aggrieved. There was frustration within society and it was not unusual to hear statements like, the worst military dictatorship is better than this democratic government. Nigerians always welcome military intervention because we have not yet developed mentally the values and virtues of democracy.2

Naipaul composed his fictional writings of the 1970s against a worrying backdrop. In 1965, the Indonesian military massacred a million or more alleged communists (many of whom also happened to be ethnic Chinese). In 1967, civil war broke out in Nigeria, resulting in the death and displacement of millions. In 1971, following an election whose outcome confounded the projections of the ruling ethnic group, the Pakistani army invaded East Bengal and massacred hundreds of thousands of Bengalis. Most of these events were shaped by Cold War geopolitics; the actions of the Indonesian and the Pakistani armies were supported by the United States government.3 In a 1971 interview, an agitated Naipaul declared that the Pakistani army was using weapons supplied by the United States and China to commit war crimes.4 Naipaul was “extremely upset” about the East Pakistan invasion, which recalled the distress he felt at the civil war in Nigeria a few years earlier. When Naipaul visited the United States in 1968, he met with Cyprian Ekwensi, Chinua Achebe, and Gabriel Okara and expressed his support for the millions of Biafrans who were suffering from war and famine as a consequence of a blockade imposed by Nigeria’s federal government.5

A MBIGUOUS F REEDOM

125

The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European novels on which Naipaul had modeled his early work presupposed a stable society. He now found himself having to invent a style to describe the ways global forces contributed to social instability. In an interview given after the publication of In a Free State (1971), a collection of stories about individual displacement in a globalizing world, Naipaul provocatively declared that he was no longer in the business of imagining society in the provincial manner he had come to associate with English writers: You might go on endlessly writing “creative” novels, if you believed that the framework of an ordered society exists, so that after a disturbance there is calm, and all crises fall back into that great underlying calm. But that no longer exists for most people, so that kind of imaginative work is of less and less use to them. They live in a disordered and fast-changing world, and they need help in grasping it, understanding it, controlling it.6

Naipaul’s fictional works during this period undermine the associations that are typically made between freedom, individual happiness, and collective arrival. Freedom, as Naipaul revalues the word, connotes the condition of having been cut loose or cast adrift from institutional protection as a consequence of social disruption. Refugees, unprotected minorities, and stateless people all subsist in a “free state.” In Naipaul’s prologue to the three short works of fiction that make up In a Free State, Egypt’s political independence has resulted in the expulsion of Egyptian Greeks from a place they had long considered home. Being in a “free state” here means being the collateral damage of political emancipation—freedom resulting in unfreedom: “They were travelling to Egypt, but Egypt was no longer their home. They had been expelled; they were refugees. The invaders had left Egypt; after many humiliations, Egypt was free; and these Greeks, the poor ones, who by simple skills had made themselves only just less poor than Egyptians, were the casualties of that freedom.”7 At first glance, Naipaul’s tone appears to be coldly brisk. This is not because Naipaul no longer seeks to “identify with, explain or

126

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

understand” his characters in this work, but rather that he focuses on communicating a pervasive sense of insecurity or disorientation among minority groups that find themselves, in one form or other, in a free state.8 Naipaul sought, through the portrayal of individual states of mind, to capture the feel of the changing times. Although the novella “In a Free State” unfolds through the eyes of its two central characters, Bobby and Linda, two English expatriates on a car journey through an unnamed African country that has recently become independent, the tone of the third-person narrator never fails to impress on the reader the general sense of uncertainty in the country itself. This is how “In a Free State” begins: In this country in Africa there was a president and there was also a king. They belonged to different tribes. The enmity of the tribes was old, and with independence their anxieties about one another became acute. The king and the president intrigued with the local representatives of white governments. The white men who were appealed to liked the king personally. But the president was stronger; the new army was wholly his, of his tribe; and the white men decided that the president was to be supported. So that at last, this weekend, the president was able to send his army against the king’s people.9

The novella opens with what appears to be a fact-based, unemotional account of political tensions in the country. The reader is lulled into a false sense of security by the simple diction and the soothingly repetitive rhythm of the sentences. This is why the words “at last” come as a violent shock. Easily missed because these words deliver devastating news in a deliberately understated way, they nevertheless convey to the reader the sense of doom that has been lurking beneath the surface all along. Naipaul uses these words to reveal a few chilling truths: how impatiently the new leader had been waiting for the former colonial power’s permission to unleash military violence on a disobedient ethnic community and how complicit the former colonial powers are with such action. Even though the narrator appears disinterested, then, his concern for the fate of history’s victims is subtly implied by the tellingly ironic “at last.”

A MBIGUOUS F REEDOM

12 7

Similarly, when the victims of the army’s actions appear near the end of the novella, the narrator’s empathy is communicated remotely, by means of the solicitude shown for the appearance of the prisoners, whose great accomplishments in the past are mentioned in a way that throws into relief their wretchedness in the present. They too have been placed in a “free state”: Then they saw the prisoners. They were sitting on the ground; some were prostrate; most were naked. It was their nakedness that had camouflaged them in the sun-and-shade about the shrubs, small trees and lorries. Bright eyes were alive in black flesh; but there was little movement among the prisoners. They were the slender, smallboned, very black people of the king’s tribe, a clothed people, builders of roads. But such dignity as they had possessed in freedom had already gone; they were only forest people now, in the hands of their enemies. Some were roped up in the traditional forest way, neck to neck, in groups of three or four, as though for delivery to the slave-merchants. All showed the liver-coloured marks of blood and beatings. One or two looked dead.10

For ordinary Africans, being in a free state could also place stress on interpretative frameworks. Social codes were destabilized, and new visual signals were deployed to convey a state of civil disunity: “In the old photographs the president wore a headdress of the king’s tribe, a gift of the king at the time of independence, a symbol of the unity of the tribes. The new photographs showed the president without the headdress, in jacket, shirt and tie, with his hair done in the English style.”11 For those catapulted into power, freedom brought a sense of entitlement and license. The elite were in a free state in that they had shaken loose from traditional constraints: “They were the new men of the country and they saw themselves as men of power. They hadn’t paid for the suits they wore; in some cases they had had the drapers deported.”12 These new Africans were also freely aligned with the interests of a class of international elites. In Naipaul’s polemical depiction, they were “high civil servants, politicians or the relations of politicians, non-executive directors and managing directors

12 8

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

of recently opened branches of big international corporations.”13 They were “new” in that they were the new colonialism’s front men. Having until very recently been discriminated against and excluded from power, this group sought to make up for lost time by advancing its selfish interests without regard for its civic obligations. Just as plunder assumed a new guise in the postcolonial epoch, a free state did not do away with racism so much as foster new forms of exclusion. Thus there were no “Asiatics at the [popular New Shropshire] bar: the liberations it offered were only for black and white.” This is remarkable, the narrator explains with a display of resentment that recalls the joke about the drapers, because the capital was an “English-Indian creation in the African wilderness. It owed nothing to African skill; it required none.”14 Flush with the high prices that commodities and raw materials fetched on the international market, the postcolonial elite confidently assumed that good times would not come to an end. However, there are warning signs that such complacency is misplaced: In the capital Africa showed only in the semi-tropical suburban gardens, in the tourist-shop displays of carvings and leather goods and souvenir drums and spears, and in the awkward liveried boys in the new tourist hotels, where the white or Israeli supervisors were never far away. Africa here was décor. Glamour for the white visitor and expatriate; glamour too for the African, the man flushed out from the bush, to whom, in the city, with independence, civilization appeared to have been granted complete. It was still a colonial city, with a colonial glamour. Everyone in it was far from home.15

The sardonic eye of the narrator of “In a Free State” constellates a set of shifting moods and encounters in which the attitudes of the new African elite, shadowy neocolonial forces, African peasants, the marginalized ethnic and racial minorities, and complacent British expatriates combine in ways that seem likely to give rise to new ways of being in a free state. No single national or unified point of view emerges from these disparate subject positions. Naipaul does not provide a normative viewpoint from which an alternative to the tense and unsatisfactory

A MBIGUOUS F REEDOM

12 9

state of affairs can be envisioned. Even though “In a Free State” conforms to the formal realism of nineteenth-century European fiction, it does not presuppose the consensus or shared framework that underlies that form of writing. Freedom in this context evokes disparate, even incommensurate, visions of social life that have not yet been combined to enable shared ways of seeing and saying. Many of these disparate perspectives are filtered through Bobby’s consciousness. Although Bobby is a British civil servant, he is a supporter of the underdog. He regards Africans as his equal and is outraged by his compatriots’ casually racist attitudes. Accompanying Bobby on his long drive back from the capital city to the Southern Collectorate, where he lives and works, is Linda—a “compound wife” married to a British radio journalist who has become disillusioned by all the pro-government programs the new regime requires him to produce. Linda and her husband plan to leave for the apartheid state of South Africa, where white expatriates who no longer feel welcome in erstwhile British colonies are relocating. In contrast to Bobby, who is given to ostentatious displays of colonial guilt, Linda has an unassailable sense of her superiority. Much of the comedy of the novella follows irresistibly from the antagonism the two characters display toward each other. Linda thinks that Africans are primitive and congratulates herself for having the guts to say so. Bobby responds with sanctimonious outrage to virtually everything she says, as their long car journey turns into a sequence of revealing exchanges about the different ways that racial prejudice manifests itself in the white expatriate community in the era of decolonization. In a discomfiting twist, Naipaul nudges the reader into a feeling of complicity with the racist Linda. The reader is not asked to identify with or approve of Linda, but is also not allowed to view her racist attitudes from a distance or with comfortable detachment. Linda transforms the reader who laughs at her jokes into an often unwilling accomplice of her racist views.16 Naipaul’s strategy of implicating the reader in objectionable attitudes may have been part of a broader effort to diagnose the psychic attitudes of the former colonial master. In a classic essay, “Regulated Hatred,” D. W. Harding argues that Jane Austen’s books are, “as she meant to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom

13 0

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

she disliked.”17 Naipaul’s novella, which was admired by many English readers, was written in the late 1960s, a time when ethnic nationalist opposition to the immigration of Commonwealth subjects to Britain was on the rise.18 By presenting Linda as well as Bobby in an ironic light, Naipaul draws on his personal familiarity with this apparently unrelated context to anatomize the self-serving positions adopted by his ideologically diverse English hosts toward colonialism and its consequences. Bobby has a working-class background. A scholarship boy, his sexuality further contributed to his isolation during his time at the University of Oxford, where he suffered a nervous breakdown. Bobby thinks himself fortunate to have escaped the aridity of England’s class system, its bleak tenements, and its repressed sexual atmosphere. Looking out the car window at the natural beauty all around, he tells Linda that he was “saved” by Africa. Bobby also finds himself in a free state in other ways; the same-sex encounters he seeks with African peasants and poor boys take place between equals, Bobby believes, because (unlike his compatriots) he sees black people as equals. Now that the country has become independent, he is happy to be able to serve it in a new capacity, putting his skills at the service of the local people rather than the colonial ruling elite. Naipaul subtly illustrates how Bobby’s anti-elitism and his solidarity with Africans may be more complicated than they seem. This becomes apparent when Bobby expresses his disapproval of the fugitive African king, whom he criticizes for being too much of an Anglophile and insufficiently “African.” It is suggested that the origins of Bobby’s hostility may lie in the fact that he and the king were contemporaries at Oxford. Whereas Bobby had been ignored by his peers, the king was a much-sought-after figure in the social circles of the same university. After he graduated, he also found many admirers and supporters in the upper echelons of English society. The arguments that repeatedly break out between Linda and Bobby over the course of their long drive signal some of the rifts within English society in the era of decolonization. Occasionally, however, the two find themselves in complete agreement. Both Bobby and Linda “can’t stand” the cunning Indian shopkeepers. These shopkeepers, Bobby complains, “don’t sell the Africans a pack

A MBIGUOUS F REEDOM

13 1

of cigarettes. They sell them just one or two cigarettes at a time. They make a fortune out of the Africans.”19 Linda feels just as strongly about the Indian exploitation of Africans. Both the righteously anticolonial Bobby and the staunchly pro-imperialist Linda are committed to protecting African tradition against the rapacious Indian shopkeeper. Such moments of concord are rare, however. When Bobby gratuitously remarks that blacks were not permitted during colonial times to live in a fancy white suburb he happens to glance at through the car window, Linda ignores the barb. She mischievously retorts that surely the servants of white people must have been allowed to live there. Bobby responds, with the calm grim satisfaction of a man prophesying the racial holocaust, “I suppose that is why someone like John MubendeMbarara has refused to move out of the native quarter.” “How well you pronounce those names,” [Linda said].20

Bobby’s moral earnestness puts him at an obvious disadvantage. He replies, somewhat desperately, that Linda will now have to visit the native quarter if she wishes to view the work of this artist. John Mubende-Mbarara will not come to people like her; people like her must go to him. Linda said, “When Johnny M. began, he was a good primitive painter and we all loved his paintings of his family’s lovely ribby cattle. But he churned out so many of those he got to be a little better than primitive. Now he’s only bad. So I don’t suppose it matters if he does continue to paint his cattle in the native quarter.” “That’s been said before.” “About him living in the native quarter?” “About his painting.” Bobby hated himself for answering.21

The cheerfully cynical Linda baits the sanctimonious Bobby for her entertainment, and his many stumbles make for painfully funny exchanges that expose the flaws of both characters.22 At one point in this road trip, the barbed exchanges develop into open hostility. Reproof and contempt drip from everything Bobby

13 2

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

says in response to Linda’s imperturbably racist views. When Linda dismisses the Mau Mau fighters in Kenya as filth-eating savages,23 Bobby snaps, “They were oppressed for centuries.”24 He also rails against the British habit of “lecturing the Africans about corruption” when so many of the departing British expatriates (who are Linda’s friends) are demanding to be reimbursed by the African state for thousands of pounds of made-up expenses.25 Bobby adds in a satisfied tone that he has reported this dishonest behavior to his new boss, Mr. Butere. As the tension mounts, it becomes evident that “In a Free State” explores the deranging legacy of colonial rule. Naipaul reveals the continuities between the corruptions of the colonial and postcolonial periods when Bobby expresses regret that the killing of the king had not taken the form of a “police action” rather than a military assassination.26 Assassinations make for bad publicity; Bobby’s civil service training will enable him to make this point tactfully to his new boss, who is the minister of the interior. Bobby only disagrees with the means employed by his bosses, not their end. He believes that the president’s attack on the king is a legitimate and necessary effort to consolidate the authority of the central government, regardless of the suffering it causes the king’s people. Although Bobby makes these points to the reactionary Linda to underscore that he works solely for the advancement of African interests, it turns out that his aims serve British and American interests as well. Although “In A Free State” cannot be described as a piece of anticolonial writing, Naipaul’s use of irony suggests that one way for the colonized to overcome their anger is by regarding their colonizers less as cruel gods than as people who have also been affected by the deranging effects of colonialism. Cultivating a coolly assessing attitude toward the absurdities of the colonial past, as well as the postcolonial order that has succeeded it, appears to be, for Naipaul, the first step toward a clear-eyed grasp of the challenges facing the society. The most memorable scenes in the novella are devoted to exposing the self-deception of the colonizer who declares his solidarity with the colonized. Bobby’s humiliation by the “Zulu activist” in the ironically named New Shropshire bar—“the capital’s interracial

A MBIGUOUS F REEDOM

13 3

pick-up spot”27—is one example. Accustomed to paying poor African boys just a few shillings for sexual favors, Bobby fails to notice that the Zulu’s simple appearance is an affectation—dressing down is how the black man from South Africa separates himself from the unsophisticated, newly rich eastern Africans among whom he now finds himself. The narrator tells the reader that the Zulu’s use of items of clothing as props to test or flirt with white men suggests that he is a more complicated character than Bobby realizes: “The cloth cap was like part of his elusiveness. The cap made the Zulu appear now as a dandy, now as an exploited labourer from the South African mines, now as an American minstrel, and sometimes even as the revolutionary he had told Bobby he was.”28 Significantly, it is Bobby who comports himself like an unsophisticated man from the country, failing to take the hint when the Zulu tells him that nothing can be bought in the capital city for less than several hundred dollars. Bobby implies that such a price is too high, but continues to believe that he still has a chance with the man. A poorly paid civil servant, Bobby fails to see that his racial prestige and authority do not get him very far in a place like the New Shropshire bar, which caters to a wealthy clientele with which he lacks the means to compete. The Zulu has bigger fish to fry and is looking for a way to rid himself of Bobby. The opportunity presents itself when Bobby attempts to seduce him. Bobby reflexively addresses the Zulu in the pidgin English that has always worked with peasant boys picked up on the roadside in the rural south of the country. Almost instantly, Bobby realizes the Zulu may view this speech as condescending, and he code-switches. But it is too late. The Zulu calmly spits in Bobby’s face, in full view of the other white patrons, precipitating the latter’s headlong flight from the bar. The scene in the gas station late in the novella exposes the pretensions of the benevolent white man in a different way. When Bobby and Linda break their journey in a rural place called Esher, Bobby pays for gas and behaves as though nothing is amiss when the young African attendant has difficulty calculating the change. True to form, Linda pounces on the perceived incompetence of the gas station attendant. Bobby can barely contain his anger at her remark when

13 4

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

Linda suddenly points out the damage done by another attendant to Bobby’s windshield: Linda said, “Look what this one’s been doing.” Bobby looked at Linda’s side of the windscreen. Then he looked at the small African. The African was using a double-edged cleaner, one edge made of rubber, one edge made of sponge; but both sponge and rubber had perished, and he was rubbing the central bar of metal on the windscreen. He had left a complicated trail of deep scratches on the windows all around the car. Scratching away now, not looking at Bobby, he frowned, to show his intentness.29

The scene is excruciatingly painful to read. The obviously racist disregard of Linda’s “this one” makes the reader turn reluctantly in the direction of her gaze. However, the reader’s reflexive desire, which is also Bobby’s, not to validate Linda’s self-satisfaction is upended by the grim comedy of the damaged windshield. Through the misguided actions of the African man who damages the windshield, Naipaul succinctly communicates the immense hurdles that face peasant societies unprepared for the historical transition to modern society into which they have been inducted. It is also a story of rural peoples recently forced to work in disorienting semi-urban conditions. Naipaul’s staging ensures that the historical predicament faced by this individual is presented as sharply as possible, rather than vacuously transmuted into empathy underpinned by the false presupposition that observer and observed inhabit the same lifeworld. Some of these points can be gleaned from the passage just quoted. But the dramatic brilliance of the scene pivots around exposing Bobby’s pretensions. The events in this episode are filtered through Bobby and communicated through his agitated feelings. His fury at the damage to his car is compounded by the fact that Linda, whom Bobby has come to loathe for her racism, regards the damaged windshield as confirmation of her views about African backwardness. It is an “I-told-you-so” moment. Bobby longs to hit Linda. In a superbly orchestrated move that intensifies the

A MBIGUOUS F REEDOM

13 5

grotesquely comic nature of the scene, he instead directs his pentup fury at the African attendant: Bobby saw the fineness of the African’s features, the special, dead blackness of the skin, and recognized him as a man of the king’s tribe. Bobby was at once deeply angry. The African, aware of Bobby’s scrutiny, frowned harder. “What on earth are you doing?” Bobby pushed the door open so violently that the African was hit and thrown off balance.30

Under pressure, Bobby turns into the very thing his rational self claims to have disavowed. His irrationality manifests itself in the arbitrary judgments of the colonial master who operates on the supposition that he knows his natives: “Oh yes, you are very clever,” Bobby sneers. “Like all your people.”31 It is as if Bobby has, against his will, issued an unconscious directive, as did his would-be humanitarian precursor Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (1899), who was driven mad by Africa a century earlier. By revealing how Bobby discovers his own heart of darkness despite his best efforts, Naipaul shows the colonial master to be suborned by a deeper corruption that no amount of rationalization will overcome. When the Indian district superintendent who apparently oversees the running of the state-owned gas station does not appear to answer for the gas attendant’s actions, Bobby seizes on a familiar object of loathing. It is “the old Asian trick of remote control,”32 he cries, as if the Indian is to blame for conspiring with the African—now troublingly identified by his features as belonging to the criminalized tribe of the fugitive king—to damage Bobby’s windshield. The emotional violence of the story reaches a climax at this point; it stands in for the actual violence that takes place offstage, which we discern only through its effects—the dead king in his burnt car, the beaten people of the king’s tribe. The violent momentum is kept up with the appearance of the old colonel at the hotel. Like the country’s new chief of security, a man aptly named Hobbes, the colonel believes that history allows for only two kinds of subjects: predators

13 6

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

and their prey. He appears as an angry-chorus-like figure promising worse things to come for the country. In another echo of Heart of Darkness, it is as if Conrad’s Kurtz had recovered from his mental breakdown in the Inner Station and opened a hotel in the same place (another submerged parallel with Bobby, with whom the colonel ostensibly has nothing in common): These people don’t know how lucky they are . . . if the Europeans had come here fifty years earlier, [these Africans] would have been hunted down like game and exterminated. Twenty, thirty years later—well, the Arabs would have got here first, and they would all have been roped up and driven down to the coast and sold. That’s Africa. They’ll kill the king all right. They’ll decimate his tribe before this is over. Have you been listening to the news?33

Similarly, it is through the starkly racist exchange with one of his workers that the colonel brings into the open the deep-seated forms of hatred that structure this colonial society and contribute to the violent passions that run beneath the surface. It culminates in a terrifying scene that distills the psychic damage wrought by settler colonialism on ruler and ruled. It is a weirdly comical conversation that takes place in the free state, between a fearful yet defiant former white master and his recently emancipated African “boy”: “Who do you hate more? The Indian or me?” “I hate the Indian.” “You are ungrateful. Who do you hate more? The Indian or me?” “I will always hate you, sir.” “Don’t you forget it. Your hate will keep me alive. One night, Peter, you will knock on my door—“ “No, sir.”34 [THE COLONEL:] [PETER:]

Unlike other postcolonial writers, Naipaul is not interested in attacking the former colonial rulers for believing themselves superior. He suggests that such sadism is the inevitable result of the extreme asymmetries of power created by the colonial system in

A MBIGUOUS F REEDOM

13 7

Africa. The solution lies in the colonized strengthening themselves by taking stock of their predicament. This is also Naipaul’s way of suggesting that the postcolonial nation cannot rely on others, however well-intentioned they may appear, to build the kinds of institutions and social practices it needs in order to thrive. All humanitarian or philanthropic acts subtly reproduce older asymmetries of power. True freedom comes only when one has joined the ranks of the strong. This is a kind of melancholy insight, which is underscored at the end of the novella. Bobby falls asleep thinking that his servant belongs to the king’s tribe, toward which he now feels an even greater dislike. He tells himself that he must sack the boy when he wakes up in the morning. Bobby receives a kind of poetic justice, however. When he runs into the army that is hunting down people of the king’s tribe, Bobby expects to be treated with respect. He gives the low-ranking soldiers his credentials and explains his association with the high-ranking government official, Mr. Butere. Bobby’s fine words are met with uncomprehending looks that recall the scene in the gas station. This time, however, Bobby’s presumption gets him into trouble. The soldiers beat him up and relieve him of his valuables. The army is out of control elsewhere in the country, so Bobby gets off lightly, relatively speaking: Bobby drove in and out of the white barriers and then slowly past the vehicles halted on the other side of the road, vehicles going out of the Collectorate: the Peugeot taxi-buses, the broken-down vans and African cars. The passengers were on the verge. Some were holding duplicated foolscap sheets, their passes; but others were already sitting down on lying on the grass, half naked, their clothes torn; the fully clothed soldiers moving among them. Some of the African women were in Edwardian costumes. So the first missionaries had appeared among the king’s people; and so, ever since, but in African-style cottons, the women of the king’s people had dressed on formal occasions or whenever they made a long journey.35

As they come into view for the first time in the novella, the narrator pays his respects to the technical and organizational skills of the

13 8

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

king’s people, which predate the arrival of the Europeans: “They were a people who lived, vulnerably now, in villages along their ancient straight roads: roads that had spread their power as forest conquerors, until the first explorers came.”36 The people gathered by the roadside are descendants of a group that had accomplished a great deal before the advent of European missionaries and colonial officials. It was ironically these institutions, bearers of a novel idea of progress, that disturbed the ideas of society and order that had underpinned the old arrangements. The missionaries and officials, and others who came in their wake, laid the conditions for a form of historical transition unfamiliar to the local population. This European makeover of old institutions reconfigured an “Africa” along lines that provided Naipaul, as it had Joseph Conrad before him, with a “vision of the world’s half-made societies as places which continuously made and unmade themselves.”37 Only in the closing passages of “In a Free State” does Naipaul offer glimpses of a normative vision. It lies in the possibilities represented by African communities such as these—their values and internal organization, their organizational and technical skills, all of which had been tragically passed over for political reasons in the era of decolonization. Naipaul reveals that he is guided by pragmatic, rather than political, considerations: the better educated or technologically advanced local community ought to have been allowed to lead the way to a better postcolonial future for the nation.

6 TRUTH AND LIE A Bend in the River

A

BEND IN THE RIVER is at once Naipaul’s bleakest and most powerful work.1 It explores how individuals who have been forced into making wrenching choices at a time of political crisis find ways to turn adversity to personal advantage. A central aim of this chapter is to explore how Salim, the novel’s protagonist, discovers the tools and acquires the will to take decisions that enable him to survive in a period of social turmoil in postcolonial Africa. These features distinguish Bend from the more detached narration of “In a Free State,” in which Naipaul portrayed individuals as passively acted upon by abstract social forces. Before discussing how Salim acquires the tools to describe his situation adequately, it is necessary to provide some context. The events in Bend are set against the backdrop of civil unrest in the Congo during the1960s, immediately after the nation gained its independence from Belgium.2 The novel begins with the narrator, Salim, a young Indian Muslim man, making the brutal decision to abandon his family home on the east coast of Africa for a town in Central Africa, where he plans to start afresh. Salim belongs to a family of Indian Muslim traders who have lived on the African coast for generations. They are part of a community that has retained its language and customs and keeps its distance

14 0

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

from local African communities. Salim’s family of traders once flourished in the region, notably during the period of waning Arab dominance and rising European rule, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. But the future looks uncertain in the era of decolonization. Unlike his other family members, Salim is convinced that political independence, which will soon sweep across Africa—black majority rule replacing white colonial rule—will have an adverse effect on minority communities like his: If the insecurity I felt about our position on the coast was due to my temperament, then little occurred to calm me down. Events in this part of Africa began to move fast. To the north there was a bloody rebellion of an upcountry tribe which the British seemed unable to put down; and there were explosions of disobedience and rage in other places as well.3

Convinced that there is no future for him on the coast, Salim packs his belongings and leaves his family. Driving for several days, he reaches a town in Central Africa, possibly Kisangani, located at a bend in the Congo River. Salim has bought a dry goods shop in this town from his mentor and family friend, Nazruddin, who has advised him that there is an opportunity to make money there. Although Salim is a shopkeeper whose education was cut short, he is intelligent and perceptive. His first words in the novel, which is narrated from his point of view, are those of a realist: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”4 Salim believes he must always stay one step ahead of the volatile conditions of the region, and he must therefore learn how to grasp and describe the world with accuracy and without sentimentality. Reflecting on these matters, one day he discovers something striking about how the colonial authority has described aspects of his childhood world: Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area. The British administration gave us beautiful stamps. These stamps depicted local

T RU T H A ND L IE

141

scenes and local things; there was one called ‘Arab Dhow.’ It was as though, in those stamps, a foreigner had said, ‘This is what is most striking about this place.’ Without that stamp of the dhow I might have taken the dhows for granted. As it was, I learned to look at them. Whenever I saw them tied up at the waterfront I thought of them as something peculiar to our region, quaint, something the foreigner would remark on, something not quite modern, and certainly nothing like the liners and cargo ships that berthed in our own modern docks. So from an early age I developed the habit of looking, detaching myself from a familiar scene and trying to consider it as from a distance.5

“As it was, I learned to look at them.” Salim learns to “detach” himself from familiar ways of looking and attach himself to an alien and self-conscious way of constituting his everyday surroundings. By learning to look with the eyes of the foreigner, Salim discovers a style of representation that gives him a new idea of agency. He grasps that the foreigner has made the barely noticed dhow into an emblem of the place. Salim intuits that the image on the stamp is not a description of a preexisting reality so much as a way of constituting reality in a new way. The epiphany of the stamp empowers Salim, giving him an insight into the style of representation to which those in power have access. If indeed, as Salim says, the world is what it is, the truth of that reality—how it is described and understood—is an effect of its representation. This insight into the way representation plays a role in constituting reality teaches him the way of seeing adopted by history’s agents—even as it decisively alienates him from his own people, in whose manners and minds “little had changed.”6 Readers may have noticed that the image on the stamp resembles what the critic Edward Said, in a groundbreaking study, denounced as “orientalist” representation.7 Said and Naipaul put forward their differing analyses of the same representational operation within a year of each other: Said’s Orientalism was published in 1978 and Naipaul’s Bend in 1979. Remarkably, even though Said wrote several (mostly negative) essays on Naipaul’s work in the 1980s, and even discussed Bend, he never mentioned the interesting resonances

14 2

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

between his and Naipaul’s engagement with the nature of (Western) representation. In Said’s analysis, the image of the dhow on the stamp illustrates how the colonial authorities represent the “East” as a place that is frozen in time. Because of its associations with preindustrial or exotic forms of transportation, the dhow is made to symbolize an unchanging and backward place. In Said’s view, the person looking at the image of the dhow unconsciously projects such associations onto the people or region represented by the stamp. Through this representational move, Said argues, the East is stripped of its history and context and made into the opposite of the dynamic West. Because the stamp is produced by the colonial authority in East Africa, the image of the dhow also conveys the subliminal message that Western imperialism is both a modernizing project that aims to uplift its subjects and a custodial one that preserves the traditions and cultural heritage of its subjects, as emblematized by the dhow. For Said, representation does not just describe a place but stamps it with an alien essence or identity. Salim, as we will see, also explores this idea in Bend. For the moment, however, as a person who is trying to improve his position at a time of unrest, Salim’s aim is to extract as much knowledge as he can from the meager resources at his disposal. Therefore, he is not interested in criticizing orientalist representation but seeks instead to learn how to manipulate its rules for his own ends. In doing so, he hopes to graduate from being one of history’s victims to becoming one of its agents. This is why Salim does not regard the image of the stamp merely as an instrument of colonial domination but also as an invaluable portal of access to the tools by which he may become an agent of knowledge in his own right. Hence, even though Salim is conscious of the position of “exteriority” from which such representations are executed, he refuses the oppositional terms in which Said frames his critique. Instead, Salim intuits that he must first be able to understand and reproduce the structure of “orientalist” representation in order then to be able to scrutinize its duplicitous operations from within its terms. To his mind, there is no other way for him to become an historical agent. Just as there is no “outside” to the global order, there is no viable alternative to the objectified representation of the dhow.

T RU T H A ND L IE

14 3

This insight engenders in Salim a more worldly understanding of the nature of this style of representation. He becomes aware of the ironic and self-serving uses to which moral and historical “truths” are put in modern societies:8 If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie. Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were more moral. We didn’t lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn’t think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did. But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.9

What Said negatively labels as “orientalist,” then, Salim regards as a representational technique he must learn to deploy if he is to gain control over the ways in which meanings are produced and values are conferred in the modern era. Even though orientalist representation exoticizes or reifies, Salim intuits that it also reveals the indispensable cognitive framework and representation schema he may learn to manipulate in order to produce an adequate representation of the world. As a consequence, Salim discovers a way of reflecting on the intellectual limitations of his own formation. He recalls a story that his grandfather, a trader in colonial times, once told about how he had participated in the slave trade: I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber. He couldn’t tell me when he had done this. It was just there in his memory, floating around,

14 4

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

without date or other association, as an unusual event in an uneventful life. He didn’t tell it as a piece of wickedness or trickery or as a joke; he just told it as something unusual that he had done— not shipping the slaves, but describing them as rubber. And without my own memory of the old man’s story I suppose that would have been a piece of history lost forever. I believe, from my later reading, that the idea of rubber would have occurred to my grandfather at the time, before the First World War, when rubber became big business—and later a big scandal—in central Africa. So that facts are known to me which remained hidden or uninteresting to my grandfather.10

To the outsider, Salim’s grandfather’s lack of remorse for his slavetrading activity may suggest cruelty or indifference. But Salim treats it as an example of his grandfather’s unthinking conformity to the rules of his group and an indication, more broadly, of the conformity of other African men to the rules of their group. These different local groups facilitated or participated in the “secret slavery that continued on the coast until the other day.”11 Because he was entirely at peace with the morality of his actions, Salim’s grandfather focused his story on the way he had outsmarted the colonial authorities by passing the slaves off as rubber. Salim believes that had his grandfather been taught to activate the perspective embodied by the stamp, he would have been able to arrive at a more self-critical or detached assessment of his part in the slave trade, not least by accessing the wider discussions taking place at the end of the nineteenth century. Under those circumstances, it could be argued, Salim’s grandfather would have been capable of justifying his actions or expressing remorse for them. But because his grandfather had not, in Salim’s words, “learned to look,” he could not reflect upon his actions in a manner consonant with the discursive norms of Europe’s “lies.” For, as Salim wryly notes, Belgium’s King Leopold used humanitarian rhetoric as cover for the mass violence his agents perpetrated in the Congo: “When the Europeans were dealing in one kind of rubber, my grandfather could still occasionally deal in another.”12

T RU T H A ND L IE

14 5

Salim is a practical businessman whose objectives at the start of the novel are straightforwardly unsentimental: first, to avoid becoming one of history’s casualties, and second, to join the ranks of history’s victors. Thus, even though he expresses a moral objection to the slave trade, Salim is less exercised by its immorality than by the fact that his grandfather’s account reveals a structural flaw in his community’s ability to adapt to the changed times. In a different vein, Salim worries that black African leaders who deploy anticolonial language are, in his view, inattentive to the ways such rhetoric—given its historical provenance—is inextricably linked to Europe’s lies: “I feared the lies—black men assuming the lies of white men.”13 The lesson of the stamp in Bend opens into a complex reflection on the postcolonial subject’s historical predicament in the era of independence. It also points to some of the entangled ways of thinking they must rely upon to navigate the challenges of the modern period. It is therefore ironic that when Salim, who has never lived outside of the east coast of Africa, trains himself to study his surroundings in a dispassionate and critical way, he is mistakenly “assigned an ideological whiteness” by critics who declare that it is inconsistent with postcolonial approaches to the past.14 As Salim trains himself to critically scrutinize self-regarding European characters like Father Huismans, he also appraises young African characters like Ferdinand, the lycée student whose mother Zabeth leaves under Salim’s supervision. When Ferdinand repeats Pan-Africanist talking points about how “the world outside was going down and Africa was rising,” Salim detachedly describes Ferdinand as an historical type: When I pushed [Ferdinand] past the stage where he could repeat bits of what he had heard at the lycée, I found that the ideas of the school discussion had in his mind become jumbled and simplified. Ideas of the past were confused with ideas of the present. In his lycée blazer, Ferdinand saw himself as evolved and important, as in the colonial days. At the same time he saw himself as a new man of Africa, and important for that reason. Out of this staggering idea of his own importance, he had reduced Africa to himself; and the future of Africa was nothing more than the job he might do later on.15

14 6

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

Characters in Bend are not treated as unthinking or impervious to change. In one of the most interesting developments in the novel, Ferdinand confounds Salim’s gloomy prediction by maturing into an empathetic, thoughtful, and responsible high-ranking government official. Not only does Ferdinand develop into a more humane person that the emotionally stunted Salim, the idealism of his early years evolves into practical wisdom and honesty. In this way, Ferdinand symbolizes the immense potential of the country’s educated youth. Ferdinand is educated first at the local lycée and later in the polytechnic created by the president. He is able to turn his early views in a productive direction because of the state scholarship he receives. For a brief period, it appears that the education system is creating informed citizens and promising leaders. Reflecting on Ferdinand’s development, Salim acknowledges that a new beginning has been made in the Domain, the place where the new polytechnic is located. Salim’s analysis offers another instance of how the lies—the “hoaxes” of the colonial past and the postcolonial present—nevertheless offer possibilities for the young of the new nation. In this way, the skeptical Salim is able to keep faith with the progress of the postcolonial nation: The Domain, with its shoddy grandeur, was a hoax. Neither the President who had called it into being nor the foreigners who had made a fortune building it had faith in what they were creating. But had there been greater faith before? . . . Yet that earlier hoax had helped to make men of the country in a certain way; and men would also be made by this new hoax. Ferdinand took the polytechnic seriously; it was going to lead him to an administrative cadetship and eventually to a position of authority. To him the Domain was fine, as it should be. He was as glamorous to himself at the Polytechnic as he had been at the lycée. To him the world was getting newer. . . . For me that same world was drab, without possibilities.16

Despite his patronizing attitude, which is partly the result of his feeling of inadequacy, Salim recognizes that young men like Ferdinand have the intelligence and determination to help build

T RU T H A ND L IE

147

an informed and stable society. Looking at Ferdinand’s composure and his integrity, he also recognizes that the postcolonial state’s investment in education has begun to bear fruit very quickly. If the stamp episode illustrated how colonized peoples could discover the preconditions of an agency that was not defined primarily by its opposition to colonialism, Ferdinand’s development indicates how such agency might become universalized in postcolonial society. Salim realizes this even as he grows aware that he has probably arrived at the limits of his own development. “Ferdinand, starting from nothing, had with one step made himself free, and was ready to race ahead of us.”17 For all his misgivings, then, Salim begins to affirm and feel proud of the institutions that are coming into being in his new home in Central Africa. However, Salim’s optimism proves short-lived. Ferdinand is prevented from realizing his potential as a government official because the fragile peace established by the authoritarian state does not hold. As a result, he is unable to provide the country with the leadership it urgently needs. Like Ferdinand, the country becomes a victim of internal disunity. The repeated armed uprisings and the failure of state-run institutions lead to the president (also known as the Big Man) consolidating power in his own hands. The Big Man conducts a Mao-style purge in which he disbands the Youth Guard, a group he had once sponsored as the spiritual guardians of the nationalist ideology. In a populist move to shore up his power, he also encourages ordinary people to turn against the party members who have taken too independent or elitist a line by criticizing him. These actions result in a period of instability from which the country never recovers. By the final section of the novel, copper prices have collapsed, state institutions have been weakened, and a new armed movement aimed at overthrowing the Big Man has begun in earnest. Government officials and police officers, sensing that the state might collapse, squeeze ordinary people for bribes—they have to plan ahead, after all. The sense of insecurity becomes all-pervasive. As state officials grow increasingly predatory, it becomes impossible for anyone to think about anything except their own survival. Naipaul’s portrait of the fraying

14 8

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

psychological states of Salim and Ferdinand unfolds alongside the undermining of the country’s institutions. ✴✴✴

