Who's Afraid of V.S. Naipaul?

Sometimes it’s quite fun to imagine “what could have happened.” At times, it is an exercise in futility. Other times, though, it really stretches our minds. In White Mughals, William Dalrymple unearths a fascinating history of early British India. Many British officers became Hindu or Muslim – to the extent of dressing within the culture, speaking the languages and, most significantly, marrying into their new family of faith. Their children were raised British-Indians, English-speaking Hindus or Muslims, arguably as comfortable in -- or at least capable of handling -- both worlds. Dalrymple, a prolific author and a Briton fascinated by Hinduism (see The Age of Kali and other great works), remarks how this could have created a fascinatingly different and more peaceful Subcontinent. Whether or not I might agree, as a person of Subcontinental descent, thus naturally quite wary of "integrating colonialism," it remains an intriguing possibility.

Why didn’t it happen, though? Well, it’s all America’s fault, of course. Lord Cornwallis, fresh from defeat in the United States, vanishes from American textbooks only to show up elsewhere: In India. When there, he quickly becomes horrified: He just got whupped by a bunch of local Anglos turned American, ready to defend their rights, and fears that an India led by Anglo-Indian elites, professing the native faiths and fluent in the native cultural terminologies and contexts, would similarly overturn British rule and make an ambitious Subcontinent out of a flustered and flummoxed one. He immediately crushes the local Anglo-Indians, bans marriages with locals and seals the English off, ensuring the latter’s exclusive domination and the locals growing a worrisome inferiority complex.

Speaking of inferiority complexes: Dalrymple has turned his sights to V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel Prize winner and excellent author, and am I glad that he has. He has tackled him in The Guardian, and published a similar piece in a recent issue of The Friday Times. I haven't linked that piece because 1) it's so similar, and 2) Friday Times requires annoying registration.

For a man whose work contains many eloquent warnings of the dangers of misplaced political passions - the Islamic Revolution in Iran to take just one example - this might appear to be a surprising volte face, especially when one considers the horrific anti-Muslim pogroms that followed Ayodhya, when BJP mobs went on the rampage across India and Muslims were hunted down by armed thugs, burned alive in their homes, scalded by acid bombs or knifed in the streets. By the time the army was brought in, at least 1,400 people had been slaughtered in Bombay alone.

Naipaul has often been lauded as a great writer – he is, just read Half a Life, and you’ll certainly consider him astonishing – but he’s also considered a valuable voice on the problems of the Islamic world. On the contrary, he's, in my opinion, a big hypocrite, a man who is Westernized and proclaims the glories of the West, though himself not (ethnically) of the West. He then goes on to discredit Islam for being "imperialist." He wonders why Iranian Islamists feel proud of "women's liberation" accomplished by Arabs -- and calls that a sign of "imperial Islam." Hmm. I am proud of many aspects of America, and fascinated by this country's 18th century history and independence movement, though my family was never originally a part of it. Is that a sign of imperialism?

However, for some good reason Naipaul's views on Islam are taken very seriously. He is a writer whose fiction and non-fiction written over half a century forms a body of work of great brilliance, something the Nobel committee recognised in 2001 when it awarded him literature's highest honour, and singled out his analysis of the Islamic world in his prize citation. Such praise, most often from those against Islam or blind to their own pasts, avoids Naipaul’s immense inconsistencies and hypocrisies, both born of his own fundamentalism.

There was some surprise last month when Sir Vidia and Lady Naipaul turned up at the office of India's ruling Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and gave what many in the Indian press took to be a pre-election endorsement not just of the party but of the entire far right-wing Hindu revivalist programme. India was indeed surging forward under the BJP, the Nobel Laureate was quoted as saying, and, yes, he was quite happy being "appropriated" by the party.

Keep in mind, this is the Naipaul who warns of imperialist Islam, who sees it as a whitewashing danger, who thinks it’s out to destroy India (Islam is going to destroy India? About the only thing Islam has recently destroyed has been itself. In India, too). That a Nobel Prize Winner, a writer of extraordinary sensitivity and perceptiveness, can be so blind in this major regard points to that writer’s underlying biases. Namely, Naipaul can’t get over the conquest of parts of India by Muslims, though some of those conquests were against local Muslims. In fact, Naipaul even looks down on the Taj Mahal – what is he, a Talib? – because it apparently symbolizes the imperial ambitions of Indian Muslims.

