An Area of Darkness

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  Somewhere something has snapped. Where does one begin to look for this failure? One begins with that Kurukshetra temple. On it there is a plaque which says this exactly:

  THIS TEMPAL HAS BEEN BUILT THROUGH THE CHARITY OF RAJA SETH BALDEO DAS BIRLA AND HAS BEEN DEDICATED OF SHREE ARYA DHARMA SEVA SANGH IN NEW DELHI. HINDU PILGRIMS OF ALL SECTS E.G. SANATANISTS, ARYA SAMAJISTS, JAINS, SIKHS AND BUDDHISTS ETC WILL BE ENTERTAINED PROVIDED THEY ARE MORALLY AND PHYSICALLY PURE AND CLEAN

  NOTE PERSONS SUFFERING FROM INFECTIOUS OR CONTAGIOUS DISEASES WILL NOT BE ADMITTED

  The crudity of the language is matched by the crudity of the self-appraisal. India may be poor, the plaque says in effect, but spiritually she is rich; and her people are morally and physically pure and clean. Self-appraisal, the crudity of the stonework and marblework, the imperfect use of the foreign language: they are all related.

  *

  Some Indians denied that the Indian plastic sense had decayed. Those who thought it had, rejected the view that the Moguls were partly responsible – for the quantity and extravagance of their building: Akbar exhausting experimentation, his successors taking decoration to its limit – and blamed it on the British intervention. The British pillaged the country thoroughly; during their rule manufactures and crafts declined. This has to be accepted, and set against the achievements listed by Woodruff: a biscuit factory is a poor exchange for gold embroidery. The country had been pillaged before. But continuity had been maintained. With the British, continuity was broken. And perhaps the British are responsible for this Indian artistic failure, which is part of the general Indian bewilderment, in the way that the Spaniards were responsible for the stupefaction of the Mexicans and the Peruvians. It was a clash between a positive principle and a negative; and nothing more negative can be imagined than the conjunction in the eighteenth century of a static Islam and a decadent Hinduism. In any clash between post-Renaissance Europe and India, India was bound to lose.*

  The stupefaction of peoples is one of our mysteries. At school in Trinidad we were taught that the aboriginal inhabitants of the West Indies ‘sickened and died’ when the Spaniards came. In Grenada, the spice island, there is a cliff with the terrible name of Sauteurs: here the Amerindians committed mass suicide, leaping down into the sea. Stupefied communities of other, later races survive. There are the degraded Hindus of Martinique and Jamaica, swamped by Africa; and it is hard to associate the dispirited Javanese of Surinam in South America, objects of local ridicule, with the rioters and embassy-burners of Djakarta. India did not wither, like Peru and Mexico, at the touch of Europe. If she were wholly Muslim she might have done. But her Hindu experience of conquerors was great; Hindu India met conquerors half-way and had always been able to absorb them. And it is interesting, and now a little sad, to see Indians, above all in Bengal, reacting to the British as they might have done to any other conqueror, Indian or Asiatic.

  The attempt at a half-way meeting is there in an early English-inspired reformer like Ram Mohun Roy, who is buried in Bristol. It is there, generations later, in the upbringing of Sri Aurobindo, the revolutionary turned mystic, whose father, sending him as a boy of seven to be educated in England, required his English guardians to shield him from all Indian contacts. It is there, a little later still, but now pathetically, in the Mullick Palace in Calcutta. Decaying already, since this is India, with servants cooking in the marble galleries, the Palace is like a film set. As we go through the tall gateway we feel that this is how a film might begin; the camera will advance with us, will pause here on this broken masonry, there on this faded decoration; there will be silence, and then the voices will come through the echo chamber, the sound of carriages on the crescent-shaped drive: for Mullick’s entertainments were fabulous. Great columns of the Calcutta Corinthian style dominate the façade; fountains imported from Europe still play in its grounds; statues representing the four continents stand in the corners of the marble patio where the family now keep birds in cages; on the lower floor a large room is made small by a colossal statue of Queen Victoria; and elsewhere, below excessively chandeliered ceilings, dust has gathered on what looks like the jumble of a hundred English antique shops: a collector’s zeal turned to mania: the Bengali landowner displaying his appreciation of European culture to the supercilious European. Nothing here is Indian, save perhaps the portrait of the owner; but already we can sense the Anglo-Bengali encounter going sour.

