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Authors: V.S. Naipaul
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which implies protection, the other man’s responsibility, the other man’s ideas.
I T WAS WRITTEN , of course. It was the price of the independence movement.
The movement, as it developed under Gandhi, became a reforming religious movement, and it was in the Indian tradition that stretched back to the Buddha. Gandhi merged the religious emphasis on self-perfection in the political assertion of pride. It was a remarkable intuitive achievement. But it was also damaging. It was not concerned with ideas. It committed India to a holy philistinism, which still endures.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Raja Rammohun Roy had said that forty years of contact with the British would revivify Indian civilization. He spoke before the period of imperialist and racialist excess; the technological gap was not as wide as it later became; the West, to the forward-looking Indian, was then less the source of new techniques than the source of a New Learning. But the gap widened and the mood changed. The independence movement turned away, as it had to, from people like Roy. It looked back to the Indian past. It made no attempt to evaluate that past; it proclaimed only glory. At the same time the imaginative probing of the West was abandoned. It has never been resumed. The fact escapes notice. The West, so much more imitable today than in 1800, might be pillaged for its institutions and technology; its approval is valuable. But the political-religious-philistine rejection still stands. The West is “materially affluent but psychologically sick”; the West is a sham. No Indian can say why. But he doesn’t need to; that battle has been won; independence is proof enough.
A scholar in Delhi reminded me that Macaulay had said that all the learning of India was not worth one shelf of a European library. We had been talking of aboriginal Africa, and Macaulay was brought in to point out the shortsightedness of a certain type of obvious comment. Later it occurred to me, for the first time, that Macaulay had not been disprovedby the Indian revolution. He had only been ignored. His statement can be reaffirmed more brutally today. The gap between India and the West is not only the increasing gap in wealth, technology and knowledge. It is, more alarmingly, the increasing gap in sensibility and wisdom. The West is alert, many-featured and ever-changing; its writers and philosophers respond to complexity by continually seeking to alter and extend sensibility; no art or attitude stands still. India possesses only its unexamined past and its pathetic spirituality. The Indian philosopher specializes in exegesis; the holy man wishes to rediscover only what has been discovered; in 1967 as in 1962 the literary folk squabble like schoolmen, not about writing, but about the proprieties of translation from all their very ancient languages. India is simple; the West grows wiser.
Her revolution did not equip India for a twentieth-century independence. When that came, it existed within an assumption of a continuing dependence: an accommodating world, of magic, where Indian words had the power Indians attributed to them. The bluff had to be called; the disaster had to come.
O NE BY ONE I NDIA has had to shed ideas about herself and the world. Pain and bewilderment can no longer be resolved by the magical intervention of a Vivekananda, a Gandhi, a Nehru, a Vinoba Bhave. Fifteen years ago Bhave said, more or less, that his aim was the withering away of the state. He called it “the decentralized technique of God,” and even the pious dismissed him as a dreamer. The state has now withered away. Not through holiness; it is just that the politicians, homespun villagers in New Delhi, no longer have an idea between them. Magic can no longer simplify the world and make it safe. India responds now only to events; and since there can be no play of the mind each disagreeable event—the Chinese attack, the Pakistan war, devaluation, famine and the humiliating
I T WAS WRITTEN , of course. It was the price of the independence movement.
The movement, as it developed under Gandhi, became a reforming religious movement, and it was in the Indian tradition that stretched back to the Buddha. Gandhi merged the religious emphasis on self-perfection in the political assertion of pride. It was a remarkable intuitive achievement. But it was also damaging. It was not concerned with ideas. It committed India to a holy philistinism, which still endures.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Raja Rammohun Roy had said that forty years of contact with the British would revivify Indian civilization. He spoke before the period of imperialist and racialist excess; the technological gap was not as wide as it later became; the West, to the forward-looking Indian, was then less the source of new techniques than the source of a New Learning. But the gap widened and the mood changed. The independence movement turned away, as it had to, from people like Roy. It looked back to the Indian past. It made no attempt to evaluate that past; it proclaimed only glory. At the same time the imaginative probing of the West was abandoned. It has never been resumed. The fact escapes notice. The West, so much more imitable today than in 1800, might be pillaged for its institutions and technology; its approval is valuable. But the political-religious-philistine rejection still stands. The West is “materially affluent but psychologically sick”; the West is a sham. No Indian can say why. But he doesn’t need to; that battle has been won; independence is proof enough.
A scholar in Delhi reminded me that Macaulay had said that all the learning of India was not worth one shelf of a European library. We had been talking of aboriginal Africa, and Macaulay was brought in to point out the shortsightedness of a certain type of obvious comment. Later it occurred to me, for the first time, that Macaulay had not been disprovedby the Indian revolution. He had only been ignored. His statement can be reaffirmed more brutally today. The gap between India and the West is not only the increasing gap in wealth, technology and knowledge. It is, more alarmingly, the increasing gap in sensibility and wisdom. The West is alert, many-featured and ever-changing; its writers and philosophers respond to complexity by continually seeking to alter and extend sensibility; no art or attitude stands still. India possesses only its unexamined past and its pathetic spirituality. The Indian philosopher specializes in exegesis; the holy man wishes to rediscover only what has been discovered; in 1967 as in 1962 the literary folk squabble like schoolmen, not about writing, but about the proprieties of translation from all their very ancient languages. India is simple; the West grows wiser.
Her revolution did not equip India for a twentieth-century independence. When that came, it existed within an assumption of a continuing dependence: an accommodating world, of magic, where Indian words had the power Indians attributed to them. The bluff had to be called; the disaster had to come.
O NE BY ONE I NDIA has had to shed ideas about herself and the world. Pain and bewilderment can no longer be resolved by the magical intervention of a Vivekananda, a Gandhi, a Nehru, a Vinoba Bhave. Fifteen years ago Bhave said, more or less, that his aim was the withering away of the state. He called it “the decentralized technique of God,” and even the pious dismissed him as a dreamer. The state has now withered away. Not through holiness; it is just that the politicians, homespun villagers in New Delhi, no longer have an idea between them. Magic can no longer simplify the world and make it safe. India responds now only to events; and since there can be no play of the mind each disagreeable event—the Chinese attack, the Pakistan war, devaluation, famine and the humiliating
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