But the ruins of the north - the monuments of the Great Mughals - only "speak of waste and failure". Even the Taj and the magnificent garden tombs of the Mughal emperors are to Naipaul symbols of oppression: "Europe has its monuments of sun kings, its Louvres and Versailles. But they are part of the development of the country's spirit; they express the refining of a nation's sensibility." In contrast, the monuments of the Mughals speak only of "personal plunder, and a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered". In a recent interview, Naipaul maintained that "the Taj is so wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people."

Every great tourist attraction, or almost every great one, was erected on the backs of great amounts of labor and effort, often unwilling (but also often paying). Nevertheless, that does not make it ugly or even dangerous, if properly contextualized. On the contrary, many country’s poor today survive because these monuments exist (say, Egypt). Naipaul reminds me of those Iranians who can’t get over the Arab conquest. We should have a 1,000 year limit on self-pity. After a 1,000 years, you can no longer complain. That sounds fair.

More striking still was the quote attributed to Naipaul about the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Babur's mosque, in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, a decade ago: "Ayodhya is a sort of passion," he said. "Any passion is to be encouraged. Passion leads to creativity."

As I said, the Taliban. Part Deux: The Hindu. Now, it’s only understandable that Nehru has completely faded and failed (I watched Shashi Tharoor, author of the recent bio of Nehru – a good one, too, quite enjoyable, try to defend Nehru, and he only sunk faster). Part of the reason Pakistan was made was because of assertive Hindu nationalism, and perhaps the creation of Pakistan gave Hindu nationalism all the more impetus and all the more forward momentum. Since Bengali Muslims and northwest Indian Muslims have their own states, in which Islam forms a significant part of their identity, why cannot modern India have a Hindu component to its identity? Had Nehru taken this path, I think the BJP would not have formed and the riots would not have occurred, as a moderate religiosity coupled with modernity would have been just the security Hindus needed, just the badge of identity they demanded.

Now, the BJP has calmed down somewhat, and I think Indian nationalism will, for at least the time being, be tied to the Hindu religion and both will move hand-in-hand. Hinduism has really asserted itself, and has the right to enjoy the fruits of its endeavors. So far as it helps India progress, too, it’s not so bad, but it also has a dark side. Then again, every fundamentalism, nationalism and secularism has its dark sides – as all humans have dark sides. However, were people like Naipaul to be more behind the responsible elements of these movements, things would not have to be “this way.” But what do we get? Naipaul condemning Islamic fanaticism while praising “any passion” – for “passion leads to creativity.” This is an astonishingly stupid perspective from an author, I think. Passion also consumes, debilitates and destroys, as anyone with an addiction to writing should know.

Yet Naipaul's earlier statements, especially his remarks that the first Mughal emperor Babur's invasion of India "left a deep wound", are consistent with ideas Naipaul has been airing for many years now. In 1998, for example, he told the Hindu newspaper: "I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions ... The Old World is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed." Such attitudes form a consistent line of thought in Naipaul's writing from An Area of Darkness in 1964 through to the present.

Nevertheless, Naipaul's entirely negative understanding of India's Islamic history has its roots firmly in the mainstream imperial historiography of Victorian Britain. The Muslim invasions of India tended to be seen by historians of the Raj as a long, brutal sequence of pillage, in stark contrast - so 19th-century British historians liked to believe - to the law and order selflessly brought by their own "civilising mission".

There is something deliciously ironic in a man claiming that Islam was and remains imperialistic, while himself being of Indian origin, writing in English and writing in praise of ideals developed in the West (then he claims Iranians should not be proud of Islam, because “they had nothing to do with its birth.” Hello?) Basically, Naipaul is a contradiction. He cannot understand that, when a global culture is global, it does not have to impose itself by force. Many Hindus wrote in Persian and Urdu through the 19th century because those were the dominant languages. Today, many Muslims write in English – yours truly included, as well as those born and raised in originally non-English areas. This is not always a bad thing, and sometimes, it is a good thing.

Furthermore, every civilization draws attention to its roots, and converts to it pay attention to those roots more so than their own. Go to Washington, D.C.: I suppose the Congress and the White House remind one of Middle Atlantic Native American architecture, or even old Celtic architecture. On the contrary, Anglo immigrants and their descendants deliberately built a new Rome, and called their highest House the Senate, their members Senators, and so on and so forth. Even the word Republic: It’s originally Latin. Does that mean America is devoid of identity?