One of the strengths of Bend is its attention to contextualizing details, not least the manner in which historical possibilities ebb and flow and how rapidly individual agency can be overwhelmed by the volatile shifts of postcolonial politics. Many of the challenges facing the postcolonial society can be traced to the predatory practices of the colonial period. It is interesting to see that Naipaul treats with neutrality, and does not censure, the constraints under which the admittedly Machiavellian president must work in order to forge a nation out of an ethnically fractured territory. In response to a regional uprising, the president vows to transform the army into a truly national institution, now drawing from all the tribes, not just the tribe that, having once worked for slavers that terrorized local Africans, formed the core of the colonial army. He brutally dissolves the old army and has many soldiers killed; then he recruits soldiers from different tribes and regions. In this way, the army is transformed into an institution that is more diverse and therefore more representative of the different groups that compose the newly independent nation. However, this welcome shake-up has the untoward effect of placing even more power in the hands of the president. As the autonomy of the different regions is gradually undermined in an effort to create a unified national identity, the central authority’s power also expands unchecked. The president initiates grand projects such as the polytechnic, which he hopes will serve as a training ground for an elite who will promote the ideals of Pan-Africanism, which is something of an obsession for him. The Big Man’s dreams are anything but small. He is portrayed not as a rapacious plunderer, but rather as a man who aspires to become a moral leader on the continent, even though the underdeveloped state of the economy suggests that the nation’s resources might be put to more practical and less ostentatious use: “The message of the Domain was simple. Under the rule of our new President the miracle had occurred: Africans had become modern

T RU T H A ND L IE

149

men who built in concrete and glass and sat in cushioned chairs covered in imitation velvet.”18 During the early years of promise, it appears that the country is doing very well. It seems destined to become a model for the entire continent, proof of the way decolonization would bring about economic justice and social progress to the long-exploited people of the country. The war in Vietnam leads to a prolonged rise in the price of raw materials such as copper, which is produced in the country, which in turns brings wealth and spending power to ordinary workers, even as they pay for expensive projects like the Domain that contribute to the education and training of elites. Fueled by the copper boom, the country advances to the forefront of the new Africa. It appears that the president is devoted to building institutions and to the creation of a national identity. To keep the Soviet Union at bay, Western aid and personnel pour in for the president’s projects.19 In this buoyant context, Indar, Salim’s Oxford-trained family friend from Zanzibar, visits Congo as the leader of a Western nongovernmental organization aimed at bringing European educators to teach in the country. “Unless we can get them thinking, and give them real ideas instead of just politics and principles, these young men will keep our world in turmoil for the next half century.”20 It is as part of this broader neocolonial project that young men like Ferdinand are being trained for modernity. Despite himself, Salim cannot conceal his pride and astonishment at what the country has accomplished: Those young men [in the Polytechnic] had sharp minds and spoke wonderfully—and in French, not the patois. They had developed fast. Just a few years before, Ferdinand had been incapable of grasping the idea of Africa. That wasn’t so now. The magazines about African affairs—even the semi-bogus, subsidized ones from Europe—and the newspapers, though censored, had spread new ideas, knowledge, new attitudes.21

Salim sees that the students are fascinated by what his Indian friend from the coast has to say about his travels to other parts of Africa and treat him as “one of them.”22

15 0

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

However, it soon becomes evident that little has been done to address the backward state of the economy. Salim observes that when “the Chinese or Taiwanese didn’t turn up to till the land of the new model African farm [on the Domain]; the six tractors that some foreign government had given remained in a neat line in the open and rusted, and the grass grew high about them.”23 These are symptoms of a “combined and uneven development.”24 The commodities boom brought a fake development to Salim’s town, enriching a few while leaving most people as poor as before. During this period, a group of non-African middlemen and merchants, not local Africans, make a quick profit. This group is uncreative and lacking in technical knowledge.25 Salim’s friend Mahesh obtains a franchise to open an American-style Bigburger restaurant, with its imported machinery, plastic seating, and air-conditioning. As if on cue, the newly rich African elite shows up to patronize the shop, and Mahesh becomes very successful. When the copper boom ends as abruptly as it began, Mahesh is forced to close down Bigburger. By this time, he has taken all his profits out of the country. With middlemen dominating the local economy, the development that takes place is superficial. Not many people are lifted out of poverty. Dispositions have not been transformed by the rapid modernization. The local Africans—such as Ildephonse, who manages the Bigburger franchise—affect interest in their work when the boss is present, but when left on their own, Salim observes, they become vacant and indifferent. This is a peasantry inducted too quickly into a disorienting process that only superficially resembles the historical transition to capitalism in the European context. When European and American scholars, formed by a different history, arrive at the Domain, they speak of the future in a language that is not attuned to the needs of ordinary Africans. Academics, such as the Belgian historian Raymond, are brought in to deliver lectures and teach classes to prepare African civil servants for positions of leadership. Their talk is high-minded; they focus on grand themes of history and political theory and the most recent debates in anthropology. But they do not attend to the situation on the ground. Naipaul paints a richly nuanced picture of the emerging society. There are some real achievements—individuals of

T RU T H A ND L IE

151

substance like Ferdinand are produced—but the broader social challenges are immense. Salim’s own ability to view the world with disinterest and skepticism also begins to fray because of the attachment he forms to the cultivated Europeans and their seductive view of human possibility. From the point of view of the excluded majority of Africans, there is something unreal, even surreal, about the world of the Domain, where many of the expatriate academics who teach in the local polytechnic reside. Salim is very conscious of this because he lives in the town, where the Africans and the Greek and Italian middlemen mock these newly arrived people. Although Salim is aware that the expatriates live in a bubble, writing and discoursing about “Africa” despite being socially disconnected from local life, he becomes attracted to their vision of the world. This turns out to be the first step toward his undoing. At a dinner party at Raymond’s home in the expatriate preserve of the Domain, Salim is deeply moved by a Joan Baez song. As he contemplates the tasteful decor of “African mats on the floor and the African hangings on the wall and spears and masks,”26 he cannot help surrendering to the noble and beautiful sentiments expressed in the song, even though he is aware that they are drawn from a world quite alien to the one he inhabits. “It was make-believe— I never doubted that. You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time.”27 Despite his skepticism, however, Salim finds himself succumbing completely to the inviting mood set by the song: “It was better to share the companionship of that pretence, to feel that in that room we all lived beautifully and bravely with injustice and imminent death and consoled ourselves with love. Even before the songs ended I felt I had found the kind of life I wanted; I never wanted to be ordinary again.”28 Salim’s assessment of the Domain recalls his earlier allusion to the lies of white men, but he now feels that a life devoted solely to the cultivation of a clear-eyed vision of human reality would be savorless. Even though Salim knows that the sentiments expressed in the Joan Baez songs falsify his reality, they imbue his life with a meaning he finds both intoxicating and exhilarating.

152

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

This scene serves as a turning point in Salim’s development. It accounts for his new relationship to the lie: “The Domain was a hoax . . . it was always reassuring to return to the town I knew, to get away from that Africa of words and ideas as it existed on the Domain (and from which, often, Africans were physically absent). But the Domain, and the glory and the social excitements of the life there, always called me back.”29 There is pathos and irony in this turn of events. The lie had earlier stood for Salim’s touchstone in his navigation of reality; now the lie gradually begins to take the place of that reality. Whereas the lesson of the stamp had liberated Salim from his tradition and enabled him to study his surroundings objectively, his time with the expatriates in the Domain has transformed him into the self-deceiving seeker of a beautiful if unattainable vision of social possibility. Salim’s statement “you expected justice and received it much of the time” loses its ironic connotation.30 Salim had begun his story with a grip on the fact that, for a man of his background, the world must be embraced for “what it is.” This was the only way he stood a chance of ever making good and not be “nothing.” But despite his awareness that the order in which he must survive is nothing like the worlds poeticized by Joan Baez, he now finds that he cannot live without the longings opened up by the lie, which has become preferable to the drudgery of his business at the bend in the river. Salim’s search for truth now becomes intertwined with his need for beautiful lies with which he can support himself. This development coincides with the fading of his earlier sense of purpose and ambition. He finds in the Domain an illusion that will sustain him in his dispirited state. Thus, although Salim calls the Domain a hoax, he longs to return each time he is back in his run-down apartment in the town. Salim’s affair with Yvette, Raymond’s young Belgian wife, has everything to do with his absorption in the lie: Yvette fulfills Salim’s desire to be “lifted” from his circumstances. However, such willed self-deception results in misunderstandings. In a shockingly violent scene, Salim turns on Yvette and beats her viciously when she makes the mistake of teasing him as if he were her equal. After the two share an intimate moment in Salim’s

T RU T H A ND L IE

15 3

apartment, Yvette playfully asks Salim if he has African prostitutes hidden in his bedroom. Yvette was affecting the role of the jealous wife. This innocent joke misfires; it jolts Salim into a realization that they are, objectively speaking, not equals. In truth, he has as little claim to the world that Yvette comes from as he does to the powerful emotions elicited by Joan Baez’s song. The affair with Yvette has, in fact, been a panacea for his insecurity. Exposed in this way, Salim explodes with rage, violently beating and sexually humiliating Yvette. Yvette inadvertently reminds Salim of what he has always known— that whereas she and her husband Raymond are protected by their “strong” European passports, Salim is a member of a local, unprotected minority. Salim screams as he beats Yvette for innocently teasing him, as if he were a white man, about the imaginary African women: “Do you think I’m Raymond?”31 Distracted by the personal relationships he forms in the Domain, Salim is caught unawares when the political situation suddenly changes. In an effort to shore up its base, the government arbitrarily “nationalizes” Salim’s shop and gifts it to a local African party member. Unlike his fellow businessmen Noimon and Mahesh, who have moved much of their wealth abroad in anticipation of a day like this, Salim ironically falls victim to the very sentimentality he had confidently dismissed in the first words of the novel. By the end of the novel, he is left with nothing and has, in his own eyes, been reduced to nothing. ✴✴✴

A Bend in the River offers a portrait of the slow and gradual way in which the social institutions of a newly independent nation are undermined and begin to fall apart after an initial period of promise sustained by a boom in commodity prices. The postcolonial state is unable to consolidate its gains or create the impersonal institutions that the society needs for its longer-term flourishing. There are no “good” or “bad” characters in Bend. Everything is regarded in historical light. The president’s choices are hemmed in by forces he cannot control. He is depicted as a corrupt leader,

15 4

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

to be sure, but the reader is given to understand that he cannot be fully blamed for the fact that his effort to unify the fractured nation by autocratic means ended up exacerbating those fractures.32 On a personal level, Salim feels no anger when a desperate family servant, Metty, betrays him to the police. The novel describes the complex connections between different parts of society. The reader grasps how the disparate histories of ordinary people, expatriates of different classes, the African townsfolk, the new class of officials, the middlemen communities, the old Indian families on the coast are all part of a single social constellation, the individual parts of which cannot be viewed in isolation. In the same way, the oscillations between periods of peace and unrest in the emerging nation, as well the dread and mixed motives felt by ordinary people caught between warring factions, are explored with great power. These qualities make Bend one of the greatest works of postcolonial literary realism. “The literary practice of every true realist [writer],” Georg Lukács writes, “demonstrates the importance of the overall objective social context and the insistence on all-round knowledge required to do it justice.” Even where the “surface of social reality may exhibit ‘subversive tendencies,’ ” Lukács adds, “it is important to see it as a factor in this [social] totality, and not magnify it into the sole emotional and intellectual reality.”33 Naipaul writes in the spirit of realism as Lukács understands it: he is interested far more in situating the story of individuals’ lives within their historical context than in assigning praise or blame. Near the end of the novel, Salim is thrown in jail for being unable to pay an exorbitant bribe. Salim is saved by his old friend Ferdinand, who, as a high-ranking official, now returns the kindness Salim once extended to him. Salim is freed, but Ferdinand describes the wider condition of the society as a large jail in which everyone has become vulnerable: “It’s bad for everybody . . . we’re all going to hell, and every man knows it in his bones. We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning. That is why everyone is so frantic. Everyone wants to make his money and run away. But where? That is what is driving

T RU T H A ND L IE

15 5

people mad. They feel they’re losing the place they can run back to.”34 What are the places that people can “run back to”? Psychologically, if not in actuality, this is the only escape that the novel provides in its conclusion. Writing about an individual from a community of “traders and merchants in the Indian Ocean for centuries,” Naipaul has woven together stories drawn from diverse histories and geographies. But Bend is also one of the first novels to describe an aspect of global civilization that has largely remained invisible: it concludes, as In a Free State began, with a vision of displaced peoples at times of political upheaval. This is the world of refugees who, like the moths in the final scene of the novel, flit across the television screens of Western viewers. As a novelist, Naipaul deals not with what Lukács, in Theory of the Novel, famously called “transcendental homelessness,” but with homelessness as such. By turning Salim into a refugee at the end of the novel, Naipaul transforms this figure from a statistic into a being with a history, a life rich with possibility, characterized by ambition and energy, before his hopes are shattered by forces beyond his control. As the civil war rages on, and the rebels close in on the town at the bend in the river, Salim is reduced to trying to leave with a suitcase in his hand. He barely gets away in time, and he leaves with the knowledge that he has abandoned his servant Metty, a mixed race man from the East African coast, to an uncertain fate. Salim manages to scrape together the last of his savings to buy a ticket on a steamer that departs just as the rebel army enters the town. Salim is in a passenger cabin, but roughly lashed by a single rope to the steamer is a barge filled with many poor people, all of whom are equally desperate to escape the town. Exposed to the elements, the locals hope that the steamer will take them away to relative safety. As the rebels enter the scene, and as shots are fired, the narration grows chaotic, as if miming the events described. This lack of clarity only heightens the feeling of suspense and terror. By this point, the narration has imperceptibly switched from first-person to third-person. The reader is taken out of an exclusive

15 6

T HE MIDDL E P ERIOD: 196 2–19 8 0

concern with Salim’s fate to an equally urgent wish to know what will become of those poor people on the barge. When the rebels board the steamer, at first they are fought off. The panicked crew severs the rope to the barge, fearing that the barge will slow their escape, making them more vulnerable to the bullets of the rebel forces. At first, the people on the barge do not realize it has been cut adrift. The steamer pulls away. In the final paragraph of the novel, Naipaul inserts a brilliant visual image of moths, at once sepulchral and ethereal, that appear for an instant, apparently frozen in the steamer’s searchlight: At the time what we saw was the steamer searchlight, playing on the riverbank, playing on the passenger barge, which had snapped loose and was drifting at an angle through the water hyacinths at the edge of the river. The searchlight lit up the barge passengers, who, behind bars and wire guards, as yet scarcely seemed to understand that they were adrift. Then there were gunshots. The searchlight was turned off; the barge was no longer to be seen. The steamer started up again and moved without lights down the river, away from the area of battle. The air would have been full of moths and flying insects. The searchlight, while it was on, had shown thousands, white in the white light.35

Naipaul’s prose is effective precisely because it describes the suspenseful episode in language that is devoid of emotion. He leaves it to the reader to imagine the heartrending scene of terror and desolation for the people abandoned by the steamer. In this way, the invisible poor are effectively bodied forth and given features, even if only for a fleeting moment. Like the ephemeral moths drawn to the light or the images of refugees in the media, it is suggested, they will soon vanish from the reader’s consciousness. Different aspects of his own character can be found in Ferdinand, Metty, Salim, and Indar, particularly in the ways they learn, or fail to learn, to build upon the perspective of the stamp—something that Naipaul himself was only beginning to do as a consequence of becoming more aware of postcolonial reality. In his essay “Conrad’s

T RU T H A ND L IE

15 7

Darkness” (1974), published before he began working on Bend, he observed: To be a colonial was to know a kind of security; it was to inhabit a fixed world. And I suppose that in my fantasy I had seen myself coming to England as some purely literary region, where, untrammeled by the accidents of history or background, I could make a romantic career for myself as a writer. But in the new world I felt that ground move below me. The new politics, the curious reliance of men on institutions they were yet working to undermine, the simplicity of beliefs and the hideous simplicity of actions, the corruption of causes, half-made societies doomed to remain halfmade: these were the things that began to preoccupy me.36

Bend does not portray postcolonial African societies in the negative light that such a bald statement might suggest. The process of writing the novel had apparently led him to a more complex attitude. He focuses instead on a nuanced exploration of the way individuals such as Salim attempt to acquire the tools that enable them to “see the general aspect of things.”37 The distinct vision of modernity symbolized in Ferdinand (as opposed to the Big Man) reflects Naipaul’s own attentiveness to how the actions of principled African intellectuals or officials were tragically overwhelmed by circumstances. A Bend in the River is a searing novel. It also marks the culmination of the second phase of Naipaul’s career. Just as Naipaul felt compelled to explore new ways of looking and feeling after A House for Mr Biswas, in the decade after Bend’s publication his work took yet another turn. In the 1980s, ambiguity and interpretive open-endedness came to play a more prominent role in his writings.38 Naipaul also began to experiment more with mixed genres, blending autobiography and history with fiction to explore how people who had been formed by historically challenging or debilitating pasts evolve their own diverse languages to reflect upon that formation.

7 PRODUCTIVE DEFORMATION The Enigma of Arrival

T

HREE IMP ORTA NT works—Finding the Centre (1984), The Enigma of Arrival (1987), and A Way in the World (1994)—establish the new direction taken by Naipaul’s work in the third and last phase of his career. In A Bend in the River and “In a Free State,” Naipaul probed the deranging effects of historical upheaval on individuals; in these later works, he explores how people from peripheral backgrounds develop emotional resources and imaginative strategies in the face of disorienting change. This phase is also marked by Naipaul’s experimentation with different ways of writing about his own life, mingling autobiography with fiction and history, such that the boundary between fact and fiction is often troubled. By the early 1980s, Naipaul had begun to take a greater interest in how peripheral peoples were describing their societies. New forms of wealth and mobility, the exchange of ideas between countries of the global South, the emergence of new religious ideologies, the rise of populist and ethnic movements, all called for an exploration of emergent ways of looking. In this context, Naipaul began to modulate his approach to postcolonial societies, which he had previously treated as reactive formations. Beginning with Among the Believers (1981), Naipaul attended more closely to transcribing and interpreting the ways people were actually making sense of their circumstances,

16 2

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

even when he disagreed with them. As a result, the people Naipaul met in different parts of the world played a more active role in shaping the narratives he produced than they had in his earlier work. Naipaul was also interested in the new forms of thinking and feeling that were emerging in contexts where the postcolonial state had been unable to foster institutions that aided the functioning of democratic societies. He began to experiment with a more varied and complex mode of writing, in which existential and historical themes were explored in a more connected manner. He also moved away from the terse and hard-hitting style of his publications in the 1970s, paving the way toward a gentler and more quietly introspective tone. A comparison of two autobiographical essays published ten years apart, “Prologue to an Autobiography” (1984, in Finding the Centre) and the earlier “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine” (1974), helps illustrate the shift in tone and sensibility that Naipaul’s writing underwent in the 1980s.1 Whereas the tone of “Conrad’s Darkness” reveals a writer obsessed with a project of global comprehension that he merely seeks to communicate to his readers, Finding the Centre is disarmingly intimate in its focus on the comic details of Naipaul’s effort to get started as a writer. In a startling break from the bleak tone of his works in the preceding decade, the 1984 essay “Prologue to an Autobiography” is a quietly self-deprecating account of Naipaul’s beginnings as a writer. The sensuous details of the “smooth, ‘non-rustle’ BBC script paper”2 on which the young Naipaul had, thirty years before, typed out “Bogart,” the first story in Miguel Street, are “reality effects” that do not serve to confirm a referential truth so much as to humorously convey the mood of anxiety and superstition in which the twentythree year old Naipaul had begun and completed his first publishable work. There was a ritual immobility to the “unusual” typing posture Naipaul adopted in the hope that the “magic” would hold as he hammered out the first of several stories over several days in the BBC freelancers’ room: shoulders thrown back, spine arched, “my knees were drawn right up; my shoes rested on the topmost struts of the chair, left side and right side. So, with my legs wide apart, I sat at the typewriter with something like a monkey crouch.”3 There is even an ironic aura surrounding the “foldmarks and the wine stains” left on the manuscript by its sympathetic (and alcoholic) first reader4

P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

16 3

as Naipaul offers warm sketches of the men, several of them aspiring writers, working in the same room as he typed out his story in 1955. Separated by ten years, “Conrad’s Darkness” and “Prologue to an Autobiography” occasionally touch on the same autobiographical details, but they give the impression of having been written by two very different people. The author of “Conrad’s Darkness” seems completely alone, a grimly austere figure cursed with the gift of being able to look into the mad eye of history and not blink, in the words of one reviewer.5 In contrast, “Prologue to an Autobiography” bustles with a feeling of easy camaraderie in the BBC freelancers’ room that its author transmitted onto the page in his depiction of the Port of Spain street he was writing about in Miguel Street: “the freelancers room was like a club: chat, movement, the separate anxieties of young or youngish men below the passing fellowship of the room.”6 Besides the Guianese Gordon Woolford, there were John Stockbridge, the Englishman, and Andrew Salkey, the Jamaican writer who would introduce Naipaul to Diana Athill, the editor at André Deutsch who would prove so important to his early success. Their advice was not only literary but also sartorial. They made him get rid of his working-class overcoat (“It had been chosen for me, before I went to Oxford, by the Maltese manageress of an Earl’s Court boarding house”), which they deemed “wrong” for a writer. “Prologue” also suggests that the origins of Naipaul’s realism lay in the struggle to overcome an emotional investment in the idea of historical justice that was connected to his father’s literary aspirations: From the earliest stories and bits of stories my father had read to me, before the upheaval of the move, I had arrived at the conviction— the conviction that is at the root of so much human anguish and passion, and corrupts so many lives—that there was justice in the world. The wish to be a writer was a development of that. To be a writer as O. Henry was, to die in mid-sentence, was to triumph over darkness. And like a wild religious faith that hardens in adversity, this wish to be a writer, this refusal to be extinguished, this wish to seek at some future time for justice, strengthened as our conditions grew worse in the house on the street.7

16 4

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

If Naipaul’s aggressive, even obnoxious, public statements of the 1960s and 1970s gave the impression that he could only have become a writer by repudiating his peripheral origins—contributing to the Naipaul myth that would solidify by the end of the 1970s—the distinguishing feature of Naipaul’s writings of the 1980s onward is their self-conscious efforts to undo that myth by embracing aspects of that very past as formative, even essential, to his becoming a writer. Also implicit in the passage quoted from his 1984 essay is a marked shift in Naipaul’s rhetoric. It could be said, of course, that Naipaul was offering another myth in the place of the old one, now grown restrictive—a moving vision of the author as himself damaged and vulnerable, indeed a struggling character in one of his own generically indeterminate works. What is clear is that Naipaul was self-consciously trying to change directions in “Prologue.” The image of a vulnerable postcolonial whose personal vision arose from his becoming disabused of the false hopes that he (following his father) had initially placed on historical justice might then be viewed as part of this effort at urging a revaluation of his work. Whether or not there was an instrumental aspect to this turn in Naipaul’s later writing, it resulted in some of his most rewarding work. The styles and genres experimented with in this period enabled Naipaul to write fiction that was self-implicating, in which residual and emergent modes of seeing and feeling interrupted, relativized, and complicated the perspectives of the mature author. These internal shifts in perspective also paved the way for Naipaul to express his affinity with and empathy for the people he met during his travels. Old memories, chance encounters, and fugitive scenes from childhood are all dredged up in “Prologue” and looked at in a new light; possessed of an unexpected power, they provide the narrator with new ways of assessing his life and the wider history of his society. During this period, Naipaul experimented with mixed genres in which fiction and autobiography were combined—most notably in The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World. He allowed himself to move away from the constraints of character and plot to focus on questions of a more psychological and historical kind. Naipaul also juxtaposed new impressions or encounters with memories from

P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

16 5

childhood in Trinidad, allowing the latter to appear as a residual form that haunted his contemporary life. Many of these new strategies are explored for the first time, and most self-consciously, in Enigma, the autobiographical novel discussed in this chapter. One of the most remarkable features of Enigma is the manner in which Naipaul self-consciously implicates himself in this history of disadvantaged people. By revealing compromising aspects of his formation, Naipaul subtly undermines his authority. Rather than detaching himself as he sometimes did in his writings of the 1970s, Naipaul makes himself think through the constraints imposed by the past. For this reason, the authoritative voice for which Naipaul had made his name is mostly absent in this (and future) work. Although a fictionalized autobiography, it is notable that events in Enigma do not unfold in the linear and realist manner of Naipaul’s earlier novels, notably A House for Mr Biswas (a Bildungsroman) and The Mimic Men (a fictionalized memoir). Enigma does not trace the passage of a peripheral subject’s transition from a state of ignorance to self-knowledge, nonmodernity to modernity. Instead, Naipaul explores his origin and development by means of a layered and discordant narration that alternates between two points of view: the child growing up in colonial Trinidad and the writer in the metropole. The narrating self is produced out of the oscillation between these two perspectives (each subject to internal shifts) that does not stabilize in a single point of view. In the same way, the self’s development is narrated by means of reflections on the contradictory insights generated by these interpenetrating points of view. In Enigma, Naipaul experimented with techniques that allowed him to express material factors that had gone into the shaping of his life. Even though the events in Enigma are nearly all drawn from Naipaul’s life story, realist conventions governing the autobiography and the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman are ironized inasmuch as the story of the writer’s origins and growth is not disentangled from or rendered independent of the manner of its presentation. For one thing, the writer’s autobiography implicates him in a peripheral past that he has ostensibly left behind. Naipaul presents his formation as a deformation, requiring and enabling disjunctive temporalities

16 6

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

of style and thought. Proust-like remembrance occurs in the sense that Naipaul emphasizes the suggestible manner in which events are experienced; sensations and often fallible introspection take precedence over a concern with the objective depiction of events. By way of a formally distinctive description of his own life, Naipaul engages a mode of critical reflection that thoughtfully broaches historical divisions and tensions within societies formed by the colonial encounter. Enigma begins with its narrator, Vidia Naipaul, a man who has just moved into a cottage on the grounds of a manor in the Wiltshire valley in England, looking out the window: The first four days it rained. I could hardly see where I was. Then it stopped raining and beyond the lawn and outbuildings in front of my cottage I saw fields with stripped trees on the boundaries of each field; and far away, depending on the light, glints of a little river, glints of a little river, glints which sometimes appeared, oddly, to be above the level of the land. The river was called the Avon; not the one connected with Shakespeare. Later—when the land had more meaning, when it had absorbed more of my life than the tropical street where I had grown up—I was able to think of the flat wet fields with the ditches as “water meadows” or “wet meadows,” and the low smooth hills in the background, beyond the river, as “downs.” But just then, after the rain, all that I saw—though I had been living in England for twenty years—were flat fields and a narrow river.8

The disarticulated nature of the narrator’s experience is suggested by the disjointed enumeration of objects: lawn, fields, river are listed and visually juxtaposed without being assimilated to a set of associations. They feel devoid of context and meaning. Ironically, then, the seen objects are named in order to emphasize the disorientation or blankness of the narrator. This feeling of disorientation affects the reader, too, who cannot quite map out all the temporal shifts of the second paragraph, ranging as they do across different times without being organized by a single point of view. The sudden appearance of the incongruous “tropical street” in the second paragraph hints at past forces that have shaped the writer’s development and might now

P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

167

be influencing the strangely disconnected manner of his seeing. In this light, even the narrator’s proleptic assimilation to “the land” is likened to the acquisition of a facility, a second language that never becomes second nature. The use of “absorbed,” which can denote thoughtful immersion (active, deliberate) or taking something up or in (passive, organic), produces the effect of an integration that paradoxically engenders (a new kind of) distance or alienation. Only after so much of his life has been absorbed by the land does the narrator become “able to think” of familiar objects associated with it as water meadows and the like. What initially seem to be the narrator’s first-person recollections gradually begin to acquire overtones of a free indirect discourse in which the narrator presents the thoughts of another character, a younger self or the self in another incarnation, formed in a different time, with all that is implied by its distinct ways of being-in-the-world. The narrator (an older man called Naipaul) attempts to reproduce what, in an earlier incarnation, he (let us call him Vidia) saw when he first arrived at the Wiltshire cottage. Unannounced, a division is set up between the two figures, Vidia and Naipaul, observer and narrator, which corresponds to the division between an older artist who has “arrived”—the one who writes in the present—and a younger, anxious self whose sight is disconnected from the everyday modes it would otherwise take for granted. The phrases “I saw” and “I knew”9 have a subtly undermining effect in that they take apart the realistic presuppositions that the narrator clings to for his orientation. The sentences that follow the passage above are aimed at evoking sensations attending a memory rather than portraying the event itself: “If I say it was winter when I arrived at that house in the river valley, it is because I remember the mist”; “and this picture of the rabbits . . . calls up or creates the other details of the winter’s day.”10 “I saw what I saw very clearly. But I didn’t know what I was looking at. I had nothing to fit it into.”11 Broken impressions give way to familiar words and phrases that are disembedded from their everyday assignations. Thus, winter was “a word” that “had lost some of its romance for me”;12 “Salisbury” is the “name of the town I had come to by train.”13 Even when the narrator becomes familiar with the proper designations for objects, they are encased in quotation marks

16 8

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

(“I was able to think of the flat wet fields and the ditches as ‘water meadows’ or ‘wet meadows’ ”). A disjunction appears, then, between the realistic description, which does not acknowledge any instability in perspective, and representations indicative of a fractured perception. This approach marks a fundamental shift in Naipaul’s writing. In his earlier work, he used realist techniques to depict the periphery as the product of an historical disordering. Colonial powers relied on alien norms to reshape local practices and institutions that the natives were poorly equipped to criticize or reform. Nineteenthcentury plantation societies of the sort Naipaul grew up in were artificial spaces created by imperial fiat—articulated within an international market but sustained by unfree labor. The periphery was defined by modes of uneven development that were experienced in the form of disjunctive temporalities. The breakthrough represented by Enigma lies in the way this state of affairs is captured not so much through its content but its form. Naipaul does not merely depict this condition; he seeks to incorporate its effects into the fabric and style of his writing, revealing through verbal texture how such a disordering influenced the kind of writer he became. One of the central insights yielded by this approach is that the narrating subject is the product of a disturbance that he cannot overthrow, only channel. The originality of The Enigma of Arrival lies in its attempt to engage, at the level of form, the disorienting effects of the periphery’s induction into modernity. Enigma reworks motifs drawn from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927). Memory for Naipaul acts as a portal to new ways of seeing the familiar past and how he has been formed by it.14 However, his development is also an effect of disjunctive temporalities. This is revealed in the way his perception (of his surroundings in Wiltshire) intersects with and is overlaid by recollections of his childhood (in colonial Trinidad). Naipaul tells the reader that, although he has lived in England for twenty years, he still has the “rawness of the colonial’s nerves” and is bothered by the sense that he is “in the other man’s country.”15 As recently as two decades earlier, he would have been “a racial oddity in the valley.”16 Attempts to make himself inconspicuous backfire. When curious locals ask him where he lives,

P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

169

Naipaul makes up a cottage, not realizing that all the cottages would be known to them. Throughout the first section, and indeed the entire book, first impressions are repeatedly withdrawn or qualified, as the narrator has difficulty orienting himself to his surroundings. Strikingly, however, these false impressions have a productive role to play in the text: even when ostensibly corrected, they are returned to and reworked for the insights and perspectives they afford. The shifts in points of view previously noted prepare the reader for a new way of thinking about the narrator’s mistakes; they become the misdirection by which the peripheral writer orients himself. At first, Naipaul indulges in the melancholia of one who believes he has come to the valley at a time when it is undergoing change, his presence there being a “portent” of that change.17 At the same time, he also hints that this impression is mistaken: indeed, the “ruins” of the valley are later revealed to be only a century old, and to have been deliberately made.18 The migrant laborers, whom he initially takes for country people, turn out to be refugees from the nearby towns, unemployed, rootless, looking for jobs with little security.19 Brenda, a working-class woman who repels and attracts Naipaul with her frankly sexualized and irreverent behavior, is regarded with hostility. However, after her death, Naipaul discovers in her family story, particularly in the thread of destroyed hopes and ambition, an echo of his own childhood. This revelation casts a retrospective light on Brenda that makes us now read her as one of the narrator’s secret-sharers. Brenda’s vanity is recast as a version of Naipaul’s mortification at the cruelty and humiliation he took for granted, traits of people who have been “hurt by poverty.”20 Similarly, the narrator first describes Jack, the farmhand who works hard on his garden despite the fact that it borders on a muchused, muddy drove way, as follows:21 “I saw his life as genuine, rooted, fitting: man fitting the landscape. I saw him as a remnant of the past.”22 He then corrects this characterization, informing the reader of his mistake: Jack is no peasant; he came of his own choice.23 The garden is not the continuation of traditional activity, but an artistic expression. Despite disabusing himself of Jack’s peasant origins, however, Naipaul does not completely relinquish his false first impression.

17 0

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

He deliberately holds to that early way of looking at Jack. Falsehood is not opposed to truth; it is the means by which truth of a limited, fragile sort is produced by the existentially and geographically dislocated writer.24 Through his impressions of Jack, the narrator fashions a deliberate and extraterritorial connection to the land. It is a feeling that no one from that place is likely to share with the narrator. He identifies with (a certain image of) Jack, the artist-asworking-man (a man with Naipaul’s background). Naipaul’s discovery of this strategy enables him to make a connection with figures from his own past in Trinidad. Naipaul admires but cannot identify with the values that went into making the “reconstructed church” in the valley, with “a special idea of the past, the assertion—with the wealth and power of an unbelievably extensive empire—of racial and historical and cultural virtue.”25 He feels greater affinity with the “insecurity” from which workingclass English people like Jack seek to make things and, through such making, seek to invent themselves anew: “In the middle of the farmyard dereliction and his own insecurity in his job and cottage, Jack kept his elaborate gardens and did his digging for vegetables and flowers and kept his plots in good heart.”26 This condition reminds Naipaul of the earlier dislocations and global insecurity that had brought Indians to Trinidad. The story is told through an exploration of how the term “gardener,” so much a part of the culture of the English manor, did not exist in Trinidad. Sugarcane, the old slave crop, “was what the people still grew and lived by; it explained the presence, on that island, after the abolition of slavery, of an imported Asiatic peasantry.”27 Sugarcane “explained the poor Indian-style houses and roughly thatched huts beside the narrow asphalt roads” that were built to carry the crop to the town.28 The gardener evoked pictures of an Indian who was little more than a “worker in a garden, a weeder and a waterer, a barefoot man, trousers rolled up to mid-shin, playing a hose on a flower-bed.”29 It conjured pictures of “unskilled and debased” work.30 Nevertheless, it was out of this group that “a new kind of agriculture began to develop” in Trinidad after the Second World War.31 Naipaul sees this kind of work as a creative form of self-invention that is more suited to people of his background. The example here is Jack,

P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

17 1

so to speak, not the reconstructed church in the valley. The racial and historical pride of the latter is not for Naipaul because it is associated with the kind of wealth and cultural forms associated with his landlord, whose “grandeur had come from the consolidation and extension in imperial times of a family fortune established earlier, during the beginnings of the industrial revolution.”32 Two forms of dispossession and relocation are narrated here, that of an English peasantry and that of slave labor—moments within the grand historical narrative described by Karl Marx as the “primitive accumulation of capital.”33 The fake hut and the cottage, like the reconstructed church, were built to express this grandeur. Naipaul, like Jack, is a product of the processes by which, to cite Marx, producers had been separated from their means of production. Interestingly, it is by reasserting a certain relationship to the land that Jack and the Aranguez laborers create a new form of valuation. It is in the careful working on oneself that a new kind of postcolonial culture can also be imagined: The vegetables they grew—aubergines, beans, okras—had a shorter cycle than sugarcane and they were correspondingly more demanding. They required finer attentions; and every day during a vegetable cycle the vegetable growers could be seen weeding or digging or watering or spraying, even when there was horse racing or an international cricket match in Port of Spain or some big festive event, working the way men work only when they work for themselves.34

There is little doubt that Naipaul is subtly comparing the work of the laborers to creative labor. This is what he had seen in Jack’s garden. He recalls the tightness with which Jack trimmed his hedge when he reports that he was able to write at times of acute anxiety because it was like entering a “walled garden or enclosure.”35 Jack’s hedge spoke to Naipaul of such an enclosure from the muddy drove way and the farm vehicles that spattered mud on his garden. The Enigma of Arrival presents Naipaul as a writer who seeks to create out of a sense of insecurity. Naipaul draws on models like Jack and the Aranguez farmers to situate his own efforts at self-creation.

