NAIPAUL HAD gained a reputation as a writer who denigrated non-European peoples, but he declared that his “brutal” analyses were aimed at equipping postcolonial societies with tools to grasp the nature of their predicament.1 He claimed that he hoped to disabuse formerly colonized peoples of their investment in claims of identity that substituted self-destructive fantasies of strength or unity for an objective study of the past. In his view, writers who studied the past dispassionately were unlikely to alter readers’ sensibilities so long as ethnonationalism, with its exclusionary ideology of race and culture, remained the dominant idiom of collective self-expression in newly independent countries. Trinidad in the 1960s, Naipaul declared, was “corrupted by a fantasy which is their cross.”2
What does it mean for a society to be “corrupted by fantasy”? The Loss of El Dorado represents Naipaul’s most sustained attempt to explore this question by means of an excavation, at once imaginative and historical, of how events in Trinidad’s past had contributed to its habit of self-deception in the postcolonial era.
Trinidad was discovered in the early sixteenth century by Spanish and English adventurers who were searching for a fabled city of gold known as El Dorado. Native populations were enslaved and collectively tormented to serve this European delusion. Ironically, over time, they too became possessed of this way of thinking and began to echo the language of their masters. In an audacious move that speaks of a novelist’s rather than a disciplinary historian’s instincts, Naipaul implies that the collective Trinidadian tendency to “fantasy” was shaped by the violent influences of this past.
Looking back on The Loss of El Dorado more than a decade after its publication, Naipaul described its themes as “[the European] discovery, the New World, the dispeopling of the discovered islands; slavery, the creation of the plantation colony; the coming of the idea of revolution; the chaos after revolutions in societies so created.”3 The thesis of Loss of El Dorado is that the social character of Trinidad became indelibly marked by the European fantasies its founding was meant to serve. He wrote The Loss of El Dorado in order to identify and comprehend the pattern of self-destructive actions into which Trinidad had been forced by tragic events in its past.4 If the sources of this historical disordering could be identified, he seemed to suggest, a path to an alternative collective future might be charted.5
The Loss of El Dorado (1969) is the result of archival research Naipaul conducted in the British Library. Its narrative is organized around two pivotal moments in the history of early Trinidad. The first is the sixteenth-century English and Spanish dream of discovering El Dorado, the mythic land of gold. The second is nineteenth-century Britain’s effort to bolster its strength in South America by fomenting a revolution against the Spanish Empire during the Napoleonic wars.
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Trinidad entered historical records as the nearby launching point of the Spanish and English search for a land of gold, the fabled El Dorado, which was rumored to be located in neighboring Guiana. Naipaul outlines this rumor as follows:
There had been a golden man, El Dorado, the gilded one, in what is now Colombia: a chief who once a year rolled in turpentine, was covered with gold dust and then dived into a lake. But the tribe of the golden man had been conquered a generation before Columbus came to the New World. It was an Indian memory that the Spaniards pursued; and the memory was confused with the legend, among jungle Indians, of the Peru the Spaniards had already conquered.
Always the Indians told of a rich and civilized people just a few days’ march away. Sometimes there were pieces of gold, finely worked; once a temple of sun was found in the jungle; once a crazed explorer returned with a tale of an enormous city of long straight streets, its temples full of golden idols.6
The Spaniards became obsessed with an Amerindian story and made it their own. Over time, different groups of conquered and enslaved Indians learned to feed versions of this story back to the Spaniards, who, disregarding the circular traffic upon which such stories were based, took them as independent proof of the existence of El Dorado.
As a consequence of the circulation of countless reports and stories about the city, European fictions had come to infect the Indian imagination. Tormented by the alien men who were gripped by these fictions, the Indians incorporated into their myths and legends the accounts peddled by the Europeans. The so-called contact zones of West and East became the sites where historical disorientation fed on itself, creating an echo chamber in which lunacy was reinforced. In their search for independent clues to the location of El Dorado, the Europeans only caught the Indian echoes that the former had set in motion.
Over time, Naipaul suggests, even the Indians came to mistake these lies for truths. The epistemic fractures introduced by the European delusion came to be the ground upon which local truth was constituted. What had been the peculiar trait of the adventurers came to inform the manner in which reality was experienced and narrated by conqueror and enslaved alike. “The legend of El Dorado, narrative within narrative, witness within witness, had become like the finest fiction, indistinguishable from truth.”7 Such stories even gave rise to an early form of realism, ostensibly focused on empirical truth. Naipaul points to the proliferation of official letters, records, descriptions, journal entries, and maps that constituted the archive of a collective fantasy.
Naipaul wonders if there had been an element of self-awareness in the conqueror’s lunacy. Given the enormous investments and the careers made (and unmade) by the search for El Dorado, was Amerindian participation in the derangement a part of the social contract instituted by the colonizer? Conversely, was willing submission to the lunacy of the powerful necessary for the enslaved to survive the hellish conditions the Spanish had created? This was the true romance of the New World, serving as template for the collective self-deception that would recur over the centuries to come.
Naipaul describes the intolerable conditions the Indians faced. Caught between the competing demands of the Spanish and the English, when they were coerced into serving one party, they made enemies of the other. Nothing could be done to satisfy either tormenter, both of whom sought to enslave or exterminate them. By 1595, the Spanish governor Antonio de Berrio had divided up Trinidad among his soldiers, enslaving the local leaders and torturing and enchaining those who resisted. Arwacas Indians, who were cannibals, were brought over from the mainland and “resettled in Trinidad to ‘eate out and wast those that were naturall of the place.’ Two Indians had been recently hanged and quartered for trading with English ships.”8
When Sir Walter Raleigh, representative of the English Crown, raided Port of Spain in 1595, he massacred all the Spaniards he could find.9 Simple reason dictated his decision. Had he failed to do so, Raleigh pithily remarked, “I should have savoured very much of the asse.”10 Raleigh then went on to trumpet England’s role as liberator of the Indians:
He called the chiefs and spoke to them through one of his interpreters. I made them understand that I was the servant of the Queene, who was the great casique of the North and a virgine…she had delivered all nations about her, as were by [the Spaniards] oppressed, and having freed all the coast of the Northren world from their servitude, had sent mee to free them also, and withall to defend the countrey of Guiana from their invasion and conquest.11
Guiana was to be the freed territory from which Raleigh launched his search for El Dorado.12 Spain took the English raid on Port of Spain to be confirmation of what the Spanish had known all along, “another proof of the existence of El Dorado.”13 In other words, Raleigh’s raid strengthened Spain’s belief that there was gold in the region. This was one of many circular processes through which the Europeans fed each other’s fantasies, all the time dragging the Amerindian peoples toward a slow death. (Centuries later, the English would again promise freedom from Spanish rule; this time, duplicity took the form of the prospect of national liberation.)
If fiction shaped reality, reality could also shape fiction. Naipaul connects the El Dorado story to the emergence of literary realism, which traces its origins to this region in the early modern era. He proposes a brief but suggestive account of how realism might have originated in the historical disordering inflicted upon the colonial periphery. In contrast to canonical European accounts of the “rise of the novel,” which emphasize the Enlightenment ideas and practices associated with the bourgeois print culture, empiricism, and scientific rationality in the European metropole,14 Naipaul proposes that the primal scene of realist representation can be found in the sustained interpenetration of cruelty and lunacy that took place in the global periphery.
