An Area of Darkness

by V. S. Naipaul

  But here is that observer again:

  Instead of having graceful hamlets dotting the land, we have dung-heaps. The approach to many villages is not a refreshing experience. Often one would like to shut one’s eyes and stuff one’s nose; such is the surrounding dirt and offending smell.

  The one thing which we can and must learn from the West is the science of municipal sanitation.

  By our bad habits we spoil our sacred river banks and furnish excellent breeding grounds for flies.… A small spade is the means of salvation from a great nuisance. Leaving night-soil, cleaning the nose, or spitting on the road is a sin against God as well as humanity, and betrays a sad want of consideration for others. The man who does not cover his waste deserves a heavy penalty even if he lives in a forest.

  The observer is seeing what no Indian sees. But he has now declared his foreign inspiration. The celebrated Indian daily bath he frequently dismisses as ‘a kind of bath’. He is unwilling to see beyond the ritual act to the intention, and in the intention to find reality. Sanitation is one of his obsessions. And just as in London he had read books on vegetarianism and clothes-washing and in South Africa books on bookkeeping, so he has read books on this subject.

  In his book on rural hygiene Dr Poore says that excreta should be buried in earth no deeper than nine to twelve inches. The author contends that superficial earth is charged with minute life, which, together with light and air which easily penetrate it, turn the excreta into good soft sweet-smelling soil within a week. Any villager can test this for himself.

  It is the characteristic note of this observer. His interest in sanitation, which is properly the concern of the latrine-cleaner, is not widely shared. The briefest glimpse of the lavatories at New Delhi’s international airport is sufficient. Indians defecate everywhere, on floors, in urinals for men (as a result of yogic contortions that can only be conjectured). Fearing contamination, they squat rather than sit, and every lavatory cubicle carries marks of their misses. No one notices.

  *

  In Europe and elsewhere the favoured bunk in a railway sleeper is the top bunk. It is more private and less liable to disturbance from dangling feet or opening doors. In India, however, where the top bunk has the added advantage of being freer of dust, the lower bunk is preferred, not because it is easier to spread one’s bedding on it – there are porters and servants to do that – but because climbing to the top bunk involves physical effort, and physical effort is to be avoided as a degradation.

  On this express to Delhi my sleeper had been booked by a high railway official and I was naturally given the lower bunk. My travelling companion was about forty. He wore a suit; he might have been a senior clerk or a university teacher. He was not happy about the top bunk. He complained about it first to the porter and then, after the train had started, to himself. I offered to change with him. His sourness vanished. But he simply stood where he was and did nothing. His bedding had been spread for him on the top bunk by the porter, and he was waiting until we got to the next station, two hours distant, so that he might get a porter to take it down for him. I wished to settle down. I began to do the porter’s job. He smiled but offered no help. I lost my temper. His face acquired that Indian expressionlessness which indicates that communication has ceased and that the Indian has withdrawn from a situation he cannot understand. Labour is a degradation; only a foreigner would see otherwise:

  Divorce of the intellect from body-labour has made of us the shortest-lived, most resourceless and most exploited nation on earth.

  The observer, the failed reformer, is of course Mohandas Gandhi. Mahatma, great-souled, father of the nation, deified, his name given to streets and parks and squares, honoured everywhere by statues and mandaps and in Delhi by Rajghat, which the visitor must approach barefooted over scorching sand, his portrait garlanded in every pan-shop, hung in hundreds of offices, bare-chested, bespectacled, radiating light and goodness, his likeness so familiar that, simplified to caricature and picked out in electric lights, it is now an accepted part of the decorations of a wedding house, he is nevertheless the least Indian of Indian leaders. He looked at India as no Indian was able to; his vision was direct, and this directness was, and is, revolutionary. He sees exactly what the visitor sees; he does not ignore the obvious. He sees the beggars and the shameless pundits and the filth of Banaras; he sees the atrocious sanitary habits of doctors, lawyers and journalists. He sees the Indian callousness, the Indian refusal to see. No Indian attitude escapes him, no Indian problem; he looks down to the roots of the static, decayed society. And the picture of India which comes out of his writings and exhortations over more than thirty years still holds: this is the measure of his failure.

  He saw India so clearly because he was in part a colonial. He settled finally in India when he was forty-six, after spending twenty years in South Africa. There he had seen an Indian community removed from the setting of India; contrast made for clarity, criticism and discrimination for self-analysis. He emerged a colonial blend of East and West, Hindu and Christian. Nehru is more Indian; he has a romantic feeling for the country and its past; he takes it all to his heart, and the India he writes about cannot easily be recognized. Gandhi never loses the critical, comparing South African eye; he never rhapsodizes, except in the vague Indian way, about the glories of ancient India. But it is Gandhi, and not Nehru, who will give 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 veranda as a latrine.