17 2

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

It is through the mediating figure of Jack, both working man and artist, that Naipaul comes to see an affinity between himself and the Indian farmers of Aranguez, who had presumably been a source of pain and embarrassment for middle-class urban Indians in the postwar years. These men worked hard on their crops (eggplant, beans, okra) with a concentration and creativity that paralleled Naipaul’s own arduous labor to remake himself through his writing: “the way men work only when they work for themselves.”36 This revaluation, in turn, allows the reader to grasp the deeper psychological connection for the narrator between gardening and writing: I saw [Jack] turning over the soft, dark, much-sifted earth below the old hawthorn tree. That brought back very old memories to me, of Trinidad, of a small house my father had once built on a hill and a garden he had tried to get started in a patch of cleared bush: old memories, of dark, wet, warm earth and green things growing, old instincts, old delights.37

The mature narrator’s delight in Jack’s labor infects (the representation of) the event it calls up. Yet here too we see a discordant note, which stands in the way of a simple reconciliation between the two temporalities. The words “he had tried to get started” focalize the child’s premonition that his father, a failed writer who had been born on a plantation, would not succeed at this endeavor; it casts a shadow over the wished-for immediacy of “old instincts, old delights.”38 The different but intersecting temporalities of the writer, gardener, and plantation worker, mediated by the metropole and the periphery, are drawn together in holistic fashion by means of Naipaul’s falsely but productively romantic view of Jack.39 Naipaul’s account of his unreliable impressions has a history in English and European letters. Joseph Conrad used it to powerful effect in Heart of Darkness. However, in Enigma, Naipaul makes errancy a central way of grasping the distinctive makeup of the peripheral writer. This stance allows the peripheral writer to discover his voice by working through rather than suppressing his disorientation, which is grounded in history. Similarly, literary genres

P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

17 3

and concepts, including autobiography and Bildung, function as pretexts for Naipaul to discover a language adequate to his (de) formation. This self-consciously errant way of taking up such conventions contrasts instructively with a ruling stereotype of postcolonial criticism, whereby the autobiographical subject from the periphery expresses, in Jed Esty’s formulation, her “alienat[ion] from any available moral and psychological schemes for self-formation.”40 Esty’s approach to postcolonial modernism tends to highlight metropolitan concepts and historical templates that are, at bottom, forms of false or distorted consciousness that Naipaul embraces. They are the misleading yet indispensable points of reference that serve as the raw material through which the peripheral writer gains his bearings. As I will show, this strategy provides Naipaul with an original way of engaging in historical reflection. He intensifies the dislocations of the past, making a virtue of having been misled. Indeed, we have already seen one instance of this process at work in the interplay of contradictory perspectives on gardening: Jack, the Aranguez laborers, and Naipaul’s father all belong to different temporalities. As these temporalities are brought into contact with one another, they elicit different and mutually interruptive forms of reading. Just as the narrating self is created through the shifting points of view, so too is the autobiographical subject consolidated through disjunctive temporalities whose influence on him cannot be adequately inventoried. Such a strategy is an expression not of authorial freedom but of constraint. The narrator is aware that capitalist Europe’s venerable concept-metaphors (progress, stasis, decline) risk becoming exercises in unintended parody when applied to the colonies. The struggles of the metropolitan core are not those of the systemically underdeveloped periphery, which is not premodern or modern in the sense implied by the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism that for Franco Moretti entails the revaluation of the youthful hero of Bildung.41 Others, like Gregory Castle, see in modernist Bildungsromane in England and Ireland a critique and recuperation of the form in the context of economic and political rationalization in the era of high modernism.42 But these studies do not focus on the specific

174

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

problems of peripheral writers who, like Naipaul, are defined by the dependent character of their induction into modernity.43 Naipaul’s early ambition to be an artist was tied to the metropolitan education he received in the periphery, from which he acquired a deep regard for “the writer [as] a person possessed of sensibility . . . someone who recorded or displayed an inward development.”44 However, objective conditions in the periphery meant that such aesthetically informed ideologies were necessarily incorporated in distorted ways.45 Lacking any experience of a modern state or civil society, the historical condition of possibility of bourgeois interiority, Naipaul writes: I hardly knew our own [Indian] community; of other communities I knew even less. I had no idea of history . . . I had no idea of government. I knew only about a colonial governor and a legislative council and an executive council and a police force. So that almost everything I read about history and other societies had an abstract quality. I could relate it only to what I knew: every kind of reading committed me to fantasy.46

He wryly inverts received accounts of European discovery, likening his backwardness to the attitude of the “earliest Spanish travelers to the New World, medieval men with high faith: traveling to see wonders, parts of God’s world, but then very quickly taking the wonders for granted, saving inquiry (and true vision) only for what they knew they would find even before they had left Spain: gold.”47 In the journey from the New World to the Old, the peripheral subject was on a quest for inward development, much as the Spanish—traveling in the opposite direction centuries earlier—had hoped to discover gold. Setting up as a novelist in such terms, then, unavoidably meant worsening the disorientation that Naipaul sought to overcome. Comparing himself to the impoverished older people in his AsianIndian community who “looked back to an India that became more and more golden in their memory,”48 the narrator describes how his youthful desire for metropolitan fulfillment and inner development were variants of a broader pattern of peripheral distortion, grounded

P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

17 5

in objective historical conditions that he could not name but clues to which existed all around, and indeed “within” him: I didn’t look back to India, couldn’t do so; my ambition caused me to look ahead and outwards, to England; but it led to a similar feeling of wrongness. . . . I was used to living in a world where the signs were without meaning, or without the meaning intended by their makers. It was of a piece with the abstract, arbitrary nature of my education, like my ability to “study” French or Russian cinema without seeing a film, an ability which was, as I have said, like a man trying to get to know a city from its street map alone.49

The modern education that Naipaul receives is meant to shock him out of this condition of historical retardation, but his excellence as a student results only in intensifying these disparate feelings. In Enigma, he suggests that the peripheral writer’s path to maturity cannot be achieved solely by a desire to overcome his ignorance and accede to the inner development or Bildung (which cannot be merely rejected either). Naipaul’s vision is created out of a formative dislocation. This dislocation gives shape to the narrator’s discovery of a form responsive to the order in which he grew up, where “signs are without meaning or without the meaning intended by their makers.” Most crucially, he came to believe “that my subject was not my sensibility, my inward development, but the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in.”50 Growing up in Trinidad, a space shaped by Asian, African, and Caribbean influences, Naipaul is at one level referring to his complex cultural background, as well as the many places which he would repeatedly travel to and write about in his fiction and nonfiction. However, the phrase “worlds I contained within myself” hints also at his search for forms that adequately express the underlying affinity that connects him to those who have been shaped by pasts akin to his. The places he visits are almost always shaped by pasts similar to his own: the fictional situations and travel encounters staged in his work are what make possible an understanding of “inward development” adequate to a peripheral subject who has

176

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

exhausted the avenues to think of himself in relation to his own situated past (in Trinidad). He purportedly seeks out new perspectives from which to reflect upon his peripheral historicity by visiting other parts of the global South. Naipaul presents himself as being unlike the European or American traveler, who is at best capable of sympathetic or disinterested understanding. In contrast, travel forces him to reflect on the objective conditions by which he has been produced, discovering formally innovative ways of expressing the ideas he (and the people he meets) have inherited and improperly repurposed.51 Modernist technique enables Naipaul to explore self-formation as irreducibly implicated by the very historical disorientation it purports to examine: Several weeks of original composition lay ahead of me when I left Gloucester and went to Wiltshire, to the valley. For the first four days it rained and was misty; I could hardly see where I was. . . . And that Wiltshire valley fog was right. In my imagination, at that stage of my story, I was living in a made-up Africa, a fairy-tale landscape that mixed (according to my need) the high, rainy plateau of Rwanda with the wet, terraced, cultivated hills of Kigezi in western Uganda. . . . Now, in Wiltshire in winter, a writer now rather than a reader, I worked the child’s fantasy the other way. I projected the solitude and emptiness and menace of my Africa onto the land around me. And when four days later the fog lifted and I went walking, something of the Africa of my story adhered to the land I saw.52

This passage is an account of the writing of “In a Free State,” the novella in Naipaul’s Booker Prize–winning In a Free State, a fictional account of expatriate anxiety during the turbulent aftermath of formal political independence in an African country modeled on Uganda, which is discussed in chapter 5. I have shown how, in Naipaul’s autobiography, representational unsureness stands as an enigmatic, even paradoxical, way of indicating arrival for an artist whose formidable reputation continues to be founded in his authoritative pronouncements on the global South. Thus, when Naipaul writes “I projected the solitude and emptiness

P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

17 7

and menace of my Africa onto the land around me,” he implicates himself, and at the same time, mobilizes valuations born of the types of racialized and ethnocentric perspectives that characterize the postcolonial polity’s structure. Mutatis mutandis, such feelings and attitudes take the form of cultural media: they make up the terms in which postcolonials weave the fabric of everyday life. To the extent that he does indeed channel unstated but widespread attitudes there, Naipaul makes available a style of presentation that is appropriate to the historicity of the periphery. He does not just make racialization an object to be read; he sets it to work by creating forms that speak to the way everyday hostilities and mutual suspicions coexist with unspoken forms of tolerance and diversity. Such traits are conjoined in Naipaul’s work, notably in the hotel scene discussed toward the end of this chapter. In Naipaul’s powerfully compromised performance, then, literature becomes the form in which to stage and reflect upon a historical predicament from which there is no easy escape.53 He formally engages the power of his deformation, revealing the fault lines of peripheral societies by way of a deployment of socially conditioned prejudices. Such moves typically provoke condemnation from postcolonial scholars aprioristically committed to expressions of agency, resistance, and the formation of hybrid collectivities “from below”; identitarianism and communalism have become entrenched as the dominant idiom of postcolonial politics. Many postcolonial artists and thinkers, who censure politically reactionary developments as a betrayal of the utopian ideals of certain strains of anticolonialism, fault Naipaul for failing to shed his prejudices and for not assuming a nonracist viewpoint that repudiates prejudice. Such attitudes are, of course, laudable. But what is uniquely compelling about Naipaul’s work is its refusal to falsify the historicity by which it is produced. Naipaul does not uncritically accept the cultural prejudices or reflexive assumptions of his past, but seeks, by making that past visible through aesthetic staging, to present it as an objective condition that needs to be worked through. This response does not affirm a utopian attitude disconnected from the reality of actually existing postcolonial society. Naipaul’s art is, for better or worse, irreducibly marked by the legacy of ethnicist

178

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

thinking. But from this position, Naipaul stages discomfiting scenes that invite critical scrutiny and reflection. This represents an effort on Naipaul’s part to think out of the historical disorientations by which he was produced. Disavowal of prejudice would have been much easier to accomplish, but it would have produced less disturbing and memorable works of art. Owning this trait enables him to express, rather than repress or disavow, the negative sentiments and affect by which he and other peripheral subjects have been shaped. Often in oblique and even unintended ways, Naipaul’s self-implicating reflections open up the question of how a new critical consciousness might emerge from subjects in whom he sees “aspects of himself.”54 The challenges to developing such a style of thinking cannot be overstated, because the epistemic fractures inflicted by the colonial legacy were dispersed and ramified in the wake of the global movement of peoples that took place after the Second World War. Naipaul situates his attempts to begin writing fiction in this disorienting time: Because in 1950 in London I was at the beginning of that great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century—a movement and a cultural mixing greater than the peopling of the United States, which was essentially a movement of Europeans to the New World. This was a movement between all the continents.55

The young Naipaul, in the age of decolonization, was given “an intimation of a world in flux, a disturbed world.”56 As a colonial, he is the product of a disturbance whose origins and consequences he was unable to grasp when he first encountered it—in himself. Although he did not realize it at the time, he would eventually be convinced that his task as a writer was to discover a form adequate to “the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in.”57 With this in mind, we can discuss how the theme of development is presented in Enigma. It is presented in two ways: first, as a story of Naipaul’s overcoming his repression of his race,58 and second, as the story of Naipaul’s development in comparison with that of others

P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

17 9

who, from similar backgrounds, moved toward ideologies of “separateness,” including black power and, later, Islamic fundamentalism.59 Naipaul traces the links between his own development and these culturally or religiously separatist movements as they evolved, respectively, in Trinidad and across Asia and Africa. Naipaul makes the origin of all these movements the new global dynamic set in motion at the end of the Second World War. In 1950, brown or black people whose societies had been modernized in disorienting ways claimed their agency by demanding that they be treated as equals. They “had asserted propriety, their wish to live within an old order, their wish to be treated as others.”60 Two decades later, he observed that this desire for equality was being replaced by ideas of “separateness” based on ideas of ethnic and religious ideologies.61 When Naipaul first traveled to England, he experienced racial “humiliation.”62 At the time, however, he was unable to acknowledge or, as we say, process this violation, because racial questions were “too close to my disturbance, my vulnerability.”63 Despite his education, Naipaul had also grown up in a closed, inward-looking group. Before he left Trinidad in 1950, he tells the reader, he had only been to restaurants on three occasions. And, on the day he was to leave on the liner that would take him from New York to Southampton, England, Naipaul suffered from “hideous anxiety” about “sharing a cabin” with unnamed others,64 mostly because of this background. When he boards the SS Columbia, the purser leads Naipaul to an isolated cabin, far from the other passengers. Naipaul cannot believe his luck, but the joke is on him. He does not realize that, far from being shown special consideration, he is being segregated from the white passengers. The truth is painfully revealed when, in the middle of the night, someone walks into his cabin and turns on the light switch. Instead of expressing surprise or outrage at this intrusion, a timid Naipaul keeps his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. What follows is a comic sequence of events. It turns out that another passenger, a black man, is being shown into the room. This man takes one look at the pretend-sleeping Naipaul and becomes angry: “It’s because I’m colored you’re putting me here with him,” the black man says, before leaving the room.65

18 0

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

Although he is aware of what has occurred, the young Naipaul is in too fragile a state to acknowledge it, for “racial diminution formed no part of the material of the kind of writer I was setting out to be.”66 The black man nonetheless communicates to Naipaul the experience of what W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk called “double consciousness”—the sense of “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”67 Nothing in his life in Trinidad has prepared Naipaul for this experience, commingling the subjective experience of class insecurity and the objective expression of racial hostility. Naipaul’s ironic description of his younger self’s attempt to deny a reality that seemed too humiliating recalls Frantz Fanon’s 1956 discussion of the black man’s “slow construction of [his] self as body in a spatial and temporal world . . . a definitive structuring of my self and the world,”68 in which Fanon accounts for the constrained framework in which the experiences of the black man unfold in a European context. It is a tacit acknowledgment of this structure that lies at the heart of Naipaul’s assent to the black man’s refusal to be his cabinmate. Speaking at the Congress of Black Writers and Artists, George Lamming observed, “[The Negro] encounters himself in a state of surprise and embarrassment. He is a little ashamed, not in the crude sense of not wanting to be this or that, but in the more resonant sense of shame, the shame that touches every consciousness which feels that it has been seen.”69 It is the desire to escape the shame of being seen in this racialized way that prompts the peculiar reaction of both men to one another, where a mutual rejection is belied by a deeper, if unacknowledged, solidarity. Historical conditions dictated that Naipaul’s desire to be recognized as a free and unique individual be reciprocated by the black man, another vulnerable being who was holding to an idea of his own unique selfhood. Both men were, in 1950, asserting their “need for a new idea of the self”70defined by equality. In Enigma, Naipaul recalls this personal experience in 1950 alongside his musings on the growing black power movement he witnessed in the Caribbean in 1970: the “Negro on the Columbia had asserted propriety, [his] wish to live within an old order, [his] wish to

P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

18 1

be treated as others. Twenty years later, the Negroes of Trinidad . . . were asserting their separateness. They simplified and sentimentalized the past.”71 My vision of the history [of Trinidad] was not the vision that set the young black people marching in the streets and threatening another false revolution. The story had not stopped where my book had stopped; the story was going on. Two hundred years on, another Haiti was preparing, I thought: a wish to destroy a world judged corrupt and too full of pain, to turn one’s back on it, rather than to improve it. After the book I had written [The Loss of El Dorado (1969)], after my two years’ exaltation, I saw this anger from two sides: from the side of the Negroes, the people with the hair, and also from the side of the Asian-Indian community, the people mainly threatened, not black or white.72

When Naipaul travels to St. Kitts, “the earliest British colony in the Caribbean,” a place where judgments remain “simple,”73 he observes: The past was also accessible in the eighteenth-century main square, called Pall Mall, of the little town, where newly arrived slaves from Africa were put up for sale after being rested in the barracoons. For one hundred and fifty years in St. Kitts the memory of this past had lain dormant. Now, in a mimicry of Trinidad and the United States and other places, the memory revived, when the memory had really ceased to humiliate, serving instead as a political stimulus, a communal rhetoric of sentimentality and anger.74

Despite the critical tone, it is striking how different Naipaul’s tone in Enigma is from that found in The Middle Passage, where he first wrote about his travels in the West Indies. In the earlier work, Naipaul held himself apart from the situations he wrote about. In Enigma, by contrast, his criticism of the ascendancy of black power in the Caribbean is juxtaposed with his earlier account of the encounter with the black man in the ship’s cabin, a scene underpinned by a feeling of quiet solidarity.

18 2

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

Moments such as these reveal the crucial turn that Naipaul’s writing had taken. In works such as Enigma, he was no longer seeking to establish, as he had often been until the late 1970s, his separateness from other people with backgrounds similar to his own. Instead, the orchestration of narrative in Enigma underscores how its narrator was formed by experiences very similar to those of the people about whom he wrote. The autobiographical aspects of his fictional and nonfictional writings would become central to the writings in this late phase, for the simple reason that they allowed Naipaul to fuse two components of his work: a desire to open his work to multiple perspectives and also to imagine the possibility of shared feelings. In the late twentieth century, new identitarian political movements, grounded in subaltern, populist, and fundamentalist ideas, began to challenge the elite dispensations that had revealed themselves to be the heirs of the colonial power, in more ways than one. Despite his skepticism, Naipaul would show a greater willingness to see how these expressions of historical subjectivity were related to his own. Naipaul’s story connects his development to the larger arc of history by linking the era of decolonization that began after the end of the Second World War with the spread of Islamist politics in the late 1970s, which presented itself as a second wave of decolonization that had not been anticipated by either the departing colonial masters or their appointed nationalist leaders. In a circular movement, at the end of Naipaul’s decade-long stay in the Wiltshire cottage in 1980, he receives a letter from Angela, the young Maltese housekeeper of the London boardinghouse where he had stayed in 1950. Angela’s letter recalls to Naipaul his young, unformed, self, which links him to a group of young Muslims in emerging societies who were drawn to the ideals of Islamic fundamentalism. “I was also deep in a book. My thoughts were of a whole new generation of young people in remote countries, made restless and uncertain in the late-twentieth century not by travel but by the undoing of their old certainties, and looking for false consolation in the mind-quelling practices of a simple revealed religion.”75

P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

18 3

These observations suggest that Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998) is not an anti-Muslim polemic, but a peculiar form of historical interpretation. In this work, Naipaul describes the rise of Islamism as part of a longer trajectory of decolonization and self-discovery to which he is connected. Even though Naipaul finds little to celebrate in the ideology of black power in Trinidad or of those who advocate an Islamic state, he nonetheless sees their struggles as responses that exhibit similarities to his manner of reacting to violent or disorienting experiences on the SS Columbia. They are the disparate but connected products of a “world in flux, a disturbed world”76 that Naipaul first saw, but failed to recognize, when he arrived in London in 1950. What makes the approach of Enigma distinctive is Naipaul’s exploration of the ways in which postcolonial subjects who are victims of racial oppression or exclusion reproduce the racist ways of looking they have inherited from diverse sources. Thus, although Naipaul is the object of racial exclusion on the SS Columbia, he reveals his own racially marked perceptions elsewhere in this work. Naipaul reproduces racial stereotypes that presumably reflect the nature of his socialization in Trinidad. In this way, Naipaul discovers a form that addresses the objective complexity of living in fractured societies. As we see in the following passage, Naipaul implies a connection between the artist’s reflection on his own formation and the steps through which a critical or reflective consciousness attuned to the historical predicament of the periphery might be nurtured. The scene is a hotel in New York, and the focalizer is the eighteen-year-old Vidia on his way to the University of Oxford to begin his undergraduate studies: The newsstand downstairs, in the lobby of the Wellington [Hotel in New York], was part of this romance: a little shop, in the building where one lived: it was quite new to me, quite enchanting. I bought a packet of cigarettes from the man who was selling, a tall, grayhaired man, as well dressed and formal and educated, I thought, as a teacher. (Not like the Indian shopkeepers of our country villages, men who kept themselves deliberately dirty and ragged, the dirtier

18 4

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

the better, to avoid hubris, to deter jealousy and the evil eye. Not like the Chinese in their “parlors,” who wore sleeveless vests and khaki shorts and wooden clogs, stayed indoors all the time, and in spite of their wizened, famine-stricken, opium-den appearance, fathered child after child on happy black concubines or blank-faced, flatchested Chinese wives.77

A charming picture unexpectedly turns into a shocking advertisement for unhinged racist stereotypes. In Naipaul’s account, the focalizer of the passage is the provincial eighteen-year-old whose repugnantly comical sketch of dirty Indians, wizened Chinese, and happy black concubines is presented—through free indirect discourse—as an effect of the naturalized, unselfconscious channeling of sensibilities in the colonial society. The young Naipaul is in this sense no more than a vessel for a socially recognizable performance that would be accessible to all members of the fractured colonial society. Naipaul’s distortions, exaggerations, resentments, and sweeping pronouncements put into play the mutually belittling ethnic or sectarian perspectives that dominate peripheral societies. The focalizer of the scene alternates between seeing others and imagining himself seen by others. The line separating the two perspectives, as with the distinction between the older narrator and the younger observer at the beginning of Enigma, is at once upheld and troubled. This passage culminates with the narrator submitting himself to the Trinidadian stereotype of the Indian from the country. He ends his day “like a peasant, like a man reverting to his origins, eating secretively in a dark room, and then wondering how to hide the high-smelling evidence of his meal.”78 Such ironic tensions are generated by a fluid combination of comic and hostile perspectives that oscillate between being directed at the self and at the other. A twist is added when Naipaul attempts to overcome the unenlightened attitudes instilled by his family and community, attitudes that he “took for granted”79 and that later “mortified” him:80 Thinking back to my own past, my own childhood . . . I found so many abuses I took for granted. I lived easily with the idea of poverty, the nakedness of children in the streets of the town and the

P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

18 5

roads of the country. I lived easily with the idea of the brutalizing of children by flogging; the ridiculing of the deformed; the different ideas of authority presented by our Hindu family and then, above that, by the racial-colonial system of our agricultural colony. No one is born a rebel. Rebellion is something we have to be trained in. And even with the encouragement of my father’s rages—political rages, as well as rage about his family and his employers—there was much about our family life and attitudes and our island [Trinidad] that I accepted—acceptances which were later to mortify me.81

Ironically, in the earlier passage, Naipaul repeats the very “ridiculing” rhetoric he unequivocally condemns in this passage.82 Should he not now also feel retrospective mortification and shame at the way his Trinidadian formation programmed him to stereotype Indian-, Chinese- and Afro-Trinidadians in that memory from 1950? Does this last passage repudiate, then, the sentiments expressed in the one before, in which people are reduced to crude stereotypes? This does not seem to be the case. The narrator simply fails to make the connection between his use of racism as a practice of everyday life in one passage and his efforts to overcome the deformations resulting from his upbringing in another. But we could propose a different interpretation. These two moments in the text supplement and interrupt one another; they exist as two disjunctively productive moments in the unevenly developed writer (and society). They do not cancel each other out so much as set the terms for a possible space of critical reflection, one attuned to the fractures of the postcolonial context. In one case, prejudice is depicted as a wrong that should be stamped out; in the other, it serves as a text where offensive images are played with and intensified, made into a cultural form that needs to be analyzed and repurposed. Both are strategies of cultural criticism and social reflection that the peripheral writer’s narrative of self-formation make visible. Naipaul formally embraces the power of his deformation through an intensification that channels broader processes that inform postcolonial cultures. At such moments, his artistic resolution has the appearance of a barely controllable disturbance. Put more circumspectly, Enigma can be read as a stocktaking of the ways in which

18 6

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

the narrator’s shortcomings owe something to such a condition. His writing reveals him to be informed by the underdevelopment he describes. By inventing a form that captures aspects of this formation, Enigma also indicates some of the fault lines of postcolonial plural societies that need to be confronted, and which may also form the basis of a literary and cultural criticism attuned to the historicity of the periphery.

8 LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND India: A Million Mutinies Now

I

N THE final pages of The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul describes returning to Trinidad to attend his sister Sati’s funeral, where he encountered a distant relation of his sister’s husband. This was an old Indian man who astonished Naipaul by running together disparate historical events from 1498, 1784, and 1845. By conflating incidents that were centuries apart, the old man had mistakenly concluded that some East Indians living in Trinidad belonged to communities that had been on the island for four or five hundred years. Unlike his younger self, who would have been impatient with this display of historical ignorance, Naipaul responded sympathetically to the old man’s way of thinking: “He had created a composite history. But it was enough for him. Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.”1 This reaction points to an important shift in Naipaul’s thinking. In his early years as a writer, Naipaul regarded travel as an occasion to “define himself very clearly to himself.”2 The work he produced was defined by an exacting interest in facts. By sustaining this approach to his writing, he was able, despite being from a place where historical thinking remained undeveloped, to form a picture of the ways he had been shaped by the forces of the past.

18 8

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

Over the years, however, Naipaul discovered professional and emotional security. Success allowed him to relax and become more open to experimenting with new ideas and sentiments, as is revealed in the exchange with the old Indian man in Enigma. Naipaul’s work is also infected by a quiet playfulness, as seen, for instance, when the narrator sheepishly confesses to “look[ing] for cracks and flaws” in a road newly laid by a large agribusiness venture that has, to his dismay, begun its disruptive operations in the area. Naipaul knows that his hope that the asphalt mixture will not set is pure “fantasy,” but for the first time in his writing, he uses the word without the negative connotations it has in earlier works such as The Loss of El Dorado or India: A Wounded Civilization. Indeed, in Enigma, Naipaul often draws on fantasy to excavate the ways hidden emotions might play a role in shaping his rational thoughts. He revels in the natural beauty of Wiltshire, England, where he has taken residence, but feels acutely conscious of the fact that he is a racial outsider. Naipaul confesses, again somewhat irrationally, that one reason he starts feeling less uneasy is because the estate he lives on is owned by an eccentric old English landlord (reputed to have been the lover of the poet Siegfried Sassoon in his youth) who seems determined to make no improvements and to let the estate slowly fall into ruin. This state of dilapidation suits Naipaul’s psychological needs, indeed it makes him feel at home. He hints that he would have felt uncomfortable, out of place, had things on the estate been up-to-date or working perfectly. Ivychoked trees come crashing down, boilers and pipes mysteriously explode in the night, and Naipaul, normally a stickler for standards, does not complain. There is something equally comical about the way Naipaul wants to have nothing to do with the restored church in the valley. This church is the pride of the people who see in it ideas of “redemption and glory,” but he is disquieted by its presence. Naipaul is homo duplex: he enjoys the protection and charm of the English countryside, he sees and feels as the English do in many respects, but he also remains—and wishes to remain—an inassimilable, even invisible, outsider. He wishes to establish his own relationship to the place.

L A ND S C A P E S OF T HE MIND

18 9

This is partly why Naipaul responds warmly to the peculiar ideas of the old family friend he meets at his sister’s funeral. It signals a turn away, in his writing, from a comprehension of a disorienting and complex reality to a new style of questioning: what are the ways people tell stories that enable them to chart “a way in the world”? This phrase is the title of one of Naipaul’s most important late works, whose sympathetic tenor contrasts starkly with the existential indifference signaled by the opening phrase of an earlier work, A Bend in the River: “the world is what it is.” In Enigma, Naipaul focuses less on the degree to which individuals fail or succeed at accommodating themselves to a hard, inflexible world and more on the ways ordinary people seek to reinvent themselves or make sense of their own development. In this phase of his career, Naipaul becomes more interested in the stories that people tell about themselves. For this older Naipaul, “what was most important about a travel book were the people the writer travelled among. The people had to define themselves. A simple enough idea, but it required a new kind of book; it called for a new way of travelling.”3 Elsewhere Naipaul hinted at the larger purpose served by this wish to experiment with form and structure. Even though the people would speak for themselves, it was the job of a writer to weave together a composite form in which the stories built upon or supplemented one another’s perspectives: “the special art in this book lay in divining who of the many people I met would best and most logically take my story forward, where nothing had to be forced.”4 This new attitude decisively shaped the form and style of Naipaul biggest and most ambitious work of travel writing. In India: A Million Mutinies Now (1989), Naipaul allows the diverse perspectives of the people he meets across the country to shape his multifaceted, manyvoiced narrative. The structure of the book is distilled in its beautifully suspenseful opening, in which Naipaul’s observes with fascination a large procession of Dalits (once known as untouchables) in Bombay. In striking contrast to his earlier writings on India, Naipaul describes how the scene initially mystifies him, and its meaning and significance arrive in delayed fashion. Even when it has been apparently decoded as an event in which the Dalits are revealed to be honoring

19 0

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

their spiritual leader, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the mystery and ambiguity of the initial encounter is not completely dispelled. Because Naipaul has to rely on the voices of others, starting with the taxi driver, to help him make sense of what he is looking at, this process also brings different truths and perspectives into view, with no single point of view holding sway from the start. What results is a layered and polyphonic work that showcases a multiplicity of voices through which a complex range of disparate and often contradictory viewpoints are brought forth. At the heart of the work is Naipaul’s perception that the social awakening he was among the first to identify in India at the end of the twentieth century—the subtitle of his book became a catchword for Indian commentators—had paradoxically given rise to two diametrically opposed tendencies: ever greater social fragmentation, on the one hand, and the emergence of a hitherto absent central, unified social will, on the other. Naipaul’s work is structured by this fundamental tension, as revealed in the disparate and sometimes antagonistic views of the people he meets. In his actual meetings with people, however, Naipaul never brings up these broader topics. Instead, he encourages his interlocutors to produce “a connected narrative” of their lives.5 In other words, he is interested in his interlocutors as individuals; they are not merely “people chosen as typical of an aspiring community or interest group.”6 Naipaul is interested in the complex selves he encounters, treating them with the eye of a novelist who is interested in telling stories that are irreducibly “heteroglossic,” where the individual is not simply made to stand in for one ideological standpoint.7 By paying attention to the sensibility and the quality of thought of the people he meets, Naipaul gains insights into the texture and complexity of the broader movements in society. When he meets Mr. Raote, a member of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena organization in Bombay, the latter is initially “a little rough” with Naipaul because he thinks Naipaul, an English-speaking foreigner, wants to discuss politics.8 However, when Naipaul persuades Mr. Raote that he is primarily interested in his “background and development,” the tone of their conversation changes.9 Naipaul is exercised by the fact that Raote “was interested in his own story; his idea of himself was of a man who had struggled.”10

L A ND S C A P E S OF T HE MIND

19 1

A very different interlocutor, Subroto, a sensitive but unsuccessful Bengali writer of film scripts, is a man “who talked of his craft with so full a heart and mind” that Naipaul feels drawn to his struggle.11 Naipaul is struck by Namdeo Dhasal, the Marathi-language poet and leader of the Dalit Panthers, who tells Naipaul he “wishes to search out his own roots”12 and is “detached from his own life, and observing it from a distance.”13 Namdeo’s partner, Mallika, born into a communist family, her mother an upper-caste Hindu and her father a Muslim, speaks at length about her life and then writes Naipaul a long letter in Marathi to supplement her remarks. Through a dialogue with the “solitary” Kala, whose mother suffered abuse after she was married at fourteen, Naipaul gains a new perspective on the Indian family, a topic at the heart of A House for Mr Biswas.14 Naipaul uses these interviews as a lens to explore new ideas of selfhood and achievement that had been in the making for some decades in India. He wishes also to describe the new social tensions and possibilities that may have resulted from this development. Naipaul revises his earlier criticisms of caste affiliation and identity, which he had regarded as an obstacle to “individuality and the possibility of excellence.” Now, he concedes that such a peremptory attitude may have blinded him to the ways in which this dominant feature of Indian culture and society has contributed to positive social developments.15 Although Naipaul personally feels as negatively as ever about casteism, in Mutinies he feels compelled to take seriously the complicated role caste identity has played in the creation of a more dynamic and, counterintuitively, a more equal society in India: The caste or group stability that Indians had, the more focussed view, enabled them, while remaining whole themselves, to do work—modest improving things, rather than revolutionary things— in conditions which to others might have seemed hopeless . . . many thousands of people had worked like that over the years, without any sense of a personal drama, many millions; it had added up in the 40 years since independence to an immense national effort . . . the increased wealth showed; the new confidence of people once poor showed.16

19 2

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

Naipaul is also struck by the fact that marginalized groups are now asserting themselves and demanding a place in the visible life of the nation. He supports this type of self-assertion because these mutinies are, in his view, “reformist”: they look to existing institutions, notably the state, for help and redress. More than any other colonial territory, Naipaul believed, India had produced generations of elites who had benefited from the new learning imported by the British. Parliament, an independent judiciary, a free press, and educational institutions were established during the colonial period. People inducted into the new learning, in their capacity as judges, lawyers, civil servants, professionals, intellectuals, scientists, publishers, and journalists, constituted an institutional core that was, he believed, probably robust enough to withstand the potentially destabilizing effects of mutinous social movements “from below.” Despite Naipaul’s hopeful attitude at the start of the work, the overall impression conveyed by Mutinies is one of ambivalence. Naipaul is aware that the political ascendancy of social groups often takes troubling forms. Many Indians complained that legitimate efforts to improve conditions for the poor had also brought criminal elements into democratic politics. It had also made corruption, unprecedented greed, and the overturning of old reverences a feature of daily political life. Overall, a hardening of disparate religious, regional, clan-based, caste, and kinship identities had taken place across the country, and the long-term implications for liberal democratic culture were impossible to predict. Naipaul pointedly notes that the Shiv Sena, a movement claiming to represent poor Maharashtrians, had burnished its political credentials by attacking poor South Indians as outsiders who came to Bombay looking for work. Whereas in his earlier work he had seen the cosmopolitanism of a Pan-Indian identity as the only antidote to the divisive claims of kin, caste, and region, Naipaul’s observations now cause him to entertain the possibility that the two modes of being are locked in a dialectical relationship, combining opposition with supplementation. This tension is captured by Naipaul’s richly unsettling description of the way the new politics had thoughtlessly reordered architectural symbols of colonial rule. This long passage also gives the reader a flavor

L A ND S C A P E S OF T HE MIND

19 3

of the prose of the late Naipaul, in which description discloses submerged and unresolved ideological tensions: The [Bombay Municipal] corporation building was in the confident Victorian-Gothic style of British Bombay. A wide, solid staircase, with Victorian metalwork below a polished timber banister, led to the council chamber. . . . The councillors’ chairs were upholstered in green. But the Mayoral chair had a saffron cover. Saffron is a Hindu colour, and here it is the colour of the Shiv Sena. Saffron satin filled the Gothic arch below the gallery on one end wall of the chamber. In front of the saffron satin was a bronze-coloured bust of Shivaji; above the bust, on the satin, were a round shield and crossed swords, also in bronze colour. . . . The council chamber was so perfect in its way, so confident, its architectural details so considered, it was hard to imagine that it had all been negated by the simple saffron of the Sena. It made me think of the Christian cathedral in Nicosia in Cyprus, taken over by the Muslims, cleansed of much of its furniture, and hung with Koranic banners.17

Naipaul draws a disquieting parallel between the Shiv Sena’s appropriation of the colonial monument and historical or ethnic “cleansing.” To the outsider, he notes, India looked like “the unending smallness of men. But here in the corporation chamber, in the saffron and crossed swords of the Sena, were the emblems of war and conquest”:18 It made the independence struggle seem like an interim. Independence had come to India like a kind of revolution; now there were many revolutions within that revolution. What was true of Bombay was true of other parts of India as well: of the state of Andhra, of Tamil Nadu, Assam, the Punjab. All over India scores of particularities that had been frozen by foreign rule, or by poverty or lack of opportunity or abjectness had begun to flow again.19

Despite his reservations about these tendencies, Naipaul is genuinely intrigued, even excited, by the ways old complacencies are being newly challenged by disadvantaged groups.

194

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

One stance that remains unchanged from Naipaul’s earlier writings, however, is his view that the revival of a decimated “Hindu India” owed more to the British period than Indian nationalists of any stripe were willing to concede: Portugal had arrived in 1498 and triumphed in 1509–10. Just over half a century later the great Hindu kingdom in the South, the empire of Vijayanagar was defeated and physically laid waste by a combination of Muslim rulers; almost at the same time, in the North, the Mogul power was entering its time of glory. It might have seemed then that Hindu India, without the new learning and the new tools of Europe, its rulers without the idea of country or nation, without the political ideas that might have helped them to preserve their people from foreign rule—it might have seemed then that Hindu India was on the verge of extinction, something to be divided between Christian Europe and the Muslim world, and all its religious symbols and difficult theology rendered as meaningless as the Aztec gods in Mexico, or the symbolism of Hindu Angkor.20

These words recall the earlier quote featuring the Bombay Municipal Court. Naipaul’s rebuke appears to extend to those nationalists whose exclusive views of identity implies a rejection of the hybrid formation to which they owe so much of their sense of themselves. This rejection is represented in this instance by their refusal to acknowledge those values and ideas imported from Europe during the colonial period: “through the unlikely British presence in India, a Hindu India had grown again, more complete and unified than any India in the past.”21 In an interview several years after the publication of Mutinies, Naipaul suggested a way of taking this view of Indian hybridity further. He argued that Hindus had benefited from an idea of human equality that was unique to Christianity and Islam, and that Hinduism’s consequent hybridization through contact with these religions was a positive development: The two great revealed religions, Islam and Christianity, have altered the world forever, and we all, whatever our faith, walk in their light. Over and above their theology, these religions gave the world social

L A ND S C A P E S OF T HE MIND

19 5

ideas—brotherhood, charity, the feeling of man for man—which we now all take for granted. They are the basis of our political ideas and our ideas of morality. Those ideas didn’t exist before, not in the classical world, not in Hinduism or Buddhism. 22

✴✴✴

The originality of Mutinies rests on Naipaul’s attempt to convey the restlessness and dynamism of the nation through a medley of individual stories that interrupt, echo, and supplement each other. Some of these encounters have an element of comedy, as with the melancholy forty-year-old Jain broker named Papu, who feels guilty at how much money he’s made on the stock market. While he does not quite implicate himself in the inequality of his society, Papu fears that even the elastic fatalism of poorer Indians will not endure, given the sense of unrest that is pervasive everywhere. India, he gloomily predicts, will soon be confronted by violent upheavals aimed at mere destruction: “It won’t be anything. It will be total chaos.”23 Naipaul does not share Papu’s pessimism. Nonetheless, Papu’s outlook seems to color Naipaul’s description of Patil, a Bombay Shiv Sena leader for whom “the revolution had already started.”24 Patil is a midlevel activist for the right-wing Sena, and his lack of education is perhaps typical of the many lower-class people who make up the rank and file of this organization. He is a no-nonsense, plain-spoken man who informs Naipaul that there is a Muslim-led worldwide conspiracy to destroy Hinduism. Somewhat incongruously, he goes on to boast that the Muslims in his area donate money to the Sena, which he offers as proof of Muslim support for the organization. Asked if this amounts to extortion, Patil brushes aside the question.25 When Naipaul drives past the large slum called Dharavi, he is reminded that such areas serve a purpose for populist leaders who do not feel bound by truthful argument or consistency. Places like Dharavi are “allowed to exist because, as people said, it was a votebank, a hate-bank, something to be drawn upon by many people. All the conflicting currents of Bombay flowed there as well; all the new particularities were heightened there.”26

196

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

Naipaul feels dismay at the fact that the power of the Sena is not backed by a corresponding level of understanding on the part of its leaders. In the home of Mr. Raote, the Sena bigwig, Naipaul is shown book collections of the great Marathi poets Tukaram and Eknath. He is dispirited by the reverential manner in which Mr. Raote and his mother handle the books, who treat them as “sacred household objects rather than books to be physically read.”27 Observations of the intellectual limitations of members of this group recur in the text; they underscore Naipaul’s doubts about them. Naipaul does admit, however, that he is unable to fully appreciate the kind of religiosity displayed by the likes of Raote and his mother. It is entirely possible, Naipaul suggests, that he fails to grasp essential things when he complains about being completely unimpressed and unmoved by the intellectuals of the Shiv Sena, not least when one of them says, “Each and every Maharashtrian, even if he lives in a hutment, has a culture.”28 He seems to look for positive signs of the changing culture that are more familiar. The wider aspirations of men and women who seek to assert themselves is evidenced by the effort they take in decorating their modest homes. These were “the rooms of people who had begun to feel they were doing well and had begun to respect themselves”:29 There was a Sony television set, with a video. A patterned lace cloth covered the Sony, and there was a doll on the cloth. On the pink walls there were plastic hibiscus sprays on sections of plastic trelliswork. . . . On top of the cabinet was a very big multi-coloured candle, to balance the doll on the Sony. Among the things on the shelves were a set of stainless-steel tumblers and eight china cups with a flowered pattern. The glass cabinet and the things in it—leaving aside the aluminium tumblers—were like things I had known in my childhood. They were still here in a kind of wholeness: my heart went out to them.30

Despite the sentimental appeal of such scenes, however, the revolution feels thin to Naipaul because it is lacking in ideas and historical understanding. The energies and passions he sees all around, he muses, could go in many different directions at once.