  Englishness, unlike the faith of other conquerors, required no converts; and for the Bengali, who was most susceptible to Englishness, the English in India reserved a special scorn. An imperial ideal, well on the way to a necessarily delayed realization, was foundering on the imperialist myth, equally delayed, of the empire-builder, on the English fantasy of Englishness, ‘the cherished conviction’, as one English official wrote in 1883, ‘which was shared by every Englishman in India, from the highest to the lowest, by the planter’s assistant in his lowly bungalow … to the Viceroy on his throne … that he belongs to a race whom God has destined to govern and subdue’. The mock-imperial rhetoric of the dedication of Nirad Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian might serve as an epitaph on this unfulfilled imperial encounter. Translated into Latin, it might be carved in Trajan lettering on the India Gate in New Delhi: ‘To the memory of the British Empire in India, which conferred subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship, to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge Civis Britannicus sum, because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped, and quickened by the same British rule.’

  No other country was more fitted to welcome a conqueror; no other conqueror was more welcome than the British. What went wrong? Some say the Mutiny; some say the arrival in India afterwards of white women. It is possible. But the French, with or without their women, might have reacted differently to the francophile Bengali. The cause, I believe, has to be looked for not in India but in England where, at a time we cannot precisely fix, occurred that break in English sensibility as radical and as seemingly abrupt as that which we have witnessed in our time. The civilization to which the Indians were attracted had been replaced by another. It was confusing – the guests whom Simpson’s Restaurant in the Strand was nourishing for imperial purposes continued to bear the outer semblance of Parson Adams and Tom Jones – and many Indians, from Aurobindo to Tagore to Nehru to Chaudhuri, have recorded their bewilderment.

  It is perhaps only now that we can see what a clean break with the past the Raj was. The British refused to be absorbed into India; they did not proclaim, like the Mogul, that if there was a paradise on earth, it was this, and it was this, and it was this. While dominating India they expressed their contempt for it, and projected England; and Indians were forced into a nationalism which in the beginning was like a mimicry of the British. To look at themselves, to measure themselves against the new, positive standards of the conqueror, Indians had to step out of themselves. It was an immense self-violation; and in the beginning, in fact, a flattering self-assessment could only be achieved with the help of Europeans like Max Muller and those others who are quoted so profusely in nationalist writings.

  It resulted in the conscious possession of spirituality, proclaimed as in the plaque of the Kurukshetra temple. Spiritualise Science, Says Prasad is a newspaper headline over a report of one of the late President’s almost daily speeches in retirement. It results in this, from the Times of India:

  A ‘RETAILER’ OF SPIRITUALITY

  Santiniketan, January 16

  Acharya Vinoba Bhave yesterday described himself as a ‘retailer’ with regard to the wealth of spirituality.

  He made this remark at a reception here saying that the Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, Tagore, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda were ‘wholesalers of spirituality while I myself am a retailer, drawing from that inexhaustible storehouse to supply to the villagers.’ – PTI

  It resulted in the conscious possession of an ancient culture. At an official reception for the former governor of a state someone called acros
s to me, as we sat silently in deep chairs set against the walls of the room, ‘How is Indian culture getting on in your part of the world?’ The former governor, a heavily-stockinged veteran of the Independence struggle, leaned forward and noticed me. He was reported to be keen on Indian culture; I was later to read newspaper reports of his speeches on the subject. Wishing to show that I took the question seriously and was anxious to establish a basis for discussion, I shouted back across the large room: ‘What do you mean by Indian culture?’ My IAS friend, under whose protection I was, closed his eyes in dismay. The former governor leaned back; silence returned to the room.