At the end of the sixteenth century, English sailors from the Edward Bonaventura landed on the island of St. Helena (“not an earthly paradise, as is reported”15). Exploring the island, the sailors found a “chapel” in which they heard someone singing:
They pushed the door open and saw a naked man. He was very frightened. He thought they were Portuguese and were going to kill him.
He was an English tailor who had gone to sea and had fallen ill. He had been set down in St Helena and had lived there alone for fourteen months. He spent his days in the chapel, hiding from the sun. When he understood that the newcomers were his countrymen, “what betweene excessive sudden feare and joy, he became distracted of his wits, to our great sorrowes.” Forty goat-skins were drying in the sun. “For want of apparel” they made him “two sutes of goats skinnes with the hairy side outwards, like unto the savages of Canada.”
He was still alive when the Edward Bonaventura came into the Gulf of Paria, but perhaps dead when after eight days the ship with the starving crew went out again through the Dragon’s Mouth, a ghost ship already, its journey soon to end in mutiny, derangement, mystery.16
The story is recorded in Hakluyt’s Voyages and went into the making of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe more than a hundred years later.17
Naipaul suggests that Crusoe may be a composite of different historical figures, of which the crazed tailor is one. Other stories relating to the early years of Trinidad also served as inspiration for the realist novel. The other model for Crusoe was Antonio de Berrio, the shipwrecked governor referred to earlier. Naipaul believed that Defoe used the island of Tobago as the model for Crusoe’s island. Like Crusoe, Berrio felt sufficiently anxious to require his men to “make a written declaration of their loyalty” when a rival leader arrived to claim Trinidad.18
But such proclamations of sovereignty were belied by the fact that these men “never had enough to eat. They were also in danger of being eaten. Man-eating Caribs were increasingly on the prowl.”19 Comedy, albeit of a grim kind, is never far from Naipaul’s mind as he piles on examples of absurdity and lunacy in his account of the early years of Trinidad’s founding.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
In 1797, some two hundred years after Raleigh departed, the English would be back—yet again as liberators. Invoking the French Revolution, they spread word that they planned to liberate all the slaves in the Spanish territories and that they wanted to support nationalist movements across the region. The British wanted to foment revolution in these Spanish territories. They hoped to enhance their imperial power by bringing the new ideology of free trade to the region; their aim was to make Port of Spain into a “great British trading port of an independent South America.”20
But there was a complication: “Trinidad, the base for revolution, was at the same time being established as a British slave colony.”21 Naipaul elucidates the cynical maneuvering of imperial Britain: To undermine the authority of its rival imperialists, Britain propagandized for the spirit of liberty and free trade. Yet even as it urged the slaves to rise up against their masters, Britain relied on brutal methods of maintaining order in its own colonies. In Trinidad specifically, the British ruled over “an empire of plantations and Negroes, the whip, the branding-iron, the knife (for cutting off Negro ears), the stake and the torture cells of the Port of Spain jail.”22
Freedom served as a distant echo of an equally elusive dream of an earthly paradise two centuries earlier. In both cases, vulnerable groups were tragically drawn into fantasies promulgated by powerful and unscrupulous forces. Naipaul explains how the British drew upon the rhetoric of liberty to encourage unrest among vulnerable populations in the Spanish colonies. These populations were abandoned to their fates soon afterward, when such agitation ceased to be useful to Britain’s campaign against Spain.
In Naipaul’s recounting, new complications arose for the British side in the nineteenth century. He focuses on the scandal that ensued from the arrest and torture of Luisa Calderon, a thirteen-year-old slave girl, in early-nineteenth-century British Trinidad, which brought tensions between metropole and colony to a head. Calderon was subjected to torture on Christmas Day in 1801 at the direction of the British governor of Trinidad, Thomas Picton. Governor Picton, appointed to administer Trinidad at a time of global political unrest and tight budgets, resorted to brutal punishments to maintain law and order. Many years later, he would be hailed the “saviour of the colony” for his effective disciplinary rule of the island.23 In 1800, however, this was not so. At the time, Picton had fallen out of favor with the liberals and enlightened thinkers who were on the political ascendant in London.
Received opinion had it that London wanted to turn Trinidad into a colony of free settlers and a base of free trade. Picton was thought to be an ally of the slave owners, not the reformers in favor of free trade. A growing line of argument among the reformers was that slavery was expensive and morally objectionable. In their view, free labor could be more cheaply imported; a memorandum on “free Chinese immigration” was widely read.24 Moreover, it was clear that free trade succeeded best in circumstances where wage labor, rather than slavery, enabled markets and consumerist values to take root. This ideology was in keeping with the British state’s aims during the Napoleonic wars, which were to destabilize the Spanish as much as the French empires. Realpolitik and morality were nicely aligned for the British elite.
Things looked very different in the faraway colony of Trinidad. Picton needed the support of the slave owners to maintain order in Trinidad, which was underfunded by London and therefore insecure. It made no sense for Picton to support the English reformers in Trinidad—who clamored for the changes authorized by the metropole—because they were opposed to the slaveholders, whom Picton leaned on for help in maintaining law and order in Trinidad.
At this point, relying on the backing of the French plantation owners, Picton rewrote the laws to tighten his hold on the reins of power and to bolster the power of the slave owners. Whereas the Spanish code “had reduced a Negro to his needs,” Picton altered it to ensure that “the new code was concerned only with the needs and fears of the Negro’s owner.”25 By doing so, Picton made enemies of the English reformers on the island, many of whom were supporters of the French and American revolutions. This group challenged Picton’s authority and appealed to London to have him replaced. In response, Picton decided to punish the members of this group “through their negroes.” (Like their political adversaries, the liberals were also slave owners). Dawson, a “Liverpool Negro-shipper,” learned that his “devout Negro” slave Goliah had been arrested on his way to church. Some days later, Goliah was found “under the gallows in the jail-yard, ‘dreadfully mangled from his hips up to his shoulders, having been unmercifully flogged with a driver’s whip, which cut huge lumps of flesh from his body.’ Goliah was taken back to the plantation; he revived just to speak a few words to his master; a few days later he died.”26
The Courant, the local Trinidad newspaper, barely mentioned such incidents, no doubt because the arbitrary execution of slaves by the British state was not considered news. “In its obliqueness was a type of truth,” Naipaul remarks witheringly. He notes that slaves in Trinidad were treated as cruelly as ever despite Britain’s official policy of liberating South America and freeing its slaves. In Trinidad, neither the slaves’ suffering nor their voices could be made to count in the brutal circumstances resulting from the fight between the European slaveholders and reformers.