  It is a correct emphasis, for more than a problem of sanitation is involved. It is possible, starting from that casual defecation in a veranda at an important assembly, to analyse the whole diseased society. Sanitation was linked to caste, caste to callousness, inefficiency and a hopelessly divided country, division to weakness, weakness to foreign rule. This is what Gandhi saw, and no one purely of India could have seen it. It needed the straight simple vision of the West; and it is revealing to find, just after his return from South Africa, how Gandhi speaks Christian, Western, simplicities with a new, discovering fervour: ‘Before the Throne of the Almighty we shall be judged, not by what we have eaten nor by whom we have been touched but by whom we have served and how. Inasmuch as we serve a single human being in distress, we shall find favour in the sight of God.’ The New Testament tone is not inappropriate. It is in India, and with Gandhi, that one can begin to see how revolutionary the now familiar Christian ethic must once have been. Hindus might try to find in this ideal of service the ‘selfless action’ of the Gita. But this is only Indian distortion, the eternal Indian attempt to incorporate and nullify. The Gita’s selfless action is a call to self-fulfilment and at the same time a restatement of degree; it is the opposite of the service which Gandhi, the Indian revolutionary, is putting forward as a practicable day-to-day ideal.

  The spirit of service, excrement, bread-labour, the dignity of scavenging, and excrement again: Gandhi’s obsessions – even when we remove non-violence, when we set aside all that he sought to make of himself, and concentrate on his analysis of India – seem ill-assorted and sometimes unpleasant. But they hang together; they form a logical whole; they answer the directness of his colonial vision.

  *

  Study these four men washing down the steps of this unpalatable Bombay hotel. The first pours water from a bucket, the second scratches the tiles with a twig broom, the third uses a rag to slop the dirty water down the steps into another bucket, which is held by the fourth. After they have passed, the steps are as dirty as before; but now above the blackened skirting-tiles the walls are freshly and dirtily splashed. The bathrooms and lavatories are foul; the slimy woodwork has rotted away as a result of this daily drenching; the concrete walls are green and black with slime. You cannot complain that the hotel is dirty. No Indian will agree with you. Four sweepers are in daily att
endance, 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.

  Class is a system of rewards. Caste imprisons a man in his function. From this it follows, since there are no rewards, that duties and responsibilities become irrelevant to position. A man is his proclaimed function. There is little subtlety to India. The poor are thin; the rich are fat. The petty Marwari merchant in Calcutta eats quantities of sweets to develop the layers of fat that will proclaim his prosperity. ‘You look fat and fresh today’ is a compliment in the Punjab. And in every Uttar Pradesh town you might see the rich and very fat man in cool, clean white sitting in a cycle-rickshaw being pedalled by a poor and very thin man, prematurely aged, in rags. Beggars whine. Holy men give up all. Politicians are grave and unsmiling. And the cadet of the Indian Administrative Service, when asked why he has joined the service, replies after some thought, ‘It gives me prestige.’ His colleagues, who are present, do not disagree. It is an honest reply; it explains why, when the Chinese invade, the administration in Assam will collapse.

  Service is not an Indian concept, and the providing of services has long ceased to be a concept of caste. The function of the businessman is to make money. He might wish to sell shoes to Russia. He therefore sends good samples; the order obtained, he sends a shipload of shoes with cardboard soles. Overcoming foreign distrust of Indian business practices, he gets an order from Malaya for drugs. And sends coloured water. It is not his duty as a merchant to supply genuine drugs or good shoes or any shoes or drugs at all; his duty is, by whatever means, to make money. The shoes are sent back; there are complaints about the coloured water. This is the merchant’s luck; these are the trials he has to endure. He hops from enterprise to enterprise, from shoes to drugs to tea. A tea plantation is a delicate organization; he soon works it to ruin. Short-sightedness and dishonesty do not enter into it. The merchant is simply fulfilling his function. Later, fulfilling another aspect of his function, he might give up his money altogether and end his days as a mendicant sadhu.

  The tailor in Madras will give you trousers with a false hem. At the first shrinking the trousers are useless. But his label is in the waistband and he begged you to give his name to others. He can make money only if he gets customers; and he will get customers, not by making good trousers, but by getting his name known. And here is a shirtmaker distributing leaflets to announce the opening of his establishment. The Japanese have driven him out of West Africa. ‘Their finish was better.’ He speaks without rancour; that defeat was just part of his luck. His response to it is not to improve his finish but, abandoning ‘the black Negro savages of Africa’, to start afresh in this Indian town. The shirt he makes you is atrocious. The cuffs are an inch too narrow, the tail is several inches too short; and after the first wash the whole thing shrinks. He has made a little extra money by saving on material; for this reason he remains warm towards you and whenever he sees you he presses you to have another shirt made. (If you had gone to him with an introduction and had therefore been represented to him as someone capable of doing him harm, it would have been in his interest to be extravagantly generous; the shirt might even have been a little too large.) Every morning he pauses at the door of his shop, bows and touches the dust of the threshold to his forehead. This is how he guards his luck; his enterprise is a contract between God and himself alone.