The remarkable fusion of styles that resulted from this rebirth can still be seen in the tomb of Ibrahim II, completed in 1626. From afar it looks uncompromisingly Islamic; yet for all its domes and arches, the closer you draw the more you realise that few Muslim buildings are so Hindu in spirit. The usually austere walls of Islamic architecture in the Deccan here give way to a petrified scrollwork indistinguishable from Vijayanagaran decoration, the bleak black volcanic granite of Bijapur manipulated as if it were as soft as plaster, as delicate as a lace ruff. All around minars suddenly bud into bloom, walls dissolve into bundles of pillars; fantastically sculptural lotus-bud domes and cupola drums are almost suffocated by great starbursts of Indic deco ration which curl down from the pendetives like pepper vines.

This picture of Hindu-Muslim hybridity, of Indo-Islamic intellectual and artistic fecundity, is important, for it comes in such stark contrast to the Naipaulian or BJP view of Indian medieval history as one long tale of defeat and destruction. Today most serious historians tend instead to emphasise the perhaps surprising degree to which Hinduism and Islam creatively intermingled and "chutnified" (to use Salman Rushdie's nice term); and an important book has been published that goes a long way to develop these ideas.

Anyone wishing to understand the complexities and fusions of medieval India would be well advised to look at Beyond Turk and Hindu, edited by David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence, (University Press of Florida, 2000). A collection of articles by all the leading international scholars of the period, it shows the degree to which the extraordinary richness of medieval Indian civilisation was the direct result of its multi-ethnic, multi-religious character, and the inspired interplay and cross-fertilisation of Hindu and Islamic civilisations that thereby took place.

You could say that Pakistan, in attempting to free Islam from Hinduism, went too far in purification and created an abstract (and therefore irrelevant?) Islamic identity, with no actual rooting in the society. In other words, an ideology, pure and simple. By detaching Indian Islams from their ethnic, historic and creative – as well as institutional foundations – Pakistan became nothing. Whereas before, Indian Islam was so rich and so beautiful because it had a context, if even a minority one.Without that capacity, we have become a blank and bereft nation, whose vanished moorings are clear.

Indeed, as one author points out, there is not a single medieval Sanskrit inscription that identifies "Indo-Muslim invaders in terms of their religion, as Muslims", but instead they refer more generally in terms of "linguistic affiliation, most typically as Turk, 'Turushka'". The import of this is clear: the political groupings we today identify as "Muslim" were then "construed as but one ethnic community in India amidst many others".

Of course this approach is not entirely new. From the early 1960s until only a few years ago, Indian history textbooks emphasised the creation in medieval India of what was referred to as the "composite culture". This cultural synthesis took many forms. In Urdu and Hindi were born languages of great beauty that to different extents mixed Persian and Arabic words with the Sanskrit-derived vernaculars of north India. Similarly, just as the cuisine of north India combined the vegetarian dal and rice of India with the kebab and roti of central Asia, so in music the long-necked Persian lute was combined with the Indian vina to form the sitar, now the Indian instrument most widely known in the west. In architecture there was a similar process of hybridity as the great monuments of the Mughals reconciled the styles of the Hin dus with those of Islam, to produce a fusion more beautiful than either.

Yet Sufism, clearly central to any discussion of medieval India, barely makes an appearance in Naipaul's work. "Islam is a religion of fixed laws," he told Outlook magazine. "There can be no reconciliation [with other religions]". In this one sentence he dismissed Indian Islam's rich 800-year history of syncretism, intellectual heterodoxy and pluralism. The history of Indian Sufism in particular abounds with attempts by mystics to overcome the gap between the two great religions and to seek God not through sectarian rituals but through the wider gateway of the human heart. These attempts were championed by some of south Asia's most popular mystics, such as Bulleh Shah of Lahore:

Neither Hindu nor Muslim
I sit with all on a whim
Having no caste, sect or creed,
I am different indeed.
I am not a sinner or saint,
Knowing no sin nor restraint.
Bulleh tries hard to shirk
The exclusive embrace
of either Hindu or Turk.

Also notably absent in Naipaul's work is any mention of the remarkable religious tolerance of the Mughals: neither Akbar nor Dara Shukoh makes any sort of appearance in Naipaul's writing, and his readers will learn nothing of the former's enthusiastic patronage of Hindu temples or the latter's work translating the Gita into Persian, or writing The Mingling of Two Oceans, a study of Hinduism and Islam which emphasises the compatibility of the two faiths and speculates that the Upanishads were the source of monotheism. Such views were far from exceptional and most Mughal writers show similar syncretic tendencies: the greatest of Urdu poets, Ghalib, for example, wrote praising Benares as the Mecca of India, saying that he sometimes wished he could "renounce the faith, take the Hindu rosary in hand, and tie a sacred thread round my waist".