  Spirituality and ancient culture, then, were as consciously possessed as Parson Adams and Tom Jones in Simpson’s. But it was inevitable that with this unnatural self-consciousness a current of genuine feeling should fail. The old world, of ruins which spoke only of continuity and of creation as an elemental repetition, could not survive; and Indians floundered about in a new world whose forms they could see but whose spirit eluded them. In the acquiring of an identity in their own land they became displaced.

  They acquired a double standard. Five hundred deaths from cholera in Calcutta are reported in a news-brief in an Indian newspaper. The death of twenty children merely requires to be stated.

  POX IN FEROZABAD

  ‘The Times of India’ News Service

  AGRA, June 1: Small-pox is reported to have broken out in epidemic form in Ferozabad.

  Twenty persons, mostly children, are reported to have died in Jaroli Kalan village.

  The death of sixteen miners in Belgium in the same newspaper is big news. The peasants in the collectorate courts attend with open mouths to the drama of debates in a language they cannot understand, while outside, in an atmosphere of the bazaar, other peasants, with all the time in the world, it seems, lounge about in the dust, and the typists sit with their ancient machines in the faint shade of trees, and the lawyers, startling in their legal subfusc, wait for custom. These collectorate bazaars function within a changed assumption of the value of man that is still only legalistic, confined to the collectorate and the courthouse, a type of make-believe, part of the complex ritual which supports the Indian through his dusty existence. Caste, another law, which renders millions faceless, is equally to be cherished. Mimicry conceals the Indian schizophrenia. India must progress, must stamp out corruption, must catch up with the West. But does it truly matter? Does a little corruption hurt anybody? Is material prosperity all that important? Hasn’t India been through it all before – the atom bomb, the aeroplane, the telephone? So in conversation Indians can be elusive and infuriating. Yet I had only to think myself back to my grandmother’s house, to that dim, unexpressed awareness of the world within and the world without, to understand, to see their logic, to understand both their passion and their calm despair, the positive and the negative. But I had learned to see; I could not deny what I saw. They remained in that other world. They did not see the defecating squatters beside the railroad in the mornings; more, they denied their existence. And why should these squatters be noticed anyway? Had I seen the beggars of Cairo or the Negro slums of Rio?

  Language is part of the confusion. Every other conqueror bequeathed a language to India. English remains a foreign language. It is the greatest incongruity of British rule. Language is like a sense; and the psychological damage caused by the continued official use of English, which can never be more than a second language, is immense. It is like condemning the council of, say, Barnsley to conduct their affairs in French or Urdu. It makes for inefficiency; it separates the administrator from the villager; it is a barrier to self-knowledge. The clerk using English in a government office is immediately stultified. For him the language is made up of certain imperfectly understood incantations, which limit his responses and make him inflexible. So he passes his working life in a sub-world of dim perceptions; yet in his own language he might be quick and inventive. Hindi has been decreed the national language. It is understood by half the country; it can take you from Srinagar to Goa and from Bombay to Calcutta. But many in the North pretend not to understand it. And in the South the nationalist zeal for Hindi, encouraged by Gandhi, has altogether died. Hindi, it is said, gives the North an advantage; it is better for North and South to remain illiterate and inefficient, but equal, in English. It is an Indian argument: India will never cease to require the arbitration of a conqueror. And the advocates of Hindi, in their new self-appraising way, seek not to simplify the language but to make it more inaccessible. ‘Radio’, a universal word, will not do: it has to be rendered into the wampum-and-wigwam quaintness of ‘voice from the sky’.