This was the setting for Naipaul’s account of Luisa Calderon’s torture. The slave girl was exploited in the fight that broke out between Governor Picton and the liberal reformist opposition in Trinidad. Luisa was falsely accused of theft by a free mulatto woman in Port of Spain. She was then arrested and taken to jail, where she was tortured for several days. As Luisa’s story became known, the English opposition on the island worked feverishly to draw attention to the young girl’s arrest. London took notice. Picton found himself charged with a crime; his trial became a public event. Pictures of Luisa Calderon and the implements used for her torture were sold in London. Naipaul dryly notes the metropolitan double standard evident in the public outrage directed at Picton: “Slavery existed; it had made many people rich. Yet it was clear that Picton was being tried for being governor of a slave colony.”27 Picton had carried out the will of the British state. For all his personal cruelty, he was a “victim of people’s conscience, of ideas of humanity and reason that were ahead of the reality.”28
More importantly, Naipaul argues that the slave girl Luisa Calderon had been made a pawn in the quarrel between two powerful entities. History had forced Luisa into an absurd situation; her arrest led to her fate being worked out neither in terms that she understood nor, following her ordeal, in ways responsive to her needs. Her voice could not be heard because it was drowned out by, and subsumed into the agendas of, bigger players.29 Naipaul argues that the lesson to be drawn from Luisa’s fate is how the powerless are woven into the self-aggrandizing fantasies of the powerful. Instead of merely rejecting this appropriation as morally unjustifiable (which Naipaul believes it is), we need to grasp that this is how power operates. Because there is no “outside” to this space of operation, Naipaul suggests it is important for the subjected to learn how to make their voices fully conversant with the codes of power rather than insist that there ought to exist institutional spaces outside them. Naipaul devotes a great deal of space to narrating the disappearance of the “faceless” and “silent” underclass,30 but he also points out that such groups lacked the means to take stock of their vulnerable state.
In Loss, Naipaul seems to warn against the possibility that historically disadvantaged people can directly seize control of the historical narrative by an act of political will. There can be no clean break with the past, least of all through declarations of solidarity between or within oppressed groups. Such actions, Naipaul believes, will likely result in further disorientation and self-destructive actions—thereby prolonging the agonies of the past. The only way people in similarly vulnerable situations might have an opportunity to prevent such outcomes is if they have access to the institutional means to overcome their ignorance by learning to correctly describe the disorienting effects of the past and to draw adequate lessons from it. In his view, the tutelary function played by civic and educational institutions is indispensable to any lasting and productive change.
An adequate perspective on their past could emerge only by working through the complex weave of the kind of society that had been produced in Trinidad. Naipaul suggests that the tools of social remaking and resistance lie in critical reflection that must ultimately rely not on the distracting demand for historical justice or on the elusive desire to remake society on utopian grounds, but on the more modest acquisition of the tools of access to the discourse of civil society. Having exposed the complex and hypocritical motivations of both the liberals and the reactionaries, the radicals and the slave owners, Naipaul nonetheless falls back on a realistic attitude. For all their flaws, Naipaul argues, the liberal reformers were the bearers of a flexible kind of thinking and seeing that could form the basis of historical agency for the colonized.
In the conclusion of The Loss of the El Dorado, Naipaul tellingly gives up the ironic tone that had guided much of the work. He claims that in a society like Trinidad, the moment of hope came and faded very quickly when the “early English immigrants” came in the late eighteenth century:
In the Spanish-French-African city of planters, launch-captains, soldiers, slaves, whores, keepers of grogshops and retail shops selling salt, tobacco and dried meat for peons, the early English immigrants had been new and startling. They were too grand for the setting: they looked absurd, ignorant and gullible. They were distinguished not only by their wealth and commercial adventurousness…and the other emblems of a finer domestic self-cherishing, but also by their intellectual liveliness. They dominated naturally. This liveliness—the threat of letters to London lawyers and newspapers, the affirmation of rights and freedoms—was a carry-over from the metropolis.31
This group represented a force opposed to that of the entrenched authority of the planters. However, the vigor of the new English forces in Trinidad was not to last. They too were worn down by the mediocrity and corruption of the place. Things did not improve in the manner suggested by the ideologues of historical progress; the nineteenth century came to be defined by bureaucratic rationalization. Slow decline and degradation followed as even these new forces were absorbed by the emergent colonial culture that arose in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars:
In the slave society, where self-fulfillment came so easily, this liveliness began to be perverted and then to fade and the English saw their pre-eminence, more simply, as a type of racial magic. The shifting of Empire to the east, the emigration of the ambitious, was a further intellectual depletion…. [These were people] who had ceased to assess themselves by the standards of the metropolis and now measured their eminence only by their distance, economic and racial, from their Negroes.32
As the empire grew, English intellectuals—who had a generation earlier defended universalist principles—became mere mouthpieces of imperial ideology. Luisa Calderon’s forgotten story coincided with a period of transition in which enlightened values gave way to an empire solely concerned with mundane matters:
The 19th-century writers who came, Trollope, Kingsley, Froude, came as tourists from a leading industrial country to an imperial outpost heroically manned. Imperial history, honouring Picton [the reactionary], suppressing Fullarton [the reformer], had already become selective and anachronistic. Trollope was worried about the labour shortage; Kingsley wrote about the vegetation and with tenderness about the people; Froude wrote anxiously about race and the Empire. None questioned the lesser life of the agricultural colony, which made nothing, imported everything, where it had begun to be felt that education was an irrelevance, something for the ambitious poor, that the rich, the white or the secure needed only to be able to read and count.33
Naipaul claimed he had achieved a greater historical awareness through the writing of The Loss of El Dorado, and he hoped to transmit this new view of the past by which he had been made to his fellow Trinidadians. “Ever since I had begun to identify my subjects,” Naipaul writes in the Enigma of Arrival, “I had hoped to arrive, in a book, at a synthesis of the worlds and cultures that had made me…. I felt in [The Loss of El Dorado] I had made such a synthesis.”34
The tragic fate of the Chaguanes Indians, who lived in Trinidad before they were probably massacred by the Spanish, held a personal interest for Naipaul. Following the extermination of people like the Chaguanes, the land was remade as a plantation society, worked by slaves brought from Africa. This “derelict” land of rural Trinidad was the place to which Naipaul’s ancestors were transported. Indians from the “ancient, distressed Indo-Gangetic plain” were shipped in to replace black laborers on the sugar estates.35 “The Indians were people to whom authority had always been remote; they had little sense of history, were governed and protected by rituals which were like privacy; and in the Trinidad countryside they created a simple rural India. They were an aspect of the colony. The colony became an imperial amalgam, the Empire in little.”36 And so, as the Empire consolidated itself, it found itself hardening from “above” and “below.” While the colonial authorities concerned themselves primarily with revenues and security, the members of Naipaul’s rural Indian community remained backward, their benighted state testifying to the termination of the enlightened spirit in which nineteenth-century colonial reform had been initiated.