  ‘After acceptance she should please him; when he is infatuated with her she should suck him dry of his wealth and at last abandon him. This is the duty of a public woman.’ The Kama Sutra, it might be said, reveals a society in undress; and no Indian manual is so old that it has ceased to be relevant. It is perhaps inevitable that a religion which teaches that life is illusion should encourage a balancing pragmatism in earthly, illusory relationships. The duty of the public woman – and mark that word duty – resembles the duty of the businessman: if you want to find sharp practice and monopolies preached as high virtues you can do no better than read some of the tales of the Indian classical period. The cow is holy. It is to be reverenced by being allowed to live, even if it has to be turned out into grassless city streets; even if it has been knocked down by a lorry on the Delhi-Chandigarh road and lies dying slowly in its blood for a whole afternoon, it remains holy: the villagers will stand by to see that no one attempts to take its life. The black buffalo, on the other hand, creature of darkness, is always fat and sleek and well looked after. It is not holy; it is only more expensive. The Kama Sutra lists fifteen situations in which adultery is permissible; the fifth situation is ‘when such clandestine relations are safe and a sure method of earning money’; and at the end of the list comes the warning that ‘it must be distinctly understood that it (adultery) is permitted for these purposes alone and not for the satisfaction of mere lust’. This moral ambiguity is in keeping with what the Kama Sutra, like other Indian manuals, lays down as the duties of the cultured man: ‘to engage in activities that do not endanger one’s prospects in the other world, that do not entail loss of wealth and that are withal pleasant’.

  In the introduction to Tales of Ancient India, a selection of translations from the Sanskrit, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1959, J. A. B. Van Buitenen writes:

  If I have toned down the ‘spiritual’, it is because sometimes one wishes to protest against the image of Indian spirituality – here as well as in India. The classical civilization was not overly spiritual. Even its skull-bearing hermits and vagrant saints had the zest to find humour in a funeral pyre. The homely Buddha of history becomes a towering pantheon of tier upon tier of beings teeming with a restless splendour that owes little to resignation. For a brief span even free will could be an issue. There was a spirit abroad that fleetingly allowed itself to be captured in a living form before it lost itself in formless spirituality. It is hard to believe that so much life would die even in a thousand years.

  Caste, sanctioned by the Gita with almost propagandist fervour, might be seen as part of the older Indian pragmatism, the ‘life’ of classical India. It has decayed and ossified with the society, and its corollary, function, has become all: the sweeper’s inefficiency and the merchant’s short-sighted ruthlessness are inevitable. It is not easy to get candidates for a recently instituted award for brave children. Children do not wish their parents to know that they have risked their lives to save others. It isn’t that Indians are especially cowardly or have no admiration for courage. It is that bravery, the willingness to risk one’s life, is the function of the soldier and no one else. Indians have been known to go on picnicking on a river bank while a stranger drowned. Every man is an island; each man to his function, his private contract with God. This is the realization of the Gita’s selfless action. This is caste. In the beginning a no doubt useful division of labour in a rural society, it has now divorced function from social obligation, position from duties. It is inefficient and destructive; it has created a psychology which will frustrate all improving plans. It has led to the Indian passion for speech-making, for gestures and for symbolicaction.

  Symbolic action: tree-planting week (seventy per cent of the trees planted die from lack of attention after the speeches), smallpox eradication week (one central minister is reported to have refused to be vaccinated for religious reasons, and vaccination certificates can be bought for a few shillings from various medical men), anti-fly week (declared in one state before the flies came), children’s day (a correct speech by Mr Nehru about children on the front page of the newspaper and on the back page a report that free
milk intended for poor children had found its way to the Calcutta open market), malaria eradication week (HELP ERADICATE MALARIA daubed, in English, on the walls of illiterate Hindi-speaking villages).

  When action is so symbolic, labels are important, for things and places as well as for people. An enclosed open space, its purpose made clear by its fixtures, nevertheless carries a large board: CHILDREN’S PLAYGROUND. Another open space with a stage at one end has the sign: OPEN AIR THEATRE. The jeep that leads a state governor’s cavalcade is marked in white: PILOT JEEP. New Delhi is a jumble of labels; the effect is of a civil service bazaar. Even ancient and holy buildings are disfigured. The eighth-century temple at the top of Shankaracharya Hill in Srinagar is hung at the gateway with a multi-coloured sign which would serve a haberdasher’s shop. Set into the ancient stonework of one of the temples at Mahabalipuram near Madras is a plaque commemorating the minister who inaugurated the work of restoration. The Gandhi Mandap in Madras is a small colonnaded structure; carved on it are the names of the members of the committee that put the mandap up; the list is taller than a man.

  The machinery of the modern state exists. The buildings exist; they are labelled; they sometimes anticipate need, and such anticipation can often be its own sufficient fulfilment. Consider the credits at the bottom of a Tourist Department leaflet: Designed and produced by the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, for the Department of Tourism, Ministry of Transport and Communications. The structure is too perfect, too well labelled. It is not surprising that sometimes it proclaims no more than good intentions. The copies of Family Planning News that I saw contained little news of families that had been planned and many photographs of charming ladies in those wonderful saris, planning family planning. Traffic lights are part of the trappings of the modern city. Lucknow therefore has them; but they are only decorations, and dangerous, because ministers are required by their dignity never to halt at lights; and there are forty-six ministers in this state. The sweetshops of Gorakhpur are required to have glass cases; the cases accordingly stand, quite empty, next to the heaps of exposed sweets. There is that fine new theatre at Chandigarh; but who will write the plays?