Bookless in Baghdad

by Shashi Tharoor

  Naipaul persists, writing three books in a year. When, toward the end of the collected correspondence, his first novel — The Mystic Masseur — is accepted for publication, we share the author's exhilaration, and celebrate the vindication it carries, not just of himself, but of his father. Comic and keenly observed, it is the kind of novel his father might have written — in a style that Naipaul himself would soon outgrow.

  There is much material in the correspondence for the serious student of Naipaul's work, so much of which reflects the angularities of his personality. We read of his inability to accept “the responsibility of deserving affection” and of the nervous breakdown he attributes to “loneliness, and lack of affection.” We learn repeatedly of his contempt for Trinidad, his dismissiveness toward acquaintances and relatives who do not measure up to his civilizational standards (all too often based on their failure to master the English language), and his awareness of his impact on others (“A friend told me the other day that people don't like me because I made them feel that I knew they were fools”). But we juxtapose these with the wise, compassionate, and invariably sound advice his father gives him in letter after letter on both life and literature. When Vido underlines his observation that “I think a man is doing his reporting well only when people start to hate him,” his father replies, “I think it's the other way: a [writer] is doing his work well when people begin liking him.” What a difference of worldviews lies between those lines! “Write sympathetically,” Pa goes on — an injunction one wishes his increasingly acerbic and judgmental son had taken more to heart in the course of his distinguished but often dyspeptic writing career.

  Writing sympathetically is not something V. S. Naipaul has done much of in his twenty-five books, which reveal many of the personal qualities that have made him so impressive, so readable, and yet so contrarian a writer. His novels are, to me, much the lesser achievement; his nonfiction, wrong-headed though it often is, is monumental. Naipaul's books of “journeys” and “excursions” are not quite travel books, though they are invariably about his own travels; they are not works of political scholarship, though they abound in political judgments; they are as much about himself — his ideas, values, prejudices, his own sense of dislocation as an Indian born in “unhallowed” Trinidad and settled in England — as they are about the countries he visits.

  And yet sympathy has not been entirely lacking. Naipaul describes his method as that of a “discoverer of people, a finder-out of stories.” In his books (most notably the curiously lumpy India: A Million Mutinies Now) he has tended to repeat verbatim long conversations with his interlocutors (not always getting them right, as some howlers in the India book testify), letting the stories go on when the reader is clamoring for interruption, context, analysis. But in his more recent works Naipaul injects himself a little more into the tales of the people he listens to, and even sometimes interprets them for the reader. His second book on Islam, Beyond Belief, is — despite the harshness of some of his depictions of Muslims — a more compassionate work than Naipaul's earlier books; whereas much of his nonfiction could be faulted for generalizing carelessly from small particulars, here Naipaul writes of individual needs, fears, and motivations with great delicacy and precision, and his individual cases have depth and humanity, while combining to make a compelling larger picture. Naipaul says the individual stories themselves are the point of his book: “the reader should not look for ‘conclusions.’”

  Naipaul's own sense of displacement, so effectively chronicled in his earlier books, most notably The Enigma of Arrival, is at the heart of his view of the world: his scathing contempt for “half-formed civilizations,” his rejection of the passionate certitudes of those who act out a “rage” against a world that has advanced beyond their comprehension. In his books, he often spurns the “incompleteness” and “emptiness” of his native Trinidad, and dismisses people “without an idea of the future.” This is a recurrent theme: in Among the Believers he poured contempt on Islam's failure to keep up with “the spread of universal civilization,” arguing that “it was the late twentieth century — and not the faith — that could supply the answers.” If he has begun to seem slightly less dismissive in his later work, some of his judgments of the Muslim world are no different from those he has levied at non-Islamic societies he has found similarly “half-formed,” from India to Zaire.

  Which is what makes those adolescent letters such curiously compelling reading. It is not just that we have seen what became of the young man with the fierce literary passion bubbling through the letters; it is that the letters themselves tell a story that almost exonerates the man the correspondent became. Reading the exchange between the youthful Naipaul and his father, one is enthralled as by a compelling epistolary novel, made all the more poignant by our fore-knowledge of the tragedy that is to come (his father's premature and no doubt preventable death). And I, for one, caught up intensely in the family dramas detailed in these letters, could not help empathizing (as an Indian, as a writer, and as one-half of a very similar correspondence in my own college days) with many of the paternal and fraternal concerns they reflect. The fact that the famously curmudgeonly V. S. Naipaul kept these letters safe for the four decades that have passed since they were written tells us there is more to like about him than his books have ever revealed.

  “I had always looked upon my life as a continuation of his,” Naipaul wrote to his mother upon Pa's death, “a continuation which, I hoped, would also be a fulfillment.” This it most emphatically is; and the reader cannot help sharing the Naipauls’ heartbreak that his father did not live to savor his son's success. “I have no doubt whatever,” Pa wrote to the eighteen-year-old Vido, “that you will be a great writer.” He would have been proud beyond words that his Vido, now Sir Vidia Naipaul, “followed no other profession.”