Naipaul seems to extrapolate from the historical events of the past to produce a thesis about the cultural logic of the colonial space. Working with a novelist’s imagination, he relies on his reading of the two moments in Trinidad’s past to posit a sweeping frame of interpretation in which, he thinks, the logic and structure of the society is laid bare. The stern judgment in Loss appears to result from Naipaul’s treatment of Trinidad as a “character” in a novel, whose actions are the result of a trauma it suffered in its youth. At such moments, Loss resembles less a history than a narrowly focused and deterministic account of how the colony’s origins in fantasy and cruelty shaped the identity and culture of modern Trinidad. Thus the 1801 official torture of Luisa Calderon by the colonial state after she confessed is, with all its horrors, a precursor of the cruel practices that would go on in modern Trinidad.37 At least this appears to be Naipaul’s judgment:
The severe, judicial whipping of children continues to be one of the solemn dramas of Trinidad backyard life. A badly beaten child is said to be “blessed.” This is from the French blesser, to wound; but the word is spoken as an English word and has the associations of church, sacrament awe. A blessing is an occasion for stillness. The blesser is handled with care by his womenfolk; while the mood of stillness lasts he is a man apart, fragile, touched by an unnatural and even divine frenzy. For the blessed child there is special affection and a special food of love: butter in hot sugared milk. The mood of stillness becomes a mood of sweetness: it is known that after a blessing everyone is closer. The drama that has been enacted…both in its master-slave reality and its man-child mimicry—is, of course, the drama of the plantation whip, transmuted into a dream of community. In the Negro kingdoms of the night the role of the Grand Judge, who punished at night as the overseer punished by day, was important.38
Naipaul has been criticized for one-sidedly emphasizing negative aspects of Trinidadian life.39 It is said that he revels in such portrayals because he is self-loathing or a racist. However, it is also possible to argue that Naipaul unearths “negative” aspects of the past with the critical aim of revaluing ways of thinking and feeling that have become normalized. From this perspective, Naipaul’s descriptions are informed by a desire to activate new lines of thought and action, not, as his critics imply, because he seeks to denigrate non-European cultures. Naipaul’s Loss can be recognized as his effort “to have a new vision of what one had been born into, and to have an intimation of a sequence of historical events going far back.”40
Naipaul’s single-minded way of excavating the past can be faulted for producing a univocal narrative that is at times lacking in nuance. Motivated in part by what he saw as the alarming rise of identity politics, Naipaul wrote a work in which the historical story sometimes seems to be driven by an underlying didacticism. Helen Hayward has observed one of the ways in which “a novelist’s rendering of history” can fall prey to tendentiousness:
The events [Loss] narrates are made vividly present by the use of telling detail and in novelistic fashion. Naipaul gives an impression of effortless ease in his reconstruction of events…there is no room for uncertainty as to what occurred, and the motives of the various participants are seemingly transparent to him…. The parts hang together, in so far as they do hang together, not by means of plot, but by virtue of the metaphoric consonance implied by collocation: British plans to stir up revolution in Spanish-America likened to the pursuit of El Dorado—both are chimeras, motivated by greed, and are doomed to remain ineffectual. This can lead to the impression that, for all the disjunctions, Naipaul’s rendering of history fits together almost too well.41
Such lapses, at once formal and intellectual, nonetheless reveal how, at this point in his career, Naipaul regarded himself as engaged in equipping historically vulnerable subjects with a language to describe their historical predicament. More broadly, Naipaul’s own skepticism about talk of racial or ethnic solidarity arose from his deeper conviction that the postcolonial epoch had resulted in the substitution of one set of oppressors for another. In the tea gardens in the north of India, created during colonial times with aborigines serving as laborers, Naipaul observes how, since independence, the British management had been replaced a group of well-heeled Indians who had acquired the mannerisms of their racially alien precursors. Meanwhile, the aborigines remained in their same position, still known as “tea workers.” The racial hierarchy of the colonial period had been replaced by a caste-like hierarchy in the postcolonial era:
Indian caste attitudes perfectly fit plantation life and the clannishness of the planters’ clubs; and the Indian tea men, clubmen now in the midst of the aborigines, have adopted, almost as a sign of caste, and no longer with conscious mimicry, the style of dress of their British predecessors: the shirt, the shorts, and the socks. The tea workers remain illiterate, alcoholic, lost, a medley of tribal people without traditions and now (as in some places in the West Indies) even without a language, still strangers in the land, living not in established villages but (again as in the old plantations of the West Indies) in shacks strung along the estate roads.42
Naipaul was one of the first postcolonial writers to think about global parallels between different groups of unprotected and exploited peoples. He discerned the historical similarities between these aboriginal peoples in South Asia and the Amerinidians to whom the Spanish conquistadores in sixteenth-century Trinidad referred to as “Indians of work.” It is also difficult to miss the connections between the aboriginal tea workers in India and Naipaul’s indentured ancestors in Trinidad.
Occupying a position long inhabited by other aliens, the conquistadores of modern India are the upper-caste Hindus dressed in their peculiar shirts, shorts, and socks. Significantly, Naipaul is not primarily focused on this easily caricatured social type but on the more serious “absurdity” of the victim, who is in no position to give an account of his dispossession. Naipaul’s prose rebels against being placed in this position of not-knowing and not-seeing. In this it is likely that his perspective on Indian history and society is partly framed by his own New World formation.
INDIA: A WOUNDED CIVILIZATION
Emboldened by what he had accomplished with The Loss of El Dorado, Naipaul turned his attention to South Asian history. India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) recalls Loss in its exploration of how events in the distant past establish a social and intellectual framework that continues to influence contemporary behavior. A parallel between the two works can be seen in how the two old societies, as imagined by Naipaul, responded to “conquests and defilements.”43 In Loss, Naipaul describes how the conquered Amerindians had absorbed and been inducted into the fantasies of their conquerors. In Wounded, Naipaul argues that the Indian response to conquest was a kind of denial—a deeper retreat into a fantasy of an unchanged archaic order, as symbolized by “empty rituals” and “old magic.” Unlike the Amerindians, who had been dragged into an alien fantasy in which they were forced to participate, Indians had found a way of ignoring a painful reality by retreating into a fantasy of a changeless eternal order. Whereas the Amerindians were tragically compelled to embrace an outsider’s delusion, the Indians had closed themselves off and turned inward, with disastrous consequences for their intellectual and cultural development. Indians held to archaic rituals as a way of coping with being conquered and defeated; they had effectively “retreated,” making themselves “intellectually smaller, always vulnerable.”44 Both Loss and Wounded can be read as Naipaul’s seeking to equip defeated peoples to whom he felt connected with ways of looking that would enable them to comprehend their predicament.
