India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  ‘What about the positive side of the struggle today?’

  That shadow area I talked about is becoming congested now. It is forcing people to go out on their own. It is forcing them to be entrepreneurial.’

  Pravas came from far away, from the east of the country. His grandfather had been a priest, and his father entered government service as a clerk.

  ‘It is almost the standard Indian success story. My father would have got into the service in the mid-40s, the time at which the administration was just beginning to pick up. There was still not a lot of science and industry, or anything like that. But the structure was expanding. This was a precursor of development. When the real development came, there was non-traditional administration. Traditional administration would need police, soldiers, clerks and lawyers. Non-traditional administration needed industrialists, artisans, engineers, doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs. Because my father entered the service at the precursor stage, he wasn’t a scientist.’

  ‘What sort of things did your father read?’

  ‘He retained quite a lot of tradition. He chanted mantras. My grandfather was a good old classical ritualistic purohit, according to what I’ve heard. Performing the rituals was his profession. Whereas with my father, if you want to trace the transition, the mantras were chanted out of familiarity, reverence, a way of expressing your gratitude to God – you had these mantras reverberating in your head since childhood. I make no difference between that and the young man today in a video or audio surrounding who chants, formally and informally, Hindi film songs.

  ‘My father is taller than I, and he makes a good sight sitting there cross-legged, chanting, with his back straight. I think the posture is beautiful. My father is seventy-six, and his back is still straight. But with my father the chanting of the mantras has been, in quotes, “degraded” from a livelihood to pleasure. Oral pleasure, if you like; nostalgia; a protection against fears. A gamut of feeling – all this I call pleasure, since it’s done out of volition.

  ‘We lived in a small princely state in the east. My grandfather was one of the priests of the royal family. Not really a big king: it was a feudal kingdom of maybe 100 or 200 square miles.’

  A small princely state in the east, a priest serving the ruling family. I said, ‘That is really old India.’

  Pravas said, ‘The degree of cultural change that I have personally gone through and digested would break a person elsewhere. When I was a child, and we went to visit my ancestral place, we would go in bullock carts – it was the only mode. Or walk. That was as recently as 1960. You wouldn’t have what we think of as a bathroom. You would go down to the river.’

  ‘Were you aware of hardship?’

  ‘At the time it seemed normal. Everybody did that in the village. And for years, going back to the village after I had left it, going back for a day or so, it was more like a picnic. Before you recognized you were deprived, you were out.

  ‘Most of the kings in those days had a policy of encouraging a certain amount of intellectualism. It was a cause for pride. In direct terms that meant they made sure that their people, the priestly caste, the intellectuals, didn’t have to depend on other people for their security. So they gave a piece of land to the purohits. A gift of land to a purohit or anybody else couldn’t be taken back. It was a gift in perpetuity. It would have been considered a sin of the lowest order to recover a gift. In that kingdom there were between five to 10 priestly families. The religious rituals were very specialized. Some purohits did certain things, and other purohits other things.’

  ‘They were privileged people?’

  ‘Yes and no. The piece of land wasn’t much. It was a subsistence piece. It was only to see that the person didn’t die. It was something to fall back on, but nothing more than that. The purohits didn’t have a lot of clothes. They had two dhotis or something like that. Compared to the tradesmen, people selling grain or timber or oilseeds or oil, they would be poor. Compared to the beggars, they were well off.’

  ‘So the brahmins were kept by the kings in an ambiguous position?’

  ‘If you look at it from the economical point of view, then of course it looks incongruous. But it had a logic of its own. The brahmins had status and royal protection. The king would deal severely with any act of aggression against the priests. And the kings would encourage intellectual exchanges. Debates, chanting, yagnas or big pujas, with brahmins from other kingdoms as well, perhaps – everybody competing, or co-operating in a competitive sense, to show their own excellence. Sometimes you would have a thousand brahmins sitting and chanting, but with each man keeping an ear for who was singing well or badly. It’s precisely what happens at scientific or intellectual conferences today.

  ‘The internal factor is that the priestly community was born and brought up with the psychology that they didn’t expect more. It’s so much part of the internal system that it’s gone down to the folk level. The Lord Vishnu has two wives – Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom. The two wives would naturally be at loggerheads – a depiction of the fact that the intellectual life seldom goes with wealth: you have to choose one of them. So, by a combination of circumstances, this priestly class didn’t look for riches, and they wouldn’t be given riches. A perfect matching of interests.

  ‘In my father’s life the balance was of a different kind. He didn’t have an assured security, like my grandfather. He had to work to provide for his family. His life was half ritual, half the struggle for survival. The balance was between the two.

  ‘In certain communities you are supported by the scaffolding of the society. If you are in a merchant caste, dealing in oilseeds or cotton straw, and you wish to graduate to dealing in radios, the scaffolding is the same. You only change the commodity. There is a group movement there. Whereas, in a case like my father’s, he wasn’t moving with the society – the society wasn’t moving in a coordinated way. Quite a lot of young men were doing the same thing at that time, but all of them were doing it individually. Not only did my father have the difficulty of clearing the way, but every time he moved back, to my grandfather’s house, there would have been conflict. It would have been like moving between a hot and a cold room.’