  Indian attempts at the novel further reveal the Indian confusion. The novel is of the West. It is part of that Western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now. In India thoughtful men have preferred to turn their backs on the here and now and to satisfy what President Radhakrishnan calls ‘the basic human hunger for the unseen’. It is not a good qualification for the writing or reading of novels. A basic hunger for the unseen makes many Indians vulnerable to novels like The Razor’s Edge and The Devil’s Advocate, whose value as devotional literature is plain. Beyond this there is uncertainty. What does one look for in a novel? Story, ‘characterization’, ‘art’, realism, a moral, a good cry, beautiful writing? The point hasn’t been settled. Hence the paperbacked numbers of the Schoolgirl’s Own Library in the hands of male university students; the American children’s comics in the room of the student at St Stephen’s, New Delhi; the row of Denise Robins next to the astrological volumes. Hence Jane Austen offered in an Indian paperback as a writer whose use of simile is especially to be relished.

  It is part of the mimicry of the West, the Indian self-violation. It is there in Chandigarh, in that new theatre for plays that are not written, in those endless writers’ conferences where writers are urged to work for ‘emotional integration’ or the five-year plans, and where the problems of the writer are tirelessly discussed. These problems appear to be less those of writing than of translation into English; the feeling is widespread that, whatever English might have done for Tolstoy, it can never do justice to the Indian ‘language’ writers. This is possible; what little I read of them in translation did not encourage me to read more. Premchand, the great, the beloved, turned out to be a minor fabulist, much preoccupied with social issues like the status of widows or daughters-in-law. Other writers quickly fatigued me with their assertions that poverty was sad, that death was sad. I read of poor fishermen, poor peasants, poor rickshaw-men; innumerable pretty young girls either simply and suddenly died, or shared the landlord’s bed, paid the family’s medical bills and then committed suicide; and many of the ‘modern’ short stories were only refurbished folk tales. In Andhra I was given a brochure of a Telugu writers’ conference. The brochure spoke of the heroic struggle of the people to establish a Telugu state, to me an endeavour of pure frivolity, listed martyrs, and then gave a brief history of the Telugu novel. It seems that the Telugu novel began with Telugu adaptations of The Vicar of Wakefield and East Lynne. A little farther south I was told of a writer greatly influenced by Ernest Hemingway.

  The Vicar of Wakefield and The Old Man and the Sea: it is difficult to relate them to the Indian landscape or to Indian attitudes. The Japanese novel also began as part of the mimicry of the West. Tanizaki has, I believe, confessed that in his early work he was too greatly influenced by the Europeans. Even through the mimicry, however, it can be seen that the Japanese are possessed of a way of looking. It flavours the early work of Tanizaki as it flavours the recent novels of Yukio Mishima: that curious literalness which adds up to a detachment formidable enough to make the writing seem pointless. However odd, this derives from a hunger for the seen and is an expression of concern with men. The sweetness and sadness which can be found in Indian writing and Indian films are a turning away from a too overwhelming reality; they reduce the horror to a warm, virtuous emotion. Indian sentimentality is the oppo
site of concern.

  The virtues of R. K. Narayan are Indian failings magically transmuted. I say this without disrespect: he is a writer whose work I admire and enjoy. He seems forever headed for that aimlessness of Indian fiction – which comes from a profound doubt about the purpose and value of fiction – but he is forever rescued by his honesty, his sense of humour and above all by his attitude of total acceptance. He operates from deep within his society. Some years ago he told me in London that, whatever happened, India would go on. He said it casually; it was a conviction so deep it required no stressing. It is a negative attitude, part of that older India which was incapable of self-assessment. It has this result: 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. There is a contradiction in Narayan, between his form, which implies concern, and his attitude, which denies it; and in this calm contradiction lies his magic which some have called Chekovian. He is inimitable, and it cannot be supposed that his is the synthesis at which Indian writing will arrive. The younger writers in English have moved far from Narayan. In those novels which tell of the difficulties of the Europe-returned student they are still only expressing a personal bewilderment; the novels themselves are documents of the Indian confusion. The only writer who, while working from within the society, is yet able to impose on it a vision which is an acceptable type of comment, is R. Prawer Jhabvala. And she is European.*