A humorously serious outlook
Itis difficult to describe your country to a stranger. And when it comes to India, it is full of diversities. There are so many perspectives that everyone can see a different shade to it. V S Naipaul has seen a sarcastic bright hue in the description of India.
His India is completely different from R K Narayan’s or Mulk Raj Anand’s India. The Noble Prize winner was a ‘prescient observer’ with a ‘search for vision’. This is not just the first expression of his ‘ancestral land’, An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) cover pages full of his fascination about his country.
This account of India from an all-time writer who stayed in Europe comprises of six essays. These marvels of the author’s ‘reflection and reportage’ span between 1962 and 2006. Born in Trinidad in 1932, V S Naipaul begins from his birth place and discusses its vastness, meaninglessness and insupportable, monotonous landscape. His visits to Bombay and Jammu caused him ‘only an assault on the senses’ as ‘to define your function and status in the universe is very difficult’. The terrible experience of an Indian who comes to visit India is expressed by vast landscapes and crazy character sketches.
Calcutta and a second visit to Calcutta during famine are portrayed as – in Vinoba Bhave, a dreamer’s words – ‘the decentralised technique of God’; whereas The Election in Ajmer comprises his fine firsthand reporting of the time when Indira Gandhi, as the prime minister, came up with ‘Garibi Hatao’ as her political agenda. ‘A tarred road, a water-tank, electricity’ were the promises to common men in a country where money was ‘immemorially scarce’. The chapter interestingly imbibes political murders and turbans in Kishangarh, near Ajmer.
To explain India, V S Naipaul picks up the childhood of Mohandas Gandhi and ventures into Mahatma in the making. He precisely discusses in his last, and certainly the best essay Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘intellectual confusion’ as “Many of Gandhi's smaller and now forgotten experiments, involving the labour of others, were like this, not thought out, unachieved and abandoned, serving no cause, good for the famous man and not for the people who for the various reasons had come (or sent their children) to lend a hand.”
From Mahatma Gandhi, he steers towards another mahatma that India could not support, Vinoba Bhave as his land-gift scheme died down. The author imbibes British India and its impact on these great personalities, also on the Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C Chaudhuri. He bashes the ideas, not just critically analyses, by Chaudhuri carefully that justify the Company or the Queen.
What hurts V S Naipaul is that even after seven decades of Independence, “India has no autonomous intellectual life. And that India has no means of judging. India is hard and materialist.”
V S Naipaul gives the year about which he is talking in that particular essay at the end of each essay. It helps us understanding it better when we know exactly which time of India is he talking about and gives us a sense of belongingness. Agree or not, the realistic picture projected in front of us makes the book dearer to our hearts.
The introduction to the book by Rana Dasgupta becomes another essay upon V S Naipaul and his writing style. There is humour in it, in fact, sarcasm at its peak. Students of literature and the intellectuals who cherish the form and content of essays will definitely devour this India Essays.