  16

  Salman Rushdie: The Ground

  beneath His Feet

  SIXTEEN VALENTINE'S DAYS AGO, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa, an Islamic edict, calling for the death of Salman Rushdie — and made the Indian-born British author of The Satanic Verses the most famous writer in the world. Yet the extent to which this controversy has dominated our perception of his work is itself an injustice. Mention Rushdie, and some see a stirring symbol of the cause of freedom of expression in the face of intolerant dogma; others, particularly in the Islamic world, find a blasphemous crusader for secularist social subversion. Neither image may be inaccurate, but reducing him to this emblematic figure has only served to obscure his true literary contribution — as, quite simply, one of the best and most important novelists of our time. As an Indian novelist, I can only repeat what Waugh said of Wodehouse: he is the head of my profession.

  For Salman Rushdie has brought an astonishing new voice into the world of English-language fiction, a voice whose language and concerns stretched the boundaries of the possible in English literature. His heritage is derived from the polyglot tumult of multiethnic, postcolonial India; his intellectual convictions owe as much to Nehruvian nationalism and the eclecticism of the Sufi mystics as to any source west of the Suez; his style combines a formal English education with the cadences of the Indian oral storytelling tradition, the riches of Latin American magic realism, and the extravagant fabulism of the Arabian Nights. Both in his life and in his writing, Rushdie has stood for intermingling and interchange, displacement and transfiguration, migration and renewal. He recalled and reinvented his roots while thriving in his own uprootedness. With Midnight's Children he brought a larger world — a teeming, myth-infused, gaudy, exuberant, many-hued, and restless world — past the immigration inspectors of English literature. And he has enriched this new homeland with breathtaking, risk-ridden, imaginative prose of rare brilliance and originality.

  In eight novels (of which I have only skipped the first, the reputedly impenetrable Grimus) Rushdie has developed his characteristic concerns with the great issues of our time. Themes of migration, innovation, conversion, separation,
and transformation suffuse his work: exploration and discovery, faith and doubt, pluralism and purity, yearning and desire, infuse his fiction. And with all of Rushdie's novels, his story is also about the telling of stories. Above all, it would seem, of Indian stories, for Indian history, society, and contemporary politics are a rich lode he has profitably mined in all his books. India is, as ever, the intersection of the many strands of Rushdie's intellectual heritage, the womb of his imagination.

  India — “that country without a middle register, that continuum entirely composed of extremes” — is itself a character in many of his books. The author's farewell to it in The Ground beneath Her Feet is unbearably poignant: “India, my terra infirma…. India, my too-muchness, my everything at once, my mother, my father and my first great truth…. India, fount of my imagination, source of my savagery, breaker of my heart. Goodbye.” But with Rushdie India always leads to the world; it is a mini-universe for a writer whose concerns are universal. “To provide for the planet's soul, there is India. One goes there as one goes to the bank, to refill the pocketbook of the psyche.”

  But what does the novelist fill it with? In a sadly overlooked passage of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie writes of “the eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian artistic tradition.” Under the Mughals, he says, artists of different faiths and traditions were brought from many parts of India to work on a painting. One hand would paint the mosaic floors, another the human figures, a third the cloudy skies: “individual identity was submerged to create a many-headed, many-brushed ‘Overartist’ who, literally, was Indian painting.” This evocative image could as well be applied to the nature of Indianness itself, the product of the same hybrid culture. How, after all, can one summarize the idea of the Indian identity? Any truism about India can be immediately contradicted by another truism about India. The country's national motto, emblazoned on its governmental crest, is “Satyameva Jayaté”: Truth Alone Triumphs. The question remains, however: Whose truth? It is a question to which there are at least a billion answers — if the last census hasn't undercounted us again.

  I raise the question of truth because, in the recent political campaigns in northern India, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee apparently described the Congress Party leader, Sonia Gandhi, as a foreigner. When protests erupted, the PM said he was not casting aspersions on the leader of the opposition, merely stating a fact. But is it a fact? The renewed debate on the issue of Sonia Gandhi's eligibility to lead the country has brought to the forefront a vital question that has, in different ways, often engaged me — the question, Who is an Indian?

  The last time this issue grabbed the headlines was nearly six years ago, when a crisis erupted in the Congress Party over the claim by three powerful Congress politicians, Sharad Pawar, Purno Sangma, and Tariq Anwar — with classic Congress secularism, a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim — that Mrs. Gandhi is unfit to be prime minister because she was born in Italy. In the extraordinary letter they delivered to her and leaked to the newspapers, the three party leaders declared, “It is not possible that a country of 980 million, with a wealth of education, competence and ability, can have anyone other than an Indian, born of Indian soil, to head its government.” They went so far as to ask her to propose a constitutional amendment requiring that the offices of president and prime minister be held only by natural-born Indian citizens.