L A ND S C A P E S OF T HE MIND

19 7

At times, it seems to him that self-respect cannot be differentiated from narcissistic self-regard. Naipaul cautiously asks Patil, the Shiv Sena organizer, if his newfound self-confidence (the term Patil uses is atma-vishwas) led him toward “some fellow feeling” for Dalits. After all, hadn’t they been driven out of Hinduism by caste prejudice? Patil is dismissive. He declares that the Dalits “have no reason to be angry. They’ve not suffered as much as they say,” adding with some unhappiness that the Dalits had recently allied themselves with Muslim groups.31 Naipaul does not challenge Patil. But this is not necessarily because of his moral blindness to the dangers of ethnic majoritarian feeling. Naipaul’s inquiry at this point focuses on whether Patil might be willing to entertain wider notions of human association. What lies behind this quest is Naipaul’s temporary decision to suspend his judgment, set forth previously in An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization, that ethnicist thinking cannot result in broader forms of affiliation and must result in a debased form of nationhood. From this standpoint, Patil’s reaction does not provoke a challenge from Naipaul because it would represent a reversion to Naipaul’s earlier positions, the one that Mutinies purports to correct and leave behind. In the end, however, Naipaul inclines to the view that such ethnic forms of political empowerment from below may not possess the resources to produce a new idea of human association: Alienation: it was the common theme. Mr Patil was triumphant now; but his blood still boiled. Even now he felt that his group might sink, and that others were waiting to trample on them. It was as though in these small, crowded spaces no one really felt at home. Everyone felt that the other man, the other group, was laughing; everyone lived with the feeling of siege.32

The stories of Mutinies implicitly offer commentaries on each other. Just as the Jain banker Papu’s gloomy prophecy about the dangers of the new political forces is confirmed by the appearance of Patil the Shiv Sena activist, so too is Patil connecting through his own “self-respecting” demeanor to the, in his view, troublesome “pride” of the Dalits.33

19 8

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

The Dalits had always been an object of pity or contempt. “There was a time when we were treated like animals,” Namdeo Dhasal, the Marathi-language Dalit poet, tells Naipaul. “Now we live like human beings. It’s all because of Ambedkar.”34 Naipaul returns more than once to the image of the Dalits on the street. Such a right had not always existed for Dalits; it had arrived, after they had gained a degree of wealth, education, and political awareness. Now they regarded themselves as agents, indifferent to the other groups or peoples who passed them by on the street. Naipaul celebrates this grit and persuades himself that the degrading effects of caste discrimination can in this instance be diminished through the mobilization of caste identity, in the sense described by Namdeo— despite, or perhaps because of, the latter’s remark that caste prohibitions are replicated even in the slums.35 In such a context, emancipation can arrive only through the uneven and multiply fracturing effects of identity politics, the million mutinies working themselves out. But this process can result in new forms of internal polarization. Namdeo confesses that he has been marginalized within the Dalit community for attempting to enter the “mainstream.”36 This is because, he claims, “the reactionaries among the Dalits didn’t want to be in the mainstream. Their feeling was that, to break communal feelings, you had to be communal yourself.”37 Naipaul is aware that such positions do not always amount to an idea of politics he can accept. However, Naipaul’s meeting with a young Muslim man brings back memories of his own Trinidad years. The Muslim man in question, Anwar, lives in Dharavi, the Bombay slum referred to earlier. Naipaul meets and speaks with Anwar and then is taken to his home. There he meets Anwar’s father, who mentions in passing the bloody “quarrels” that constantly took place in their crowded environment: I felt that if I had been in their position, confined to Bombay, to that area, to that row, I too would have been a passionate Muslim. I had grown up in Trinidad as a member of the Indian community, a member of a minority, and I knew that if you felt your community was small, you could never walk away from it; the grimmer things became, the more you insisted on being what you were.38

L A ND S C A P E S OF T HE MIND

19 9

Akeel Bilgrami writes that “Naipaul’s colourful gloss on the withdrawal of Anwar and other Muslims into the insular shell of their religion is nowhere situated between the larger picture of a struggle between a minority and the will of an elite to perpetuate a majoritarian myth.”39 This is a misreading, for Naipaul sympathetically contextualizes the perspective of an embattled minority. Naipaul is not interested in offering a political analysis that cites upto-date social-scientific research by academics (the absence of which renders the book superficial in Bilgrami’s eyes). Naipaul appears to be attempting something different. He is trying to understand how individuals like Anwar conceive of and reflect on their predicament. Approaching Anwar as a novelist might, Naipaul is trying to imagine him, so to speak, from the inside, as an individual whose aspirations may be replete with inner tensions and contradictions. Naipaul asks Anwar why, despite his obvious intelligence and resourcefulness, he does not leave and try to make a life elsewhere, in a place less ravaged by sectarian tensions. In such a place, Naipaul thinks, Anwar might be able realize his true potential, without living in a state of constant anger. He comes to realize that Anwar cannot imagine making a life separated from his community. Strength for Anwar is defined exclusively in terms of the group, not the individual. By the same token, it is important that the group not acknowledge internal differences or contradictions. This applies as much to rampant majorities as to embattled minorities. Anwar is himself a victim of the disregard that he, a Sunni Muslim, apparently extends towards Shias. Naipaul begins to doubt whether intense group feeling of this kind can be channeled toward an idea of “wider human association.”40 As in his earlier writings on India, Naipaul offers acute descriptions of the pressures faced by rural peoples who have moved to the city to make a living. He describes the choking fumes and the extreme pollution to which the poor are especially vulnerable. In Bombay, he is overwhelmed by a vision of “black mud, with men and women and children defecating on the edge of a black lake, swamp and sewage, with a hellish oily iridescence”41 and is relieved to leave behind “the stench of animal skins and excrement and swamp and chemicals and petrol fumes, the dust of cloth waste, the amber mist of truck exhausts.”42

200

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

In contrast to An Area of Darkness, which focused exclusively on Naipaul’s emotionally overwrought reactions to urban blight, Mutinies seeks to describe or refract the emotions and states of mind of his interlocutors. Naipaul uses these reactions as a way to mediate his own thoughts and feelings. When they drive past an impoverished Muslim area with characteristics like those described in the previous paragraph, the despairing Papu offers Naipaul his interpretation of why so many Muslims are alienated and angry, which Naipaul records: “People will tell you that the Muslims here are fundamentalists. But don’t you think you could make these people fight for anything you tell them to fight for?”43 Toward the end of the book, Naipaul expresses ambivalence about the form that the social awakening has taken. The mutinous self-assertiveness of groups has energized societies in valuable ways. At the same time, the absence of broader syntheses makes unlikely a breakthrough that might enable a more inclusive idea of the national community to emerge: To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups.44

Naipaul notes that the democratizing impulse emblematized by the “revolutions within the revolution” owe much to the legacy and lessons of British colonial institutions.45 Instead of regarding the new, fracturing politics as a repudiation of the old colonial institutions, Naipaul studies it as an elaboration or an intensification of its lessons. Elite anticolonial nationalism was the first revolution; the million mutinies were the revolution within the revolution. But it remains unclear if this second, internal act of decolonization necessarily has the potential to become something more than a destructive intensification of the politics of identity.

L A ND S C A P E S OF T HE MIND

201

Naipaul hints at but does not elaborate these possibilities. The reader is led to suppose that preventing this destructive outcome requires that the elements and forces involved in the smaller revolutions move quickly to grasp the importance of the “New Learning”— a reference to scientific inquiry and historical analysis—that was introduced during the colonial period: For 150 years or more Hindu India—responding to the New Learning that had come to it with the British—had known reforming movements. For 150 years there had been a remarkable series of leaders and teachers and wise men, exceeded by no country in Asia. It had been part of India’s slow adjustment to the outside world; and it had led to its intellectual liveliness in the late 20th century: a free press, a constitution, a concern for law and institutions, ideas of morality, good behavior, and intellectual responsibility quite separate from the requirements of religion.46

When Naipaul leaves Bombay and heads south, he meets with people like the South Indian scientists Pravas and Subramaniam, who are able to describe and reflect on the kind of interface of knowledge and affect that their Brahmin forebears accomplished by means of contact with the New Learning introduced by the British. Naipaul seems to think that the expertise and intelligence of this class of intellectual elites will stabilize the political energies he witnessed in Bombay—that they might serve as a kind of civilizational counterweight, with their moderation and their grasp of the connections between the different periods of Indian history as well as the ways in which the pressures of the cultural past continue to play an important role in the present. ✴✴✴

In the concluding section of Mutinies, Naipaul interestingly adopts an optimistic tone that is at odds with the uncertain mood displayed in earlier parts of the book. He recalls from his earlier visits that after independence, better-educated Indians had tacitly relied on their

202

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

particular identities for orientation, even if they overtly described themselves as working toward a cosmopolitan, “continent-wide” national identity. However, their effort to build this Pan-Indian identity ironically resulted in the proliferation of new particularities because of how they set about achieving it. Both the upper-caste Indian Administrative Service officers with whom Naipaul stayed in 1962 and the Dalits he observed in 1988 drew upon a fixed, pre-scripted idea of themselves, even as they sought to inhabit and expand an emerging idea of civil society. Naipaul argues that this work had resulted in a new political culture, in which local and national forces were in productive tension. “Out of the political frenzy there had come a kind of balance: for the first time in the history of India, perhaps, most people felt that they or their representatives, someone of their group, had a chance of getting to the warm centre of power and money.”47 Naipaul is swayed by his encounter with a charismatic and intelligent South Indian politician named Prakash, who explains how the whole thing holds together. Prakash believes that the local forms of entrenched hierarchy and the wider demands for equality can be reconciled through the democratic process: Caste, [Prakash] said, was the first thing of importance. A man looking for office or a political career would have to be of a suitable caste. That meant belonging to the dominant caste of the area. . . . And since it seldom happened that the votes of a single caste could win a man an election, a candidate needed a political party; he needed that to get the vote of the other castes. So the whole parliamentary business of political parties and elections made sense in India. It encouraged co-operation and compromise; the very multiplicity of Indian castes and communities made for some kind of balance.48

Because that work had been done within the regional caste- and clanbased associations, Naipaul had in 1962 mistaken it for a symptom of retreat and depletion. Now, visiting India in 1988, meeting men like Prakash, he persuaded himself that the new forms of empowerment were also expressing themselves in the language of ethnic particularity and pragmatic alliances between groups with distinct,

L A ND S C A P E S OF T HE MIND

203

self-consciously held caste identities. Members of vulnerable groups felt that they had gained a foothold in the power structures from which they had long been excluded. So the work had borne fruit in raising up those from below, despite having resulted at times in a hardening of separate identities and the intensification of a fractious identity politics. Naipaul ultimately moves toward a synthesis of this position with a view of history with which he is more familiar. He offers an argument for the ultimately regenerative force of the British period because of the intellectual tools it provided to the diversely synthetic or hybrid movements that had begun to flourish across India by the late twentieth century.49 Colonialism presupposed racial hierarchy, but it nevertheless brought the alien idea of equality. It is this idea that Naipaul ultimately values above all others in Mutinies. It is with this in mind that Naipaul offers an assessment of the colonial period, beginning with a discussion of a famous English journalist’s treatment of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Naipaul describes how, only a few days’ travel from Calcutta in 1857, William Howard Russell found himself “among people to whom the wider world is unknown; who are without the means of understanding this world; people who after centuries of foreign invasions still cannot protect or defend themselves; people who—Pandy or Sikh, porter or campfollowing Hindu merchant—run with high delight to aid the foreigner to overcome their brethren.”50 Similarly, as evidence of a broken society, Naipaul comments, “the Muslims would have no obligations to anyone outside their faith. The Hindus would have . . . no higher idea of human association, no general idea of the responsibility of man to his fellow. And because of that missing large idea of human association, the country works blindly on, and all the bravery and skills of its people lead to nothing.”51 Naipaul believes that the survival of this old India would have “le[d] only to more of what ha[d] gone before”;52 hence, the Indian system that the British overthrew had “come to the end of its possibilities.”53 In contrast, the India that will come into being at the end of the period of British rule will be better educated, more creative and full of possibility

204

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

than the India of a century before . . . it will have a larger idea of human association, and . . . out of this larger idea, and out of the encompassing humiliation of British rule, there will come to India the ideas of country and pride and historical self-analysis, things that seem impossibly remote from the India of Russell’s march.54

This passage encapsulates why Naipaul is reluctant to criticize the colonial period, even though he regards it as a period of “encompassing humiliation.” For all its injustices, it was colonial rule that made possible new opportunities for many vulnerable groups, including groups like his, which had long been “without representation”: “It fills me with old nerves to contemplate Indian history, to see . . . how close we [Trinidadian Indians] were to cultural destitution, and to wonder at the many accidents which brought us to the concepts—of law and freedom and wide human association—which give men selfawareness and strength.”55 Naipaul’s judgments on India are greatly influenced by his West Indian background. He traces his origins to a dispossessed peasantry who had “no idea of a state of glory from which there had been a decline or a break . . . no easy idea of an enemy.”56 He seems to be channeling the experience of displaced peasants, for whom ideas of civilizational greatness or cultural wholeness—whether “ancient” or “modern”—would have made no sense. Naipaul believes that neither he nor his father would have been given the chance to fashion their own lives had the British not broken up a settled hierarchy and, armed with a distinct set of ideological principles, replaced it with institutions that, despite their often violent or unjust attributes, indirectly freed up wider resources within the society. Naipaul implicates himself in the analyses and suggests that his view of the past cannot but color his analysis of India’s present. Rashid, the sensitive native of Lucknow who is Naipaul’s guide, cannot regard the past with the same equanimity. Rashid, one of whose ancestors served at the court of the Nawab of Oude, regards the British plunder during the Indian Mutiny of the Nawab’s summer palace in Lucknow as an act of desecration, one of many events that contributed to the long decline of his community. Naipaul takes note of this history and is not dismissive of it. However, for Naipaul,

L A ND S C A P E S OF T HE MIND

205

the British period is “full of ambiguities.” As the book moves toward its conclusion, Naipaul becomes increasingly focused on individuals who, like him, are able to capitalize on their colonial formation and are less focused on criticizing its injustices. Naipaul’s attraction to individuals who display a more straightforward and robust conception of reform reasserts itself at the end of Mutinies. But this reappearance is softened by the fact that it now seems to be one version of the diverse ways Indians have of engaging with the past. Naipaul offers an admiring description of Vishwanath, a Delhi-based editor of a tough and practical women’s magazine— none too popular with more educated readers—that offers practical advice and guidance to lower-middle-class women about how to balance their modern aspirations for independence with the demands of traditional society: Stage by stage, then, taking nothing for granted, the writer took the reader through the problems, in India, of personal hygiene. “An orderliness of surroundings is the first and essential step.” “Orderliness”—a euphemism. “Surroundings”—a strange word, but clearly “house” or “apartment” wouldn’t have suited everyone’s living space. So we begin to understand that the living conditions for the people for whom this article is meant are not always good. Some of the readers of this article would be at the very margin, would just be making do.57

In conclusion, we might recall how Naipaul speaks approvingly of the inevitability in the postcolonial period of people “awakening to history and new knowledge of their place in the scheme of things, refashioned history according to their need.”58 When Naipaul visits Kashmir in early 1989, it is the manners of individual people, rather than the fractured politics of the region, that interest him. He shows little interest in “the religious and political restlessness in the valley.”59 He also does not elaborate on the “secessionist group [that] had been setting off bombs in public places in the city,” and which had also been demanding the expulsion of all non-Kashmiri residents.60 Instead, Naipaul describes how local people interact as they go about their daily business, and how the urban landscape of the

206

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

better-educated, prosperous, but increasingly crowded city has changed. All this is done in the company of the Kashmiri Muslim Nazir, the gracious son of Aziz, the hotel manager who took care of Naipaul in 1962. Naipaul is struck by the fact that Nazir, “with his own new ideas of elegance and self, couldn’t but be more complicated than my relationship with his father [Aziz]”:61 From his grandfather’s little shop to his father’s successful hotel career, to his own prospects as a graduate and accountant—there had been a step-by-step movement upwards. Would it continue? [Nazir] had never been out of Kashmir. . . . Twenty-seven years after I had got to know him, [Nazir’s father] Aziz had remained more or less the same. It wouldn’t be like that with Nazir. Already he had intimations of a world outside. . . . New ways of seeing and feeling were going to come to him, and he wasn’t going to be part of the valley in the way he was now.62

Despite the political strife in which the region is embroiled, Naipaul suggests that the future lies with the likes of people like Nazir who have been won over to a sense of themselves as free and cosmopolitan individuals, from which there can be no turning back. Young men like Nazir are proof that “the idea of freedom had gone everywhere in India”63 and civic ideals would, over time, supplant the stultifying ideas inherited from the “trampled-over” Indian past. Naipaul suggests that Nazir’s sensibility is a long-term consequence of the interaction, at once complementary and antagonistic, between the colonial enlightenment and the Indian anticolonial tradition: “India was set on the way of a new kind of intellectual life; it was given new ideas about its history and civilization. The freedom movement reflected all of this and turned out to be the truest kind of liberation.”64 Building on what might be described as a dialectical approach, in the final pages of the book Naipaul argues that the violent mutinies from below reflect the process by which a “central will, a central intellect, a national idea”65 has taken hold across the country. This was the case even where it seemed that the “beginnings of an intellectual life” were “negated by old anarchy and disorder.”66 Despite appearances to the contrary, the mutinies do not portend social disintegration

L A ND S C A P E S OF T HE MIND

207

so much as the challenging process by which older conceptions of self and society are brought into being. Individual equality and local difference might, in an emerging dispensation messily created from below, exist in a continuously negotiated, productive tension: The Indian Union was greater than the sum of its parts; and many of these movements of excess strengthened the Indian state, defining it as the source of law and civility and reasonableness. The Indian Union gave people a second chance, calling them back from the excesses with which, in another century, or in other circumstances (as neighboring countries showed), they might have to live: the destructive chauvinism of the Shiv Sena, the tyranny of many kinds of religious fundamentalism (people always ready in India to let religion carry the burden of their pain), the film-star corruption and racial politics of the South, the pious Marxist idleness and nullity of Bengal. Excess was now felt to be excess in India. What the mutinies were also helping to define was the strength of the general intellectual life, and the wholeness and humanism of the values to which all Indians now felt they could appeal. And—strange irony—the mutinies were not to be wished away. They were part of the beginning of a new way for many millions, part of India’s growth, part of its restoration.67

By means of the novel process of self-fashioning that was underway, people like Nazir had come to embrace a universal idea of human association. It is clear that Naipaul regards this as a dangerous historical moment but one that is also charged with great potential.

9 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE FAITHFUL Among the Believers; Beyond Belief

I

N PR E V IOUS chapters, I have explored the ways Naipaul implicates himself in the situations he describes. His interpretation of his own past, as well as the prejudices he inherited, inform his writing. These features of his writing are present in Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998), Naipaul’s nonfictional accounts of his travel to four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries in 1979 and 1997, respectively.1 When Naipaul first arrives in Malaysia, he meets Shafi, a successful Malaysian businessman from a rural village in the north of the country who is roughly the same age as he. Naipaul’s ostensible purpose in meeting Shafi is to understand the kinds of institutional and social reforms advocated by Islamic fundamentalists in Malaysia. The year is 1979, and the Iranian Revolution has just taken place. However, what stands out about Naipaul’s account of their encounter is his interest in Shafi’s village background and the syncretic form of Islam he practiced growing up in a rural area. Naipaul’s own beginnings lay in semirural Trinidad, and the friendliness that develops between that the two men can be traced to the fact that they share a degree of nostalgia for that simpler period of their lives.

C ON V ER S AT ION S W I T H T HE FA I T HF UL

209

Both men had grown up in plantation economies out of which the British had formed multiracial societies. Both came from workingclass families, grew up during the twilight years of colonial rule, and achieved worldly success. Both had moved away from their rural pasts but remained attached to the memory of childhoods spent partly in the countryside. It is from this idea of a shared rural past, as well as a break with that past, that Naipaul attempts to understand Shafi’s turn toward a rigorous set of Islamic beliefs premised on an explicit rejection of the relaxed Islam he had known as a child. Shafi belongs to the Malay Muslim majority in Malaysia, a prosperous country. He is closely connected to Anwar Ibrahim, a former Islamist student radical and a rising political star. Shafi’s political connections have won his construction company several lucrative state contracts. When Naipaul tries to understand why a successful and apparently well-adjusted man like Shafi is attracted to religious fundamentalism, he is surprised by his answer. Shafi claims that as a Malay, he “had nothing”: he lacked a cultural past that was his exclusively his, rather than one formed by diverse cultural practices. Shafi took such mixture or borrowing as a sign of a lack of cultural integrity. He regarded his belief in a fundamentalist Islam as a solution to this confusion. It was a way for him, as a modern and educated person, to carve out a less messy and therefore more rational relationship to his past. By becoming “nothing but his faith, a kind of abstract man,” Naipaul interposed, he would overcome the putative backwardness embodied by his cultural and historical background.2 Naipaul disagrees with this valuation and thinks it would be more correct to say that Shafi has a rich heritage that he simply rejects. By rejecting the Hindu, Buddhist, and animist influences that remain present in the practices of his rural Muslim community, by disavowing the sensuous pleasures that he associates with his childhood in the Kota Baru village in the northern state of Kedah, Shafi seeks to remake himself in a way that conflates modernity with a refusal to examine the historicity of his formation. Naipaul considers such an attitude the antithesis of a historical way of being, in which efforts are made to account for, rather than suppress, plural

2 10

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

and conflicting strands of one’s past. In Naipaul’s conversation with Shafi, we see how two people growing up in far-apart colonial societies responded in diametrically opposed ways to the same predicament. Shafi had turned to a purer, simplified idea of his past: “We are the first generation. It’s only a few who can understand the complete way of Islam. We want to change from the normal tradition [of ordinary Malay Muslims], which is not the true Islamic way of life. But the process is difficult and takes time,” he tells Naipaul.3 In other words, this is a form of postcolonial self-fashioning very different from the one to which Naipaul had subscribed in his effort to become a writer. Believers comes across in this juxtaposition less as a metropolitan attack on Shafi’s ways than a portrait of competing visions of individual possibility as articulated by two postcolonial subjects. Like Naipaul, Shafi received a colonial education. Unlike Naipaul, Shafi rejected the secular and liberal principles inherited from the colonial past as the first step to remaking himself. One way people seek to make sense of, or regain control over, the psychological disorientation caused by modernity is by imposing a univocal interpretation of the past. Shafi’s hope is to still the psychological dislocations he feels as a rural person who has made the journey to the city and become successful in a relatively short period of time. The new Islamic ideas and values he embraces as the means to this end require him to reject aspects of his own formation that are dearest to him. Because all things pre-Islamic are un-Islamic, according to the fundamentalist values Shafi now espouses, once treasured memories of local practices have to be revalued and condemned as transgressions, actions undertaken in a state of ignorance. Older notions of the sacred that Shafi had absorbed as a child are similarly devalued because they are mixed forms, partaking of Sufi and animist beliefs that are considered beyond the pale by Islamic fundamentalists and modernists alike. In Naipaul’s view, Shafi’s strategy has not relieved him of the insecurity he feels about his mixed-up past. Instead, it has opened

C ON V ER S AT ION S W I T H T HE FA I T HF UL

2 11

up new forms of inner turmoil that Shafi, a sensitive man who was deeply formed by his village years, struggles to put into words. Thus, although he frames his story as a journey from false to true religion, Naipaul cannot help reading his story in a manner unintended by Shafi: And I wondered how far—added to the absence of the sense of history—this inability to fit words into feelings had led Shafi to where he was. Feelings, uncontrolled by words, had remained feelings, and had flowed into religion; had committed Shafi to learning the abstract articles of a missionary faith; had concealed his motives, obscured his cause, partly hidden himself from himself. Religion now buried real emotion. He loved his past, his village; now he worked to uproot it.4

In Naipaul’s eyes, Shafi’s effort to remake himself along the lines laid out by a purified Islam recently imported from Arabia serves only to ramify his psychological fractures. This is the kind of self-fashioning that Shafi, also an educated, middle-class person, undertakes with a determination that Naipaul finds at once moving and abhorrent. Shafi’s struggle bears similarities to Naipaul’s own journey, except that it results in a set of resolutions that Naipaul finds unacceptable: In Pakistan the fundamentalists believed that to follow the right rules was to bring about again the purity of the early Islamic way: the reorganization of the world would follow automatically on the rediscovery of the true faith. Shafi’s grief and passion, in multiracial Malaysia, were more immediate; and I felt that for him the wish to re-establish the rules was also a wish to re-create the lost security of his childhood, the Malay village life he had lost. Some grief like that touches most of us. It is what, as individuals, responsible for ourselves, we constantly have to accommodate ourselves to. Shafi, in his own eyes, was the first man expelled from paradise. He blamed the world; he shifted the whole burden of that accommodation onto Islam.5

2 12

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

Shafi is nostalgic for the village community—a part of him thinks it beautiful and wishes to preserve this old Malay way of life—but his missionary aims push him in the opposite direction, toward purifying the old ways of his village. Naipaul characterizes himself as being, like Shafi, formed by memories of peasant peoples and the disruptions resulting from their move to urban areas.6 He is therefore able to empathize with Shafi’s predicament. Naipaul also wonders whether Shafi took such radical steps to remake himself precisely because he was a sensitive and thoughtful person eager to give meaning and value to his existence that the simple Malay village life could not satisfy. Naipaul humanizes Shafi by repeatedly drawing attention to the pathos of Shafi’s struggle. In this sense, Shafi’s efforts parallel Naipaul’s own attempt to understand his past by writing about it. In the long passage quoted earlier, Naipaul notes that Shafi is from the kind of “simple society” that Naipaul recognizes from his own past.7 The words “grief” and “accommodation” also recall Naipaul’s early novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961). Growing up in circumstances like those depicted in that novel, Naipaul writes, Shafi “knew nothing” about history: “From his parents he had heard about the Japanese occupation of Malaysia during the war. . . . At school he wasn’t interested in history. And now there wasn’t time for learning or reading; there was his work for the [Islamic] movement. The rich past of his people remained closed to him: Hinduism, Buddhism, animist belief.”8 Because of his ignorance of the past, Shafi is unable to reflect on how it has shaped him. Instead, what stepped into the breach, offering answers to questions that were inchoately yet urgently felt, was fundamentalist thinking. Fundamentalism gives disoriented men like Shafi a way to think. It provides them with a clear sense of moral purpose, identity, and most importantly perhaps, an unambiguous way of describing the past. Naipaul shows that Shafi’s Malay village customs have been shaped by pre-Islamic customs associated with Hindu, Buddhist, and animist practices. But this is of no significance to Shafi, who takes it as a sign of his modernity that such practices should be denounced and banished. Naipaul notes, however, that Shafi is fully aware that these “pagan” or pre-Islamic practices, pervasive in Malay rural

C ON V ER S AT ION S W I T H T HE FA I T HF UL

2 13

society, provide much of its anchoring norms and moral texture. Such practices also represent the deepest source of psychological nourishment for Shafi because they are connected to old ideas of belonging to the kampung (village) life of his childhood. In a quiet moment of understanding that passes between the two men, Naipaul senses that Shafi’s faith requires him to disavow the memory of the very things that sustain him psychologically in the big city.9 “The contradiction in Shafi’s thought had come out towards the end of our last conversation. The village way was the true Malay way; but that way had to be altered. Belief had to be purified, the old pagan traditions of the village uprooted.”10 The fracture that opens up within Shafi’s psyche accounts for something Naipaul perceives, a disjuncture between Shafi’s insistence on the correct course of action and his own existential dissatisfaction with such a prescribed course. Naipaul finds Shafi a compelling character because he lives out his life by overlaying psychological disjunctions he is aware of but is unable to adequately describe. He compounds the feeling of inner contradiction as he seeks to overcome it through more vigorous affirmations of religious orthodoxy. Shafi had grown up in a politically stable Muslim-majority nation. Malaysia had been rewarded for being a staunch ally of the United States in its fight against communism. Mass poverty or violence did not cause Shafi’s turn to fundamentalism. It came, rather, out of the disorientation brought about by rapid prosperity. Nothing in Shafi’s technical education taught him how to study or reflect on his formation. Naipaul’s record of his conversations with Shafi represents one of the most thoughtful and empathetic efforts by a writer to examine how postcolonial subjects might learn to think through the conditions by which they are formed. Remarkably, however, Edward W. Said interpreted Naipaul’s engagement with Shafi as a cynical attempt to depict Muslims in a negative light: What [Naipaul] sees he sees because it happens before him and, more important, because it confirms what, except for an occasional eye-catching detail, he already knows. He does not learn: they prove. Prove what? That the “retreat” to Islam is “stupefaction.”

2 14

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

In Malaysia Naipaul is asked [by Shafi]: “What is the purpose of your writing? Is it to tell people what it’s all about?” [Naipaul] replies: “Yes, I would say comprehension.” [Shafi:] “Is it not for money?” [Naipaul:] “Yes. But the nature of the work is important.”11

Said accuses Naipaul of condescension and bad faith in his responses to Shafi’s questions. He takes Naipaul to be saying that Shafi lives in a state of “stupefaction” because he is a Muslim and is therefore unable to appreciate that Naipaul regards writing as a vocation. In this way, Said implies that Naipaul does not treat Muslims as individuals but as mindless automatons. But Said misreads the spirit in which the conversation between Naipaul and Shafi takes place, as Said’s own quotation of Believers illustrates. When Shafi decides to take over the role of interviewer and subjects Naipaul, as a fellow colonial with a comparable past, to questioning, Naipaul takes Shafi’s questions very seriously and answers them as honestly as he can. It is not Naipaul’s fault that Shafi does not seem to comprehend his view of writing as a vocation or a calling that is not prompted solely by a desire to become rich. Because writing is not a religious activity, Shafi assumes it can only be a moneymaking enterprise.12 A lack of discernment that has its roots in class, not religious, background partly explains Shafi’s limited view of the world. Shafi drew on fundamentalist ideas to make sense of his own development in part because the wider society did not foster historical reflection, Naipaul suggests. Fundamentalism answered a need; it provided an encompassing way of looking that would restore wholeness not by reconciling Shafi to the peasant world he had lost, but by proposing a completely novel idea of a homogeneous national community made up exclusively of pious Muslims. Malaysia’s multireligious population, as well as the cultural norms of a thriving society, presented a challenge to Shafi’s preferred reality. When Naipaul visited Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution, he was struck by the immense appeal that the idea of Jamé Towhidi (a pure society exclusively made up Muslim believers) had even among educated and middle-class individuals. Among these individuals was Mr. Jaffrey, the editorial writer for the English-language

C ON V ER S AT ION S W I T H T HE FA I T HF UL

2 15

Tehran Times. In order to become a part of this imagined community, Mr. Jaffrey, a Shia Muslim, had left his native Lucknow in India and moved to Iran after the revolution. Naipaul was mystified that Mr. Jaffrey was convinced that as soon as an Islamic state was established people would automatically become good. Historical reason seemed alien to this way of thinking. What is striking about Naipaul’s account is his suggestion that the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism is a symptom of the historical disorientation I have discussed in previous chapters. Although Naipaul begins by suggesting that Islam makes “imperial demands”13—a claim that Said justifiably criticizes—it seems significant that Naipaul’s sweeping statement gives way to the more interesting insights that grow out of his conversation with individuals in different countries. What emerges out of these exchanges are not categorical statements about Islam, but the contradictory aspirations or convictions of individuals living through a period of rapid and disorienting change. Naipaul notes, for instance, that while Mr. Jaffrey welcomes the Iranian Revolution, his own colonial education in India has also made him a supporter of individual rights. Mr. Jaffrey belatedly acknowledges that the authoritarian legislation adopted by the new state may be inimical to his own professional survival as a journalist. In Naipaul’s view, Mr. Jaffrey becomes paralyzed in the face of his contradictory desires. Naipaul comes to like Mr. Jaffrey, and even sympathizes with his struggle, but the two do not meet again. When he goes looking for him some time later, Naipaul learns that Mr. Jaffrey’s paper has been closed down and Mr. Jaffrey himself had fled Iran. ✴✴✴

Naipaul’s books on the Muslim world do not depict people as if they are solely defined by their religious identity.14 The manner of his engagement with the people he meets in Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia is similar to the stories of his encounters in other parts of the world, with their primary focus on individual lives. Naipaul’s view of the Muslims he meets is also colored by a sense of historical affinity; he shares a colonial past with most of them.

2 16

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

In these books, he mostly writes about people he grows to like and with whom he wishes to spend as much time as possible. His affection and sympathy for people like Mr. Jaffrey and Behzad (in Iran); Shafi and Syed Alwi (in Malaysia); Abdurrahman Wahid, Goenawan Mohamad, and Dewi Fortuna Anwar (in Indonesia); and Syed (in Pakistan) is plain. When he returns to these countries in 1995, more than a decade after his first 1979 visit, he makes every effort to meet with the same people to see how their thinking might have evolved (as his own has). This is especially true of Imaduddin, whom Naipaul describes meeting in 1979 in Believers. It is clear from Naipaul’s account in Beyond Belief in 1995, when he returns to Jakarta to look up Imaduddin again, that his affection for Imaduddin is reciprocated. The two men warmly reconnect as if little time has elapsed. Conversely, when Naipaul is prevented from meeting with Shafi again because the latter has possibly fallen into disfavor with his organization, he expresses genuine regret. Such an investment in individuals and how they have developed, constitutes an important part of Naipaul effort to make visible how his own evolving understanding of his formation can be brought into conversation with the way others reflect on their pasts. Naipaul was equally keen to learn whether the new forms of religious revival underway in Iran and other places would result in new forms of historical reflection. Like many people he would meet in his travels, Naipaul had been able to identify, if not entirely escape, the constraints of the past—the prejudices of his forebears, for instance. Were there similar signs of such transformation in the Muslimmajority societies he visited? This was the question that Naipaul, at once critical and comparing, carried with him in his travels to Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia. In Pakistan, Naipaul observes that some of his educated interlocutors appear to disavow the hybrid and plural aspects of their past and seek instead to reimagine their social order along the lines of socially purified and monolithic order defined by orthodoxy. Instead of seeking to reproduce the rules of a previous time, Naipaul suggests that modern people must find ways of responding creatively to their present challenges. One instance of a creative response can be found in an earlier era of Islamic civilization. Here is Naipaul’s characterization

C ON V ER S AT ION S W I T H T HE FA I T HF UL

2 17

of the Chachnama, the famous thirteenth-century Persian-language account of the Arab conquest of Sind (a region in today’s Pakistan) in 712 CE: The Chachnama shows the Arabs of the seventh century as a people stimulated and enlightened and disciplined by Islam, developing fast, picking up learning and new ways and new weapons (catapults, Greek fire) from the people they conquer, intelligently curious about the people they intend to conquer. The current fundamentalist wish in Pakistan to go back to that pure Islamic time has nothing to do with a historical understanding of the Arab expansion. The fundamentalists feel that to be like those early Arabs they need only one tool: the Koran. Islam, that made the seventh-century Arabs world-conquerors, now clouds the minds of their successors or pretended successors.15

In Naipaul’s view, the predicament of contemporary Muslims requires more skeptical habits of mind. What is needed is a dynamic rather than a mechanical response to modern challenges. This, Naipaul implies, is the lesson the Chachnama holds for present-day readers. He argues that whereas the early Muslims of the seventh century were “enlightened” and open to external influences, those of modern-day Pakistan have their minds “clouded” by longing to return to the state of their seventh-century Arab predecessors. In contrast to these contemporary Muslims, the Chachnama activates a dynamic relationship to its own time. What is required of modern Muslims is not an unhistorical retrieval of a bygone world but a historically conscious response analogous to the one exhibited by the Chachnama. Passages like these implicitly reveal Naipaul to be less interested in reifying Islam as an ahistorical and “imperial” force than in studying it as an historical institution, not least by revealing a sympathy for its internal diversity. We recall that this perspective prompts Naipaul to wonder why Shafi is so disapproving of his Muslim fellows in his Kedah village for subscribing to an older, supposedly less “pure” kind of Islam. In other words, Naipaul’s position presupposes that Muslim practices and beliefs are plural and that Islam is responsive to and shaped by different contexts, which is why he thinks that it is only

2 18

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

Shafi (not fellow Muslims in his birthplace) who can be described as subscribing to this “imperial” view. Naipaul’s criticisms are directed primarily at late-twentieth-century Islamic fundamentalism, not Islam as such. It is in this critical spirit that Naipaul observes that although history is part of the Pakistani school curriculum, it is taught chiefly as a way of praising the glories of the Muslim past: History, in the Pakistan school books I looked at, begins with Arabia and Islam. In the simpler texts, surveys of the Prophet and the first four caliphs and perhaps the Prophet’s daughter are followed, with hardly a break, by lives of the poet Iqbal, Mr. Jinnah, the political founder of Pakistan, and two or three martyrs, soldiers or airmen who died in the holy wars against India in 1965 and 1971. History as selective as this leads quickly to unreality. Before Mohammed there is blackness: slavery, exploitation. After Mohamed there is light: slavery and exploitation vanish.16

In Naipaul’s view, the fundamentalist urge self-consciously mimicked the modern appearance of historical consciousness only to neutralize its inquiring and critical impulse. Thought existed solely as an instrument for the enforcement of orthodoxy. It was a circular and closed form of reasoning. Visiting Pakistan in 1979, Naipaul had several dispiriting encounters that reminded him of the Hindu golden-ageists of India he had met a few years earlier, who “look[ed] back to the past and speak of the present Black Age.”17 Naipaul discerns a likeness between Hindu nationalists and fundamentalist Muslims: in the stultifying Islamic “fundamentalist scheme,” Naipaul writes, with Hindu India also in mind, “the world constantly decays and needs to be recreated. The only function of our intellect is to assist that recreation.”18 ✴✴✴

As I have noted in the two preceding chapters, in this phase of his career Naipaul also showed an interest in the ways local responses not grounded in historical thinking might yet enable people to arrive

C ON V ER S AT ION S W I T H T HE FA I T HF UL

2 19

at capacious ways of acknowledging the shaping power of the past. Naipaul’s interest in expressions of the sacred, particularly those that predate the great monotheistic religions, is part of this new focus. He was intrigued by what local people could tell him about how these older traditions might provide an alternative to the technologically sophisticated methods employed by fundamentalist organizations. As its title indicates, Beyond Belief (1998), published seventeen years after his first encounter with Shafi in Among the Believers (1981), was aimed at learning what kinds of resources lay beyond those conceptions of belief that had been appropriated by fundamentalists. Naipaul returned to explore how older ways of thinking might enable postcolonial subjects to question the monolithic identity to which fundamentalist religion had obliged so many to submit.19 Naipaul wondered whether there existed, in local traditions and customs, resources of thought that might bring about a relaxation of ways of seeing and feeling. Could this prompt a reevaluation of the great monotheistic religions that had become so dominant the world over? The scenario Naipaul sought to examine in his travels was whether these newer and more absolutist claims of the great world religions might, through such efforts, come to be regarded not as superseding but only as “complementing” the “old faiths.”20 Naipaul is drawn to a vision in which the central beliefs of the great religious traditions coexist without conflict and believes that it may have found expression in some places in Indonesia: The religion of the village was a composite religion; the idea of the good life was a composite idea. People lived with everything at once: the mosque, the church, Krishna, the rice goddess, a remnant of Hindu caste, the Buddhist idea of nirvana, the Muslim idea of paradise. No one, Umar Kayam said, could precisely say what he was. People said, ‘I am a Muslim, but—’ Or, ‘I am a Christian, but—.’21

Among the central figures Naipaul seeks out to elaborate this alternative vision are Abdurrahman Wahid, the leader of the Nahdlatul Ulama, a forty-million-strong Muslim organization that has deep roots in the older, pre-Islamic traditions of Indonesia; and Gunawan Mohamad, poet and magazine editor, whose father was a political

220

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

prisoner executed by the Dutch in 1941. It is to these two men that Naipaul largely turns for insights into how an older and more inclusive idea of Islam might be imagined. Abdurrahman Wahid is a Muslim whose faith is deeply connected to local Javanese cultural traditions that predate the arrival of Islam. Wahid inherited the leadership of the Nahdlatul Ulama organization from his father, who was its founder. Unusually for his generation, Wahid’s father had learned Arabic as a child and had been sent to study at Al Azhar University in Cairo. He had remained influenced by important Muslim reformers such as Al Afghani. Just as importantly, he was deeply formed by local Javanese traditions of learning, to which he had also been exposed as a child. Wahid draws on his father’s example to argue that Islamic practices need to be embedded in local histories and cultures. He is also adamant that the new Indonesian president Habibie (whose policies are supported by the modernist Muslims) is wrong to promote “political Islam,” a divisive force in Indonesia’s multireligious society. Wahid believes that Islam is “a moral force which works through ethics and morality,” and that it should be strictly separated from politics. “I feel it personally,” Wahid declares, “because my father participated in the writing of the constitution, which gives equal status to all citizens. People should practice Islam out of conscience, not out of fear. [President] Habibie and his friends create a fear among non-Muslims and non-practicing Muslims to show their identity. This is the first step to tyranny.”22 By contrast, Imaduddin, who is a friend of President Habibie, is convinced that strong institutions will arise when people are made into strict Muslims. In Indonesia, Naipaul writes, “the historical sense [is] falsified,” and intellectual self-consciousness disturbingly implies that “history has to serve theology.”23 This influential, technocratically minded generation of fundamentalists look down on the traditional religious leaders of the sort represented by Abdurrahman Wahid, whose syncretic faith is regarded as a symptom of their backward or non-modern mindset. Some of these fundamentalists, including Imaduddin, are engineers whose prestige as religious ideologues derives partly from the fact that they received their degrees from American universities.