Yet Naipaul continues to envisage medieval India solely in terms of Islamic vandalism. Likewise, he continues to talk of Mughal architecture as entirely "foreign ... a carry-over from the architecture of Isfahan", ignoring all the fused Hindu elements that do so much to define its profound Indianness: the jalis, chajjas and chattris, quite apart from the fabulous Gujerati-Hindu decorative sculpture that is most spectacularly seen at Akbar's capital, Fatehpur Sikri. Yet while architectural historians see a remarkable fusing of civilisations in Mughal buildings, Naipaul thinks "only of everything that was flattened to enable them to come up".

Note: William Dalrymple's White Mughals (Harper Perennial) recently won the Wolfson Prize for History

Comments

[MdK]

Interesting piece again, makes you think, well makes me think anyway

[Thebit]

I always recommend Naipul to people who begin to blather on about Rushdie being the "saviour" of a certain ethnicity ("Indian Muslims"); because, usually, those who support Rushdie only do so to reinforce their prejudices and Naipul has all the anti-Muslim credentials they're looking for. At least Naipul, for all his bigotry, is a superior writer to Rushdie (have you tried to read _Fury_?).

It is only Hinduvata hordes who seek to write Islam out of India's history, or to recast Muslim rule it as a "dark age" of some sort. They are aided by people Gautier. Muslims, for better or for worse, are as much a part of India, as anyone else. Whatever wrongs they have may have done, they also did enriched the subcontinent.

On the wider point a very good insight on Pakistan. A nothing state. That seems to sum up its predicament.

[malik]

just finished reading white mughals too and found it a fascinating, rich sub text on a until now unknown aspect of Indian history. It debunks the dominant image that usually comes to mind in terms of the legacy of british rule- portrayed by most modern films and media- that of the arrogant, exclusivist British and their contempt and ravaging of a largely subjugated and passive native india. on the contrary this book shows that India was a highly pluralistic and open state with clever, vibrant, passionate people who interacted and jousted with the new foreigners on an equal basis.
ahh... i think ppl sincerely underrate the pleasures of indulging in past fantasies and glories of mughal india...thorougly enjoyable and always a good self esteem boost...highly recommend it.

[malik]

just finished reading white mughals too and found it a fascinating, rich sub text on a until now unknown aspect of Indian history. It debunks the dominant image that usually comes to mind in terms of the legacy of british rule- portrayed by most modern films and media- that of the arrogant, exclusivist British and their contempt and ravaging of a largely subjugated and passive native india. on the contrary this book shows that India was a highly pluralistic and open state with clever, vibrant, passionate people who interacted and jousted with the new foreigners on an equal basis.
ahh... i think ppl sincerely underrate the pleasures of indulging in past fantasies and glories of mughal india...thorougly enjoyable and always a good self esteem boost...highly recommend it.

[drapeto]

Since Bengali Muslims and northwest Indian Muslims have their own states, in which Islam forms a significant part of their identity, why cannot modern India have a Hindu component to its identity? Had Nehru taken this path, I think the BJP would not have formed and the riots would not have occurred, as a moderate religiosity coupled with modernity would have been just the security Hindus needed, just the badge of identity they demanded.

nah, man. it was the congress's employment of hindu religious symbols that encouraged and legitimized hindu-nationalist appeals. it wasn't nehru not taking this path that stoked hindutvadis, it was indira gandhi taking this path and jp narayan giving the rss a pass and the congress funding the shiv sena etc etc that gave the bjp its buzz.

the real solution was for everyone to become evr type atheists. ;-)

It is only Hinduvata hordes who seek to write Islam out of India's history

right, islamists only wrote muslims out of india's future.

[Thebit]

"the real solution was for everyone to become evr type atheists."

Yes, but "atheist" is a doctrinal position determined by Christianity.

"islamists only wrote muslims out of india's future."

Not sure what that means. Sorry.

[alibhai]

Drapeto, Do you imply muslims in India dont have a stake in the future of the country. Or are you refering to the muslims of Pakistan and Bangladesh whose histories and future can not be studied in a vacuum without the wider subcontinental context.

[a.v. koshy]

very interesting article, in the light of the election results wonder what naipaul thinks of his fav party having plummeted in spite of yrs truly nobel laureate rooting for it and of the collective decison of opposition coalition parties to give an italian born dual citizen the chance to be prime minister of india? salman rushdies comments on why bjp fell and why he is glad about it seem valid but tame, in this regard, but has naipaul made any comments regarding this? is sonia gandhi coming back to power a return of the ideal situation dalrymple refers to where christian hindu and muslim can all marry and have kids and share the country or is it regression? i would ideally like a reply from the author of the review on dalrymple's book.