  Of course there has been no such amendment, and the three Congress leaders are now ex-Congress leaders, having founded the Nationalist Congress Party instead to add to the splendid alphabet soup of political parties in our country. But their territorial notion of Indian nationhood is a curious one on many counts, and particularly so coming from long-standing members of the Indian National Congress, a party that was founded under a Scottish-born president, Allan Octavian Hume, in 1885 and among whose most redoubtable leaders (and elected presidents) was Annie Besant, who was born English, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who was born in Mecca. Even more curious is the implicit repudiation of the views of the Congress's greatest-ever leader, Mahatma Gandhi, who tried to make the party a representative microcosm of an India he saw as eclectic, agglomerative, and diverse.

  The three musketeers of the nativist revolt did, of course, anticipate this latter criticism. So they went out of their way to reinvent the Mahatma on their side. “India has always lived in the spirit of the Mahatma's words, ‘Let the winds from all over sweep into my room,’ ”they wrote with fealty if not accuracy. “But again he said, ‘I will not be swept off my feet.’ We accept with interest and humility the best which we can gather from the north, south, east or west and we absorb them into our soil. But our inspiration, our soul, our honor, our pride, our dignity, is rooted in our soil. It has to be of this earth.” The contradiction between their paraphrase of the Mahatma's views (absorbing the best from all directions) and their emotive “rooting” of “honor, pride and dignity” in the “soil” of “this earth” is so blatant it hardly needs pointing out. Yet it suffers a further inaccuracy: by law, even a “natural-born Indian” is one who has just one grandparent born in undivided India, as defined by the Government of India Act, 1935. You do not have to be of this soil to be an Indian by birth.

  But Sonia Gandhi is, of course, an Indian by marriage and naturalization, not birth. So the usual chauvinists and xenophobes — not to mention the political opportunists of other stripes — have been quick to jump on the bandwagon started by the soil-sprung triumvirate. But is her westernness immutably irreconcilable with their Indianness? In The Ground beneath Her Feet Rushdie brilliantly translates “dis-orientation” as “loss of the East.” “Ask any navigator: the east is what you sail by. Lose the east and you lose your bearings, your certainties, your knowledge of what is and what may be, perhaps even your life.” But not for Rushdie the flawed simplicity of the conventional encounters between East and West. The West, he points out, “was in Bombay from the beginning,” in a land “where West, East, North and South had always been scrambled like codes, like eggs, and so Westernness was a legitimate part of Ormus, a Bombay part, inseparable from the rest of him.”

  So the truth may lie in a simple insight: as I have written in my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium, the singular thing about India is that you can only speak of it in the plural. There are, in the hackneyed phrase, many Indias. Everything exists in countless variants. If Americans can cite the national motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” Indians can say, “E Pluribus Pluribum.” There is no single standard, no fixed stereotype, no “one way.” This pluralism is acknowledged in the way India arranges its own affairs: all groups, faiths, tastes, and ideologies survive and contend for their place in the sun. At a time when most developing countries opted for authoritarian models of government to promote nation-building and to direct development, India chose to be a multiparty democracy. And despite many stresses and strains, including twenty-two months of autocratic rule during a “state of emergency” declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, a multiparty democracy — freewheeling, rumbustious, corrupt, and inefficient, perhaps, but nonetheless flourishing — India has remained.

  One result is that India strikes many as maddening, chaotic, inefficient, and seemingly unpurposeful as it muddles through into the twenty-first century. Another, though, is that India is not just a country, it is an adventure, one in which all avenues are open and everything is possible. “India,” wrote the British historian E. P. Thompson, “is perhaps the most important country for the future of the world. All the convergent influences of the world run through this society…. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind.”

  That Indian mind has been shaped by remarkably diverse forces: ancient Hindu tradition, myth, and scripture; the impact of Islam and Christianity; and two centuries of British colonial rule. The result is unique. Many observers have been astonished by India's survival as a pluralist state. But India could hardly have survived as anything else. Pluralism is a reality
that emerges from the very nature of the country; it is a choice made inevitable by India's geography and reaffirmed by its history.

  One of the few generalizations that can safely be made about India is that nothing can be taken for granted about the country. Not even its name: for the word India comes from the river Indus, which flows in Pakistan. That anomaly is easily explained, for what is today Pakistan was part of India until the country was partitioned by the departing British in 1947. (Yet each explanation breeds another anomaly. Pakistan was created as a homeland for India's Muslims, but till very recently there were more Muslims in India than in Pakistan.)

  With diversity emerging from its geography and inscribed in its history, India was made for pluralist democracy. It is not surprising, then, that the political life of modern India has been rather like traditional Indian music: the broad basic rules are firmly set, but within them one is free to improvise, unshackled by a written score. The music of India is the collective anthem of a hybrid civilization.

  Over fifty-four years ago, at midnight on August 15, 1947, as the flames of communal hatred blazed across the land, independent India was born as its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed “a tryst with destiny — a moment which comes but rarely in history, when we pass from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” With those words he launched India on a remarkable experiment in governance — remarkable because it was happening at all. “India,” Winston Churchill once barked, “is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.” Churchill was rarely right about India, but it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the range of levels of economic development that India does.