C ON V ER S AT ION S W I T H T HE FA I T HF UL

221

Imaduddin sees himself as a modernizer, and this feeds his fixed views. He is “determined to erase local errors, all the customs and ceremonies and earth reverences.”24 In a “mental training” class Imaduddin devises for young middle-class urbanites in Jakarta, Naipaul notices that the game the students play emphasizes cooperation and collectivity. The point of the game is to impress the group with the idea of unity, itself a stand-in for the utopia promised by the Islamic state. Yet attractive as the game is, it denies historical realities because it invokes a pure society made up exclusively of believers, operating on the assumption that Indonesia is not a multireligious society. There is, Naipaul notes, “an unspoken corollary: everything outside that community was shut out, everything outside was impious, impure, infidel.”25 In the debt-fueled boom years leading up to the Asian financial crisis of 1997, public intellectuals like Imaduddin made statements that confidently linked economic development to religious orthodoxy: “When [the students abroad] become devout Muslims and good leaders of Indonesia they will not think about revolution but about accelerated evolution.”26 In response, Naipaul recalls the poet Gunawan Mohamed’s comment on the way the Indonesian language had been degraded by public figures: “It sounded like a slogan, something worked over, words, to be projected as part of the program: development, but with minds somehow tethered: ‘We have to overcome our backwardness and become one of the new industrial countries by 2020.’ ”27 Naipaul had first observed Imaduddin leading a “mental training” exercise in Jakarta in 1979, shortly after he had been released from jail as a political prisoner of the Suharto regime. Over the next decade, Imaduddin’s fortunes rose as Indonesia economy boomed. By the time Naipaul returned to Indonesia in 1995, Imaduddin was famous and had been appointed head of the prestigious Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI), a politically connected outfit that combined religious devoutness with a modernizing ideology. Imaduddin was also a close associate of the new president, Habibie. He belonged to a group of technocratic, modernizing, fundamentalist Muslims who found themselves closer to the center of power than ever before. Meeting him again after many years, Naipaul found that Imaduddin had only grown more confident in his religious values. He remained as indifferent to Indonesia’s heterogeneous, pre-Islamic

222

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

past as he had been in 1979, when he surprised Naipaul by expressing indifference to the fate of Borobudur, the famous ninth-century Buddhist temple in Java.28 He was one of those “colonial students, often the first in their families to travel abroad for university degrees, [who] were to go back home with borrowed ideas of revolution; so these Sumatran students and pilgrims in Mecca, influenced by Wahhabi fundamentalism, and a little vain of their new knowledge, were to go back home determined to make the faith of Sumatra equal to the Wahhabi faith in Mecca.”29 From this standpoint, Java’s richness in “the monuments of the pagan past” might have been, to Imaduddin, an unhappy reminder of a benighted culture that was far removed from truth and morality.30 There might have been other reasons for Imaduddin’s indifference to his past or his inability to grasp the value of historical consciousness—namely, the lack of material and intellectual development in Dutch Sumatra, where he was born. Shortly after independence, authoritarian rule resulted in the murder and incarceration of thousands of intellectuals, an incident that was still not open to public discussion more than three decades later. For many decades, censorship and conformity prevailed. Gunawan Mohamed, the poet referred to above, elaborates his view of how colonialism and authoritarian rule had combined to degrade the Indonesian language itself: I don’t think educated Indonesians speak any language which can be used to express and develop their thinking. In Sukarno’s time the language was steered into a totalitarian use, and in Suharto’s time it has been bureaucratized. I wrote poetry in the 1960s, and I discovered that all the language had big abstract connotations—nation, people, revolution, socialism, justice. . . . Even some adopted liberal ideas. Like free market. They are dead, not derived from experience, the soil, the street.31

Gunawan goes on to observe, “The surviving local traditions were not strong enough to deal with these borrowed ideas.” The anticolonial thinkers had incorporated alien and abstract words in an underdeveloped society that lacked the vocabularies and institutions to elaborate their meanings. These words overlaid the postcolonial order that

C ON V ER S AT ION S W I T H T HE FA I T HF UL

223

came into being, without ever being integrated into “experience.” Local traditions were equally at the mercy of the “borrowed ideas” that came later, this time through the language of fundamentalist Islam. Under the pressure of two alien traditions, the local forms of intellectual life and meaning-making had withered. In the contemporary scene, there was no question which set of borrowed ideas had a stronger influence. The older ways of thinking lacked the energy or the conceptual sophistication to overcome the very strong pull of fundamentalism. In part, this was because historical understanding found no soil into which it could sink roots; such thinking formed no part of the modernizing zeal of Indonesia’s technocratic elite: Islam was the formal faith of the people. But below that were the impulses of the older world, relics of the Hindu-Buddhist-animist past, but no longer part of a system. The ninth-century temples of Borobudur and Prambanan—the first Buddhist, the second Hindu— were a cause for pride. But they were no longer fully possessed by the people, because they were no longer fully understood. Their meaning, once overpowering, now had to be elucidated by scholars; and Borobudur remained a mystery, the subject of academic strife. It was the Dutch who rediscovered Borobudur and presented it to the people of Java: that was how Gunawan Mohamad, a poet and editor, put it. Gunawan—a Muslim, but in his own Indonesian way—said, speaking of the past, and making a small chopping gesture, “Somewhere the cord was cut.”32

✴✴✴

As part of his desire to retain his relationship to this complex past and not give in to the modernizing fundamentalisms of Imaduddin, Abdurrahman Wahid had maintained the pesantren schools— religious boardinghouses set up to educate peasant children in rural areas.33 Schools for Muslim students, but with their origins in preIslamic, possibly Buddhist, education, they would, according to this view, serve as an important site for formulating and disseminating an alternative to the fundamentalist idea of Islam.

224

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

When Naipaul first visited Wahid’s pesantrens in 1979, however, he could not imagine how these schools, with their rote learning and rigid curricula, could ever represent an improvement over the hightech stultification enacted through the educational policies of the fundamentalists. At one of Wahid’s rural schools, Naipaul recalls seeing “boys sitting about bamboozling themselves with simple textbooks of religious laws which they would have known by heart, with some boys even sitting in the dark before open books and pretending to read.” Nevertheless, Naipaul tries to offer a vaguely hopeful assessment of this dispiriting scene:34 Perhaps religious teaching had to come with this repetitiveness, this isolating and beating down and stunning of the mind, this kind of pain. Perhaps out of this there came self-respect of a sort, and even an idea of learning which—in the general cultural depression—might never have otherwise existed. Because out of this religious education, whatever its sham scholarship and piety, and its real pain, there also came a political awakening.35

Naipaul later adds, “Mr. Wahid, with his pesantren education and pesantren family pieties, had become more internationalist and liberal. Imaduddin had remained committed to the holy war.”36 But this may have more to do with Wahid’s unusual family background, which is not reflected in the quality of education overseen by his organization. What becomes clear through conversations with Wahid is that those individuals who oppose the Islamization of the state are themselves reliant on intellectual tools that are out of date or are also designed to “bamboozle.”37 Those who would respect the internally diverse and historically situated forms of Islam in the country are unlikely to provide a viable alternative to the fundamentalist goal, which is to deliver technological advancement with true faith.38 At the end of the century, it is Imaduddin, not Wahid, who is able to tap into the deepest aspirations of postcolonial nationalism. Despite or because of his sophisticated understanding of the past, it is Wahid who appears out of touch with the times. A complicated picture emerges in Naipaul’s account, to which there appears to be no clear solution. Naipaul’s reluctance to draw a conclusion on this

C ON V ER S AT ION S W I T H T HE FA I T HF UL

2 25

issue is itself intriguing. It may be because of his unstated conviction that, for all its shortcomings, Wahid’s method represents a more desirable local way of moving forward for people of limited background and education. Naipaul here seems to believe, in ways that he will go on to explore in The Masque of Africa, that local Islams, like African belief systems, are engaged in a “kind of crossover from old beliefs, earth religions, the cults of rulers and local deities, to the revealed religions— Christianity and Islam principally—with their larger philosophical and humanitarian and social concerns.”39 Viewed in this light, Naipaul possibly defers to Wahid’s instincts because of a hope that his method prepares the way for historical thinking, albeit in a circuitous manner embedded in local practices. This is also the impulse behind Naipaul’s later writings on Africa, where he is on the lookout for the ways local forms of thought and practice can complement or supplant the modernizing or exclusionary practices of monotheisms like Christianity and Islam. Naipaul uses the metaphors “crossing over” and “grinding down” to describe the way older beliefs and practices give way to the more energetic and universalist ideas associated with the most global of monotheistic faiths, Christianity and Islam.40 He seems to be saying that the only way to combat the mind-quelling tendencies of Islamic fundamentalism, which he first encountered in 1979, is by enabling more reflective practices and institutions to emerge from local initiatives such as Mr. Wahid’s, grounded in Javanese tradition. This would make it possible for a more capacious kind of Islamic practice to emerge. These speculations are only hinted at, however leaving the reader guessing at the reasons for the subtle but important differences that separate Believers from its less assertive and more internally conflicted counterpart, Beyond. In the Malaysia section that concludes Beyond Belief, it becomes evident that Naipaul is drawn to people not so much because of their religious beliefs but because he finds their stories moving. These people tell of the alternately sustaining and debilitating power of the village, the practices and values it encourages and inhibits. The stories of Nadezha, Syed Alwi, and Rashid, the Chinese bomoh (or shaman), have nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalism or

2 26

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

with the theme of conversion to Islam, both of which have, by this point, faded into the background. These individuals are more concerned with the complexity of village practices and how individuals from such backgrounds find a way to take on the challenges of the world, striking once again the theme that was explored with Shafi years before, and that Naipaul himself returned to obsessively over his long career. In the Malaysia of the late 1990s Naipaul sees hopeful signs of the integration of village-based practices with the new fundamentalist strains of Islamic belief.41 However, this insight goes unelaborated in the jumble of inconclusive but affecting stories Naipaul strings together at the end of the book. It is as if the many Malays he meets in 1995, like Syed Alwi, Nasar, and Nadezha, as well as Chinese converts to Islam like Rashid the bomoh’s son, have found a way to ease themselves into modernity without feeling any of the turmoil that Naipaul had sensed in people like Shafi in 1979. The book dissolves, rather than concludes, in two stories of great family suffering resulting from war and communal violence. What stands out in both stories are the images of two sons, Rashid and Syed Alwi, who visit their estranged and embittered fathers as they lie dying. Naipaul did not return to Trinidad to visit his sick father before he died in 1953. Trying to finish a book, short of money, Naipaul did not, despite his assurances, make the slightest effort to find a publisher for his father’s stories. When his father died, Naipaul did not return to Trinidad for the funeral. In the stories of displaced Muslims like Rashid and Syed Alwi, one a Chinese convert to Islam and the other a putative descendant of the Prophet, Naipaul seems to be searching for a way of making peace with his past as he draws on their experiences to reflect indirectly on his own intimate betrayals. Hearing of the personal regrets and sorrows expressed by people with mixed and fractured backgrounds like his gives him comfort. Naipaul finds secret sharers who have learned to make peace with the worlds that they have lost. These are interlocking and richly contradictory narratives that feel open-ended. The older, more accomplished Naipaul is willing to let the loose ends remain visible. It testifies to a journey that ultimately raises more questions than it can provide answers to.

10 CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS Half A Life; Magic Seeds; The Masque Of Africa

O

N AUGUST 11, 2011, the South African clergyman and Nobel Peace Prize–winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu gave a speech at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He emphasized a critical but rarely discussed consequence of the colonial experience: “We have to acknowledge that we do not seem to have taken on board the fact of our woundedness. Apartheid damaged us all. Not a single one of us has escaped.”1 A veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, Tutu implied that all formerly colonized peoples had to face up to the painful fact that they had been profoundly shaped by the disordering effects of the past. Those effects could not be overthrown in the manner of an external enemy. Postcolonial peoples, therefore, had to actively develop vocabularies to take stock of the ways they had been disabled by the effects of colonial violence. Keeping this formative legacy in view, they had to develop practices that enabled them to self-consciously describe and work through the enduring effects of historical disorientation. The disabused perspective that arose from such candid self-scrutiny could serve as the point of departure for new ways of thinking and acting better attuned to the historical predicament of peripheral subjects. Tutu’s words capture the essence of what Naipaul sought to achieve through his writings. Naipaul brought an interpretation of

228

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

his past to bear on his description of people who had been shaped by backgrounds similar to his own. Just as his critical formulations and aesthetic forms cannot be disentangled from their historical origins, Naipaul’s self-implicating approach served as his point of departure for insights into the many topics on which he wrote. As he notes in Finding the Centre, “I travel to discover other states of mind. And if for this intellectual adventure I go to places where people live restricted lives, it is because my curiosity is still dictated in part by my colonial Trinidad background. I go to places which, however alien, connect in some way with what I already know.”2 Far from writing with the persona of a European traveler to whom the culture of imperialism was an extension of his national or racial self-conception, Naipaul traveled and wrote to understand how he—and others like him—had been formed by their colonial pasts. He produced geographically and historically wide-ranging works in which he explored difficult, even painful, topics to which he felt personally connected. Although his approach was at times flawed or controversial, Naipaul was the first writer to offer readers a framework and a sensibility with which to compare and connect the disorienting transitions to modernity that have occurred across many parts of the formerly colonized world. Naipaul’s work speaks to the present in another way. This is an age sometimes described as “the rise of the rest” (as opposed to the more familiar “rise of the West”). By exploring the legacy of colonialism, nationalism, decolonization, the Cold War, and globalization, Naipaul furnishes a new generation of global readers with nuanced and historically informed ways of navigating both the challenges and opportunities in the “post-American” century. As ethnic majorities of once subjected territories increasingly style themselves as military and economic superpowers-in-waiting, Naipaul’s work testifies obliquely to the dangers of pursuing military and economic advancement at the expense of nurturing reflective and critical institutions. Having said that, it is important to remember that Naipaul was a writer, not an ideologue or a political pundit. He was focused on producing works of literature—ironic and textured arrangements of

C ONCLUDING REF L EC T ION S

229

words that demand to be assessed in terms of their own aesthetic and moral criteria. His sustained effort to understand historical patterns or events cannot be disentangled from his attempt to give literary form to his struggle to become a writer. For this reason, we do a disservice to the complex body of work in question if we make it a pretext for confirming preexisting views about Naipaul’s character. What I referred to earlier as the Naipaul myth—subscribed to by those who regard him as either an infallible sage or an opportunistic provocateur—impedes our ability to do justice to his work. In this book, I have attempted to illuminate the ambiguity or irony of Naipaul’s work, paying particular attention to their productive contradictions. This approach gives us a textured understanding of the journey of Naipaul the writer, as well as the wider histories to which that journey is connected. Naipaul’s explorations of postcolonial freedom cannot be reduced to the binary terms of being “for” or “against” the colonized. As I have shown, both sentiments are on display all the way from Naipaul’s early to late writings—from The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) through “In a Free State” (1971) to India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). In other words, the literary work discloses complex struggles that cannot easily be paraphrased or summarized for the convenience of those who impatiently seek to skip reading closely in order to, as they say, get straight to the point. Although Naipaul’s obsession with the global periphery remained constant throughout his life, he continually searched for new styles and literary forms that would more effectively convey his evolving perspective. This restlessness can perhaps be traced to Naipaul’s uneven development, the sense that he apprehended truths in a piecemeal way. Naipaul also became habituated to the idea that, as a writer, he had to travel to meet people and see things for himself, not rely exclusively on the word of theorists or social scientists. I have been guided by a desire not to defend or denounce Naipaul the man, but to examine how Naipaul the writer sought to develop ways of reflecting on his historical predicament without being “false” to his experiences.3

230

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

Naipaul did get things wrong. He referred to Muslims across Asia as “converts,” a misleading term since Islam has been a part of the region’s history for many centuries. He also writes: [The convert’s] idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of the converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. Those countries can be easily set on the boil.4

These are historically questionable claims. As I have argued in previous chapters, Naipaul himself disproves or qualifies them when he describes, at great length, his encounter with Shafi in Malaysia. Very little of Naipaul’s sympathetic portrayal of Abdurrahman Wahid or Dewi Fortuna corresponds to the sweeping statements just quoted. For this reason, I have chosen only to criticize Naipaul for making assertions with which I disagree. I have not found any reason to impugn him or his underlying motivation. The tensions in Naipaul’s writings are overlooked when critics focus on the man rather than on his work. Critics who have accused Naipaul of being merely Islamophobic have ignored the ways his encounters with individuals lead him to contradict some of his sweeping claims about Islam. In Rawalpindi, Pakistan, a twentythree-year-old medical student and poet named Syed tells Naipaul that his friends “just wanted the skill; they weren’t interested—as Syed was—in the civilization that went with the skill.”5 Naipaul is “so taken by Syed’s account of his approach to the outer civilization” that he copies down the young Pakistani man’s words.6 Naipaul’s reflection on his conversation with Syed gives him an insight into the richness of Islamic culture: No religion is more worldly than Islam. In spite of its political incapacity, no religion keeps men’s eyes more fixed on the way the world is run. And in the poetry of the doctor’s son [Syed], in his fumbling

C ONCLUDING REF L EC T ION S

231

response to the universal civilization, his concern with “basics,” I thought I could see how Islamic fervour could become creative, revolutionary, and take men on to a humanism beyond religious doctrine: a true renaissance, open to the new and enriched by it, as the Muslims in their early days of glory had been.7

Once again, Naipaul reveals himself to be modeling a style of reflection in his interaction with a young man from a background not dissimilar to his own. As importantly, the two quoted passages indicate the different ways Naipaul does not falsify his experience. In the case of the passage quoted earlier, in which Naipaul describes so-called “converts,” it ought to be possible to disagree with him for making sweeping or inaccurate claims without maligning his integrity as a writer. In the case of the second passage, it is useful to attend to those moments in which Naipaul explores encounters that directly contradict his sweeping claim elsewhere that there is no internal diversity among so-called converts to Islam. If it is correct to criticize Naipaul for his mistaken or prejudiced statements, it is equally important to pay attention to the internal tensions that run through his work. ✴✴✴

In his later travel writing, particularly in works such as Beyond Belief and The Masque of Africa, Naipaul builds on such sentiments to describe a more enduring idea of human connection and possibility. Naipaul’s writing reflects the desire to acknowledge the existence of groups that were there before his own group arrived in Trinidad. He wanted in this phase of his career to more explicitly imagine the connections between such historically superseded groups as they existed in far-flung spaces in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.8 What appears to have interested Naipaul most in his later writings are elements of those archaic values that survive the “grinding down of the old world” caused by the arrival of the great monotheisms, Christianity and Islam.9 This idea is first mentioned in Beyond Belief and is taken up more fully only in Naipaul’s occasionally self-ironizing last travel work, The Masque of Africa (2010).

232

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

In this work, Naipaul goes in search for what is, by his own admission, “the romantic idea of earth religions,” which refers in his mind to enchanted practices that survive in the age of Christianity and postcolonial modernization.10 In the Minangkabau region of Indonesia, Naipaul recorded the words of Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a Muslim woman who told him how she made sure to abide by her pre-Islamic customs: “[My] Pitapang ancestors probably moved into the area when it was virgin jungle or forest. In the pre-Islamic tradition it was believed that all those forests and springs and rivers were occupied by spirits. Of course, the humans who come to clear the land had to make a compromise with the original spirit inhabitants. So the ancestors had to abide by a code of behavior.”11 These were older taboos, or “earth reverences,” guided by a sense of values that appealed deeply to Naipaul. These taboos and reverences tacitly guide the more sympathetic assessments of Naipaul’s late writing. He sees something in the African idea of “energy” and uncharacteristically looks past the inadequate infrastructure of Lagos—where a recent “flood had scoured the gutters into an unspeakable dark mess”12 even as food-sellers sold pepper soup nearby—to arrive at a more hopeful view of the place: “This was like the jumbled city-scapes of Lagos that I had already got to know. They were like places that seemed waiting to be knocked down or completed, but they always spoke of energy. They did not especially depress me. I saw the jumble as superficial, and felt that with the resources of Nigeria, and when the people were ready, the jumble could one day be undone.”13 Naipaul’s resolute focus on African belief at the expense of social and political questions makes The Masque of Africa a distinctive work in his corpus. There are many interesting incidental observations, but what is constant is Naipaul’s search for links between the older norms and customs of Asian and African societies. In this way, he seeks to find in older, pre-Christian and pre-Islamic, resources the basis of a creative synthesis and historical reflection. Masque of Africa articulates, in an explicit way, the “romantic” impulses that are scattered throughout Naipaul’s later nonfictional writings. Extending the mood of genial inquiry of “The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro” (in Finding the Centre), A Million Mutinies Now, and

C ONCLUDING REF L EC T ION S

233

Beyond Belief, Naipaul’s writing shows itself seriously engaged by the thoughts of men and women like Edun, Guy Rossotango, and Phyllis in Masque of Africa.14 Although he does not entirely relinquish his critical and assessing point of view, Naipaul’s persona is generally that of someone who seeks to be enlightened about the revivifying potential represented by traditional forms of local culture. ✴✴✴

Naipaul’s last works of fiction are also quietly humorous examinations of the ways an individual’s actions contribute to the making of a democratic culture in colonial and postcolonial Indian society. Half a Life (2001) reveals Naipaul’s interest in probing the motivations of feckless characters like the narrator Willie Chandran and his father, both of whom rebel against Hindu traditions in misguided ways and who engender, despite themselves, a more egalitarian way of thinking and being. Half a Life is a comedy of unintended consequences and is, in the end, a hopeful work. The novel pays sly homage to various Indian novelists about whom Naipaul had written in the past. The setting is a small Indian town in a princely state in South India, evoking R. K. Narayan country.15 The novel begins with the narrator’s father telling the story of his days as a mediocre student in a princely state where nationalist politics had been banned. The maharaja of the state, the reader also learns, is an enlightened ruler who has provided scholarships to the backward castes. Even though anticolonial feelings are sweeping the rest of the country, the politics of this state are mobilized around lower caste-groups against Brahmin dominance, rather than anti-British agitation. Willie’s father appears to be as uninformed about local politics as he is about the state of the nation. Nevertheless, he is inspired by the Mahatma’s message to boycott Western education. He vows to make a sacrifice by burning the books of English literature he is made to study in school. This action turns out to be less radical than might be supposed because Willie’s father “didn’t understand The Mayor of Casterbridge,” one of the prescribed texts in his school, and also resented having to take copious notes on the barely comprehensible

234

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

lectures on Shakespeare he is forced to sit through. The bathos is underscored further when Willie’s father’s burning of a pile of his books (Keats and Shelley have also been added) on a busy street is simply ignored by passersby. Initially disappointed at having failed to set the town alight, the fervent young man eventually hits on another plan—one that will require an even greater act of sacrifice on his part. He will strike a blow at the evil Hindu caste system against which Gandhi had preached, “trampling” on its ancient and unjustly venerated rules by marrying “the lowest person” he could find. This aspect of the story alludes obliquely to U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara, an important novel written in Kannada that Naipaul had praised in India: A Wounded Civilization.16 The protagonist of Ananthamurthy’s novel is a Brahmin name Praneshacharya, who marries a crippled woman as an act of ascetic self-sacrifice. Praneshacharya believes that in this way he makes himself “ripe and ready” for salvation, revealing that his ostensibly selfless action is also self-serving. Naipaul adapts Ananthamurthy’s insight into Brahmanical selfdeception in Half a Life. Despite Willie’s father’s pretensions to being radically egalitarian and anti-Brahmanical, it turns out that his action is a “pre-political” act that is recognizably “brahmanical” in spirit. Much of the comedy of Half a Life refers subtly to Naipaul’s earlier writings and reactivates his reading of Indian authors. In this respect, Rhonda Cobham-Sander’s perceptive observations about Naipaul’s use of West Indian characters and history in A Way in the World applies to Half a Life: “the studied artlessness with which Naipaul juxtaposes new characters and old scenes, culled as it were from browsing his own archive, organizes the novel’s overriding concern with the act of reading.”17 The untouchable (or “backward”) girl Willie’s father decides to marry seemed to be an easily manipulable rustic—she thinks Hamlet is a story set in India—but, in another comic twist, she turns out to be a strong character with agendas of her own. Although Willie’s mother bears her own painful memories of humiliation at the hands of the upper castes, having been shooed away like an animal when as a small girl she made the mistake of asking for

C ONCLUDING REF L EC T ION S

235

water at school, her put-downs are often lighthearted, even mischievous (“Your people always look sad when they give,” she tells Willie’s father). Not only does she fail to display sufficient gratitude for having been raised up from the dirt, she tricks Willie’s father’s into serving her interests. When Willie’s father is about to be charged with corruption, Willie’s mother has her political “firebrand” uncle organize a demonstration against the police. By her actions, she turns Willie’s father into a rallying point for low-caste political agitation. Far from regarding him as their savior, the backwards incorporate Willie’s father into their effort to strengthen their local power. The backwards allege that the corruption charge against Willie’s father is trumped up and that he is being punished by the upper castes for having entered into a relationship with a backward. Much of the hilarity of this section centers on how the Willie’s father’s putatively high-minded actions are appropriated by low-caste populist rhetoric that threaten to derail the broader agenda of elite nationalists. The thought of having fallen under the protection of the backwards is “unbearable” to Willie’s father.18 Instead of winning adulation for the sacrifice he has made in emulation of “great men” like the Mahatma, Willie’s father is pulled down into a “petty caste war.”19 Out of a desire to escape the clutches of the police and the backwards, Willie’s father decides to take a vow of silence; he takes shelter in the local temple and claims to have become an ascetic. Willie’s father is at once a deceiver and a dupe. His insufferable self-pity, the consequence of the many injustices he thinks he has suffered, makes for some of Naipaul’s richest comedy. And despite being telegraphically sketched, Willie’s father’s character has greater subtlety and depth than early counterparts like Ganesh Ramsumair (of The Mystic Masseur). Unlike the scoundrels of Naipaul’s early fiction, however, Willie’s father’s actions do not serve as an allegory of adverse social trends. Indeed, Naipaul seems to strike a subtly optimistic note in his portrayal of the muddled process in which democratic processes and cultures take hold in peripheral contexts. Although Willie’s father’s motivation and actions are treated ironically, and the humor is cruel,

236

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

Naipaul effectively imagines the peculiar roundabout ways in which characters from a backward society, like Willie’s mother and father, arrive at ideas of equality and sovereign selfhood.20 The story of Willie’s father’s coming to self-consciousness is not pretty—he is not a sympathetic character—but his achievement is, all the same, important. Half a Life represents an original departure in Naipaul’s exploration of the way individuals make the transition to modern society, exhibiting a wryly relaxed mood that is distinct from both the overtly funny A House for Mr Biswas and grim A Bend in the River. Half a Life is a story of global change as well as the way peripheral subjects like Willie gradually develop a perspective on the great changes that they live through. The novel begins in the 1930s in smalltown India, then shifts its setting to London, where Willie lives in the 1950s, before he moves with his wife Ana to the Portuguese colony of Mozambique for several years before the outbreak of the civil war there in the 1970s. It follows the years of Willie’s English education and illustrates, through Willie’s career as a journalist and writer, the slow means by which he overcame “blankness” and the “habit of non-seeing” by which he had been shaped: Willie thought he was swimming in ignorance, had lived without a knowledge of time. He remembered one of the things his mother’s uncle used to say: that the backwards had been shut out for so long from society that they knew nothing of India, nothing of the other religions, nothing even of the religion of the people of caste, whose serfs they were. And he thought, “This blankness is one of the things I have got from my mother’s side.”21

Half a Life describes how Willie discovers tools that enable him to overcome this “blankness.” His story recalls one that Naipaul told about himself. In his Nobel lecture, Naipaul describes how, while he was working in the archive of the British Library in the 1960s on the early history of Trinidad, he came upon a letter from 1625 with instructions from the Spanish king to a military commander containing an ominous reference to the Chaguanes tribe, from which, Naipaul suddenly realized, the name of his hometown of Chaguanas derived.

C ONCLUDING REF L EC T ION S

237

This too was a kind of “blankness,” which would become Naipaul’s theme. This is what Naipaul effectively claims in a late essay: As soon as I begin to examine the matter I see that this ignorance of mine (there is no other word for it), this limited view, was an aspect of our history and culture. Historically, the peasantry of the Gangetic plain were a powerless people. We were ruled by tyrants, often far off, who came and went and whose names we very often didn’t know. It didn’t make sense in that setting to take an interest in public affairs, if such a thing could be said to exist. What was politically true of the Gangetic plain was also true of pre-war colonial Trinidad; in this respect at any rate the people who had made the long journey by steamship from India found nothing to jolt them.22

Naipaul’s themes reflect his desire to grapple with the disoriented state out of which he remade himself as an artist. In this respect, there is something didactic and old-fashioned about Half a Life. It imagines the ways the underprivileged might gain access to the discourse of civil society. Naipaul’s priorities are also aligned with those of many peripheral writers, at least as these are imagined by one Brazilian critic: “Combined with a collective desire and with practical political and economic aspirations, such readings can take the form of oblique recommendations to the country. In that sense, they work in the opposite manner to theories of art at the center, where directly referential or national aspects of a literary work are seen as relics or errors.”23 A historian of Trinidad has written that Naipaul’s work helps us understand better how to foster such reflexes, using strategies from gentle humor to astonishing cruelty as means of alerting readers that “critical self-awareness, born out of the hard and painful work of examining the past, is vital for individuals, peoples and nations.”24 Naipaul’s work illustrates why “writers and societies must face up to their past through serious historical examination.”25 While the story of Willie’s development answers to this description, it also stands out for the playful spirit that runs through much of Naipaul’s late writings. When a professor tells Willie that the academic

238

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

gown worn at Oxford and Cambridge was “descended from the ancient Roman toga,” he looks it up in the way his missionary education has taught him to. He learns to his surprise that the professor was possibly operating on hearsay rather than factual knowledge. “The academic gown was probably copied from the Islamic seminaries of a thousand years before, and the Islamic style would have been copied from something earlier. So it was a piece of make-believe.” Simple discoveries like this supply Willie with a healthy dose of skepticism. It alerts him to the fact that certain expressions of cultural hybridization may be repressed in favor of others (“Roman togas” being preferable to “Islamic seminaries”) in modern England. Having acquired “an idea of historical time,”26 he now learns to approach the past not as a repository of truths to be memorized, but rather as a chain of interpretations and valuations he must learn to activate for his own purposes, so as to bring out its potential for “new life-giving influence”:27 Gradually learning the quaint rules of his college, with the churchy Victorian buildings pretending to be older than they were, Willie began to see in a new way the rules he had left behind at home. He began to see—and it was upsetting, at first—that the old rules were themselves a kind of make-believe, self-imposed. And one day . . . he saw with great clarity that the old rules no longer bound him.28

In an interesting scene in Half a Life, Willie Chandran adopts a creative way of revaluing his own past in the process of writing a radio script on the history of his disenfranchised Christian community in India. This exercise teaches him how to think historically, but also—and here we are given a glimpse of the kind of novelist he will become—to activate his knowledge of the past in ways that enable him to foster a reflective mode of reasoning. While Willie could not have arrived at these insights without the aid of historical inquiry, he also believes that he should not absorb facts as ends in themselves but use them to broach a wider understanding in which history is put to the service of a more lively and capacious style of seeing and thinking:

C ONCLUDING REF L EC T ION S

239

And, almost as soon as the idea, and the angle, had been given to him by the producer, the five-minute talk had sketched itself in his mind. The beginnings of the faith in the subcontinent rendered as family stories (he would have to check things up in the encyclopaedia); the feeling of separateness from the rest of India; no true knowledge of the other religions of India; the family’s work, in the British time, as social reformers, people of Christian conscience, champions of workers’ rights . . . [Willie’s] education at a mission school, and his discovery there of the tension between the old Christian community and the new Christians, backwards, recent converts, depressed people, full of grievances; a difficult experience for the writer but in the end a rewarding one, leading to an understanding and acceptance not only of the new Christians, but also of the larger Indian world outside the Christian fold, the Indian world from which his ancestors had held aloof.29

Willie’s ability to revalue his past recalls other Naipaulian accounts of postcolonial subject who find ways to defamiliarize or describe the past in new ways. The scene in which Willie alters the story of his mother resembles the stamp scene in A Bend in the River, when Salim discovers the value of training oneself to look at a familiar object from a new angle. As with Salim, such a moment gives Willie access to an ironic style of thinking about historical truth and possibility. Unlike Salim, who is focused on an objective grasp of material reality, Willie appears to focus on disabusing himself of any veneration for external authority. He discovers that what appear to be old rules often turn out to have been implemented relatively recently, the product of contingent decisions rather than eternal laws. Willie is given greater room for imaginative freedom than most of Naipaul’s other characters. Naipaul’s last work of fiction, Magic Seeds, continues the spirit of ironic investigation of Half a Life, to which it is a sequel. Magic Seeds takes up the story of Willie in middle age, after he has left Mozambique. In this novel, Willie returns to India, where he encounters a series of flawed individuals who are part of a 1970s Maoist-style guerrilla movement based in the countryside.

240

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

The main story of Magic Seeds resonates with aspects of an intriguing encounter Willie has in Half a Life. At the end of that novel, he goes to a restaurant on the coast, where he witnesses a half-Portuguese, half-African carpenter being abused by the restaurant’s Portuguese owner. Willie senses that the man’s racial background has placed him in an inferior social position from which he cannot escape; he “carries the shame of his birth on his face like a brand.”30 Willie finds himself gripped by a violent emotion: “Who will avenge that man? Who will rescue him?” As one critic perceptively observes, when Willie leaves Mozambique for India, he discovers that he has left one caste-based society only to join another.31 Although Willie is enraged by the plight of the half-African man, he cannot imagine what can be done to relieve his suffering. Magic Seeds picks up this theme. It begins with Sarojini, Willie’s politically engaged sister, berating him for his irresolution in the face of so much human suffering. The two are in a café in a German city. Gesturing at a South Indian man who tries to sell them flowers, Sarojini states that the man is a Sri Lankan Tamil, a refugee from the violent civil war that has engulfed his country. She implies that in Sri Lanka, oppressed Tamils have taken matters into their own hands by making revolution against the state; they are “rescuing” themselves. This statement comes as a kind of answer to the question an enraged Willie had posed to himself at the end of Half a Life. In that context, Willie was “half ready” for the news of the violent uprising that would result in the expulsion of the Portuguese colonizers from Mozambique.32 On the face of it, Magic Seeds tells the story of victimized people who decide to fight back against injustice. However, a disjunction rapidly asserts itself between the identification of an objective injustice—the fate of the half-African in Mozambique or the Tamil in Germany—and the appropriate response to it. While there are terrible wrongs that ought to be corrected, the narrator suggests, it is not clear how such a correction can occur without causing greater harm to the very subjugated peoples it is meant to save. The narrative of Magic Seeds appears reluctant to pursue the complex moral and historical questions it has raised, a shortcoming for which it has been justly criticized.33 Through extended interactions with the revolutionaries, Willie discovers that they are guided less by

C ONCLUDING REF L EC T ION S

2 41

high principles than by petty concerns. Their revolutionary values, it is implied, are a cover for individual insecurity. For instance, the narrator of Magic Seeds dwells on the little causes of “shame” that prompted Ramachandra the guerrilla commander to undertake revolutionary action.34 The description of Ramachandra’s “small size” seems obfuscating.35 It feels less like a moment of aesthetic discovery than a movement toward a foregone conclusion about such people’s hidden motivations. In his conversations with Joseph’s son-in-law, the self-declared untouchable, Willie glimpses the man’s “twisted smile.”36 It is as if, Willie surmises, the man bore his wounds and his resentments on his face. The narrator’s willingness to concede authority to Willie’s hasty assessments of the rebels is equally disappointing. It is difficult to avoid the impression that Naipaul had begun the novel evoking a complex historical situation only to find that he lacked the energy—to use a key term in The Masque of Africa—to adequately elaborate a question that had troubled him for a long time. He had put it off until his very last years, when it was perhaps too late to do it justice. The narrator suggests that the armed uprising will necessarily have destructive consequences because it is being driven by psychologically damaged people. There is injustice in the world, and the cause of the weak is justified, the narrator implies, but those who purport to fight against injustice are only prompted by resentment. The rebels invoke the language of universalism, but in reality they are acting out private dramas. Even when radical activists act selflessly, the narrator implies, they are deluded; the cause is necessarily doomed to failure because most of the other participants are not capable of acting in the same way. Magic Seeds is thus a strange and inconclusive work of fiction. Naipaul tacitly acknowledges the limitations of the narrator’s prevailing attitude by attempting to complicate matters. When the middle-ranking revolutionary Bhoj Narayan is arrested, his character is accorded a deeper complexity than the narrator’s conservative prejudices typically permit. Why, Willie asks himself, had Bhoj thrown away the precious gains made by his destitute family, who had succeeded in raising themselves into working-class respectability?