[Randy McDonald]

"[T]hose who support Rushdie only do so to reinforce their prejudices and Naipul has all the anti-Muslim credentials they're looking for."

Please define "support." I like his works, and I think he should be free to write them without threat of attack. That said, I also think he's become too much of a celebrity, and that his books of late are bloated.

[Thebit]

"Please define "support.""

I can only recommend the following link:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=support

"I like his works..."

And others don't.

"...and I think he should be free to write them without threat of attack."

Sorry, but I don't know where this came from. I have never threatened him or said he cannot "feel free to write" his works.

[Randy McDonald]

s"And others don't."

So what? Can't it just be an honest matter of preferring one writer's style and subject, when he does it well? And a matter of saying that a writer should be free to write whatever he'd like?

"Sorry, but I don't know where this came from. I have never threatened him or said he cannot "feel free to write" his works."

I'm not talking about you, or to you on thsi matter. I'm talking in general about the original fatwa issued against him as a result of _The Satanic Verses,_ and the rather spectacular amount of violence directed against people who collaborated in the publishing of this book(translators, in particular, fared poorly).

Prejudices don't enter into the matter; or, at least, prejudices don't matter inasmuch as I think that all writers should be free to blaspheme against their natal religions, and that they should be congratulated if they do a good job of it. What prejudices were you talking about?

[Rajendraprasad Shinde]

Liked article on naipaul's antimuslim views proved and way shown to indian studetns and teachers to understand his hypocrisy

[JD]

Go to Washington, D.C.: I suppose the Congress and the White House remind one of Middle Atlantic Native American architecture, or even old Celtic architecture.

Hmmm, on all of my trips to DC, I've never thought this (especially the former suggestion). I always thought it looked quasi-Roman. I'll have to give this some further thought.

On the contrary, Anglo immigrants and their descendants deliberately built a new Rome, and called their highest House the Senate, their members Senators, and so on and so forth. Even the word Republic: It’s originally Latin. Does that mean America is devoid of identity?

To a degree, yes. For example, as an American, we might ask each other a question along the lines of, "What are you?" When I live outside the US (as is the case now), I would answer, "I'm an American," as you might expect. But inside the US, the expected response is one of ethnicity/nationality: "I'm English and Irish, with a little bit of blah and blah thrown in." When I first moved to Arizona in the early 1980s, the question was similar but here the questioner really wanted to know what state you had come from (Arizona was growing rapidly with many people moving there from all over the US; the vast majority of state residents at that time were not native-born Arizonans).

We Americans do, of course, have an identity, but I'm not sure we feel it as intensely. When I was a teenager, our family would put up an American flag out on the front porch most every day, especially during the summer (this was not something most people did or still do). And I suppose you might have thought my family as being "patriotic." But when I moved out west, to Arizona, I found the people there to be much more patriotic than my family or any of the easterners whom I had grown up with.

Moreover, we Americans have other identities that we also strongly associate with - our state or region primarily. For example, even though I grew up in the north-eastern US, I think of myself (still) as an Arizonan and (less so) as a Westerner (meaning, of the Western US).

So, yes, we Americans do have an identity (perhaps better to say multiple identities ;) ), and they differ from person to person and region to region, and perhaps all this makes for the confusion as to what our true identity really is.

[JCS]

While I've enjoyed reading the postings re Naipaul and comments about his flagrant bigotry, I think back to his careful and circumspect interviews in Beyond Belief. It seemed he was constantly being informed about his missed cultural cues, near misinterpretations, by his translators and guides. Nonetheless, he seemed to take great care in presenting interviews and characters in detail, reporting their comments, reflections and how each saw his/her own history, present and future. While he may be criticized by some for infusing his own opinions in his portraits, and perhaps those opinions aren't always positive, he makes an effort to search out the truth--whatever that may be--and bring it to life through a number of stories of real people using their own reminiscences and often their own words. It seems to me that he makes it clear when his characters are speaking and when he is speaking for or about them. We have too many writers today with no opinion whatsoever and with consequently nothing worth writing about. I can see now that I need to read more authors on the topic(s), but I have no regrets in reading Naipaul, have learned much (besides bigotry!) and will read more of him, along with others, in the future. Good Night and Good Luck.