At the start of Wounded, Naipaul offers a revealing anecdote of the prevalence of self-defeating forms of social action. Naipaul learned that a temple that had been defiled by British soldiers during the Second World War was being renovated and was about to have its deity newly installed. It was 1975, a time of political crisis. Naipaul writes:
A twelve-lettered mantra will be chanted and written fifty million times; and that is what—in this time of Emergency, with the constitution suspended, the press censored—five thousand volunteers are doing. When the job is completed, an inscribed gold plate will be placed below the new idol to attest to the creation of its divinity and the devotion of the volunteers. A thousand-year-old temple will live again: India, Hindu India, is eternal: conquests and defilements are but instants in time.45
Naipaul implies that this “retreat” into archaism is symptomatic of Indians’ willful turn away from reality, which can only be understood through historical study. Naipaul brings up a journey to a historical site some two hundred miles away from this temple, also in the south of the country. There Naipaul sees the ruins of the “great Hindu kingdom of Vijaynagar46…established in the fourteenth century; it was conquered, and totally destroyed, by an alliance of Muslim principalities in 1565. The city was then one of the greatest in the world.”47 While he is taking in the ruins, Naipaul is struck by the sight of a “temple that for some reason was spared destruction four hundred years ago.”48 He is equally struck by the fact that the people who enter the temple do so in a spirit altogether alien from his:
It is for this that the pilgrims come, to make offerings and to perform the rites of old magic. Some of the ruins of Vijaynagar have been declared national monuments by the Archeological Department; but to the pilgrims—and they are more numerous than the tourists—Vijaynagar is not its terrible history or its present encompassing destruction. Such history as is known has been reduced to the legend of a mighty ruler, a kingdom founded with gold that showered from the sky, a kingdom so rich that pearls and rubies were sold in the market place like grain.
To the pilgrims Vijaynagar is its surviving temple. The surrounding destruction is like proof of the virtue of old magic; just as the fantasy of past splendor is accommodated within an acceptance of present squalor.49
The chanting of mantras in the first temple unfolded in a manner that bore no relation to the emergency in which the nation was engulfed. The survival of the second temple was treated as a “miracle”—not matter for historical inquiry, but something to be unreflectively celebrated. Naipaul offers these anecdotes as expressions of intellectual stultification. In each case, when confronted by the realities of the present or the past, the pilgrims pointedly turned away and reasserted older habits and traditional forms of perception.
These were the traits of an “underdeveloped ego” that had come to be embedded in Indian habits and practices, according to the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar. According to Kakar, the underdeveloped ego has difficulty undertaking objective analysis, or analyses in which the objects are studied “as something in their own right.” Because Indians were conditioned to regard the external world “as good or bad, threatening or rewarding, helpful or cruel, all depending on the person’s feelings at the moment,” circumstances made it difficult to foster modes of reasoning that were objective. Kakar noted in a letter to Naipaul, “We Indians…use the outside reality to preserve the continuity of the self amidst an ever changing flux of outer events and things.”50
Such aversion to empirical reality, Naipaul implied, was a consequence of civilizational retreat that had been abetted by Hindu practices and beliefs. If these traits had formed as a result of “conquests and defilements,” Naipaul was far less interested in denouncing the conquerors than in analyzing the long-term effects such events might have had on the conquered. Naipaul repeatedly argued for the need to cultivate the tools to assess those purported effects. He criticized those who turned away from reality in one of two ways—as pilgrims or as ethnonationalists, who claimed a “golden age” that existed in India prior to such conquests. These, he argues, were two different forms of unhistorical and unreflective thinking.
As with other works like Loss, Naipaul appeared to be saying in Wounded that the ability to describe and assess the deforming effects of the past is a precondition for healing self-inflicted civilizational “wounds” and, by extension, for achieving an intellectual renaissance. However, instead of fostering the conditions in which such critical labor might be undertaken, the nationalist movement had “merely proclaimed the Indian past; and religion had been inevitably mixed with political awakening.”51 As a consequence, Indian elites superficially grafted foreign ideas onto an Indian framework that lacked the wherewithal to face the challenges of modernity. “The freedom that came to independent India with the institutions it gave itself were alien freedoms, better suited to another civilization; in India they remained separate from the internal organization of the country, its beliefs and antique restrictions.”52 Naipaul’s claim was that until the lasting effects of historical conquest and reordering were squarely confronted, Indian society would remain mired in different ways of affirming the past, as opposed to creating the institutions and analytical tools that would “provide it with the intellectual means to move ahead.”53 In the same way that Naipaul regretted the destructive effects of the Spanish conquest on Amerindian culture and society in Trinidad, he regarded the Muslim conquests in a purely negative light.
Given the accusations of Hindu chauvinism that would be leveled at him decades later, it is worth pointing out that Naipaul did not express nostalgia for Hindu India before the Muslim invasions. He emphasized that Hindu culture as he found it lacked the requisite tools and institutions to bring about the universalist forms of critique and historical reasoning that would enable it to assess the effects of the past and build reflective institutions adequate to future challenges. Naipaul writes, “While [Hindu] India tries to go back to an idea of the past, it will not possess that past or be enriched by it. The past can only be possessed by inquiry and scholarship, by intellectual rather than spiritual discipline. The past has to be seen as dead; or the past will kill.”54
Naipaul does not categorically reject all aspects of Hindu thought or philosophy in Wounded. He argues instead for styles of thinking that adapt such motifs in a historically self-conscious and critical manner:
The key Hindu concept of dharma…combines self-fulfilment and truth to the self with the ideas of action as duty, action as its own spiritual reward, man as a holy vessel. And it ceases then to be mysterious; it touches the high ideals of other civilizations. It might be said that it is of dharma that Balzac is writing when, near the end of his creative life, breaking through fatigue and a long blank period to write Cousine Bette in eight weeks, he reflects on the artist’s vocation.”55
However, the debased manner in which key concepts like dharma came to be understood was a result of its history:
Through centuries of conquest the civilization declined into an apparatus for survival, turning away from the mind (on which the Gita lays such stress) and creativity (Vinoba Bhave finding in Sanskrit only the language of the gods, and not the language of poets) stripping itself down, like all decaying civilizations, to its magical practices and imprisoning social forms.56
When Wounded was published, many Indian readers felt that it expressed contempt for Hindu India. One contrarian critic remarked, “If an Indian reviewer does not brand Naipaul’s book as anti-Indian and therefore totally untrue and undependable, he is likely to be called a renegade, a brown sahib. Even so, there is no gainsaying the fact that India: A Wounded Civilization is an astonishingly accurate analysis of the Indian character.”57
What seems astonishing, then, is how Wounded went from being denounced by one group of Indians in the 1970s as the work of an anti-Hindu “brown sahib” to being denounced by twenty-first-century critics as an apology for Hindu chauvinism and Islamophobia.58 Before we can understand how this remarkable reversal came about, it would be helpful first to summarize Naipaul’s argument about the South Indian kingdom of Vijayanagar. In Wounded, Naipaul begins by repeating a number of historical facts: that the kingdom of Vijayanagar was founded “in 1336 by a local Hindu prince who, after defeat by the Moslems, had been taken back to Delhi, converted to Islam, and then sent back to the south as a representative of the Muslim power. There in the south, far from Delhi, the converted prince had…[defiantly] declared himself a Hindu again, a representative on earth of the local Hindu god.”59 In other words, the kingdom had been established in a reactive manner. The Hindu prince had first been converted to Islam but, upon his return to his place of birth, had proclaimed his independence by invoking something akin to a religious “identity” as an expression of his distinction from and opposition to his erstwhile Muslim patrons. Vijayanagar’s subsequent failure to contribute much by way of ideas and reforms was a symptom of the fact that it was from its inception committed to a reified Hinduism and was “itself a reassertion of the past.”60
Naipaul suggests that even though the kingdom lasted two hundred years, it was always embattled and could never shake off the defensive crouch into which it had been forced by circumstances. This defensiveness also had adverse consequences for the kind of society that developed within Vijayanagar. The peculiar conditions of Vijayanagar’s founding and the hostile pressure to which it was subjected were reflected in the rigidly orthodox, closed kind of Hinduism practiced by the society. In these sections of India: A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul’s tone recalls the clipped, monologic tone of The Loss of El Dorado:
Vijayanagar was committed from the start to the preservation of a Hinduism that had already been violated, and culturally and artistically it preserved and repeated; it hardly innovated. Its bronze sculptures are like those of five hundred years before…the Hinduism Vijayanagar proclaimed had already reached a dead end, and in some ways had decayed as popular Hinduism so easily decays, into barbarism. Vijayanagar had its slave markets, its temple prostitutes. It encouraged the holy practice of suttee [widow sacrifice]…and Vijayanagar dealt in human sacrifice. Once when there was some trouble with the construction of a big reservoir, the great king of Vijayanagar, Krishna Deva Raya (1509–1529) ordered the sacrifice of some prisoners.61
Because of the reduced conditions in which it was practiced in Vijayanagar, Hindu practices and customs grew barbaric.62 These were the origins of the already wounded civilization whose ruins would nonetheless impress Naipaul when he visited India in 1975.