242

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

Why would such a person join the armed struggle? “Perhaps Bhoj Narayan was choosing a shortcut,” Willie imagines.37 Nonetheless, Willie cannot bring himself to condemn Bhoj for becoming dissatisfied with his family’s timidity. The great injustices that exist in the country spur Bhoj’s decision to work toward the violent overthrow of the elected authorities. But this resolution is not underpinned by the feeling of optimism that characterized the revolutionary movements of the early and mid-twentieth century. One character speaks of his desire to “see a revolution sweeping everything away,” even as he confesses that he “has no faith in the human material we have left, after centuries of slavery.”38 The extent to which “the victors won and losers lost” in India, the character continues, cannot be understood by outsiders: “It’s all hidden. When you compare this [situation] with Africa you will have to say that Africa is all light and clarity.”39 The narrator of Magic Seeds disparages the revolutionaries even as he suggests that the violent measures some of them propose are a precondition of genuine change in India, which suffers from indigenous forms of cruelty and injustice that antedate all foreign rule. Naipaul tacitly acknowledges the justness of the revolutionaries’ cause even though he questions their motivations or their likelihood of success, given the degree to which the peasants have come to internalize their subjugated status.40 Naipaul’s late works are of uneven quality. In Magic Seeds, he is less interested in tracing the moral and psychological development of characters in the manner of A Bend in the River than in using characters as a prism through which is refracted a disturbing, possibly defeatist, vision of social change. Naipaul seems unable to let go of the question of historical justice even as his treatment of it implicitly disparages those who would address it seriously. The characters of Magic Seeds have been driven to revolution by oppression and injustice. Their cause is just, yet they are all portrayed as destructive and deluded characters. A late scene in the novel provides a sense of the clinical, affectless tone and the resigned spirit in which Willie has both made his way in the world and come to be defeated by a glimpse of its immovable character. The episode begins with Willie, along with a West Indian,

C ONCLUDING REF L EC T ION S

243

a Malaysian Chinese, a Pakistani, and several other non-Europeans, attending a lecture: The afternoon lecturer had talked all week about the accretion in the industrial age of learning and new skills, of vision and experiment and success and failure. To the man from Multan (and to others on the course as well, as Willie had noticed during the week) little of that story mattered: they had been sent by their countries or companies to get at knowledge that was simply there, seemingly divinely provided, knowledge that had for a long time been unfairly denied them for racial or political reasons but was now, in a miraculously changed world, theirs to claim as their own. And this newly claimed knowledge confirmed each man in the rightness of his own racial or tribal or religious ways. Up the greasy pole and then letting go. The simplified rich world, of success and achievement, always itself; the world outside always in disturbance. Willie thought, “I’ve been here before. I mustn’t start again. I must let the world run according to its bias.”41

It appears to Willie that the new agents of history, represented here by empowered Asians, are unreflectively committed to maintaining their exclusive identities. They think modernity is synonymous with economic modernization. Looking around him, Willie is struck by the disheartening thought that education and economic growth may not make postcolonial people more enlightened, only more ethnocentric and more grasping. Willie—or is it Naipaul?—tells himself he mustn’t start again. Is this a weary concession that the claims of tribalism and identity will not disappear but intensify with the creation of new transnational elites in the postcolonial world? Although fleeting, one cannot help detecting a note of exhaustion, even a vague acknowledgment of defeat in Willie’s thoughts. The moment passes, but there is perhaps the glimmer of a suggestion that works of literature may after all have no power to alter the sensibility of people with backgrounds similar to Willie’s. Like the doubly displaced Willie, Naipaul too was a man without a country. His writings were unusual in that they were never in conversation

244

L AT E W ORK S: 19 8 1–2 0 10

with any particular society or culture. Naipaul’s success at making himself into a global writer of the first rank may in this sense have deprived him of a readership—in England, Trinidad, or India— whose sensibility, to recall his melancholy comments about the fate of his precursor Jean Rhys, he felt intimately connected to and was therefore able to shape.42 In this book, I have emphasized the importance of attending to the fact that Naipaul’s descriptions and analyses are woven from his personal history. While his observations and substantive claims about the postcolonial world are of great interest, it is crucial to pay attention to the way that such claims emerge from Naipaul’s reflections on his own historically disorienting formation. I have sought to alert readers to the complex ways his writings channel and work through the uneven forces of our time, instructively mingling autobiographical knowledge with historical understanding. I have argued that Naipaul’s writing offers the reader an historically grounded engagement with these intractable issues, in ways that reveal the traces of its own disorientation, resentment, and prejudice. In this ironic manner, Naipaul found compelling and disquieting ways to hold a mirror up to the modern world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

D

URING THE many years it took to write this book, I traveled to countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The people I met at social events often surprised me with their knowledge of V. S. Naipaul’s writings. At times, I also sensed that different works of his were better known in different parts of the world. For some there was only the early Naipaul of the humorous fictions set in Trinidad, notably A House for Mr. Biswas; for others all that mattered were the nonfictional books on India; in other places Naipaul was the first person to report on political Islam; others yet knew him as the author of A Bend in the River, a novel set in postcolonial Africa. These conversations impressed me with the diverse ways in which Naipaul is read globally. They have, in ways I cannot itemize but am obliged to acknowledge, influenced the perspective that I have adopted in this book. I have also benefited greatly from the support of several institutions and the kindness of fellow scholars: At the National Humanities Centre: Stefan Collini, Keren Gorodeisky, Geoffrey Harpham, Jean Houston, Jairo Moreno, Ruth Morse, Kent Mullikin, Jeremy Popkin, and Patricia Meyer Spacks. At the Center for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa: Ruchi Chaturvedi, Annachiara Forte, Patricia Hayes, Paolo Israel, Premesh Lalu, Uma and Rajend Mesthrie, Suren Pillay, Ciraj Rassool, and Leslie Witz.

246

A CK NO W L ED GMEN T S

At the Boston University Center for the Humanities: David Frankfurter, Aaron Hiltner, Dorothy Kelly, Erin Nolan, Eva Pascal, James Winn, and Michael Zank. At the University of California, Irvine: Jerome Christensen, Richard Godden, Arlene Keizer, R. Radhakrishnan, James Steintrager, and Rei Terada. At Boston University: Anne Austin, Larry Breiner, Rob Chodat, Bill Carroll, Louis Chude-Sokei, Wiebke Denecke, Julian Go, Gene Jarrett, Xuefei Jin, Maurice Lee, Anita Patterson, Carrie Preston, Michael Prince, Charles Rzepka, Sunil Sharma, James Siemon, and Yoon Sun Yang. Ackbar Abbas (UC Irvine) and Coílín Parsons (University of Cape Town) asked me to present my work at their respective institutions. Aamir Mufti invited me to speak at a conference on World Literature at UCLA. I also want to thank Dohra Ahmad, Elaine Freedgood, and Gauri Viswanathan for including me in a symposium held at Columbia University. Drafts of chapters were presented at Harvard University’s Modernism Seminar and at Boston University’s Lectures in Criticism series at the kind invitations of John Paul Riquelme and Leland Monk. Early versions of several chapters were published as articles: “V. S. Naipaul and Historical Derangement,” Modern Language Quarterly. 73, no. 3 (September 2012); “Edward Said, Mahmood Mamdani, V. S. Naipaul: Rethinking Postcolonial Studies,” Modern Fiction Studies 58, no. 4 (Winter 2012); “Formative Dislocation in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival,” Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3, (Fall 2013). In Malaysia, my thanks to Sharaad Kuttan, Lee Weng Choy, and Sumit Mandal. In Trinidad, Alison Donnell, Vijay Maharaj, and Gordon Rohlehr. Colleen Lye, John Paul Riquelme, Tim Bewes, Suvir Kaul, Jed Esty, Gregory Castle, Joe Cleary, Marshall Brown, Fredric Jameson, and Philip Leventhal, my editor at Columbia University Press, all provided invaluable comments on portions of the manuscript. I must also record my gratitude to Susan Mizruchi for her intellectual generosity and for her support of the project. I have learned much from conversations with Sunil Agnani, Abhishek Kaicker, Yoon Sun Lee, Karuna Mantena, Rama Mantena, John Plotz, Sanjay Reddy, and Milind Wakankar. Above all, I remain deeply indebted to Teena Purohit, with whom I discussed many of the ideas that went into this book.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Dwight Garner, “V. S. Naipaul, A Writer of Many Contradictions and Obvious Greatness,” New York Times, August 12, 2018. 2. Kenneth Ramchand, “VS Naipaul Obituary,” Guardian, August 12, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/12/vs-naipaul-obituary. 3. Meena Kandasamy, “V. S. Naipaul Leaves Behind a Formidable Body of Work—and a Troubling Legacy,” Time, August 15, 2018, http://time.com /5367849/vs-naipaul-legacy-reactionary/. 4. Kandasamy, “V. S. Naipaul.” See also Pankaj Mishra and Nikil Saval, “The Painful Sum of Things: On V. S. Naipaul,” n+1 no. 33 (Winter 2019), https:// nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-painful-sum-of-things/; Associated Press, “V. S. Naipaul, Nobel-Winning Author Who Drew Admiration and Revulsion, Dies at 85,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2018, http:// www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-vs-naipaul-20180811-story.html. 5. In his final years, Naipaul occasionally struck a penitent note. In one of his last interviews, he asked his wife, Nadira, to be present while he was being interviewed because, as he explained to the interviewer, “she prevents me from saying wicked things.” Isaac Chotiner, “V. S. Naipaul on the Arab Spring, Authors He Loathes, and the Books He Will Never Write,” New Republic, December 7, 2012, https://newrepublic.com/article/110945 /vs-naipaul-the-arab-spring-authors-he-loathes-and-the-books-he-will -never-write. When Naipaul’s authorized biographer Patrick French asked the Barbadian novelist George Lamming about Naipaul’s offensive public

248

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

IN T R ODUC T ION

persona, Lamming said that Naipaul liked “playing ole mas, meaning he was masquerading or making trouble for his own entertainment, a Trinidadian trait.” Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul [hereafter Biography] (New York: Vintage, 2008), xi. See, for instance, the title of the Irish Times review of Naipaul’s last nonfictional publication, The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010): “Is V. S. Naipaul a Racist or a Misanthrope?” See also Robert Harris, “The Masque of Africa,” Sunday Times (London), August 22, 2010. Martin Puchner et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Vol. F, 4th ed., (New York: Norton, 2018). “The Guardian View on V. S. Naipaul: A Complicated Man and a Complicated Legacy,” Guardian, August 12, 2018. Amit Chaudhuri, “V. S. Naipaul’s Legacy Is Complex—but His Writing Must Be Celebrated,” Guardian, August 12, 2018. Elleke Boehmer, “How V. S. Naipaul Reshaped the Literary Landscape,” Time, August 16, 2018. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “Africa: V. S. Naipaul, His Kenyan-Born Wife, Me and Lone Flower at the Dinner Table,” Daily Nation, August 19, 2018, https:// allafrica.com/stories/201808200818.html. “Naipaul Pulls Out of Turkey Event,” Financial Times, November 24, 2010. William Dalrymple, Twitter post, January 24, 2015, https://twitter.com /dalrymplewill/status/558929595508858881?lang=en. Jennifer Rahim and Barbara Lalla, eds., Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2014). Rhonda Cobham-Sander, “Consuming the Self: V. S. Naipaul, C. L. R. James, and A Way in the World,” in Lalla and Rahim, Created in the West Indies,51–78. Amitav Ghosh, “Naipaul and the Nobel,” 2001, amitavghosh.com/essays /naipaul.html. V. S. Naipaul, “Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture),” in Literary Occasions (New York: Vintage, 2003), 183. “During the seventy years of indentured immigration [between 1848 and 1917], 144,000 Indians came to Trinidad . . . and only 33,000 returned to India. As a result, the Indian element in Trinidad’s population increased from 27,000 in 1871 to 70,000 in 1891 and its proportion of the colony’s total expanded from 22 to 32 per cent. . . . In the early 1900s the localborn outnumbered Indian immigrants. Thus for the native Indians, India would never be home.” In 1960, out of a population of one million, “Creoles accounted for 61 per cent. The breakdown by color groups was: whites 2 per cent, browns 16 per cent, and blacks 43 per cent. Indians made up 37 per cent of the total, among whom Hindus comprised 23 per cent, Muslims 6 per cent and Christians 8 per cent.” Colin Clarke, “Spatial Pattern and Social Interaction Among Creoles and Indians in Trinidad

IN T R ODUC T ION

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

2 49

and Tobago,” in Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. Kevin A. Yelvington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 121. V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South (New York: Viking, 1989), 161–62. “Trinidad Returned Student Tells of Ordeal: Despised and Shunned,” Trinidad Guardian, April 23, 1933; “Hindu God of War Invoked for 1933 Elections Revolt Against Mr Teelucksingh,” Trinidad Guardian, November 23, 1932. Seepersad Naipaul, The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories (London: Deutsch, 1976). See, for instance, V. S. Naipaul, “The Worm in the Bud,” in A Writer’s People (New York: Vintage, 2007). A few years after Seepersad’s early death, Naipaul also wrote a letter to his wife, Patricia Hale, complaining bitterly that his father had been held back because of the racial prejudice of his British bosses (French, Biography, 183). V. S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), 15. Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972 (London: New Beacon, 1992), 11. For a self-critical account of such complacency among Nigerian elites of the 1950s, see Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2013). See, in particular, Edgar Mittelholzer, Corentyne Thunder (London: Secker and Warburg, 1941) and Sam Selvon, A Brighter Sun (London: Allan Wingate, 1952). Naipaul recalled to his biographer, “I was an object of great curiosity to [black and mixed] people. I was very small, and they couldn’t have been nicer. There were few Indians, almost no Indians in the school. It was the first time I was coming out [of the countryside]. . . . I have to record how nice people were to me, as an unprotected little boy” (French, Biography, 32). In a 1965 interview with Derek Walcott, Naipaul asserted, “I am grateful to the Trinidad I knew as a boy for making me what I am [emphasis added].” But the adult Naipaul, who was addressing Walcott, was fearful of the “sinister” place Trinidad had become. “Manners,” a key indicator of the health of society, had deteriorated. Derek Walcott, “Interview with V. S. Naipaul,” in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), 7. Nearly thirty years after this interview with Walcott, Naipaul would again recall his childhood years in Port of Spain, recalling the wonders Port of Spain held for the country boy who had just moved there. See V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World [hereafter Way] (New York: Knopf, 1994), 13–15. V. S. Naipaul, “BBC Caribbean Voices—An Island Is a World,” BBC Colonial Service, May 1, 1955, in Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon, ed. Susheila Nasta (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1988), 110–13.

25 0

IN T R ODUC T ION

29. French, Biography, 163. French was granted exclusive access to Naipaul’s private correspondence of the 1950s and 1960s. French’s invaluably extensive quotations from Naipaul’s letters of this period make clear how profoundly Naipaul was affected by the racialization of Trinidad’s politics. I have also benefited from Guyanese scholar Dolly Zulakha Hassan’s V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), which draws in part on her personal recollection of the period in question. 30. French, Biography, 167. 31. Naipaul, Way, 35. Naipaul hints at how his own racial feelings were stirred by the new political atmosphere: “Every black or African person from my past altered. And I felt a double distance from what I had known” (Naipaul, Way, 34). 32. Kirk Peter Meighoo, Politics in a ‘Half Made Society’: Trinidad and Tobago, 1925–2001 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2003), xxi. 33. C. L. R. James wrote in 1961, “What I feared and fear now more than ever is the blood of innocent people running down the streets. . . . Our political pandits are heading for this as confidently and as blindly as they smashed up the [West Indian] Federation.” Quoted in Ann Marie Bisessar and John Gaffar La Guerre, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana: Race and Politics in Two Plural Societies (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2013), 55. 34. “Inter-racial warfare [in Guyana] left a legacy of racial hatred that has permanently scarred the national psyche of the Guyanese population.” Percy Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination, and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 55. See also Martin Carter, “Time of Crisis” (1955) and “A Dark Foundation” (1955), in The University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Gemma Robinson (London: Bloodaxe Books, 2006), 195–200. 35. “It was only during the 1950s, however, that an appeal to racial sentiment became a central feature of mass political mobilization in Guyana and Trinidad” (Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival, 3). This would in part explain why Naipaul was shocked by the radically changed nature of his society, despite having been away only for a few years. The letters exchanged between Naipaul and his family between 1950 and 1953, for instance, give no indication of growing racial hostility. 36. For a contemporary overview of decolonizing Asia and Africa, see Rupert Emerson, “The Erosion of Democracy,” Journal of Asian Studies 20, no. 1 (November 1960): 1–8. 37. See, for instance, the Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012), on the 1965 mass killings of ethnic Chinese undertaken by Indonesian gangsters at the bidding of the newly independent state. 38. For a critical self-assessment, see Jussawalla, Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, 16.

IN T R ODUC T ION

251

39. V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre [hereafter Centre] (New York: Vintage, 1984), 68. 40. Naipaul, Centre, 69. 41. “The writer was told he would develop poisoning tomorrow, die on Sunday, and be buried on Monday unless he offered a goat sacrifice.” “Reporter Sacrifices Goat to Mollify Hindu Goddess: Writer Kowtows to Kali to Escape Black Magic Death,” Trinidad Guardian, June 23, 1933. 42. A 1933 newspaper article I found among Naipaul’s papers housed at the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library suggests that a related cause of the farmers’ extreme reaction was their harsh treatment by the colonial authorities. The article refers to the “unbelievable flogging (18 lashes of cat o’ nine and 5 years hard labor [inflicted on an Indian farmer] for escaping custody and receiving a pair of trousers.” The same article also mentions another peasant being subjected to similar punishments inherited from the period of slavery, including “cat [o’ nine lashes] for stealing a small amount of citrus” from the estate of his employer. G. C. Chag, Trinidad Guardian, May 27, 1933, Naipaul Archive 1:3. 43. Naipaul, Centre, 69. 44. Naipaul, Centre, 71. 45. Naipaul, Centre, 66–67. 46. See Naipaul, Centre, 66, 69. A court case in 1933 suggests that the family was engaged in strong-arm rural politics (Trinidad Guardian, February 16, 1933). 47. Naipaul, Centre, 71. 48. Signed articles in the Trinidad Guardian by Seepersad ceased to appear after October 5, 1933 (Patricia Hale, handwritten note, Naipaul Archive 1:3). 49. Bridget Brereton, “The Experience of Indentureship, 1845–1917,” in Calcutta to Caroni: The East Indians of Trinidad, ed. John Gaffar La Guerre (London: Longman, 1973), 32; Bridget Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 1870–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 182. 50. Naipaul, Centre, 53. 51. Naipaul, Centre, 53. 52. Naipaul, Way, 21. 53. Naipaul was in fact referring to a topic that his father had written about (S[eepersad] Naipaul, “Repatriation to India Officially Discouraged. Chief Immigration Officer’s Views Life in the Motherland ‘Poignantly’ Difficult,” Trinidad Sunday Guardian, June 11, 1933, Naipaul Archive 1:3). Having realized that the destitute laborers would face even greater hardships in India—a published letter of October 10, 1933, speaks of Indian returnees in Calcutta “eating leaves of trees so as to preserve life”—the colonial authorities discouraged Indian repatriation. Seepersad agreed with this assessment, but his article records that “the destitutes argue: ‘We are beggars here and we can beg in India in the same way we beg in Trinidad. If we have to die better to die in our own country [India].’ ”

252

IN T R ODUC T ION

54. Naipaul, Centre, 54. My account also draws on the typewritten pages (titled “Autobiography”) in the Naipaul Archive 1:3, where this episode is recounted at length. 55. Naipaul, Centre, 57. 56. Naipaul, Centre, 58. See also V. S. Naipaul, foreword to The Adventures of Gurudeva, 8. 57. Naipaul, Centre, 64. 58. Naipaul, Centre, 91. 59. V. S. Naipaul, The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (London: Picador, 2010), 154, 156. 60. Naipaul, “Two Worlds,” 181. 61. Naipaul, “Two Worlds,” 190. 62. Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: Norton, 2008). 63. “China Is Struggling to Explain Xi Jinping Thought,” Economist, November 8, 2018; “India Invented Planes 7000 Years Ago,” Washington Post, January 4, 2015; “Indian Prime Minister Claims Genetic Science Existed in Ancient Times,” Guardian, October 28, 2014. 64. “More and more today, writers’ myths are about the writers themselves; the work has become less obtrusive.” V. S. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness” (1974), in The Return of Eva Peron and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1981), 244. Ironically, Naipaul’s often attention-seeking, deliberately incendiary utterances contributed a great deal to the Naipaul myth, distracting readers from what he actually wrote or predisposing them to reductive interpretations what he had written. 65. Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3. 66. Nixon, London Calling, 6. 67. The extreme rhetoric deployed by the intellectual right was typically aimed at defending Naipaul from academics: “Naipaul’s explicit celebration of Western civilization won him much hostility from the Left, especially from the rancid swamp of the entitled academic Left.” David Pryce-Jones, “V. S. Naipaul, 1932–2018,” New Criterion 37, no. 1 (September 2018): 3. 68. “Ishmael Reed interprets the vogue for Naipaul among American liberals and conservatives as symptomatic of a last-ditch effort to check the rising tide of multiculturalism” (Nixon, London Calling, 176). 69. Michael Gorra, “Postcolonial Studies,” in The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V. S. Naipaul (New Delhi: Buffalo, 2002), 113. 70. See Conor Cruise O’Brien, Edward Said, and John Lukacs, “The PostColonial Intellectual: A Discussion with Conor Cruise O’Brien, Edward Said, and John Lukacs,” Salmagundi 70–71 (Spring–Summer 1986): 65–81. 71. Fawzia Mustafa, V. S. Naipaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27.

IN T R ODUC T ION

25 3

72. Selwyn Cudjoe, V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 4. Other West Indian commentators have distanced themselves from such assertions: “There has been a certain touchiness about West Indian umbrage at Naipaul’s derogatory remarks on the region, a touchiness which may be a sign of the sense of insecurity inherited by the ex-colonised. By contrast, Naipaul’s sneering comments on contemporary English society or the Tony Blair government or Oxford University have raised no more than a ripple of amusement, perhaps a patronizing ripple, in the British.” Edward Baugh, “ ‘The History That Had Made Me’: The Making and Self-Making of V. S. Naipaul,” in Lalla and Rahim, Created in the West Indies, 5. 73. Edward W. Said, “Bitter Dispatches from the Third World,” reprinted in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). For a rare voice of dissent within postcolonial studies, see Sara Suleri, who noted the self-consciously ironic dimension of Naipaul’s writing that his detractors ignored. Sara Suleri, “Naipaul’s Arrival,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 1 (Fall 1988): 25–50, 26. 74. Nixon, London Calling, 6. 75. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival [hereafter Enigma] (New York: Viking, 1987), 146. 76. Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” trans. Edmund Leites and the author, in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992). 77. Selwyn Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago: A Study of Decolonization in a Multiracial Society (Vancouver: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 45. 78. Naipaul, Way, 80. 79. Naipaul, Way, 81. 80. “Butler was a preacher, and there was something in his passion or derangement that took the oilfield workers to a pitch of frenzy” (Naipaul, Way, 81). Butler “believed that God had appointed him to lead the people of the West Indies from the wilderness of colonialism” (Ryan, Race and Nationalism, 45). Aspects of Naipaul’s story echo Eric Williams’s account— including the gruesome killing of a black policeman by Butler’s followers. Eric Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (New York: Praeger, 1962), 234. 81. Naipaul, Way, 93. 82. Naipaul, Way, 79. 83. Naipaul, Way, 80. 84. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.

25 4

IN T R ODUC T ION

85. Raymond Williams, “Culture Is Ordinary,” in Resources of Hope (London: Verso, 2016). 86. Williams, “Culture Is Ordinary,” 5. 87. “The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them—on what? It was fair to say that life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the Empire was undeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing system.” George Orwell, “England Your England” (1941), in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1964), 79. 88. Naipaul, Way, 82. 89. Naipaul, Way, 82. 90. Naipaul, Way, 80. 91. Sidney Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 16. 92. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), 102–3. 93. See “Home Again” and “Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties.” The two stories appear in Naipaul, Way, 352–380, 70–106. 94. For “competing nationalisms,” see A. N. Porter and A. J. Stockwell, British Imperial Policy and Decolonization, 1938–64, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 50. For snapshots of the competing forms that nationalisms took in colonial territories with necessarily weak institutions, including Ghana, Malaya, Nigeria, and India, see Nicholas J. White, Decolonisation: The British Experience Since 1945 (London: Longman, 1999), 54–58. For an assessment of the consequences of such fractures, see D. A. Low, Eclipse of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 267; and Martin Lynn, ed., The British Empire in the 1950s: Retreat or Revival? (London: Palgrave, 2006), 126, 130, 146–47. 95. Naipaul, “The Worm in the Bud,” 9. 96. At least this was Naipaul’s belief: “The Negro leader [Eric Williams] is a dictator-like fellow (St. Cath’s man) and if he says he’s not racialist—his canvassers say it for him. The Negroes don’t want to discuss. You cannot say anything about their leader. Their bullies heckle and break up other speakers’ meetings and preserve order at their own. The police and civil service are all Negro. So one has no defence at all” (French, Biography, 171). For some context on Naipaul’s use of “black,” see C. L. R. James’s classic autobiographical work, Beyond a Boundary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 48–51.

1. MEMORIE S OF UNDERDE V ELOP MEN T

25 5

97. For a wider consideration of the argument that “the Euro-African determinism of the plantation model forgets the East Indian Naipauls of this world,” see Rex Nettleford, “Creative Potential of Life,” Caribbean Perspectives, September 1, 1971, 118–19. 98. Eighteen seats of the twenty-four-seat Legislative Council were decided by these elections in the run-up to complete independence in 1962. Williams’s People’s National Movement (PNM) won thirteen seats. 99. French, Biography, 168. 100. See Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Societies in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 311–15; Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago, 475. Caryl Phillips has a sympathetic discussion of the encounter between Naipaul and Blair in “The Voyage In: Review of V. S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World,” New Republic, June 13, 1994, 43–44. 101. See, for instance, “For India’s Persecuted Muslim Minority, Caution Follows Hindu Party’s Election Victory,” New York Times, May 16, 2014; “Indonesia: A Nation’s Tolerance on Trial,” Financial Times, January 26, 2017; “International Criminal Court Drops Charges Against Kenya’s Ruto,” Financial Times, April 5, 2016; “Myanmar’s Military Accused of Genocide in Damning UN Report,” Guardian, August 27, 2018. 102. Naipaul, Way, 359. 103. Naipaul, Way, 365. 104. Naipaul, Way, 359. 105. Naipaul, Way, 363. 106. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 107. Naipaul, Enigma, 146–47. 108. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness.” 109. Naipaul, Enigma, 154. 110. French, Biography, 257. 111. Barack Obama obliquely acknowledged this point in an interview: “I think about [Naipaul’s] novels when I’m thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy.” Michiko Kakutani, “Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books,” New York Times, January 16, 2017.

1. MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT 1. V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre (New York: Vintage, 1984), 37. 2. See Shiva Naipaul, Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (London: Abacus, 1984), 3–46. See also the interesting interview conducted with Naipaul’s mother, Mrs. Droapatie Naipaul: Patricia Mohamed, “Structures of Experience: Gender, Ethnicity and Class in the Lives of Two East Indian Women,”

25 6

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

1. MEMORIE S OF UNDERDE V ELOP MEN T

in Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. Kevin A. Yelvington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 208–35. Naipaul, Centre, 37. V. S. Naipaul, “Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture),” in Literary Occasions (New York: Vintage, 2003), 192. Naipaul, Centre, 26. V. S. Naipaul, Miguel Street [hereafter Miguel] (London: Deutsch, 1959), 9–10. Naipaul, Miguel, 14. Naipaul, Miguel, 15. In an unpublished draft of Finding the Centre, Naipaul writes the following about his father’s first marriage. “I heard my father speak of it when I was a child—he made it a comic story: he said he escaped his wife by jumping out of a window, running away and never coming back—but I forgot it, and when I heard about it later, perhaps during a return to Trinidad, I was shocked.” Naipaul Archive 3:6. Naipaul, Miguel, 16. See Naipaul, “Two Worlds,” 192. In this speech, Naipaul revised the unpersuasive claim he had made earlier in Centre: “Though [the simple opening sentences of Miguel Street] had left everything out—the setting, the historical time, the racial and social complexities of the people concerned—they had suggested it all; they had created the world of the street” (Naipaul, Centre, 19). Naipaul had also been ignorant of Bogart’s “true story” when he wrote Miguel Street (Naipaul, Centre, 41). He only began a serious study of the region’s history in 1966, while researching The Loss of El Dorado (Naipaul, Centre, 42). Naipaul, Centre, 16. Naipaul, Centre, 17, 27. Naipaul, Centre, 37. Naipaul, Centre, 37. Naipaul describes a classmate Ramon, a petty criminal who died in a car accident in London, as follows: “He was a Hindu and had been married according to Hindu rites. These rites must have meant as little to him as they did to me, and perhaps even less, for he had grown up as an individual, had never had the protection of a family like mine, and had at an early age been transferred to a civilization which remained as puzzling to him as this new transference to Chelsea.” V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (London: Deutsch, 1964), 38. Naipaul, Centre, 28. V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World (New York: Knopf, 1994), 113–14. Naipaul, Way, 113–14. Naipaul, “Two Worlds,” 187. Naipaul, Miguel, 61. Naipaul, Miguel, 17. Naipaul, Miguel, 19. Naipaul, Miguel, 58.

1. MEMORIE S OF UNDERDE V ELOP MEN T

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

25 7

Naipaul, Miguel, 103. Naipaul, Miguel, 47. Naipaul, Miguel, 51. Naipaul, Miguel, 51. Naipaul, Miguel, 19. Naipaul, Miguel, 116. Naipaul, Miguel, 79. The term “pre-political” is taken from Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1959), 3. Naipaul, Miguel, 168. Naipaul, Miguel, 177. Naipaul, Miguel, 165. Naipaul, Centre, 41. Naipaul, Centre, 49. Naipaul, Centre, 49. Naipaul, Centre, 45. One interesting detail we learn in Centre is that as a young boy Naipaul had called Bogart “by the Hindi word for a maternal uncle,” implying that Naipaul would have been encouraged to regard Bogart as a member of his own extended family, even though they were not part of the same kin group (Naipaul, Centre, 46). This was because “at the turn of the century Bogart’s father and [Naipaul’s] mother’s father had travelled out together from India as indentured immigrants. At some point during the long and frightening journey they had sworn a bond of brotherhood” that was to be honored by subsequent generations (Naipaul, Centre, 17). V. S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), 37. See, for instance, Gordon Haight’s detailed account of the books and magazines that George Eliot studied in her effort to reconstruct the religious and rural contexts of her first masterpiece, Adam Bede (1859), a novel set in the early years of the nineteenth century. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 249–50. Naipaul, “Two Worlds,” 190. Naipaul, “Two Worlds,” 190. Naipaul, Reading and Writing, 36. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited [hereafter Middle] (New York: Vintage, 1962), 213. Naipaul, Middle, 213. Naipaul, Middle, 213. Naipaul, Middle, 214. Naipaul, Miguel, 36; Naipaul, Middle, 214. Naipaul, Reading and Writing, 30. Naipaul, “Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way,” in A Writer’s People (New York: Knopf, 2008), 115.

25 8

2. SEL F A ND S O CIE T Y

2. SELF AND SOCIETY 1. V. S. Naipaul, The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) [hereafter Suffrage] (London: Penguin, 1969); V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (1961) [hereafter House] (New York: Vintage, 2001). 2. V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness [hereafter Area] (London: Deutsch, 1964), 31, 34–35. 3. For “plural society,” see the classic study by John S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956). 4. V. S. Naipaul, Between Father and Son [hereafter Between] (New York: Random House, 1999), 122–23. 5. Naipaul, Between, 122. 6. The Guyanese critic Frank Birbalsingh makes this point in his review of the letters between Naipaul and his family, collected in Between Father and Son: Family Letters: “Not that such Indo-centric racism can ever be acceptable: it must be seen in the context of a colonial Caribbean society in which racist attitudes were common on all sides.” Frank Birbalsingh, “Father and Son,” in Guyana and the Caribbean: Reviews, Essays and Interviews (Chichester, UK: Dido, 2004), 204. 7. Naipaul, Between, 130. 8. Caryl Phillips, “The Enigma of Denial: Review of Between Father and Son: Family Letters,” New Republic, May 29, 2000. 9. “Between the brown-skinned middle class and black [Trinidadian] there is a continual rivalry, distrust and ill-feeling, which, skillfully played upon by the European peoples, poisons the life of the community.” C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London: Hutchinson, 1963), 50. 10. The early writings of the Martinique-born Frantz Fanon reveal a complicated relationship to blackness that suggests curious parallels with Naipaul. See Françoise Vergès, “Creole Skin, Black Mask: Fanon and Disavowal,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 578–95; David Macey, Frantz Fanon (New York: Verso, 1999). 11. Naipaul, Area, 42. 12. Ralph Premdas, “Ethnic Conflict in Trinidad and Tobago: Domination and Reconciliation,” in Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. Kevin A. Yelvington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 136–39. 13. Others were more alert to the deteriorating situation. See Martin Carter, The University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Gemma Robinson (London: Bloodaxe, 2006)), 193–208. 14. French, Biography, 176. 15. French, Biography, 176. See also V. S. Naipaul, “The Regional Barrier,” Times Literary Supplement, August 15, 1958. 16. Naipaul, Suffrage, 208.

2. SEL F A ND S O CIE T Y

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

259

Naipaul, Suffrage, 13. Naipaul, Suffrage, 19. Naipaul, Suffrage,119. Naipaul suggests that anti-Negro prejudice was a trait of both Hindu and Muslim communities: “ ‘What is Muslim?’ Chittaranjan asked [Baksh]. . . . ‘Muslim is everything and Muslim is nothing.’ He paused. ‘Even Negro is Muslim.’ That hurt Baksh . . . [who] shouted, ‘Good! Good! I glad! I glad Harbans ain’t want no Muslim vote. You say it yourself. Negro and Muslim is one.’ ” (Naipaul, Suffrage, 119). Naipaul, Suffrage, 69. Quoted in French, Biography 176–77. See also Ivar Oxaal, Black Intellectuals Come to Power (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1968), 190. Naipaul, Area, 35. See Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 90–91, 103. V. S. Naipaul, House, 22. V. S. Naipaul, foreword to Seepersad Naipaul, The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories (London: Deutsch, 1976), 8. The opening chapter of House “cannibalizes” (Naipaul’s word) an important scene from Seepersad’s short story “They Called Him Mohun.” The tonal differences between the two scenes are instructive. For discussions of Seepersad Naipaul’s stories, see Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1975), 33–45; Helen Hayward, The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 18–20. White offers a sensitive account of Seepersad’s work as a reporter (White, V. S. Naipaul, 29–32). Naipaul, House, 23. When his father dies and his mother is forced to leave for Pagotes to live with her sister, Biswas is not sent off to work only because he is too young. In contrast, his brothers, Pratap and Prasad, eight and eleven years old, are made into laborers on a sugar plantation (Naipaul, House, 39). Naipaul, House, 41. Naipaul, House, 41. Naipaul, House, 42. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin, 1962), 25. Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” 10–12. Naipaul, House, 160. Erich Auerbach, “In the Hôtel de la Mole,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 463. The underlying insight here is that the economic and bureaucratic expressions of “modernization” in the plantation society constrain the development of a “culture of modernity” in which institutions and norms that foster “the reflective treatment of traditions that have lost their

26 0

36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

2. SEL F A ND S O CIE T Y

quasinatural status” might be fostered. Misir’s rejection of traditional stories reflects this uneven development. Although he is empowered by the functional aspects of modernization, he lacks access to an adequate language to describe his condition. His stories are symptomatic of the condition he purports to critique. For an account of how modernization effects a peculiar “dissociation” from modernity, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 2. Naipaul, House, 75. I analyze this passage more fully in my essay “History and the Work of Literature in the Periphery,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 482–89. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Maudemarie Clark (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1998). Naipaul, House, 101. In his pioneering study, Kenneth Ramchand attributes greater historical precocity to Biswas than the narrative will support when he claims that Biswas “recognizes the blinkered insulation of [the Tulsi] world and senses its imminent dissolution.” Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1970/2004), 160. Naipaul, House, 10. Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1923), in History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1967). Naipaul, House, 110. “This peasantry, transported to Trinidad, hadn’t been touched by the great Indian reform movements of the nineteenth century. Reform became an issue only with the arrival of reformist missionaries from India in the 1920s, at a time when in India itself religious reform was merging into political rebellion.” V. S. Naipaul, foreword to The Adventures of Gurudeva, 9. Naipaul, House, 113. Auerbach, “In the Hôtel de la Mole,” 458. Naipaul, House, 139. Shama’s actions sustain Biswas. At such moments, he must “acknowledge both the urgency of his need to be free of the extended family system as well as the extent of his dependency upon it.” Fawzia Mustafa, V. S. Naipaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 68. The “profound seductions that provide the security which accompanies the familiar when posed as an alternative to the ‘new’ ” (Mustafa, V.S. Naipaul, 68) linger on in this way: they imbue Shama’s actions with energy and purpose despite resenting her exile from Hanuman House as a result of her husband’s poor judgment. Biswas has no such source of strength. Naipaul, House, 153. Naipaul, House, 148. Naipaul, House, 303.

3. HI S TORIC A L IDEN T I T IE S

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

261

Naipaul, House, 314. Naipaul, House, 314. Naipaul, House, 261. Naipaul, House, 342. Naipaul, House, 343. Naipaul, House, 343. Naipaul, House, 289. Naipaul, House, 556–57.

3. HISTORICAL IDENTITIES 1. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963). 2. V. S. Naipaul, “Cricket,” in The Overcrowded Barracoon [hereafter Barracoon] (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 21. The review was first published in Encounter, September 1963. 3. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1962), 77. 4. See Peter Calvocoressi, The World Since 1945 (London: Longmans, 1968), 351–55, 445–46. 5. Naipaul, Middle, 82. 6. Naipaul treats many of these themes in The Mimic Men (1967) and Guerrillas (1975), as well as in The Return of Eva Peron and Other Essays (1977). Similar insights can be found in Frantz Fanon, “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), 97–145. 7. See Bharati Mukherjee’s comments in Bharati Mukherjee and Robert Boyers, “A Conversation with V. S. Naipaul,” in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 75–92. 8. Mukherjee and Boyers, “A Conversation with V. S. Naipaul,” 83. 9. Naipaul, Middle, 3. 10. Patrick French (Naipaul’s biographer) and Diana Athill (his editor) both distance themselves from this passage, which shows Naipaul at his most overtly racist. Athill writes: “Vidia could not resist placing [the Negro] right at the start of the book and describing him in greater detail than anyone else in all its [The Middle Passage’s] 232 pages [italics in original].” Quoted in Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (New York: Vintage, 2008), 202. 11. Ralph Premdas, “Ethnic Conflict in Trinidad and Tobago: Domination and Reconciliation,” in Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. Kelvin A. Yelvington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 136–60. Premdas adds: “Because of the zero-sum structure of the contest conducted in a context where consensual

26 2

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

3. HI S TORIC A L IDEN T I T IE S

values shared by all citizens . . . each ethnic bloc [i.e. Indian and Creole] views this event in semi-military terms in which the victor literally defeats and punishes the vanquished. Winners in a zero-sum competitive game take all the benefits of governments and may even re-define the rules of the game to perpetuate their power. . . . the 1961 general election in Trinidad was cast in total terms as Indian conquest by Creoles” (140–41). Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 49. Naipaul, Middle, 24. It is as if, in a recalibration, all the potential violence in comic racial encounters in The Suffrage of Elvira have been brought to the fore. See V. S. Naipaul, The Suffrage of Elvira (London: Deutsch, 1958), 75–76, 119–120, 132. “Racial insults” are traded in all these scenes. On the traumatizing effects of racial politics in Naipaul’s life and work, see French, Biography, 211; Mukherjee and Boyers, “A Conversation with V. S. Naipaul,” 83–84; Bruce King, V. S. Naipaul (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 156. Naipaul, Middle, 41. Albert Gomes sought to position himself as a leader of the black working classes. See Selwyn Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago (St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1974), 94–96, 109, 128. V. S. Naipaul, “The Worm in the Bud,” in A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (New York: Knopf, 2007), 8. See also Naipaul, Middle, 68. Naipaul, Middle, 25. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Viking, 1987), 153. Naipaul, Middle, 33, 34. Naipaul, Middle, 91. Naipaul, “The Writer and India,” New York Review of Books, March 4, 1999, 486. Naipaul, “The Writer in India,” 487. V. S. Naipaul, “A Handful of Dust: Cheddi Jagan in Guyana,” in The Writer and the World, ed. Pankaj Mishra (New York: Knopf, 2002), 487. Selwyn Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago, 140. Naipaul, Middle, 80. Indian racial pride grew following India’s independence in 1947. But it sometimes expressed itself in contradictory ways. In 1946, “the first elections were held under universal adult suffrage in Trinidad. Then the bush lawyers and the village headmen came into their own, not only in the Indian areas but throughout the island. Then the loudspeaker van reminded people that they were of Aryan blood. Then, as was reported, the [Indian] politician, soon to be rewarded by great wealth, bared his pale chest and shouted, ‘I is a nigger, too!’ ” (Naipaul, Middle, 80–81). Naipaul, Middle, 78. Naipaul, Enigma, 154.

