topics: |  travel | india | social | history

"bile-infused travelogue" - Sanjay Subrahmanyam at London Review of Books

Excerpts

Indians defecate everywhere.  They defecate, mostly, beside the railway
tracks.  But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills;
they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never
look for cover...
Muslims, with their tradition of purdah, can at times be secretive. But this
is a religious act of self-denial, for it is said that the peasant, Muslim or
Hindu, suffers from claustrophobia if he has to use an enclosed
latrine....

These squatting figures - to the visitor, after a time, as eternal
and emblematic as Rodin's Thinker - are never spoken of; they are never
written about; they are not mentioned in novels or stories; they do not
appear in feature films or documentaries. This might be regarded as part of a
permissible prettifying intention. But the truth is that
Indians do not see these squatters and might even, with complete sincerity,
deny that they exist.  A collective blindness arises out of the Indian fear
of pollution and the resulting conviction that Indians are the cleanest
people in the world.  ...

they see themselves as being clean, being required by their religion to
take a bath every day, to make love with the left hand only, to take food
with the right.

it is well that Indians are unable to look at their
country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad.
And it is well that they have no sense of history, for how then would they be
able to continue to squat amid their ruins, and which Indian would be able
to read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger
and pain? It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism, to trust to the
stars in which the fortunes of all are written and to regard the progress of
the rest of the world with the tired tolerance of one who has been through
it all before. ...  there are lectures in astrology in some universities –
and to regard the progress of the rest of the world with the tired tolerance
of one who has been through it all before. The aero plane was known to
ancient India, and the telephone, and the atom bomb: there is evidence in
the Indian epics. Surgery was highly developed in ancient India: here, in an
important national newspaper, is the text of a lecture proving it. Indian
shipbuilding was the wonder of the world…

Eighteenth-century India was squalid. It invited conquest. But not in the
Indian eyes: before British came, as every Indian will tell you, India was
rich, on the brink of an industrial breakthrough;…Indian interpretations of
their history are almost as painful as the history itself; and it is
especially painful to see the earlier squalor being repeated today,… A
people with a sense of history might have ordered matters differently. But
this is precisely the saddening element in Indian history: this absence of
growth and development.

Social inquiry is outside the Indian tradition.  Formal politics became an
affair of head counting.  India is without an ideology...

The scientist returning from abroad regains the security of his caste
identity and the world is once more simplified.

[Gandhi] 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.

Reserving government jobs for untouchables helps nobody, It places
responsibility in the hands of the unqualified…It is the system that has to
be regenerated, the psychology of caste that has to be destroyed. So Gandhi
comes again and again to the filth and excrement of India, the dignity of
latrine-cleaning; the spirit of service.

'And do thy duty, even if be humble, rather than another’s, even if it is
great. To die in one’s duty is life: to live another’s is death.’ This is
the Gita, preaching fifteen hundred years before Shakespeare’s Ulysses,
preaching it today... The man who makes the dingy bed in the hotel room
will be affronted if he is asked to sweep the gritty floor.


---blurb
An Area of Darkness, based on Naipaul's first travel to India, is a harsh
portrayal of his ancestral homeland, bordering on the vituperative.  It
resulted in much controversy; critics accused him of possessing a rigid
bias in favor of Western traditions and ideology — a charge that would follow
him throughout his career.

This first trip to India affected Naipaul profoundly. On his return to
England he wrote: 'It was a journey that ought not to have been made; it had
broken my life in two.'

Naipaul's primary concern, how to deal with India's images of poverty, may
reflect his own dilemma of how to deal with his own split identity.  and
how to come to terms with it. Seeing people 'diminished and deformed' so
they 'begged and whined' his reactions range from hysteria and fear, to
anger and contempt, then compassion and pity. But all of these, he
realizes, degrade the poor; 'It is your gaze that violates them, your sense
of outrage that outrages them'; and 'it (is) compassion like mine, so
strenuously maintained, that denies humanity to many'.