Read Online The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul - Free Book Online
Authors: V.S. Naipaul
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dependent. She depends on others now both for questions and answers; foreign journalists are more important in India than in any other country. And India is fragmented; it is part of her dependence. This is not the fragmentation of region, religion or caste. It is the fragmentation of a country held together by no intellectual current, no developing inner life of its own. It is the fragmentation of a country without even an idea of a graded but linked society.
There is no true Indian aristocracy, no element that preserves the graces of a country and in moments of defeat expresses its pride. There have been parasitic landowners, tax-farmers; there have been rulers. They represented a brute authority; they were an imposed element on a remote peasantry; in moments of stress they have—with exceptions—proclaimed only their distance. They are the aptly named “native princes”; and though here and there their brute authority, of money or influence, has been reasserted, they have disappeared and nothing markstheir passing. In Hyderabad you wouldn’t have known that the Nizam had just died, that a dynasty older than Plassey had expired. Every Indian, prince or peasant, is a villager. All are separate and, in the decay of sensibility, equal.
There are contractors and civil servants in Delhi, where a “society lady” is usually a contractor’s wife. There are business executives in Calcutta, which still has an isolated, ageing set with British titles. There are the manufacturers and advertising men and film people of Bombay, where “suave,” “sophisticated,” and “prestigious” are words of especial approval. But these are trade guilds; they do not make a society. There is an absence of that element, to which all contribute and by which all are linked, where common standards are established and a changing sensibility appears to define itself. Each guild is separate. Even the politicians, with the state withering away for lack of ideas, are sterilized in their New Delhi reserve. And each trade—except the entertainment trade—is borrowed.
Every discipline, skill and proclaimed ideal of the modern Indian state is a copy of something which is known to exist in its true form somewhere else. The student of cabinet government looks to Westminster as to the answers at the back of the book. The journals of protest look, even for their typography, to the
New Statesman.
So Indians, the holy men included, have continually to look outside India for approval. Fragmentation and dependence are complete. Local judgment is valueless. It is even as if, without the foreign chit, Indians can have no confirmation of their own reality.
But India, though not a country, is unique. To its problems imported ideas no longer answer. The result is frenzy. The journals of revolt are regularly started; they are very private ventures, needing almost no readership and having responsibility to no one; within weeks they are exhausted and futile, part of the very thing they are revolting against. Manners deteriorate. Each Indian wishes to be the only one of his sort recognized abroad: like Mr. Nehru himself, who in the great days was described, most commonly, by visiting writers as the lonely Indian aristocrat—his own unexplained word—presiding over his deficient but devoted peasantry. Each Indian, looking into himself and discovering his own inadequacy, attributes inadequacy to every other Indian; and he is usually right. “Charlatan” is a favourite word of Indian abuse. The degree of this self-destructive malice startles and depresses the visitor.“The mutual hatred of men of their own class—a trait common to
shudras”:
the words are Vivekananda’s; they describe a dependent people.
This dependent frenzy nowadays finds its expression in flight. Flight to England, Canada, anywhere that lets Indians in: more than a flight to money: a flight to the familiar security of second-class citizenship, with all its opportunities for complaint,
There is no true Indian aristocracy, no element that preserves the graces of a country and in moments of defeat expresses its pride. There have been parasitic landowners, tax-farmers; there have been rulers. They represented a brute authority; they were an imposed element on a remote peasantry; in moments of stress they have—with exceptions—proclaimed only their distance. They are the aptly named “native princes”; and though here and there their brute authority, of money or influence, has been reasserted, they have disappeared and nothing markstheir passing. In Hyderabad you wouldn’t have known that the Nizam had just died, that a dynasty older than Plassey had expired. Every Indian, prince or peasant, is a villager. All are separate and, in the decay of sensibility, equal.
There are contractors and civil servants in Delhi, where a “society lady” is usually a contractor’s wife. There are business executives in Calcutta, which still has an isolated, ageing set with British titles. There are the manufacturers and advertising men and film people of Bombay, where “suave,” “sophisticated,” and “prestigious” are words of especial approval. But these are trade guilds; they do not make a society. There is an absence of that element, to which all contribute and by which all are linked, where common standards are established and a changing sensibility appears to define itself. Each guild is separate. Even the politicians, with the state withering away for lack of ideas, are sterilized in their New Delhi reserve. And each trade—except the entertainment trade—is borrowed.
Every discipline, skill and proclaimed ideal of the modern Indian state is a copy of something which is known to exist in its true form somewhere else. The student of cabinet government looks to Westminster as to the answers at the back of the book. The journals of protest look, even for their typography, to the
New Statesman.
So Indians, the holy men included, have continually to look outside India for approval. Fragmentation and dependence are complete. Local judgment is valueless. It is even as if, without the foreign chit, Indians can have no confirmation of their own reality.
But India, though not a country, is unique. To its problems imported ideas no longer answer. The result is frenzy. The journals of revolt are regularly started; they are very private ventures, needing almost no readership and having responsibility to no one; within weeks they are exhausted and futile, part of the very thing they are revolting against. Manners deteriorate. Each Indian wishes to be the only one of his sort recognized abroad: like Mr. Nehru himself, who in the great days was described, most commonly, by visiting writers as the lonely Indian aristocrat—his own unexplained word—presiding over his deficient but devoted peasantry. Each Indian, looking into himself and discovering his own inadequacy, attributes inadequacy to every other Indian; and he is usually right. “Charlatan” is a favourite word of Indian abuse. The degree of this self-destructive malice startles and depresses the visitor.“The mutual hatred of men of their own class—a trait common to
shudras”:
the words are Vivekananda’s; they describe a dependent people.
This dependent frenzy nowadays finds its expression in flight. Flight to England, Canada, anywhere that lets Indians in: more than a flight to money: a flight to the familiar security of second-class citizenship, with all its opportunities for complaint,
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