3. HI S TORIC A L IDEN T I T IE S

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

26 3

Naipaul, Enigma, 154. V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (London: Deutsch, 1964), 32. Naipaul, Area, 32. Naipaul, Area, 38. Naipaul, Area, 32. Naipaul, Area, 38. Naipaul, Area, 38. Naipaul, Area, 48. In 1966, Naipaul gifted a copy of An Area of Darkness to Jagdish Sondhi, a Kenyan-Indian businessman, inscribing it with the following words: “This, the book which I consider my best: a book written out of pain and concern; less about India than about people like yourselves and myself” (French, Biography, 253–54). V. S. Naipaul, “A Second Visit” (1967), in Barracoon, 85, 93. “In Trinidad caste had no meaning in our day-to-day life; the caste we played at was no more than an acknowledgment of latent qualities; the assurance it offered was such as might be offered by a palmist or a reader of handwriting. In India it implied a brutal division of labor; and at its center, as I had never realized, lay the degradation of the latrine-cleaner” (Naipaul, Area, 36). Naipaul, Area, 82–83. Naipaul praises Gandhi for his “revolutionary assessment,” in which Indians were broken into the idea of democratic equality by being made to clean toilets. According to Naipaul, Gandhi saw this as a way to make equality into a psychologically ingrained reflex, rather than cheaply held rhetoric. “It is the system that has to be regenerated, the psychology of caste that has to be destroyed. So Gandhi comes again and again to the filth and excrement of India, the dignity of latrine-cleaning; the spirit of service; bread-labor” (Naipaul, Area, 85). Naipaul, Area, 79; italics in original. Naipaul, Area, 49, 78. Naipaul, Area, 78. V. S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization [hereafter Wounded] (New York: Knopf, 1975), 227. Naipaul, Wounded, 27. Naipaul, Area, 79. Erich Auerbach, “In the Hôtel de la Mole,” 463. Naipaul, Area, 228. Naipaul, Area, 228. Farrukh Dhondy, “V. S. Naipaul: The Man and His Mission,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 5, no 2 (Spring 2008): 181–200, 183. Patrick French remarks that “at a time when relativism was starting to be the accepted response to any post-colonial nation’s failings, the strength of Naipaul’s views [in An Area of Darkness] looked like a shocking return to the days of

26 4

51. 52.

53.

54.

3. HI S TORIC A L IDEN T I T IE S

absolute, imperial judgments” (French, Biography, 231). Yet French goes on to say that this work would “influence the outlook of two generations of [post-colonial] Indian writers, particularly men: Amitav Ghosh, Farrukh Dhondy, Amit Chaudhuri, Tarun Tejpal, Amitava Kumar, Nirpal Dhaliwal have all written of its impact. . . . Pankaj Mishra said that he was left ‘shocked and bewildered’ when he read An Area of Darkness aged sixteen: ‘I didn’t know you could write like that about India. I think it was the first book I read in English that contained the world I lived in’ ” (French, Biography, 231). Nissim Ezekiel, “Naipaul’s India and Mine,” Journal of South Asian Literature 11, no. 3/4 (1976): 193. Twenty-seven years later, in India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), Naipaul acknowledges that although the approach he adopted may have been unavoidable, given his own understanding at the time of what it meant to be a writer, he rues the fact that he did not express a greater interest in the inner lives of the people he met on his first visit to India in 1962—a defect he seeks to rectify in Mutinies. V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now (New York: Viking, 1990), 511. Naipaul, “A Second Visit,” 93. Drawing on the Brahminical culture depicted in the Kannada writer U. R. Anantha Murthy’s 1965 novel Samskara, Naipaul would speak of a “barbaric civilization, where the books, the laws, are buttressed by magic, and where a too elaborate social organization is unquickened by intellect or creativity or ideas of moral responsibility (except to the self in its climb to salvation)” (Naipaul, Wounded, 97). Naipaul’s call for a “revolution of the mind” resonates with some views of progressive Indian writers. See, most recently, Arundhati Roy, introduction to B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, ed. S. Anand (London: Verso, 2014), 17. Interview with Charles Wheeler, in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1997).

4. FANTASY AND DERANGEMENT 1. “I long to find what is good and hopeful and really do hope that by the most brutal sort of analysis one is possibly opening up the situation to some sort of action; an action which is not based on self-deception.” Adrian Rowe-Evans, “V. S. Naipaul: Transition Interview,” in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1997), 30. 2. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1962), 68–69. 3. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Viking, 1987), 101. In a slightly bemused if complimentary review, the historian J. H. Elliott

4 . FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

26 5

described The Loss of El Dorado as “neither exactly a novel nor exactly a history.” Confusions of genre aside, Elliott was not sure how to characterize Naipaul’s objective because it did not conform to a picture of a “self-conscious exploration of a national soul that one might expect of the ordinary expatriate author.” J. H. Elliott, “Triste Trinidad,” New York Review of Books, May 21, 1970. Another historian, Peter Marshall, praised Naipaul’s “subtlety” while expressing similar reservations about his methodology. But Naipaul’s effort to read historical texts to discern enduring patterns was recognizable to some Trinidadians, including the critic Kenneth Ramchand, who described it as “the most original historical work on Trinidad.” Kenneth Ramchand, “Loss of El Dorado,” Everybody’s 25, no. 8 (December 31, 2001): 26. See, for instance, Naipaul’s discussion of “fantasy” in the 1960s black power movement in Trinidad and the Caribbean. V. S. Naipaul, “Power?” in The Overcrowded Barracoon [hereafter Barracoon] (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 267–75. This view is elaborated in interviews; see Jussawalla, Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, 30. Echoing aspects of Nissim Ezekiel’s criticisms of An Area of Darkness, the Caribbean critic Edward Baugh also faulted Naipaul for his tone and for not sympathetically adopting the perspectives of ordinary Trinidadians in The Loss of El Dorado. Edward Baugh, “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History,” Small Axe 16, no. 2 (July 2012): 65. V. S. Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado [hereafter Loss] (London: Deutsch, 1969), 4–5. Naipaul, Loss, 24. Naipaul, Loss, 43. Naipaul adopts the variant spelling of Raleigh as Ralegh in his earlier writings. Naipaul, Loss, 45. Naipaul, Loss, 45–46. Naipaul revisits the Raleigh story using a more intimate frame in A Way in the World (1990) by adopting Raleigh’s perspective on the death of his son. Lillian Feder suggestively explores the resonances in the depiction of Raleigh with other characters who appear in Loss, including Governor Hislop and Francisco Miranda. Lillian Feder, Naipaul’s Truth: The Making of a Writer (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 94–107. Naipaul, Loss, 7. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), introduction. Naipaul, Loss, 24. Naipaul, Loss, 27. See the discussion of Robinson Crusoe in Watt, Rise of the Novel, chap. 1. Naipaul, Loss, 29.

26 6

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

4 . FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

Naipaul, Loss, 63. Naipaul, Loss, 4. Naipaul, Loss, 3. Naipaul, Loss, 4. Naipaul, Loss, 198. Naipaul, Loss, 199. Naipaul, Loss, 166. Naipaul, Loss, 197. Naipaul, Loss, 141. Naipaul, Loss, 141. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–316. Naipaul anticipates Spivak’s discussion of how the nineteenth-century debate in British India over the abolition of the traditional Hindu practice of suttee (widow sacrifice) was so completely dominated by the competing claims of conservative Hindu patriarchs and the reforming British that it became impossible to retrieve the voice or values of the victimized widow. Naipaul, Loss, xiv, 272, 354. Naipaul, Loss, 350. Naipaul, Loss, 350–51. Naipaul, Loss, 351–52. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, 157. Naipaul, Loss, 352. Naipaul, Loss, 352. Naipaul, Loss, 189–94. Naipaul, Loss, 365. In The Suffrage of Elvira, the Muslim Mrs. Baksh “blesses” her son with a lashing after a ritual involving the Bible is used to determine that he has lied to her about bringing a puppy into the house. Violent beatings of children feature prominently in A House for Mr Biswas and Miguel Street. See Dolly Zulakha Hassan’s account of some of these criticisms and her defense of Naipaul in her book V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies (New York: Lang, 1989). V. S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), 30. Helen Hayward, The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 86. V. S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (New York: Vintage, 1977), 79. Naipaul, Wounded, 4. Naipaul, Wounded, 8. Naipaul, Wounded, 4. There are alternate ways of spelling Vijayanagar, including Vijaynagar and Vijayanagara.

4 . FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

267

Naipaul, Wounded, 4. Naipaul, Wounded, 5. Naipaul, Wounded, 5. Naipaul, Wounded, 90–91. Naipaul, Wounded, 8. Naipaul, Wounded, 154. Naipaul, Wounded, 8. Naipaul, Wounded, 161. Naipaul, Wounded, 156. Naipaul, Wounded, 155. Naipaul underscores the importance of cultivating secular and cosmopolitan ideals of humanistic study when he repeats his attack on Vinoba Bhave in India: A Million Mutinies Now: “As children [in colonial Trinidad] we were taught, for instance, what Goethe had said about Shakuntala, the Sanskrit play that Sir William Jones had translated in 1789. What luck that bit of knowledge should have come our way! Sanskrit was considered a sacred language; only priests and Brahmins could read the texts . . . and even in our own century pious people could get fierce about the sacredness of the language. Nearly 200 years after William Jones had translated the play, someone in independent India asked Vinoba Bhave, an imitation-Gandhi, . . . what he thought of Shakuntala. The idle fellow replied angrily, ‘I have never read the Shakuntala, and never shall. I do not learn the language of the gods to amuse myself with trifles.’ ” V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now (New York: Knopf, 1990), 398. Ramlal Agarwal, “Review: India: A Wounded Civilization by V. S. Naipaul,” World Literature Today 52, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 343. “[Given Naipaul’s] idea of a primordial Indian national identity that must be reclaimed from the obscurity of Muslim rule, Naipaul exhibits structural kinship with Hindu fundamentalism.” Pablo Mukherjee, “Doomed to Smallness: Violence, V. S. Naipaul, and the Global South,” Yearbook of English Studies 37, no. 1 (2007): 214. Naipaul, Wounded, 6. Naipaul, Wounded, 5. Naipaul echoes the prevailing consensus among historians that Vijayanagar was lacking in dynamism and that its rulers were guided exclusively by a “dharmic ideology.” This view was challenged by historians in the decade following the publication of Wounded. See Burton Stein, The New Cambridge History of India: Vijayanagara (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67–71. Naipaul, Wounded, 6. Naipaul, Wounded, 6. William Dalrymple, “Trapped in the Ruins,” Guardian, March 19, 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/mar/20/india.fiction. For a discussion of the “core beliefs” of Hindu nationalists, see Ramachandra Guha,

26 8

64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69.

70.

4 . FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New York: Harper, 2007), 637; for an account of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, see 576–580, 624–634. See also Christophe Jaffrelot, “Introduction: The Invention of an Ethnic Nationalism,” in Hindu Nationalism: A Reader, ed. Christophe Jaffrelot (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1–26. Dalrymple, “Trapped in the Ruins.” Naipaul, Wounded, 7. Dalrymple, “Trapped in the Ruins.” In a 2001 interview with Patrick French, Naipaul stated that he had focused on the destruction of Vijayanagar as a literary device because it enabled him to draw attention to an urgent need for historical reflection. See Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (New York: Vintage, 2008), 367. Dalrymple, “Trapped in the Ruins.” However, the decision by Hermann Kulke, an historian of early Vijayanagara, to reproduce an excerpt from the work of Robert Sewell—whom Dalrymple dismisses—raises questions about Dalrymple’s absolute judgment. Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India, 6th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 146–47. Kulke and Rothermund also appear to disagree with Dalrymple’s overall thesis when they describe “a deliberate policy of a religious and cultural revival in southern India after the impact of the Islamic invasion” (Kulke and Rothermund, A History of India, 143). Another historian of early India complicates the picture by referring to the “radically different [i.e., Hindu and Muslim] imperial ideologies coexist[ing] simultaneously” in Vijayanagara. Carla M. Sinopoli, “From the Lion Throne: Political and Social Dynamics of the Vijayanagara Empire,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 43, no. 3 (2000): 382. I was unable to find evidence of hatred toward Islam in India in An Area of Darkness. Visiting Akbar’s fort of Hari Parbat in Kashmir, Naipaul writes, “The Mogul one could accept, and the Hindu. It was this English presence . . . which was hardest to accept” (Naipaul, Area, 103). Naipaul also pauses to admire an “exquisite extension” to Akbar’s fort. The Kashmiri Muslims in Area are sympathetically portrayed as being deeply absorbed by folk practices and shrine worship, with no indication of their being fanatics (Naipaul, Area, 132–33, 136–37). In contrast, Naipaul’s harshest words are directed at a group of Hindu pilgrims from Delhi: “They hawked loudly and spat with noisy repeated relish everywhere, but more especially on the water lilies, plants which had been introduced to Kashmir from England by the maharaja and were without the religious association of the lotus” (Naipaul, Area, 156–57). Thomas R. Metcalf and Barbara D. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4–6.

4 . FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

269

71. Vasudha Dalmia and Munis D. Faruqui, Religious Interaction in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 72. The Muslim destruction of Vijayanagar was described as a “jihad” in some mainstream histories until around 1990. See, for instance, the account provided in Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 139. 73. See also Naipaul’s problematic statements about Muslim rule in India in a late essay, “The Writer and India,” in Reading and Writing, 48–49. Ian Buruma’s criticisms of Naipaul are pertinent. See Ian Buruma, “V. S. Naipaul, Poet of the Displaced,” New York Review of Books, August 13, 2018. 74. Tarun Tejpal, “Christianity Did Not Damage India Like Islam: Tarun Tejpal Interviews V. S. Naipaul,” Outlook, November 15, 1999, https://www .outlookindia.com/magazine/story/christianity-didnt-damage-india-like -islam/208406. 75. Farrukh Dhondy, “V. S. Naipaul: The Man and His Mission,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 5, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 181–200, 183. 76. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Master of Antipathies,” Indian Express, November 9, 2012. 77. Mehta, “Master of Antipathies.” 78. Mehta, “Master of Antipathies.” 79. Dhondy, “V. S. Naipaul,” 186. 80. Naipaul, Wounded, 61 81. Naipaul, Mutinies, 119. 82. V. S. Naipaul, “Michael X and the Black Power Killings of Trinidad,” in The Return of Eva Perón: with The Killings in Trinidad [hereafter Return] (London: Deutsch, 1980). Among the other nonfiction pieces reprinted in this collection are “A New King for the Congo” and “The Return of Eva Perón,” which explore the legacy of two populist leaders, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo and Juan Perón in Argentina. 83. Naipaul, Return, 30. 84. Naipaul, Return, 23. 85. “Raleigh, Miranda and Lebrun all correspond to the recurring type of the revolutionary maker of mischief, who then moves on, leaving others to face the consequences of his actions” (Hayward, The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul, 90). Naipaul returns to this figure in his later nonfiction, including Dipanjan, the brilliant physicist in Calcutta who joins the Naxalite movement (Mutinies, 316–324), and Shahbaz, the sensitive young Pakistani man who rejects his elite cosmopolitan past and travels to become a revolutionary in Baluchistan (Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, 274–89). 86. Naipaul, “Power?” in Barracoon, 269. 87. V. S. Naipaul, “A Second Visit,” in Barracoon, 104. 88. See Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959).

270

4. FA N TA S Y A ND DER A NGEMEN T

89. See Benedict Anderson’s discussion of mid-nineteenth-century Javanese court elites such as Ronggawarsita, who, unable to grasp this idea, referred to the arrival of the Dutch as heralding Kalyug, a Javanese word derived from the Sanskrit denoting “a time of darkness.” Benedict Anderson, “A Time of Darkness and a Time of Light” (1979), in The Specter of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998). 90. Naipaul, “A Second Visit,” 104. 91. Naipaul, “A Second Visit,” 104. 92. Shortly after An Area of Darkness was published, a writer at the Illustrated Weekly of India asserted that Naipaul “was speaking out of a real concern. . . . The severe strictures were valid, for it is time we, in this country, stirred ourselves from the moral complacency of assumed righteousness and looked into the mirror” (quoted in French, Biography, 232). 93. Naipaul, Barracoon, 101. 94. V. S. Naipaul, A Congo Diary (Los Angeles: Sylvester and Orphanos, 1980), 14. 95. Naipaul, A Congo Diary, 15.

5. AMBIGUOUS FREEDOM 1. The fight was between the old princely state, ruled over by the king of Buganda, and the newly independent nation’s elected leaders, to whom it resisted submitting. “Constitution-mongering could never bridge the gulf between Buganda’s royalist separatism and the determination of other Ugandans that their own localities should, by emulating Buganda’s progress, forestall any new sub-imperialism.” John Lonsdale, “East Africa,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 542. 2. Quoted in Karl Maier, This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000), 59. Maier adds: “As cynical as his words might have sounded, Babangida spoke a truth that many Nigerian intellectuals have been loathe to admit: The general populace and sometimes even the most strident pro-democracy activists repeatedly applauded soldiers who overthrew governments they did not support. It happened in 1966 with the January Boys coup, in 1975 with the overthrow of Gowon’s military regime, and in 1983 with the ouster of Shagari’s elected administration. The pattern was to repeat itself in 1985 when Babangida himself came to power and again in 1993 when Abacha, the man reviled as Nigeria’s worst dictator, assumed control.” 3. John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and Forgotten Genocide (New York: Knopf, 2013).

5. A MBIGUOUS F REEDOM

271

4. “The People in Bengal Are Being Killed by Chinese and American Weapons,” in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1997), 15. See also Bass, The Blood Telegram, 67–68. 5. “Cyprian [Ekwensi] said they had sought me out so that, when I saw the name Biafra in a newspaper, I might think of them as people. . . . The blacks here [in the United States] (that is the correct word here) are very hostile to Biafra; they have got it slightly wrong, of course; they see Nigeria as the free black country and Biafra as the ‘strife.’ . . . It was especially painful for me because 14 years ago I use to run into Cyprian a lot in the BBC; in those days he used to carry a novel in a briefcase and had no other problem than that of finding a title and a publisher.” V. S. Naipaul, Letter to Patricia Ann Hale, quoted in French, Biography, 276. 6. Jussawalla, Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, 36. 7. V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State (New York: Vintage, 1971), 1–2. 8. Bruce King, V. S. Naipaul (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 88. 9. V. S. Naipaul, “In a Free State” [hereafter “Free”], in In a Free State, 99. The king is based on the ruler of Buganda, referred to at the start of this chapter. 10. Naipaul, “Free,” 229. 11. Naipaul, “Free,” 104. 12. Naipaul, “Free,” 100. 13. Naipaul’s critical view was not untypical for writers of his generation. Chinua Achebe recalls a Nigerian elite “mov[ing] into homes in the former British quarters previously occupied by members of the European senior civil service. These homes often came with servants—chauffeurs, maids, cooks, gardeners, stewards—whom the British had organized meticulously to ‘ease their colonial sojourn.’ Now, following the departure of the Europeans, many domestic staff stayed in the same positions and were only too grateful to continue their designated salaried roles in post-independence Nigeria. Their masters were no longer European but their own brothers and sisters.” Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2003), 49. 14. Naipaul, “Free,” 100. 15. Naipaul, “Free,” 100. 16. “Naipaul is the “master of the difficult art of making you laugh and then feel shame at your laughter.” Nadine Gordimer, “Review: In a Free State,” New York Times Book Review, October, 17, 1971. 17. D. W. Harding, “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen,” Scrutiny, March 1940. 18. For Naipaul’s response to the rise of anti-immigrant feeling, see French, Biography, 276. 19. Naipaul, “Free,” 117. 20. Naipaul, “Free,” 109.

272

5. A MBIGUOUS F REEDOM

21. Naipaul, “Free,” 110. 22. “With both Bobby and Linda, there is no sense, as is the case in Naipaul’s earlier fiction, that a degree of self-understanding is a valuable tool in withstanding social and cultural contradictions.” Stuart Murray, “Naipaul in the 1970s: Authorial Preferences and the Symptomatic Reading of Place,” South Asian Review 26, no. 1 (2005): 65. This is true, but I would argue that the violent back-and-forth and the biting humor are a new form of reflection, shifting the burden of judgment away from characters and situating it in narrative rhythm and structure. The characters in all the stories of In a Free State (“One Out of Many” and “Tell Me Who to Kill,” along with the title story) serve primarily as filters through which broader forms of psychological and social complexity are explored, even if they are not themselves privy to insights or epiphanies. 23. Naipaul, “Free,” 163. 24. Naipaul, “Free,” 164. 25. Naipaul, “Free,” 123. 26. Naipaul, “Free,” 156. 27. Naipaul, “Free,” 100. 28. Naipaul, “Free,” 101. 29. Naipaul, “Free,” 144. 30. Naipaul, “Free,” 144. 31. Naipaul, “Free,” 145. 32. Naipaul, “Free,” 145. 33. Naipaul, “Free,” 184. 34. Naipaul, “Free,” 182. 35. Naipaul, “Free,” 235. 36. Naipaul, “Free,” 235. This point is emphasized: “They were entering the territory of the king’s people; and the highway here followed the ancient forest road. For centuries, using only the products of the forest, earth, reeds, the king’s people had built their roads as straight as this, over hills, across swamps” (Naipaul, “Free,” 228). 37. V. S. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” in Literary Occasions: Essays (New York: Vintage, 2003), 52.

6. TRUTH AND LIE 1. V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River [hereafter Bend] (New York: Vintage, 1979). 2. The main story of Bend is set in the Belgian Congo. Among the most traumatic events alluded to in the novel are the 1960 Congo army mutiny (Naipaul, Bend, 78) and tensions surrounding the European-instigated secession of the copper-rich region of Katanga at the time of Congo’s independence. The novel also records events from 1963, on the eve of Zanzibar’s

6. T RU T H A ND L IE

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

273

independence, a British colony, shortly before the massacre of local Arabs. This massacre was the result of competing nationalisms, manifested in a power struggle between an old local “creolized” Arab political elite and black African nationalists (Naipaul, Bend, 29, 31). There are also fleeting references to civil unrest elsewhere, including the events leading to the 1971 coup in Uganda that brought Colonel Idi Amin to power (Naipaul, Bend, 114). These precise historical references make clear that the novel is set during the period 1960–1973. Naipaul, Bend, 16. Naipaul, Bend, 1. Naipaul, Bend, 15. Naipaul, Bend, 12. Said defined “Orientalism as a Western style [of representation] for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 3. “The Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact. The principal product of this exteriority is of course representation” (Said, Orientalism, 21). The same point is made in Edward Said, Orientalism, 6. Naipaul, Bend, 16–17. Naipaul, Bend, 11. Naipaul, Bend, 13. Salim’s strategy can be regarded as an example of the “highly sophisticated ironizing of imperial mythmaking” at work in Bend, rather than an apology for European imperialism. Sara Suleri, “Naipaul’s Arrival,” in The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 154. In this way, A Bend in the River revalues for the postcolonial age a central theme of Joseph Conrad’s classic novella Heart of Darkness (1899). Naipaul, Bend, 16 This received view of Salim is echoed by Ifemelu, the heroine of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah (New York: Anchor, 2014), 233–34. The phrase “ideological whiteness” is Sara Suleri’s. See Suleri, “Naipaul’s Arrival,” 154. Naipaul, Bend, 48. Naipaul, Bend, 103. Naipaul, Bend, 103. Naipaul, Bend, 101. The Americans, fighting a war in Southeast Asia, have “used up more copper in the last two years than the world has in the last two centuries,” notes a minor character in a passing reference to the Vietnam War. Copper is an

2 74

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

6. T RU T H A ND L IE

important source of revenue for the country: it is during the boom in copper prices, which takes place after the second rebellion, that many of the president’s prestigious projects, including the construction of the Domain, are undertaken (Naipaul, Bend, 93). When the copper boom ends and the restive forces emerge, the president is forced to take up populist measures to retain control of the country. Naipaul, Bend, 123. Naipaul, Bend, 120. Naipaul, Bend, 121. Naipaul, Bend, 101. Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014). This section of Bend recalls Frantz Fanon’s criticisms of the national bourgeoisie in his essay “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 97–145. Naipaul, Bend, 128–29. Naipaul, Bend, 128. Naipaul, Bend, 129. Naipaul, Bend, 125. Naipaul, Bend, 128. Naipaul, Bend, 219. Although the Big Man is modeled on Mobutu Sese Seko, Naipaul deliberately downplays the stories of outrageous corruption that bedeviled Mobutu’s reign, as described in Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo (New York: Harper, 2002). Naipaul was aware of these stories—in A Congo Diary, he wrote, “Mobutu owns the Congo”—but the Big Man is not cast exclusively in this light. This suggests that Naipaul was attempting to capture a complex portrait of a postcolonial society confronted by the challenge of historical transition. Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” in Aesthetics and Politics (New York: Verso, 2007), 22. Naipaul, Bend, 272. Naipaul, Bend, 278. V. S. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness,” in The Return of Eva Perón with The Killings in Trinidad (New York: Vintage 1981), 233. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” 169. An importance transitional work is “The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,” Naipaul’s account of his visit to the Ivory Coast, which was published in Finding the Centre (1984). The final two chapters of this travelogue are marked by greater sympathy for an unfamiliar perspective than is apparent in the earlier chapters. As a consequence of his conversation with Georges

7. P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

275

Niangoran-Bouah, Naipaul revises his valuation of the tension he discerns between the “two worlds” of the society—between the (nighttime) world in which the spirits rule and the (daytime) world of “doing and development.” V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre (New York: Vintage, 1984), 137, 147.

7. PRODUCTIVE DEFORMATION 1. V. S. Naipaul, “Prologue to an Autobiography,” in Finding the Centre (New York: Vintage, 1984); “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” in Return of Eva Perón: with The Killings in Trinidad (New York: Vintage, 1974), 221–45. 2. Naipaul, Centre, 15. 3. Naipaul, Centre, 21–22. 4. Naipaul, Centre, 23. 5. Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (New York: Vintage, 2008), xiii. In his review of A Bend in the River, the critic Irving Howe described how the “astringent” Naipaul “since 1961” had deliberately made himself into “hardly even a ‘likable’ writer, for he no longer performs and barely troubles to please.” Concluding his review on a note of emotional exhaustion, Howe respectfully expressed his concern that Naipaul was inflicting on readers more reality than they could bear. “Perhaps we ought to be grateful that in his austere and brilliant way he holds fast to the bitterness before his eyes.” Irving Howe, “A Dark Vision,” New York Times, May 13, 1979. Howe’s remark makes one wonder if Naipaul began losing readers because he had, with the 1979 publication of his masterpiece Bend, become too “astringent” for his own good. Long after he moved on from this “dark vision,” Naipaul never managed to completely shed the reputation he had gained in the 1970s. 6. Naipaul, Centre, 22. 7. Naipaul, Centre, 38. 8. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Viking, 1987), 5. 9. Naipaul, Enigma, 15. 10. Naipaul, Enigma, 6 (emphasis added). 11. Naipaul, Enigma, 7. 12. Naipaul, Enigma, 5 (emphasis added). 13. Naipaul, Enigma, 7 (emphasis added). 14. Naipaul alludes to Proust when he speaks of “two ways to the cottage” (Naipaul, Enigma, 8) and the different possibilities symbolized by each path, as well Naipaul’s discovery that they are connected. See also Charles Michener, “The Dark Visions of V. S. Naipaul,” in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), 65. 15. Naipaul, Enigma, 8.

2 76

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

7. P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

Naipaul, Enigma, 191. Naipaul, Enigma, 15. Naipaul, Enigma, 187, 193. For a discussion of the manner in which Naipaul connects movements of laborers past and present, see Peter Hughes, V. S Naipaul (London: Routledge, 2014), 95–96. Naipaul, Enigma, 251. Gillian Dooley notes that “although Naipaul does his best to dispense with the mechanics of plot in Enigma, by blurring time and thus causing uncertainty in the logic of cause and effect that is basic to plotting, but he cannot avoid the emergence of plots from his narrative, the story of Brenda and Les, for example, becomes a small plot in the reader’s mind.” Gillian Dooley, V. S. Naipaul: Man and Writer (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 137. Brenda’s background does indeed come into view in a more conventionally novelistic, and sentimental, manner than does that of Jack or, indeed, Naipaul’s landlord. Here Naipaul deploys the realist style to great effect, obliquely recalling the hapless Biswas’s effort in colonial Trinidad to assert himself before powerful forces. Jack has planted a hedge to act as a barrier against the encroaching activity of large industrial farms that have appeared in the valley: “I noticed [Jack’s] hedge first of all. It was well clipped, tight in the middle, but ragged in places at ground level. I felt, from the clipping, that the gardener would have liked that hedge to be tight all over, to be as complete as a wall of brick or timber or some kind of man-fashioned material” (Naipaul, Enigma, 16–17). Naipaul, Enigma, 15. Naipaul, Enigma, 47. See the interesting discussion in Shirley Chew, “(Post)colonial Translations in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival,” World Literature Written in English 37, no. 1/2 (1998): 118–34, 130–31. Naipaul, Enigma, 203. Naipaul, Enigma, 222. Naipaul, Enigma, 224. Naipaul, Enigma, 224. Naipaul, Enigma, 225. Naipaul, Enigma, 225. Naipaul, Enigma, 225. Naipaul, Enigma, 226. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chap. 26. Naipaul, Enigma, 225 (emphasis added). Naipaul, Enigma, 169. Naipaul, Enigma, 225. Naipaul, Enigma, 28. Naipaul, Enigma, 28.

7. P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

277

39. In a review of Enigma, Derek Walcott criticizes Naipaul for romanticizing the English countryside at the expense of his birthplace, Trinidad. As I have argued, this assessment misses much of the ambivalent descriptions in Enigma. Walcott’s view has been echoed by other hasty readers, including Pascale Casanova. Equating realist form with political reaction, Casanova declares, “Naipaul’s deliberate quest for Englishness—rewarded in the end by a knighthood—naturally disinclined him to innovate with regard to literary form or style.” Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 212. See also Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 164–89. 40. Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 167. 41. “Virtually without notice, in the dreams and nightmares of the so-called ‘double revolution’, Europe plunges into modernity, but without possessing a culture of modernity. If youth, therefore, achieves its symbolic centrality, and the ‘great narrative’ of the Bildungsroman comes into being, this is because Europe has to attach a meaning not so much to youth, as to modernity.” Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 2000), 5. 42. Gregory Castle, Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 3. 43. I am alluding here to dependency theory. Nonetheless, the distinction between the forms of cultural consciousness and self-reflection in the core and the periphery should not be turned into an ontological divide (not least at a time when the line between core and periphery has been complicated by the ascendancy of non-European powers); it serves rather as a heuristic that enables us to delineate this peripheral writer’s concerns. 44. Naipaul, Enigma, 146. 45. I am drawing on Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” trans. Edmund Leites and the author, in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992). 46. Naipaul, Enigma, 143. 47. Naipaul, Enigma, 143. 48. Naipaul, Enigma, 131. 49. Naipaul, Enigma, 131. 50. Naipaul, Enigma, 146. 51. Naipaul, Enigma, 147. 52. Naipaul writes, “My travel was not like that [of Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, or Evelyn Waugh]. I was a colonial traveling in New World plantation colonies which were like the one I had grown up in. To look, as a

2 78

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

7. P R ODUC T I V E DEFORM AT ION

visitor, at other semiderelict communities in despoiled land, in the great romantic setting of the New World, was to see, as from a distance, what one’s own community might have looked like. It was to be taken out of oneself and one’s immediate circumstances—the material of fiction— and to have a new vision of what one had been born into, and to have an intimation of a sequence of historical events going far back.” V. S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), 30. Naipaul, Enigma, 169–70. Returning to Trinidad in 1961, Naipaul finds an island “full of racial tensions and close to revolution.” He reveals his fears as an ethnic minority, claiming that the “rawness of nerves among black people had become like communal festering” (Naipaul, Enigma, 159). Naipaul, Enigma, 126. Naipaul, Enigma, 141. Naipaul, Enigma, 178. Naipaul, Enigma, 147. Naipaul, Enigma, 124. Naipaul, Enigma, 159. Naipaul contrasts these movements for “separateness” to the refusal of a black man in 1950 to be berthed in the same cabin as Naipaul as a way of expressing his solidarity with the ideals of the latter group of black men (159). It might be said, however, that the contrast Naipaul sets up is unhistorical. Naipaul, Enigma, 159. Naipaul, Enigma, 159. Naipaul, Enigma, 124. Naipaul, Enigma, 124. Naipaul, Enigma, 124. Naipaul, Enigma, 125. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Brent Hayes Edwards (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles L. Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 91. Quoted in David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2000), 165. Naipaul, Enigma, 159. Naipaul, Enigma, 159. Naipaul, Enigma, 161. Naipaul, Enigma, 161. Naipaul, Enigma, 162. Naipaul, Enigma, 173. Naipaul, Enigma, 173. Naipaul, Enigma, 114.

8. L A ND S C A P E S OF T HE MIND

279

78. Naipaul, Enigma, 112. Note the deceptively lighthearted account of this episode in the eighteen-year-old Naipaul’s letter home, September 15, 1950, in which he affects indifference as to how his actions will be perceived. “I dumped the roti (wrapped in paper) in the waste basket and ate the chicken and a banana and drank ice-cold water. What the maid said on the following day when she emptied the basket, I don’t know, nor do I particularly care to.” V. S. Naipaul, Between Father and Son (New York: Random House, 1999), 13. The teenage Naipaul nervously displaces this stereotype of himself—his self-directed prejudice—onto the lowly hotel maid who occupies this position in the scene. 79. Naipaul, Enigma, 244. 80. Naipaul, Enigma, 245. 81. Naipaul, Enigma, 244–45. 82. Naipaul, Enigma, 244.

8. LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND 1. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Viking, 1987), 353. 2. Naipaul, Enigma, 154. 3. V. S. Naipaul, “Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture),” in Literary Occasions: Essays (New York: Vintage, 2003), 194. 4. V. S. Naipaul, “The Long Way Round,” Guardian, March 10, 2007. 5. V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now [hereafter Mutinies] (New York: Viking, 1990), 202. 6. Akeel Bilgrami, “Cry, the Beloved Subcontinent: Naipaul Fiddles While India Burns,” New Republic, June 10, 1991, 30. 7. Heteroglossia means “literally a ‘mixture of tongues,’ [a term the literary theorist Mikhail] Bakhtin invoked to account for the social diversity of speech types that he discovered in the novel.” Lynn Pearce, “Bakhtin and the Dialogic Principle,” in Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Patricia Waugh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 229. 8. Naipaul, Mutinies, 41. 9. Naipaul, Mutinies, 41. 10. Naipaul, Mutinies, 41. 11. Naipaul, Mutinies, 95. 12. Naipaul, Mutinies, 115. 13. Naipaul, Mutinies, 118. 14. Naipaul, Mutinies, 180. 15. Naipaul, Mutinies, 158. 16. Naipaul, Mutinies, 9. 17. Naipaul, Mutinies, 5–6. 18. Naipaul, Mutinies, 6.

280

8. L A ND S C A P E S OF T HE MIND

19. Naipaul, Mutinies, 6. 20. Naipaul, Mutinies, 143. 21. Naipaul, Mutinies, 41. “The old Hindu Sanskrit learning—which a late 18th century scholar-administrator like Sir William Jones had seen as archaic and profound as the Greek, and had sought, in a kind of romantic, living archaeology, to dig up from secretive, caste-bound brahmins in the North—that old learning had, 200 years later, in the most roundabout way, seeded the new” (152). 22. V. S. Naipaul, “Christianity Didn’t Damage India Like Islam,” Outlook India, March 4, 1999. 23. Naipaul, Mutinies, 15. 24. Naipaul, Mutinies, 15. 25. Naipaul, Mutinies, 23. 26. Naipaul, Mutinies, 60. 27. Naipaul, Mutinies, 45. 28. Naipaul, Mutinies, 45. 29. Naipaul, Mutinies, 17. 30. Naipaul, Mutinies, 17, 20. 31. Naipaul, Mutinies, 25. 32. Naipaul, Mutinies, 25. 33. Naipaul, Mutinies, 17. 34. Naipaul, Mutinies, 119. 35. Naipaul, Mutinies, 115–16. 36. Naipaul, Mutinies, 118. 37. Naipaul, Mutinies, 118. 38. Naipaul, Mutinies, 31. 39. Bilgrami, “Cry, the Beloved Subcontinent,” 31. 40. Naipaul, Mutinies, 395. 41. Naipaul, Mutinies, 58. 42. Naipaul, Mutinies, 59. 43. Naipaul, Mutinies, 59. 44. Naipaul, Mutinies, 420. 45. Naipaul, Mutinies, 6. 46. Naipaul, Mutinies, 423. 47. Naipaul, Mutinies, 193. 48. Naipaul, Mutinies, 187. 49. Naipaul’s analysis of the British partly echoes that of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London: Macmillan, 1951), 415–21. However, Naipaul does not share Chaudhuri’s pessimistic assessment about the “barbarous” tendencies Chaudhuri thought likely to overwhelm postcolonial Indian democracy. 50. Naipaul, Mutinies, 395. 51. Naipaul, Mutinies, 395.

9. C ON V ER S AT ION S W I T H T HE FA I T HF UL

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

281

Naipaul, Mutinies, 395. Naipaul, Mutinies, 395. Naipaul, Mutinies, 395. Naipaul, Mutinies, 398. Naipaul, Mutinies, 399. Naipaul, Mutinies, 403. Naipaul, Mutinies, 445. Naipaul, Mutinies, 495. Naipaul, Mutinies, 508–509. Naipaul, Mutinies, 516. Naipaul, Mutinies, 516. Naipaul, Mutinies, 517. Naipaul, Mutinies, 517. Naipaul, Mutinies, 518. Naipaul, Mutinies, 518. Naipaul, Mutinies, 518.

