Copyright 1990 Guardian Newspapers Limited The Guardian

September 27, 1990

LENGTH: 854 words

HEADLINE: Books: Lamentation in Raj-time

BYLINE: By AFSHIN RATTANSI

BODY:

India: A Million Mutinies Now, by V. S. Naipaul (Heinemann, Pounds 17.50)

'TO READ of events in India before the coming of the British is like reading of many pieces of unfinished business . . . of matters more properly the subject of annals rather than narrative history, which works best when it deals with great things being built up or pulled down.' Sir V. S. Naipaul, without doubt one of the greatest of post-war writers, here displays an ignorance of both history and of India so terrifying one wants to think it a slip of the pen.

Some 27 years after his first visit, Naipaul has returned, writing a travel book that bears his hallmark of seemingly transparent prose allied to a compassionate ear. However, he is performing an elaborate double take.

Ostensibly, the book tells the stories of the lives of men and women he encounters on his trip through various Indian cities in the late eighties. They include vignettes of ambitious film-writers, Bombay gangsters, dethroned aristocrats, Sikh civil servants and women's magazine editors. It seems as though Naipaul is merely transcribing tapes, after cajoling interviewees with a novelist's questions, 'tell me about their faces', 'what clothes?' It is as if he only leaves personal reflections to take up the limited spaces in between. However, re-reading this 'reportage' will reveal something altogether more disquieting. His last book, A Turn In The South, was a genuinely affectionate account of southern rednecks. It almost pandered to American fascism in an attempt to understand the mentality in the southern states. This book, however, is actually no more than a vehicle for Naipaul's derisory swipes at things Indian.

There are quite rightly exposes of incompetence and corruption it couldn't be a travel book on India without them. He describes the hours spent in the appalling Santa Cruz airport, watching his plane depart and return while contemplating the broken air-conditioning, an experience familiar to those who have flown out of Bombay. In Goa, he sees cooling eucalyptus trees torn down after it was belatedly realised they had dessicated the surrounding farmlands.

But the heart of the book reflects Naipaul's deep-rooted prejudices. The thesis is as simple as it is flawed: that India, inherently rotten, was once blessed by colonial rule. Indeed, the only inoffensive elements of Indian life are the recherche hunting lodges 'of European inspiration' or the 'simplicity' of life in Goa, thanks to the Portuguese who had abolished an 'Indian past'. He sees only grime, improprieties. And he is aided in all his arguments by the fact that apart from his love of Indian miniature painting, he knows virtually nothing of Indian culture the music, the language as it were, some of India's saving graces.

The book also veers close to being an unwitting crusade for Naipaul's lapsed faith, tempting one to see him as a wounded Brahmin. It is the highest of Hindu castes, whose members have had to accumulate merit over tens of thousands of re-incarnations. For Naipaul, 'the eternal grime of India' has been worsened by the various initiatives made to de-caste India. In Bangalore, he meets a scientist who moans about the quota system that ensures multi-caste entrance to university. Naipaul nods, commenting on a 'hidden irony . . . that the caste who had contributed so much to (the social revolution) should now find itself under threat.'

Other themes, such as the mismanagement of Calcutta by Marxist governments, are explored without any reference to the success of provinces such as Kerala which boast some of the highest levels of literacy in the world. And then, as the book progresses there is a slow mellowing of tone. There are increasing references to his visit in 1962, at first recounting only India's wretchedness. But then, when he returns to the Hotel Liward in Kashmir, the core of An Area Of Darkness, he sees what was once veiled, All Naipaul's books display an idolator's belief in the West .

that the country has been 'remade', that there has been a 'liberation of spirit'. But this mellowing is within the Naipaul paradigm: it is qualified by crass allusions to the great luck of the Indians in being colonised and educated by the British.

All of Naipaul's books display an idolator's belief in 'European civilisation' or 'the West'. He has a touching, Victorian faith in its secular gods, such as science. A great travel book on India wouldn't have placed so much emphasis, if obliquely, on the mind-body problem, as the body-earth solution. But though he has assumed for himself the role of a westerner visiting India, there remains something patently unJudaeo-Christian about him, something that he tries in vain to suppress. After all, he wins admirers in the West partly because of his 'Indianness'.

Enjoy it for the brilliance of a master prose-writer, for seldom has reading about someone's prejudices and complexes been so much fun. But be wary of the message. Indeed, if you really want to know about India, I can think of no other book you should so definitely not buy.