So how did Wounded come to be perceived as an anti-Muslim tract? In an influential article published in 2004, William Dalrymple charged that this work expressed Hindu nationalist and Islamophobic ideas, with which, he added, Naipaul had come to be associated in the wake of the Hindu nationalist destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992.63 Although Naipaul did not endorse the destruction of the mosque, he had shockingly failed to condemn the actions of the extremists. Projecting Naipaul’s controversial public statements in the 1990s onto works he had written decades earlier, Dalrymple declared that Naipaul had written Wounded and An Area of Darkness in order to blame Muslim rule for India’s “wounds”: “For Naipaul, the Fall of Vijayanagara is a paradigmatic wound on the psyche of India…. The wound was created by a fatal combination of Islamic aggression and Hindu weakness—the tendency to ‘retreat,’ to withdraw in the face of defeat.”64
In order to interpret Wounded as a defense of Hindu extremist ideology, Dalrymple had to ignore the fact that the central aim of Naipaul’s analysis in that work was to call for Indian self-examination, not Hindu revenge for Muslim rule. While Naipaul is not sympathetic to the period of Muslim rule in Wounded, he also does not devote any space to attacking it. Instead, it is clear that his focus is on identifying and arresting the “intellectual depletion” that apparently arose from the inadequate Hindu response to these conquests.65
There is also no evidence in Wounded to support Dalrymple’s claim that “[Vijayanagar] fell, according to Naipaul…because in particular [it] had failed to develop the military means to challenge the aggressive Muslim sultanates that surrounded it”.66 Naipaul does not mention, let alone lament, the fact that the Hindu kings had failed to adequately “develop” their military strength. Put simply, military issues form no part of Naipaul’s discussion in India: A Wounded Civilization.
Dalrymple implies that Naipaul uses the word “retreat” to denote a cowardly backing away from a physical battle. But this is not the case. Naipaul’s use of the word refers instead to an intellectual retreat and, more broadly, to a withdrawal from worldly reality by Hindus. Primary responsibility for the “intellectual depletion” in the country lay, therefore, with Hindus. Naipaul was concerned not with blaming the Mughals but with taking stock of India’s self-inflicted wounds. This is evident from his description of the temple activities in the crucial scene-setting anecdotes of Wounded, which concentrate on the shortcomings of Hindu India. Muslim violence or destruction is peripheral to Naipaul’s discussion of the two Hindu temples he visited.
Dalrymple’s polemic does not assess Wounded on its own terms so much as make it a foil to his multiculturalist vision of the Indian past. Vijayanagar’s history, he argues, expressed the values and institutions of the hybridized civilizations of premodern India. In these contexts, Hindus assimilated and synthesized Muslim values and practices and did not hold themselves apart from it. Dalrymple invokes Salman Rushdie’s word “chutnification” to underscore the point that Vijayanagar was a culturally mixed, rather than an exclusively Hindu, civilization.
My concern here is not whether Dalrymple’s or Naipaul’s vision approximates more closely to a correct understanding of the Indian past. What interests me is how Dalrymple’s laudable affirmation of cultural hybridization and syncretism as a tacit rebuke to Naipaul’s Wounded actually prevents him from grasping the book’s central point. His invocation of proliferating differences and cultural mixture completely ignores Naipaul’s insistent focus on the need for historical reflection and critical self-examination. It is also no substitute for these practices.
Dalrymple overlooks the fact that Naipaul, a writer rather than a professional historian, was drawing on the fall of Vijayanagar as a device to imagine the social and cultural consequences of a failure to cultivate critical and historical thinking, not endorsing the fantasy of a pristine Hindu past.67 He curiously faults Naipaul for failing to cite in Wounded a scholarly essay that was published in 1996, nearly twenty years after Naipaul’s book appeared. Dalrymple also declares that all historical scholarship on Vijayanagar prior to 1996 is “mistaken and Islamophobic.” He claims that previous generations of Vijayanagar scholars, on whom Naipaul had necessarily relied, reflected the racism of colonial historians and Hindu nationalists peddling “a simple and seductive vision” of the Indian past.68 Even if this were the case, it does not seem fair to single out Naipaul, an interested outsider, for blame. The issue here is not whether there is value to the vision of a hybrid Indian past that Dalrymple wishes to defend. There is. What is troubling is Dalrymple’s effort to read Wounded, and even An Area of Darkness (1964), as Hindu nationalist documents69 and to label Naipaul a racist for his differing vision of that past.
Naipaul’s last book on India preceded by a decade the shifts in scholarly consensus on the nature of Muslim rule that began to take hold around 1990. As summarized by Barbara and Thomas Metcalf, this new consensus was that the primary aim of Muslim rulers was to expand their territorial power on the Indian subcontinent, not spread their religion.70 In recent decades, philologists and historians have also begun to focus on the ways Mughal rule enabled the emergence of syncretic and inclusive forms of religious and cultural expression in India prior to the onset of British rule.71 The point of view espoused in Dalrymple’s essay owes everything to this paradigm shift which, as noted earlier, did not begin to take hold until after Naipaul’s last book on India appeared.72
Dalrymple’s accusations aside, Naipaul’s three books on India do not evince hostility toward Islam in India. When he visited India again in 1989, the new question that exercised Naipaul was the political self-assertiveness he witnessed among traditionally subordinated groups. India: A Million Mutinies Now (1989) collects Naipaul’s interviews with Indians from different parts of the country during the late 1980s. The book begins with Naipaul’s being mystified, then enraptured, by the sight of a large procession of self-contained Dalits (Untouchables) commemorating the death anniversary of their leader, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar.