  ‘What sort of conflict?’

  ‘In the older society, you would keep your purity both genetically and externally. You would only marry certain people, and you wouldn’t have contacts beyond a certain point with people of a lower caste. You wouldn’t be able to eat food cooked by someone of a lower caste. Eating was considered a sacred activity. Food was looked upon as a sacrifice to the gastric juices. There were rigid prescriptions about the time you could eat, in what direction you faced while eating, who served, and how much you ate. Food was dissected to the last detail. Different classes of people ate different amounts. For instance, in the scriptures it is prescribed that for intellectuals doing very little physical work the right amount of food would be the rice cooked from a handful of rice grains held in the fist.

  ‘Hinduism is a trinity-based religion – there are three options for everything. So food was of three kinds – sattvik, rajasik, tamasik. Sattvik foods encouraged intellectual pursuits, clarity of mind, purer thoughts. Sattvik foods were very light – most grains, a certain amount of clarified butter, the lighter vegetables. Rajasik food is work-oriented.’

  (From Deviah I later had a more comprehensive list of sattvik foods: leafy greens, milk, curds, butter, rice, wheat, most sprouts, most pulses (except a kind of dal), sweet potatoes (but not potatoes), fruit. From Deviah I also learned that rajasik food was more than work-oriented. Rajasik food encouraged both valour and passion, and Deviah gave this list: urad dal, meat, wine, spices (true brahmins don’t get on with spices). As for tamasik food – which Pravas with apparently brahminical scruple didn’t go into (and about which, fearing the worst, I didn’t press him, not wanting him to go off on this detour) – Deviah said it encouraged sloth. Strangely, though, the tamasik list that Deviah gave seemed qui
te subtle, with some elements of the rajasik; and some of its vegetables seemed to be light enough for the sattvik diet. This was Deviah’s tamasik list: onion, garlic, cabbage, carrot, aubergine, potatoes, urad dal, meat. Urad dal and meat were both on the rajasik list.)

  Pravas said, The sattvik is mind-oriented. Such people were expected to do what they did because it should be done, and not because you get a reward. Such people did what they did out of an internal motivation. Brahmins were identified with the sattvik tendency. Therefore they couldn’t eat certain foods.

  ‘The whole thing was ritualized in every way. For example, if your father was alive, you shouldn’t face south when you ate. This wasn’t an all-India prohibition, but it was more than local. So it was a serious matter if the shadow of a lower-caste person fell on your food. If it happened while you were eating, that was that. You stopped eating. The food became impure. And I forgot: nobody should touch you while you were eating, and you had to eat in a certain posture. Some people were so “orthodox”, in inverted commas, they couldn’t even hear the voice of a lower-caste person while they ate. These people ate deep within their houses.’

  ‘Would they get angry if they had to stop eating because of the shadow or the voice?’

  Pravas said with a smile, ‘Brahmins are not supposed to get enraged. They would just stop eating. Rage is not considered a brahminical quality. Though a large number of the brahmins I know, 80 per cent, say, are very short-tempered.

  ‘So my father moved between these hot and cold rooms, as I’ve called them. It was a perpetual struggle for him. He had to face a lot of questioning when he went back to my grandfather’s. Had he been eating food cooked by non-brahmins? Or wearing the right kind of dress? That was important in those days. My grandfather never wore long trousers; he wore the dhoti. My father wore half and half – dhoti and trousers. But the food business wasn’t a joke for them. In that value system it was sacrilege to break any of the rules.

  ‘Because of his background my father was philosophically oriented. Even within that his reading was different from my grandfather’s. My grandfather would practise the hard-core Sanskrit, the original mantras as written in the Vedas or Puranas. It is the hallmark of ritualism that you don’t necessarily understand the deeper meanings of everything you do, and my grandfather didn’t necessarily understand what he chanted. Ritualism is perhaps, though not very crudely, a show-act.

  ‘My father wasn’t a performer; he didn’t have that pressure. So he tried to understand what he read. He read a lot of interpretations by newer philosophers. This led him to read in many languages. He read modern philosophical works in Bengali, and he read in English. I grew up with volumes and volumes of his books in Devanagari and English. He made relatively small forays into other topics. The core was philosophical.

  ‘And there was something else. In addition to the old Puranic values, my father had the diffusion from nationalistic values, essentially Gandhian. Gandhianism was almost a mass hysteria in India, but of a healthy kind. It was the good old values, but packaged in a modern-looking way, very mass-based. The old values looked intellectual and were intellectual, and therefore maintained a distance from the masses. Gandhi found a way of making old truths appear simple. And I grew up with quite a few of those Gandhian slogans. “Work more, talk less.”

  ‘In my house the continuity of the brahminic value system remained, and then I also made my own change from an old world to a new world, from a hot room to a cold room. But this time the change was different. Nobody asked me, “Why are you wearing long pants?” Or, “Did you eat food cooked by a brahmin?” But, like my father in his government job, I didn’t have a scaffolding. I had, so to speak, to break down the door myself.’