9. CONVERSATIONS WITH THE FAITHFUL 1. V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey [hereafter Believers] (London: Deutsch, 1981); Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples [hereafter Beyond] (New York: Vintage, 1998). 2. Naipaul, Believers, 274. 3. Naipaul, Believers, 274. 4. Naipaul, Believers, 275. 5. Naipaul, Believers, 228. 6. V. S. Naipaul, “Reading and Writing,” in Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), 11–13. 7. V. S. Naipaul, “London,” Times Literary Supplement, August 15 1958. Growing up in Chaguanas, Trinidad, Naipaul says, knowledge about his past “wasn’t there.” V. S. Naipaul, “Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture),” in Literary Occasions: Essays (New York: Vintage, 2003), 186. 8. Naipaul, Believers, 274. 9. “In the city we were in a kind of limbo. There were few Indians there, and no one like us on the street. Though everything was very close, and houses were open to every kind of noise, and no one could really be private in his yard, we continued to live in our old enclosed way, mentally separate from the more colonial, more racially mixed life around us” (Naipaul, “Reading and Writing,” 14). 10. Naipaul, Believers, 252. 11. Edward W. Said, “Among the Believers,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 113.

282

9. C ON V ER S AT ION S W I T H T HE FA I T HF UL

12. Naipaul, Believers, 241. Shafi told Naipaul earlier that in his village near Kota Baru, Malaysia, “intellectual pursuits were nothing.” Very few young people went out of the village for higher education., and those who did were expected to take up religious education (224). 13. Naipaul, Beyond, xi. 14. See the thoughtful assessments by Hanif Kureishi, “Travelling to Find Out,” London Review of Books, August 30, 2018; and Anjum Altaf, “Hanif Kureishi, Naipaul and Pakistan,” Express Tribune, October 19, 2018. 15. Naipaul, Believers, 134–35. 16. Naipaul, Believers, 135. 17. Naipaul, Believers, 161. 18. Naipaul, Believers, 157. 19. Ian Buruma, “In the Empire of Islam,” New York Review of Books, July 16, 1998. 20. Naipaul, Beyond, 323, 326. 21. Naipaul, Believers, 326. 22. Naipaul, Beyond, 33. 23. Naipaul, Beyond, 157. 24. Naipaul, Beyond, 48. 25. Naipaul, Beyond, 343. 26. Naipaul, Beyond, 17. 27. Naipaul, Beyond, 17. 28. Naipaul, Believers, 241; Beyond, 48. 29. Naipaul, Beyond, 48. 30. Naipaul, Beyond, 48. 31. Naipaul, Beyond, 73. 32. Naipaul, Believers, 284–85. 33. Naipaul, Beyond, 28. 34. Naipaul, Beyond, 29. 35. Naipaul, Beyond, 29. 36. Naipaul, Beyond, 40. 37. Naipaul, Beyond, 25. 38. Naipaul, Beyond, 25. 39. Naipaul, Beyond, xii–xiii. 40. Naipaul, Beyond, xii, 129. 41. Toward the end of Beyond Belief, a Malay CEO named Nasar purports to explain the mystery of Shafi’s disappearance by telling Naipaul that Shafi had failed as a businessman and consequently began to speak in utopian terms about Islam. He had isolated himself from his more successful fellow activists like Nasar, who had gone on to become directors of big corporations. Nasar adds: “In those days we talked about Islam theoretically. [Today, in the 1990s,] we are talking about Islam as a way of life in practice. Now I confront the real world . . . That is the test. The test for a Muslim

10. C ONCLUDING REF L EC T ION S

283

is when they are confronted with reality and a choice to make. Until then they are always right. Utopian” (Naipaul, Beyond 367–68). For a historical discussion of the Malaysian state’s co-optation of elite Islamist students as business leaders in the years leading up to the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, see Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, trans. Anthony F. Roberts (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 88–95.

10. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS 1. Desmond Tutu’s speech can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =mfH8rQoAnRg. 2. V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre (New York: Vintage, 1984), 87. 3. Naipaul, Enigma, 143. 4. V. S. Naipaul, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (New York: Vintage, 1998), xi. 5. V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (London: Deutsch, 1981), 163. 6. Naipaul, Believers, 163. 7. Naipaul, Believers, 167. 8. But see the connections briefly alluded to in the foreword to The Loss of El Dorado (London: Deutsch, 1969). 9. Naipaul, Beyond, xiii. 10. V. S. Naipaul, The Masque of Africa [hereafter Masque] (New York: Knopf, 2010), 95. 11. Naipaul, Beyond, 55. 12. Naipaul, Masque, 117. 13. Naipaul, Masque, 117. 14. Naipaul, Masque, 90. 15. This is how Naipaul characterized Narayan’s evocation of small-town southern India in his novels: “Even the independence movement, in the heated 1930s and 1940s, was far away, and the British presence was marked mainly by the names of buildings and places. This was an India that appeared to mock the vainglorious and went on its own way.” V. S. Naipaul, “The Writer in India,” in Reading and Writing, 52. 16. U. R. Ananthamurthy, Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man, trans. A. K. Ramanujan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 17. Rhonda Cobham-Sander, I and I: Epitaphs for the Self in the Works of V. S. Naipaul, Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2016), 23. See also James Wood, “Half a Life,” New Republic, November 5, 2001. 18. V. S. Naipaul, Half a Life [hereafter Half] (New York: Knopf, 2001), 28. 19. Naipaul, Half, 29.

284

10. C ONCLUDING REF L EC T ION S

20. As Michael Gorra has noted, there are echoes of the father-son relationship in A House for Mr Biswas. Michael Gorra, “Postcolonial Studies,” New York Times Book Review, October 28, 2001. 21. Naipaul, Half, 53. 22. V. S. Naipaul, A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (New York: Knopf, 2007), 52 (emphasis added). 23. Roberto Schwarz, “A Brazilian Breakthrough,” New Left Review 36 (November–December 2005), https://newleftreview.org/issues/II36/articles /roberto-schwarz-a-brazilian-breakthrough. 24. Bridget Brereton, “Naipaul’s Sense of History,” in Created in the West Indies, ed. Jennifer Rahim and Barbara Lalla (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2010), 211. 25. Brereton, “Naipaul’s Sense of History,” 208. 26. Naipaul, Half, 56. 27. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980), 14. 28. Naipaul, Half, 57. 29. Naipaul, Half, 74–75. 30. Naipaul, Half, 155. 31. Naipaul, Half, 155. See James Wood’s observation that Willie frees himself from the cruel hierarchies of caste in India only to “reinsert himself into a world of frozen race and class distinctions” in Mozambique. James Wood, “Half a Life,” New Republic, 34. 32. Naipaul, Half, 155. 33. Alok Rai, “Not Much Magic,” Hindu, October 24, 2004. Rai, however, misses the ironic tone of the novel when he criticizes its “hunger for [a] transcendence [that] takes the form of a certain mysticism of violence.” It is difficult to see how Naipaul could “espouse a rhetoric of voluntarist transcendence” when all the revolutionaries in the novel are depicted as moral and physical grotesques. 34. V. S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds [hereafter Magic] (New York: Knopf, 2004), 120. 35. Naipaul, Magic, 112. 36. Naipaul, Magic, 41. 37. Naipaul, Magic, 95. 38. Naipaul, Magic, 42. 39. Naipaul, Magic, 43. 40. Naipaul, Magic, 43. 41. Naipaul, Magic, 225. 42. [Jean Rhys] is really the pioneer. She came over here at the turn of the century. She was from the West Indies, very high principles as a writer. She wouldn’t falsify her experiences. . . . [But] she’ll never feed a culture or alter sensibility, and I think if you’re a writer these are the things you want to do.” BBC Radio 3 interview, January, 29, 1973, 20:45–21:25. (Naipaul Archive, University of Tulsa, 3:6)

INDEX

academic gowns, 238 accommodation, 231 Achebe, Chinua, 124, 271n13 Ackerley, J. R., 81 action: police, 132; self-deception and, 264n1; social, 106 Adventures of Gurudeva, The (Naipaul, S.), 60Adorno, Theodor, 254n92 aesthetically informed ideologies, 174 African belief, 232 agency: fantasy of, 40; historical, 15, 100; marginalized people asserting, 117; postcolonial politics overwhelming, 148; postcolonial scholarship and, 177; in postcolonial society, 147; representation and, 141; universalization of, 147 alienation, 167; human association and, 197; V. S. Naipaul Trinidad trip and, 77; postcolonial criticism and, 173 alien norms, colonial rule and, 168 alien self-consciousness, 141 Ambedkar, B. R., 114, 190, 198 Amerindians, 93–95, 106, 109 Amin, Idi, 123 Among the Believers (Naipaul, V. S.), 161, 208, 216, 219, 225 Ananthamurthy, U. R., 234, 264n52 Anderson, Benedict, 270n89 anti-apartheid movement, 227

anticolonialism, 22, 73, 75, 131, 145, 233; V. S. Naipaul skepticism towards, 5 anticolonial nationalism, 55, 56, 200 anti-elitism, 130 anti-Indian politics, 29 Anwar, Dewi Fortuna, 216, 230, 232 apartheid, 227 archaism, 106–7 Area of Darkness, An (Naipaul, V. S.), 32, 81–88, 112, 115, 197, 200 Arwacas Indians, 94 ascetic self-sacrifice, 234 assassinations, 132 assimilation, 167 Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI), 221 Athill, Diana, 163, 261n10 Auerbach, Erich, 63 Austen, Jane, 129 authoritarianism, 147 autobiographical essays, 162 autobiographical impulses, 14 autobiography, realism and, 165 Babangida (General), 124 Babri Masjid, 111 Baez, Joan, 151, 153 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 279n7 Baugh, Edward, 253n72

286

BBC Caribbean Services, 5 BBC freelancers’ room, 163 Belgium, 74, 144 Bend in the River, A (Naipaul, V. S.), 17, 32, 89, 139–57, 161, 189, 236, 239, 242, 272n2 Berrio, Antonio de, 94, 96, 119 Best, Lloyd, 58 Beyond a Boundary (James), 73 Beyond Belief (Naipaul, V. S.), 33, 205, 208, 282n41; friends in, 216; fundamentalism explored in, 219; as historical interpretation, 183; human connection in, 231–33; Malaysia section of, 225 Bhave, Vinoba, 267n56 Biafra, 124, 271n5 Big Man, 274n32 Bildungsroman, 165, 173 Bilgrami, Akeel, 199 Birbalsingh, Frank, 258n6 Black Jacobins, The (James), 74 black power, 117–19, 181, 183 blacks: equality demanded by, 179; political rhetoric in Trinidad and, 6–8, 28; population in Trinidad, 248n18 Blair, Tony, 253n72 blankness, 236, 237 “Bogart” (Naipaul, V. S.), 39–41, 47, 48, 162 Boehmer, Elleke, 248n10, 253n84 Bolo (fictional character), 45–47 Brereton, Bridget, 251n49, 284n26 British Guiana, 49 British Library, 237 browns, 110; equality demanded by, 179; political rhetoric in Trinidad and, 7–8; population in Trinidad, 248n18 brutality, V. S. Naipaul on, 78; in colonial rule, 97; by Uganda military rule, 123 Buganda, 123, 270n2; royalist separatism, 270n1 Burnham, Forbes, 79 Burns, Alan, 78 Butler, Tubal Uriah, “Buzz,” 21, 24 Calderon, Luisa, 97, 99, 102, 103 Camus, Albert, 85, 88 Capildeos, 4 capital: accumulation of, 171; intelligence as, 118 capitalism, 22, 63; concept-metaphors of, 173; globalizing forms of, 26; historical transition to, 150, 173; transition to, 150

INDE X

Caribbean Voices (BBC program), 6 Carter, Martin, 250n34, 258n13 Casanova, Pascale, 277n39 caste identity, 191 caste system, 50, 66, 86, 105, 191, 192, 202, 234–35 Castle, Gregory, 173 cause and effect logic, 276n20 “Caution” (Naipaul, V. S.), 45–47 Central Africa, 139, 140 Chachnama, 217 Chaguanes Indians, 102, 237 Chaudhuri, Nirad C., 280n49 chauvinism: ethnocentric, 76; Hindu, 79, 109, 110; Shiv Sena and, 207 Chotiner, Isaac, 247n5 civic association and consensus, 53 civic ideals, institutions and, 75 civility, 53; cricket and, 73 civil wars, 155 Cobham-Sander, Rhonda, 2–3, 234 code-switching, 133 Cold War: disinformation in, 46; geopolitics of, 124 collective arrival, 125 collective fantasy, 93 collective order, 66–67 collectivity, 48 colonial culture, 101 colonial history, colonized people in, 23 colonialism, 1; caste-like hierarchies after, 105; deranging effects of, 132; epistemic fractures from, 178; equality and, 203; globalizing forms of, 26; hoaxes of, 146; institutions of, 119; power asymmetries in, 136; progressiveness in, 119; racial hierarchy and, 203; Roy on, 120; self-deception in, 132; Vijayanagar scholarship and, 113 colonial order, plantation economy and, 65 colonial rule: alien norms and, 168; brutality in, 97; deranging legacy of, 132; education and, 210; Hindu nationalism and, 194; ideology and, 120; in India, 120–21, 192; institutions and, 192; majority rule replacing, 140; marginalized groups and, 204; New Learning and, 201; postcolonial society challenges and practices of, 148; recovering from violence of, 227; stamps and, 142

INDE X

colonial societies: stereotypes of, 184; traits of, 53 colonized societies: independence agitation in, 55; modernity deranging, 26; nationalism impact on, 55 color-consciousness, 28 commodities boom, 149, 150, 153 communalism, 177 communal violence, 10 communism: in India, 191; in Indonesia, 124; Malaysia and fight against, 213 Communist Party, in Guyana, 79 community: country to town transition of, 63; cricket and, 73; identity and, 83; national, 200; racial leadership and, 28; Shiv Sena and, 116–17 competing nationalisms, 254n94 composite histories, 187 concept-metaphors of capitalism, 173 Congo, 74, 122, 139, 149 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, 180 connected narratives, 190 Conrad, Joseph, 31, 136, 138, 172 “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine” (Naipaul, V. S.), 156–57, 162–64 contact zones, 93 copper, 273n19 copper boom, 149, 150 counter-culture, 118 Creoles: ethnocentric chauvinism and, 76; indentured immigration, 248n18 cricket, 73 critical reflection, 83, 166, 185 critical self-awareness, 238 critical self-examination, 25 “Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro, The” (Naipaul, V. S.), 233, 274n38 Cudjoe, Selwyn, 253n72 cultural heritage, imperialism and, 142 cultural hybridization, 113 cultural integrity, 209 cultural media, 177 cultural politics, 77 culture: colonial, 101; counter-culture, 118; cricket and, 73; democratic, 73, 192, 233, 236; Hindu, 109; hybridized, 58; of imperialism, 228; Islamic, 230; peripheral societies and, 23; plantation, 59, 60, 105; political, 22, 202; postcolonial, 171, 186; signs of, 196; steel bands and, 77–78; R. Williams on, 23 “Culture Is Ordinary” (Williams, R.), 23

287

culture of modernity, 259n35 culture wars, 17 Dalit Panthers, 191 Dalits, 114, 117, 189, 197, 198, 202 Dalrymple, William, 111–14 decolonization, 16, 182; disorientation from, 8; English society rifts and, 130; as global phenomenon, 123; Islamism and, 183; as moral rebalancing, 75; movement of peoples in, 178; V. S. Naipaul on, 75, 76 Defoe, Daniel, 96 degradation: colonial culture and, 101; V. S. Naipaul on revolting against, 85 demagoguery, mass violence from, 74 democracy: cricket and, 73; ethnic and racial identity appeals in, 57; Shiv Sena rejection of, 116 democratic culture, 73, 192; in India, 233, 236 dependency theory, 277n43 Deutsch, André, 6, 163 development, 63–64; disjunctive temporality and, 168; disorientation from, 150, 168; economic, 221; Enigma presentation of, 178–79; fake, 150; inward, 174, 175; in peripheral spaces, 66; religious orthodoxy and economic, 221; uneven, 150 dharma, 109, 110 Dhasal, Namdeo, 191, 198 Dhondy, Farrukh, 116 dhows, 141, 142 Dietmar, Rothermund, 268n68 disadvantaged groups: historical narrative control and, 100; V. S. Naipaul interests in, 50 disjunctive temporalities, 168 dislocation: formative, 175; psychological, 210 disorientation, 166; from decolonization, 8; development and, 150, 168; disadvantaged people taking control and, 100; fundamentalism and, 212; historical, 93, 95, 168, 176, 178, 227; induction into modernity causing, 168; modernity and, 210; realism and, 95; subjective, 26, 47; working through, 172 displacement, globalization and individual, 125

288

Dooley, Gillian, 276n20 El Dorado: fantasies of, 93–94; legend of, 92–93 double consciousness, 180 double revolution, 277n41 dougla, 53 Du Bois, W. E. B., 180 East Bengal, 124 economic development, religious orthodoxy and, 221 education, 233–34; boycotting Western, 234; colonial rule and, 210; missionary, 238, 239; pesantren, 224; in postcolonial era, 146; progressiveness of colonialism in, 119 Edward Bonaventura (ship), 95–96 Egypt, 125 Ekwensi, Cyprian, 124 Elvira, Trinidad, 55 England: Hindu nationalism and rule by, 194; slave colonies, 97; slavery and, 97–100; societal rifts in decolonization era, 130; Spanish territory revolutions encouraged by, 96–97; Trinidad colonization and, 92, 94–102; Trinidad immigration from, 101 English public-school code, 73 Enigma of Arrival, The (Naipaul, V. S.), 8, 31, 102, 161, 164–89 epistemic fractures, 178 equality, 207; colonialism and, 203; demands for, 179 Esty, Jed, 173 ethnic admixture, fears of, 53 ethnic identity, democracy and appeals to, 57 ethnic politics, 14 ethnic prejudice, 61, 197 ethnic tensions, intracommunal, 61 ethnocentric chauvinism, 76 ethnocentric perspectives, postcolonial society structure and, 177 ethnonationalism, 91 expatriate anxiety, 176 exploited peoples, parallels between, 105 Ezekiel, Nissim, 88, 89 Fanon, Frantz, 180, 258n10 fantasy, 91–92, 106, 188; of agency, 40; collective, 93

INDE X

fascism, 116 feudalism, 173 Finding the Centre (Naipaul, V. S.), 8, 41, 47, 48, 161, 162, 228, 256n9 flogging, 251n42 formative dislocation, 175 Forster, E. M., 81 Fort de France, Martinique, Indian social structures in, 50 Fort George, 43 Foster Morris (fictional character), 21–24 freedom, 125, 127, 129; postcolonial, 229 free trade, 96–98 de Freitas, Michael. See Malik, Michael Abdul, “Michael X” French, Patrick, 19, 247n5, 261n10; access to Naipaul correspondence, 250n29 French Martinique, Indians in, 49, 50 French Revolution, 96 Froude, James Anthony, 80 Furnivall, John S., 258n3 Gandhi, Indira, 116 Gandhi, Mohandas, 11, 87, 234 gardeners, 170–72 Ghosh, Amitav, 3 global comprehension, 162 globalization: capitalism and, 26; individual displacement from, 125 global movements of people, 178 global periphery, 229 global South, 176 Glory Dead (Marshall), 21 gold, 107, 174; El Dorado and, 91–93, 95 Gomes, Albert, 77–78f Gorra, Michael, 252n69, 284n22 Greene, Graham, 21 Grenada, 24–25 ground provisions, 24 group identity, racial separateness and maintaining, 53 Gujeratis, 54 Guyana, 7; coup in, 79; racial politics in, 79 Guyana Quartet (Harris), 74 Habibie, B. J., 220 Haight, Gordon S., 257n40 Hale, Patricia, 5, 7, 28, 55 Half a Life (Naipaul, V. S.), 233–40 Harding, D. W., 129

INDE X

Harris, Wilson, 74 Hayward, Helen, 104 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 136, 172 heteroglossia, 279n7 Hindu chauvinism, 79, 109, 110 Hindu culture, 109 Hindu extremist ideology, 112 Hindu-Muslim antagonism, 50 Hindu nationalism, 111, 114–16, 190, 218; British rule and, 194; Vijayanagar scholarship and, 113 Hindus, caste system among, 50 historical agency, 15, 100 historical blankness, 236, 237 historical consciousness, 222 historical disorientation, 93, 168, 176, 178; postcolonial peoples and, 227; realism and, 95 historical knowledge: V. S. Naipaul and, 38, 42, 51; novels and, 48 historical research, 49 historical retardation, 175 historical scripts, individual choices framed by, 30 historical transition, 121 history: disconnection from social forces of, 64; human progress and, 62; imperial, 102; Muslims and, 217–18; V. S. Naipaul analysis of, 81; political uses of, 80 “Home Again” (Naipaul, V. S.), 27–31 House for Mr Biswas, A (Naipaul, V. S.), 12, 52, 59–70, 74–75, 157, 165, 191, 212, 236 Howe, Irving, 17 human association, 197 human progress, 62 human sacrifice, 111 hybrid collectives, 177 hybridity, 194 hybridization, cultural, 113 hybridized cultures, 58 Ibrahim, Anwar, 209 ICMI. See Association of Muslim Intellectuals identitarianism, 177, 182 identity: caste, 191; community and, 83; democracy and appeals to, 57; national, 148; Pan-Indian, 192, 202; representation and, 142 identity politics, 14

289

ideology: aesthetically informed, 174; colonial rule and, 120; of free trade, 96, 98; Hindu extremist, 112; imperial, 102; V. S. Naipaul criticisms and, 17, 19; nationalist, 55, 147; political leaders and, 119; racial, 120; religious, 161; of separateness, 179; of Shiv Sena, 117 ideology critique, 3, 118 imperial history, 102 imperialism, 102, 120, 131; artificial spaces of, 168; culture of, 228; as custodial project, 142; as modernizing project, 142; racialized contempt and, 80 In a Free State (Naipaul, V. S.), 125–38, 155, 161, 176, 229 indenture, 10–11 indentured immigration, 248n18 indentured laborers, 41 independence: minorities and, 140; political, 176; of Trinidad, 10, 75 independence movements, 140, 176; nationalist ideologies and, 55 India, 240; caste in, 86, 105; colonial rule and, 120–21, 192; communism in, 191; democratic culture in, 233, 236; the Emergency in, 116; hybridity of, 194; independence of, 109; V. S. Naipaul and, 81–82, 84, 86, 89–90, 119; nationalist movement in, 108; physical environment of, 84, 86; political culture in, 202; racial pride in, 262n25; repatriation in, 251n53; social awakening in, 190, 200; urban blight in, 199–200 India: A Million Mutinies Now (Naipaul, V. S.), 33, 114, 189–207, 229 India: A Wounded Civilization (Naipaul, V. S.), 106–17, 188, 197, 234 Indian Administrative Service, 202 Indian Mutiny of 1857, 203, 204 Indians: indentured immigration, 248n18; inward turn of, 106; rituals held on to by, 106–7 individual agency, postcolonial politics and, 148 individual development, in peripheral spaces, 66 individual happiness, 125 individuality, 65, 68 Indonesia, 219, 220, 222–24, 232 industrial revolution, 171

290

In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 168 institutions: civic ideals and, 75; of colonialism, 119; colonial powers reshaping, 168; colonial rule and, 192; Islamic fundamentalism and, 208; plantation economies lacking, 62–63; postcolonial building of, 137; power and, 100; reflective, 109 intellectual right, extreme rhetoric deployed by, 252n67 intelligence, as capital, 118 International University of the Alternative, 118 inter-racial warfare, 250n34 In the Castle of My Skin (Lamming), 74 inward development, 174, 175 Iran, 214–16 Iranian Revolution, 208, 214–15 Islamic culture, 230 Islamic fundamentalism, 182, 208–12, 215, 217, 218, 222–26 Islamism, 183, 209, 224 Islamist politics, 182 Islamophobia, 110, 111, 113, 230 Island Is a World, An (Selvon), 6 Jagan, Cheddi, 79 Jaipur Literature Festival, 2 James, C. L. R., 6, 42, 73, 74, 250n33 Jones, William, 267n56, 280n21 Kakar, Sudhir, 108 Kakutani, Michiko, 255n111 Kashmir, 206 Kenya, 132 Kipling, Rudyard, 81 knowledge: historical, 38, 42, 51; hostile production of, 80; in plantation economies, 64; self, 48, 81; sociological, 48 Kulke, Hermann, 268n68 Kureishi, Hanif, 282n14 Lagos, 232 Lamming, George, 74, 180, 247n5 Lennon, John, 117 Leopold (King), 144 literary realism, 95, 154 London Calling (Nixon), 17 Loss of El Dorado, The (Naipaul, V. S.), 91–105, 181, 188

INDE X

Lukács, Georg, 62, 64, 154, 155 Lumumba, Patrice, 74 de Madariaga, Salvador, 78 Madrassis, 41 Magic Seeds (Naipaul, V. S.), 240–44 Makerere University, 123 Malaysia, 208, 209, 211–13, 225, 226, 230 Malik, Michael Abdul, “Michael X,” 117–19, 122 Manley, Edna, 33 Manley, Michael, 33 manners, as indicator of health, 249n27 marginalized groups, 198; agency asserted by, 117; colonial rule and, 204; self-assertion by, 192 Marshall, Arthur Calder, 21 Martinique, Indians in, 49, 50 Marx, Karl, 171 Masque of Africa, The (Naipaul, V. S.), 205, 225, 231–33, 241 mass politics, 55 mass poverty, 213 mass violence: demagoguery resulting in, 74; justifications for, 144 master morality, 66 Mau Mau fighters, 132 Mehta, Pratap Bhanu, 115, 116 memory, 83 Metcalf, Barbara, 114 Metcalf, Thomas, 114 metropolitan discourses, 118 metropolitan revolutionaries, 118 “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad” (Naipaul, V. S.), 117–19 Middle Passage, The (Naipaul, V. S.), 49–51, 74–81, 118, 181 Miguel Street (Naipaul, V. S.), 5, 6, 38–51, 162, 163; narrator of, 38–39; setting of, 38 Mimic Men, The (Naipaul, V. S.), 33, 165 minorities: nationalism threatening, 75; political independence effects on, 140 Mintz, Sidney, 26–27 Miranda, Francisco, 119 missionary education, 238, 239 Mittelholzer, Edgar, 6 mixed-race people, 53 Mobutu Sese Seko, 74 modernism: postcolonial, 173; selfformation explored through, 176

INDE X

modernity, 277n41; colonized societies deranged by, 26; disorientation of induction into, 168; neocolonial project of training for, 149; plantation economies and, 62; psychological disorientation from, 210; Trinidad impact of, 55 modernization, 259n35; Western imperialism and, 142 modern society, truth uses in, 143 Mohamad, Goenawan, 216, 219, 221–23 Mohammed, Isaac, 53 moneyed class, 254n87 monotheisms, 232 moral rebalancing, decolonization as, 75 Moretti, Franco, 173 Mozambique, 240, 241 Muslims, 50, 53, 198–200; history and, 217–18; in Kashmir, 206; in Malaysia, 213; V. S. Naipaul referring to as converts, 230–31; population in Trinidad, 248n18; Shiv Sena and, 195 Mustafa, Fawzia, 253n71, 260n47 Myanmar, 16 Mystic Masseur, The (Naipaul, V. S.), 55 mythmaking, 273n12 Nahdlatul Ulama, 219, 220 Naipaul, Seepersad, 4, 6, 14, 259n26; childhood, 10, 12; death threats against, 9; end of journalism career, 10; on rabies inoculation campaign, 9; racial discrimination and, 53, 54; writing as vocation to, 13 Naipaul, V. S., 1, 256n9, 256n11; adolescence of, 5, 52; autobiographical essays by, 162; autobiographical impulse of, 14; biographies of, 19; on brutality, 78; Caribbean travels, 74; childhood, 33, 52; on colonial period India, 203–4; critics of, 17–18, 88–89, 104, 110, 116; on decolonization, 75, 76; derogatory remarks of, 253n72; “false” sophistication of, 20; on fantasy corrupting, 91–92; on Hindu nationalism, 114–16; historical analysis and, 81; India and, 81–82, 84, 86, 89–90, 119; Islam and, 114; knowledge of history and, 38, 42, 51; moving to London, 5; on Muslims as converts, 230–31; national identity,

291

267n58; Nobel Lecture, 11, 15; as object of curiosity, 249n27; personal background, 3–4; postcolonial peoples studied by, 15, 105; public persona, 247n5; racial prejudice in letters by, 54; reflective style, 81; return to Trinidad, 6–7; on revolting against degradation, 85; self-knowledge and, 48; shift in tone of writings by, 162–64; shocked by society change, 250n35; situating writings of, 19; skepticism towards anticolonialism, 5; skepticism towards solidarity, 104; spaces occupied by, 52; starting career, 13–14; on steel bands, 77; tone used by, 88–89; on travel, 277n52; travel writing by, 189; Two Worlds speech, 256n11; Vijayanagar destruction, 268n67; on West Indian culture, 77–78 Naipaul myth, 16–17 Napoleonic wars, 98, 101 Narayan, R. K., 87–88, 233 national community, 200 national culture, 77 national identity, 148 nationalism, 73, 147; anticolonial, 55, 56, 200; colonized societies and, 55; competing, 254n94; Hindu, 111, 194; in India, 108; minorities threatened by, 75 nationalist ideology, 147 native Indians, indentured immigration, 248n18 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 11, 114 New Learning, 201 Niangoran-Bouah, Georges, 274n38 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 65 Nigeria, 124, 232 Nixon, Rob, 17 Norton Anthology of World Literature, 2 novels: historical and sociological knowledge and, 48; rise of, 95 nullity, 47 Obama, Barack, 255n111 objective analysis, 108 Obote, Milton, 123 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 17 Okara, Gabriel, 124 order: collective, 66–67; colonial, 65; social, 60

292

orderliness, 205 Orientalism, 273n7 Orientalism (Said), 141 orientalist representation, 141–43 “Our Universal Civilization,” 283n3 Oxford University, 253n72 Pakistan, 216–18, 230; East Bengal invasion by, 124 Pan-Africanism, 145, 148 Pan-Indian identity, 192, 202 “Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties” (Naipaul, V. S.), 21–25, 27 People’s Democratic Party (PDP), 79 People’s National Movement (PNM), 79, 255n98 peripheral historicity, 176 peripheral peoples, 161, 165 peripheral societies, 15, 27, 161, 168; culture and, 23; hegemonic center resisted by, 23; realism and, 95 peripheral spaces: aesthetically informed ideologies and, 174; individual development in, 66; V. S. Naipaul developing approach to, 50–51 pesantrens, 224 Phillips, Caryl, 54 picaroon society, 118 Picton, Thomas, 97–99, 102 plantation colonies, 53, 92; English rule and, 98; social orders of, 60 plantation culture, 59, 60; caste attitudes and, 105 plantation economies: colonial order and rules of, 65; institutions lacking in, 62–63; knowledge in, 64; modernity and, 62 plotting, 276n20 plunder, 127–28 plural societies, 52–53 plural society (Furnivall), 258n3 PNM. See People’s National Movement police actions, 132 political culture: in India, 202; of Trinidad, 22 political emancipation, collateral damage of, 125 political independence, 140, 176 political Islam, 220 political movements, identitarian, 182 politics: identitarian, 182; Islamist, 182; postcolonial, 148, 177

INDE X

populism, 147 Port of Spain, Trinidad, 6, 33, 49; Indian social structures in, 50, 54; new communities in, 54; Raleigh raid on, 94; steel bands in, 77 post-American age, 16 postcolonial criticism, 173 postcolonial culture, 171, 186 postcolonial era: caste-like hierarchies in, 105; education in, 146; fractures of, 185; hoaxes of, 146; hostile knowledge production in, 80; institution building in, 137; movement of peoples in, 178 postcolonial freedom, 229 postcolonial literary realism, 154 postcolonial modernism, 173 postcolonial peoples: historical disorientation and, 227; historical predicaments of, 145; V. S. Naipaul examination of, 15, 105; revolutionary leaders and, 117 postcolonial politics, 177; individual agency overwhelmed by, 148 postcolonial racism, 75 postcolonial societies, 16; agency in, 147; colonial practices and challenges of, 148; fragility of, 8; perspectives characterizing structure of, 177; racial prejudices and, 29, 31 postcolonial studies, 17, 23 postcolonial writing, 21 poverty, in Miguel Street, 43 power: black, 117–19, 181, 183; colonial system asymmetries of, 136; institutions and, 100; learning operation of, 99–100; norms reshaped by, 168 Premdas, Ralph, 261n11 “Prologue to an Autobiography” (Naipaul, V. S.), 162–64 Proust, Marcel, 168 psychological dislocations, 210 public-school code, 73 public spiritedness, cricket and, 73 purges, 147 rabies, inoculation campaign for, 8–9 racial admixture, fears of, 53 racial antagonism, 6–7 racial blackmail, 117 racial discrimination, 53–54 racial exclusion, 183

INDE X

racial hatred, 250n34 racial hierarchy, 203 racial identity, democracy and appeals to, 57 racial ideology, 120 racialized contempt, 80 racial perspectives, postcolonial society structure and, 177 racial politics, 14, 29; anticolonial nationalism and, 55; in Guyana, 79; in Trinidad, 79 racial prejudice, 28–31, 61, 76, 129; in V. S. Naipaul letters, 54 racial self-consciousness, 29 racial separateness, 53 racial violence: in Guyana, 7; in Trinidad, 7–8; Trinidad and, 74 racism, 76, 129, 185; postcolonial, 75; Vijayanagar scholarship and, 113 racist stereotypes, 184 Rai, Alok, 284n35 Raleigh, Walter, 94, 119 Ramchand, Kenneth, 260n40 Raya, Krishna Deva, 111 realism, 63, 65, 88, 93, 154, 163, 168; autobiography and, 165; literary, 95 realpolitik, 98 Rebel, The (Camus), 88 reflection, critical, 83, 166, 185 reflective institutions, 109 reflective language, 84 reflective mode of reasoning, 239 reflective style, 81 “Regulated Hatred” (Harding), 129 religious fundamentalism, 207, 209, 212. See also Islamic fundamentalism religious ideology, 161 religious orthodoxy, economic development and, 221 repatriation, 10–12, 251n53 representation, 204; agency and, 141; identity and, 142; orientalist, 141–43 revolutionaries, 241, 242 revolutionary leaders: metropolitan, 118; postcolonial peoples and, 117 revolutionary movements, 147 Rhys, Jean, 244, 285n44 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 96 Rohingya, 16 Roy, Rammohun, 120–21 rural schools, 224 Rushdie, Salman, 113

293

Russell, William Howard, 203 Ryan, Selwyn, 253n77, 253n80, 255n100, 262n16 Said, Edward W., 17, 18, 141–43, 213–15, 253n73 Salkey, Andrew, 163 Samskara (Ananthamurthy), 234 Sassoon, Siegfried, 188 Schwarz, Roberto, 20, 277n45 “Second Visit, A” (Naipaul, V. S.), 119 Second World War, movement of peoples after, 178–79, 182 secularism, 115–16 self-assertion, 192, 200 self-assessment, 51, 121 self-awareness, 65, 83; critical, 238; El Dorado legends and, 94 self-confidence, 197 self-consciousness, 29, 164, 165, 173; alien, 141 self-creation, 171 self-deception, 132, 152; action not based on, 264n1 self-examination: critical, 25; Wounded as call for, 112, 113 self-fashioning, 210, 211 self-formation, 173, 176 self-help, 116–17 self-implication, 178, 228 self-improvement, 46 self-knowledge, 48, 81 self-sacrifice, 234 self-understanding, 272n22 Selvon, Samuel, 6 separateness, 179, 181 Shiv Sena, 114, 116–17, 190, 192–93, 195–97, 207 Sindhis, 54 Sinopoli, Carla M., 268n68 slavery, 28, 97–101, 143–45 Smiles, Samuel, 64, 65 social action, 106 social awakening, 190, 200 social codes, free state destabilizing, 127 social context, 154 social derangement, 26 social disruption, 125, 139 social dynamism, 116 social fragmentation, 190 social historical knowledge, 42 social inquiry, 205

2 94

social orders, of plantation colonies, 60 social prejudices, 24–25 social reality, falsification of, 88 social reforms, Islamic fundamentalism and, 208 social tensions, 191 sociological knowledge, 48 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), 180 South Sudan, 16 Spain, 174; Chaguanes Indians and, 102; England encouraging revolution in territories of, 96–97; Trinidad colonization and, 92–95 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 266n29 Sri Lanka, 240 SS Columbia (ship), 179, 180, 183 SS Ganges (ship), 11, 12 stamps, 141, 142, 145, 147, 239 steel bands, 77–78 Stein, Burton, 267n60 St. Kitts, 181 Stockbridge, John, 163 subjective disorientation, 26, 47 Suez crisis, 236 Suffrage of Elvira, The (Naipaul, V. S.), 51, 55–58, 70, 74, 229 sugarcane, 170 Suleri, Sara, 253n73 Surinam, 49 Swanzy, Henry, 5 sweepers, 49, 50, 86 syncretism, 113, 114 systemic forms of injustice, 62 Tamils, 240, 241 tea workers, 105 Tehran Times (newspaper), 215 Theory of the Novel (Lukács), 155 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 2 Tobago, 96 tolerance, 53 travel, 49 travel writing, 189, 205 Trinidad, 4; caste in, 86; as character in novel, 103; colonizing of, 92–96; cultural politics of, 77; elections of 1961, 76; English immigrants to, 101; fantasy on, 91–92; free trade and, 97–98; Grenada and, 24–25; independence, 10, 75; Indians in, 49, 50; modernity impact on, 55;

INDE X

oil field strike in, 21, 22; political culture of, 22; popular politics in, 21; racial antagonism in, 6–7; racial politics in, 79; racial violence and, 74; romanticizing, 277n39; separateness in, 181; as slave colony, 97; slavery in, 97–99 Trinidad Guardian (newspaper), 4, 9 Trinidadians, 258n9; caste meaning, 263n38 Turn in the South, A (Naipaul, V. S.), 205 Tutu, Desmond, 227 Two Worlds speech (Naipaul), 256n11 Uganda, 123, 176; racial context in, 29 underdeveloped ego, 108 unified social will, 190 United Nations, 74 universalism, 109, 241 universalization of agency, 147 Untouchables. See Dalits urban blight, 199–200 Vietnam, 149 Vijayanagar, 107, 110–13, 194; Muslim destruction of, 269n72; V. S. Naipaul on destruction of, 268n67 wage labor, 98 Wahhabi fundamentalism, 222 Wahid, Abdurrahman, 216, 219, 220, 223, 224, 230 Walcott, Derek, 249n27, 277n39 Watt, Ian, 265n14, 265n17 Way in the World, A (Naipaul, V. S.), 21, 27, 41–42, 161, 164 Western education, 234 West Indians: cricket and, 73; V. S. Naipaul on culture of, 77–78; steel bands and, 77 West Indies Federation, 75 White, Landeg, 259n24, 259n26 whites, in Trinidad, 248n18 Williams, Eric, 21, 27, 79, 253n80, 254n96 Williams, Raymond, 23–24 Wolpert, Stanley, 269n72 Wood, James, 284n19, 284n33 Woolford, Gordon, 163 World Is What It Is, The (French), 19 Wounded. See India: A Wounded Civilization writers’ myths, 252n64