Dismissing a middle-class Indian man who complains about the Dalits and who regards the street procession as a sign of the country’s decline, Naipaul, describes the mass celebration as a symptom of a wider “freeing of new particularities, new identities” across India. For the Naipaul of the late 1980s, the Dalits, like the forces of Hindu nationalist groups like the Shiv Sena, represented one of the many “million mutinies” he observed at work across India. These were the plural social and political forces “from below” that were working in tandem or tension with other groups to shake up frozen hierarchies, which Naipaul regarded as a necessary if insufficient condition for a renaissance in India.
In the decades after 1990, however, after the last of his three books on India had been published, Naipaul made a number of contradictory public statements, as Dalrymple correctly points out in his essay.73 Naipaul expressed admiration for Jawaharlal Nehru for not abusing his power during his years as prime minister and for doing much to support liberal institutions such as a free press and an independent judiciary. At the same time, Naipaul referred to Hindu nationalism as “a creative force” and a “necessary corrective to the history we have been talking about”.74 It appears that by the 1990s, Naipaul had grown confident that the liberal center was strong enough to check any unruly forces, thereby enabling the million mutinies of “creative” forces to bestir the stagnant order without undermining liberal institutions.
The later Naipaul’s politically motivated claim that the Muslim invasions had had only a negative effect on Hindu society was justifiably taken by his critics as reflecting sympathy for Hindu nationalism. While this reflected a lamentable narrowing of Naipaul’s focus from historical reflection to political partisanship, for our purposes—which is to look at the writer’s evolution—it is important to keep in mind that Naipaul had been criticized for the opposite reason earlier. Indeed, when he had written critically about caste (An Area of Darkness) and about retrograde Indian practices (India: A Wounded Civilization) in previous decades, he had been branded anti-Indian, anti-Hindu, and a traitor.75 Naipaul had also castigated the Hindu right’s invocation of the authority of the past in Wounded as a symptom of the stultification it sought to overcome. These positions were ignored by his detractors, who projected onto his earlier work perceived sentiments that they objected to in his later statements.
The political commentator Pratap Bhanu Mehta has offered a suggestive assessment of the nature of the controversy that Naipaul provoked at the end of the twentieth century. Mehta argues that Naipaul “failed to recognise that Hindu nationalism was an insidious form of collective narcissism that would provoke violence.” But it is equally true, he continues, that “Naipaul is hated because he said something many thought but would dare not say: that large numbers of people, including many politically committed secularists, saw elements of catharsis in Hindu nationalism”:76
The Indian secular narrative had become too wedded to a historical narrative according to which it could not be the case that Hindus and Muslims had deep conflict, temples could not ever really have been destroyed for religious reasons. Naipaul’s claim was that this was a repressive narrative that would generate its own pathologies. It made Enlightenment values precariously hostage to getting history right; as if to say that if indeed there had been conflict in the past, the current conflict would be justified. His claim was that Enlightenment values could not rest on historical myth-making. You should be allowed to say that temples were indeed destroyed. But acknowledging this and moving on was a far healthier psychological state than a discourse where that thought could only be repressed and produce its pathologies in turn. Converting the religious-secular divide into a debate over history was to miss the point. The terrain of the conflict was entirely psychological.77
Mehta concludes that whereas Naipaul had powerfully exposed the negative effects of such repression, he had in the end fallen prey to the toxic myth that secularist disavowal had unwittingly abetted: “The proper critique of Naipaul is not that he got history wrong. Having interestingly plumbed the depths of the psychology that animates movements like Hindu nationalism, he became so enamoured of what he found, that he became blind to its effects.”78
A native of India then living in London, Farrukh Dhondy recalls how Naipaul’s description in 1975 of the improvements that had been carried out by “fascist” Sena activists in a Bombay slum filled him with horror, particularly because Naipaul’s words were written during the darkest days of the Emergency, when constitutional rights had been suspended by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Unlike Naipaul, Dhondy had no “premonition or idea that this movement was a symptom of something larger.”79 Naipaul sensed that the Shiv Sena, a group denounced as xenophobic thugs by most educated middle-class people, signaled a new kind of movement. Eschewing the ideals of democracy, the Sena, Naipaul believed, conceived their idea of good governance from notions of community and self-help.
Naipaul was not, as Dhondy persuasively argues, a supporter of the Shiv Sena. He did not support their fascism or the invocations of a glorious Hindu past. Nevertheless, Naipaul saw in this group a social dynamism that he believed to be absent in the inert middle classes. Unlike their complacent social betters, these were “unaccommodated men”—an allusion to A House for Mr Biswas—who had fled rural landlessness and had evolved a “philosophy of community and self-help” in Bombay.80
Naipaul was “enamored” by this vision of marginalized people asserting their agency in adverse conditions. He describes them as “men rejecting rejection,” a phrase that would reappear more than two decades later in Naipaul’s largely admiring discussion of Dalit (or Untouchable) self-empowerment in India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).81 In sum, Naipaul’s willingness to overlook the dangerous ideology underpinning the actions of the Shiv Sena men—on the grounds that they were possessed of a forward-looking energy—represents a form of moral and intellectual obfuscation that is all the more significant for not being directly addressed.
The work that Naipaul did between the publication of The Loss of El Dorado and India: A Wounded Civilization underscores how urgently he believed that postcolonial societies needed to go beyond the rhetoric of anticolonialism toward developing new and different tools of intellectual analysis. In a series of nonfictional pieces, Naipaul made this point by illustrating how historically victimized postcolonial peoples were being led astray by self-appointed revolutionary leaders. “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” an essay Naipaul wrote in 1972, explores the life and career of a Trinidad-born political leader who came to be known for his racialist views.82
Born Michael de Freitas, also known as Michael Abdul Malik, Michael X was the son of a Portuguese shopkeeper and a black woman from Barbados. Moving to London as a young man, de Freitas cleverly reinvented himself as a revolutionary and celebrity figure who, as Naipaul describes it, perfected a discourse of racial blackmail. He soon found that he could count on the support of wealthy liberal patrons, including the ex-Beatle John Lennon. With a typically self-implicating touch, Naipaul notes that de Freitas regarded himself as an aspiring novelist. But de Freitas’s true creative skill lay in manipulation not of the written word but of the populist ideas he learned to craft in ways that appealed to both wealthy white and poor black audiences. Coming to prominence in the late 1960s, when antiestablishment feeling was cresting, de Freitas peddled slogans and revolutionary claims before left-wing English intellectuals. Some of these thinkers and journalists gave Michael de Freitas the publicity he sought by reproducing his exaggerated claims about the size of his organization and his projects.83
Naipaul saw similarities between himself and de Freitas (whom he also referred to as Malik). Both men were Trinidadians who had found wealthy and influential patrons in the metropole. Both were products of the picaroon society Naipaul describes in The Middle Passage and had been forced to make their way in the world with intelligence as their only capital. Their public statements were touched by a mixture of provocation and camp. But there were differences. Unlike Naipaul, who only saw himself as a writer, de Freitas had political aspirations. He became a racial leader in Trinidad of the sort that Naipaul, as a racial minority, was quick to recognize and fear. De Freitas was also adept at mimicking Western-style ideology critiques. Studying his use of language, Naipaul became interested in how De Freitas was able to adapt metropolitan discourses to peripheral contexts in ways that gave audiences the illusion of feeling empowered even as they were being misled:
Revolution, change, system: London words, London abstractions, capable of supporting any meaning that Malik…chose to give them. There were people in London who were expecting Malik, their very own and complete Negro, to establish a new government in Trinidad. There had been a meeting: someone had made a record. The new government was going to underwrite the first International University of the Alternative, “the seat of the counter-culture of the Alternative.” Words, and more words: “I cannot go into details,” Malik had said. “But I can say this. The new university will be an experimental laboratory of a new and sane life-style.”84
Naipaul’s mistrust of the metropolitan revolutionary follows a predictable pattern: he is a person given to self-deception or idealistic sentiments who, drawing on false historical models, ends up making things worse for the poor people he seeks to liberate. Naipaul returned to this figure in his later nonfiction. He wanted to examine how the colonial encounter had produced a distinctive type of intellectual fraud and political con man, someone who drew on his historical victimhood to win the support of guilty—and wealthy—white liberals in London and New York.