  ‘Why did you go in for science?’

  ‘There’s the milieu and the current value system. The third factor is a sense of mystery.’

  ‘Mystery?’

  ‘It’s one of the strongest motivating forces. All religions are replete with miracles. Mystery attracts, and science has that mystery. I felt that mystery, subconsciously. Put two chemicals and the colour changes – that’s the simplest mystery. Or make a machine like an electric fan which runs apparently without any motive force.

  ‘I have made one more level of transformation than my father did from his father’s time. I am more liberal in outlook than my father. I’ve probably become more questioning, because of what we may call “science”. I’m less knowledgeable about rituals. My father got a part of what his father had, and I have only a part of the rituals my father had.

  ‘I grew up in my intimate family surroundings up to the age of fifteen or sixteen. That’s the time you pick up the rituals, because you are not allowed to perform certain rituals before a certain time. For example, there are some rituals that only married men can do. But at that age I went away from home, going back only for a few days a year. So I missed a lot of the ritual side. And now I have only half the faith in it.

  ‘I don’t do it, but I have a nostalgia for it. My roots are in it. It is not alien to me. If someone says to me that I shouldn’t eat rajasik food – eggs or something – I don’t find it strange. I understand, unlike a modern nutritionist. And, in the philosophy line, I have done more of what my father did. I diversified, even more than him, into other schools of Indian philosophy and schools of other philosophies. My father had gone from the basic Vedic to the broader Indian philosophy. I have gone from that to a more global approach.’

  I said, ‘With your scholarly approach, you probably actually know more about Hinduism than your grandfather.’

  Pravas said, ‘Probably I can articulate it better in a Western sense, but I cannot say I know more than my grandfather.

  ‘Change is a continuous process. You can discern a change only once in a generation. Because once you discern it, you are already there. So in these last 50 years I can discern only two changes, but they are large because a continuing process is being focussed at two or three points. The next big change will come with my son. There are spans of transition. There are much bigger spans with the succeeding generations.

  ‘My son will go through a very large change in circumstances in many ways. In the family, in the school surroundings, in the job market, everywhere. I grew up in a half ritualistic background. My son will have no ritualistic background. But if my son loses the rituals even further, he could still be rooted locally, within his peer group. There will be many like him. Society is moving that way.

  ‘The food restrictions and so on that I talked about are known to some, but not known to most in my generation. They don’t know that such things existed and exist. And yet they are perfectly at balance in the local surroundings. If you get too attached to your roots in the old sense, you might actually become unrooted, fossilized. At least in form, at least in style, you must get into the new stream, get the new roots. More of India is doing that. Style becomes substance in one generation. Things that one starts to do because other people are doing it – like wearing long pants, in my father’s case – become natural for the next generation.’

  I thought that the changes he was talking about might have been in some way like the changes that had come a generation or two earlier to the Indian community in Trinidad, the peasant India that my grandfathers had taken with them, an apparently complete world, with language and rituals and social organization: an India that had, in its New-World setting, even during my childhood, begun to disintegrate: first the language going, then the reverence for the rituals and the need for them (the rituals going on long after they had ceased to be understood), leaving only a group sense, a knowledge of family and clan, and an idea of India in the background, an idea of India quite different (more historical, more political) from the India that had appeared to come with one’s ancestors.

  Pravas said, ‘For you the change was not subversive.’

  The word was arresting.

  He said, ‘The change wasn’t from within. It was external. Here change is gradual. It
’s happening all around me – in my father, my brother, everybody. I cannot distinguish any longer what is alien.’

  And (extending what Pravas said) there was a further, and fundamental, difference between the new generations in India and our immigrant community far away. For people of that community, separated from the Indian earth, Hindu theology had become difficult (as it had become difficult for people of formerly Hinduized areas of south-east Asia); the faith had then been half possessed by many, abandoned by many. It had been part of a more general cultural loss, which had left many with no strong idea of who they were. That wouldn’t happen in India, however much ritualism was left behind, and however much the externals changed.

  Pravas said, There will remain a few primordial principles. People will lose all the details about individual behaviour – eating and sleeping and so on. All these things will go away. But in the group memory some streams will remain perennial. Faith and its expression is one of those primordial streams, though the details may get blurred.

  ‘Recently there has been on TV the serials of the epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Most of the people on the streets of Bangalore haven’t actually read those epics. They haven’t read them in the original or in an English version or in any version. They take them for granted; they’re there. They would have known the main characters and the broad theme. They wouldn’t have known the details; they wouldn’t know the inside characters. But the TV serials were an instant success.’

  And now, for Pravas, there were all the frustrations of modern Indian life. As he described them, they were like the frustrations of the visitor: the difficulty of travel by air or train or road; the crowded, dangerous city streets; the poisonous fumes; the difficulty of doing simple things, the difficulty of arranging the physical details of day-to-day living, which the industrial revolution was meant, after all, to simplify.