In his examination of Michael de Freitas and his fantasy of becoming a political leader, Naipaul also discerned similarities with the practices of earlier fantasists and manipulators he had written about in Loss: Antonio de Berrio, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Francisco Miranda. For all their ideological differences, Naipaul saw them as Malik’s spiritual precursors, men who advanced their own interests by making false promises to their followers and patrons.85 Malik styled himself as a black power leader in Trinidad. In the United States, Naipaul argued, black power was a movement that sought to represent the demands of an impoverished and historically disenfranchised minority. Trinidad was a black-majority nation where elected black leaders already occupied the highest official positions. But such differences did not matter to Malik or his followers, who “want[ed] something more than politics. Like the dispossessed peasantry of medieval Europe, they await crusades and messiahs.”86
Naipaul regarded Malik as someone who had distorted the possibilities and pathways opened up for him by colonial education and empowerment. In his writings of this period, Naipaul wanted to contrast such an individual with others who had put their experiences of the colonial encounter to more productive use. He alights on a period—roughly the first half of the nineteenth century—when the colonized were able to exploit “contact” with the colonial institutions and leaders in order to expand their moral and intellectual horizons. In “A Second Visit,” his 1967 essay on India, Naipaul gives a more precise formulation to this idea. In the early nineteenth century, Naipaul argues, British colonialism, in Trinidad as much as India, was, from an educational standpoint, a progressive institution. Through the ideas Europeans brought to the colonies, Indians learned of cosmopolitan ideals, including respect for individual rights, the rule of law, and training for historical reflection. Some Indians realized early on that they would benefit greatly from contact with the British, not because they believed in the inherent superiority of European civilization or because they sought to enrich themselves, but because they grasped the importance of availing themselves of the intellectual tools they would require to become agents, rather than remain victims, of the global order.
Naipaul regarded Rammohun Roy (1772–1833), the Bengali reformer of the early nineteenth century, as an important member of this forward-looking group. Roy spoke favorably of this generation of British officials and scholars: “Forty years of contact with the British,” Roy declared, “would revivify Indian civilization”:
[He] spoke before the period of imperialist and racialist excess [of late-nineteenth-century colonialism]; 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.87
Early colonial rule was, for all its many wrongs, a time when exchange was possible between colonial officials and their Indian wards, through the capacious vision of human association made possible by the European Enlightenment. Naipaul associates this phase of colonial rule with the introduction of new ideas, not merely the acquisition of machinery and technical skill.88 The new learning enriched the ideas and values of people like Roy and contributed to creating a class of thinkers in the colonial world that was able, for the first time, to grasp the concept of a historical transition to modernity.89 Correctly or not, Naipaul was willing to subordinate all other concerns to this makeover, without which genuine agency was, in his view, unrealizable.
In Naipaul’s view, conditions changed as colonial rule became a more formal and hierarchical affair, because of the widening knowledge gap and hardening racial ideology. Indians, for their part, were dazzled by the utilitarian aspects of colonial rule, chiefly its machinery and technical skill. In the eyes of the natives, the West gradually became synonymous with its “institutions and technology,” which were copied and unreflectively applied.90 Historical transition came to be seen as merely a matter of “catching up.” This philistinism became an irreducible part of all anticolonial and postcolonial thinking, across the world. What might have occasioned a genuine Indian engagement with the past gave way instead to a closed thinking in which modernity became synonymous with economic development. Technical modernization would become synonymous with modernity.
Most significant is Naipaul’s claim that the possibility of a new kind of thinking—the ability to reflect on the present and to evaluate the past—was not communicated to Indians. The value of such thinking was soon lost to all but a tiny fraction of the country and could not be communicated to the larger society. Providing a glimpse of his own understanding of Indian history, and of colonial history in general, Naipaul suggests that those who came after Rammohun Roy were no longer capable of evaluating the Indian past in ways that had been open to a previous generation. The old cosmopolitan and enlightened practices, once encouraged, were now replaced with a debased ideology, and the new bureaucratic rationality redefined “culture” as the possession of a “folk.” Over time, the colonial master’s desire to keep the natives tied to their customary space was then reabsorbed as “native tradition” by the protonationalists who took up against the British. Roy could only be recast as an elitist and an apologist. By the same token, self-assessment was sidelined for a new project of cultural self-assertiveness in ways that would find its most extreme manifestations in identity politics.
For different reasons, this new spirit was embraced by colonizers and colonized alike. Unable to make proper contact with the English in the hierarchical colonial society, failing to develop their own practices of critical reflection, the colonized elite of India could not sustain the development of adequate tools for historical thought. Naipaul writes of a revealing encounter: “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.” Later it occurred to Naipaul “that Macaulay had not been disproved by the Indian revolution. He had only been ignored.”91 Naipaul diagnosed the groupthink displayed by the professor as a symptom of a deeper malaise in which moral or ideological posturing was mistaken for critical thinking. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, defensive affirmations of past “glory” would, just as regrettably, continue. So long as laziness of this sort prevailed, Naipaul suggested, the need to learn how to “evaluate the past” would not be addressed.92
Naipaul believed that the ability to candidly describe the possibilities as well as the deformations of the past was the best way to arrive at a much-needed “revolution of the mind.”93 Identifying the disorienting effects of the past, as well as the self-deceiving attitudes they bred, was, in Naipaul’s view, the first and most important task of the postcolonial intellectual. This idea of revolution had little in common with the one advertised by the likes of Michael Abdul Malik, for whom revolution began in a declaration of strength and adequacy.
During the 1970s, Naipaul returned obsessively to this theme in different settings. He wanted his writings to help clarify how postcolonial societies might be able to furnish their young with vocabularies with which to evaluate the past. When he visited the Congo in 1971, Naipaul was struck by the “intelligence of the students” he met in a Kinshasa college.94 He feared, however, that the immense potential of these young people would go unrecognized and that they would not find the guidance and nurturing they desperately needed: “So here was another feeling about Africa: that the individual, awakening to history, discovering injustice and the past, discovering ideas, was not supported by his society.”95