IN THE final pages of The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul describes returning to Trinidad to attend his sister Sati’s funeral, where he encountered a distant relation of his sister’s husband. This was an old Indian man who astonished Naipaul by running together disparate historical events from 1498, 1784, and 1845. By conflating incidents that were centuries apart, the old man had mistakenly concluded that some East Indians living in Trinidad belonged to communities that had been on the island for four or five hundred years.
Unlike his younger self, who would have been impatient with this display of historical ignorance, Naipaul responded sympathetically to the old man’s way of thinking: “He had created a composite history. But it was enough for him. Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.”1
This reaction points to an important shift in Naipaul’s thinking. In his early years as a writer, Naipaul regarded travel as an occasion to “define himself very clearly to himself.”2 The work he produced was defined by an exacting interest in facts. By sustaining this approach to his writing, he was able, despite being from a place where historical thinking remained undeveloped, to form a picture of the ways he had been shaped by the forces of the past.
Over the years, however, Naipaul discovered professional and emotional security. Success allowed him to relax and become more open to experimenting with new ideas and sentiments, as is revealed in the exchange with the old Indian man in Enigma. Naipaul’s work is also infected by a quiet playfulness, as seen, for instance, when the narrator sheepishly confesses to “look[ing] for cracks and flaws” in a road newly laid by a large agribusiness venture that has, to his dismay, begun its disruptive operations in the area. Naipaul knows that his hope that the asphalt mixture will not set is pure “fantasy,” but for the first time in his writing, he uses the word without the negative connotations it has in earlier works such as The Loss of El Dorado or India: A Wounded Civilization.
Indeed, in Enigma, Naipaul often draws on fantasy to excavate the ways hidden emotions might play a role in shaping his rational thoughts. He revels in the natural beauty of Wiltshire, England, where he has taken residence, but feels acutely conscious of the fact that he is a racial outsider. Naipaul confesses, again somewhat irrationally, that one reason he starts feeling less uneasy is because the estate he lives on is owned by an eccentric old English landlord (reputed to have been the lover of the poet Siegfried Sassoon in his youth) who seems determined to make no improvements and to let the estate slowly fall into ruin. This state of dilapidation suits Naipaul’s psychological needs, indeed it makes him feel at home. He hints that he would have felt uncomfortable, out of place, had things on the estate been up-to-date or working perfectly. Ivy-choked trees come crashing down, boilers and pipes mysteriously explode in the night, and Naipaul, normally a stickler for standards, does not complain.
There is something equally comical about the way Naipaul wants to have nothing to do with the restored church in the valley. This church is the pride of the people who see in it ideas of “redemption and glory,” but he is disquieted by its presence. Naipaul is homo duplex: he enjoys the protection and charm of the English countryside, he sees and feels as the English do in many respects, but he also remains—and wishes to remain—an inassimilable, even invisible, outsider. He wishes to establish his own relationship to the place.
This is partly why Naipaul responds warmly to the peculiar ideas of the old family friend he meets at his sister’s funeral. It signals a turn away, in his writing, from a comprehension of a disorienting and complex reality to a new style of questioning: what are the ways people tell stories that enable them to chart “a way in the world”? This phrase is the title of one of Naipaul’s most important late works, whose sympathetic tenor contrasts starkly with the existential indifference signaled by the opening phrase of an earlier work, A Bend in the River: “the world is what it is.” In Enigma, Naipaul focuses less on the degree to which individuals fail or succeed at accommodating themselves to a hard, inflexible world and more on the ways ordinary people seek to reinvent themselves or make sense of their own development. In this phase of his career, Naipaul becomes more interested in the stories that people tell about themselves.
For this older Naipaul, “what was most important about a travel book were the people the writer travelled among. The people had to define themselves. A simple enough idea, but it required a new kind of book; it called for a new way of travelling.”3 Elsewhere Naipaul hinted at the larger purpose served by this wish to experiment with form and structure. Even though the people would speak for themselves, it was the job of a writer to weave together a composite form in which the stories built upon or supplemented one another’s perspectives: “the special art in this book lay in divining who of the many people I met would best and most logically take my story forward, where nothing had to be forced.”4
This new attitude decisively shaped the form and style of Naipaul biggest and most ambitious work of travel writing. In India: A Million Mutinies Now (1989), Naipaul allows the diverse perspectives of the people he meets across the country to shape his multifaceted, many-voiced narrative. The structure of the book is distilled in its beautifully suspenseful opening, in which Naipaul’s observes with fascination a large procession of Dalits (once known as untouchables) in Bombay. In striking contrast to his earlier writings on India, Naipaul describes how the scene initially mystifies him, and its meaning and significance arrive in delayed fashion. Even when it has been apparently decoded as an event in which the Dalits are revealed to be honoring their spiritual leader, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the mystery and ambiguity of the initial encounter is not completely dispelled.
Because Naipaul has to rely on the voices of others, starting with the taxi driver, to help him make sense of what he is looking at, this process also brings different truths and perspectives into view, with no single point of view holding sway from the start. What results is a layered and polyphonic work that showcases a multiplicity of voices through which a complex range of disparate and often contradictory viewpoints are brought forth. At the heart of the work is Naipaul’s perception that the social awakening he was among the first to identify in India at the end of the twentieth century—the subtitle of his book became a catchword for Indian commentators—had paradoxically given rise to two diametrically opposed tendencies: ever greater social fragmentation, on the one hand, and the emergence of a hitherto absent central, unified social will, on the other. Naipaul’s work is structured by this fundamental tension, as revealed in the disparate and sometimes antagonistic views of the people he meets.
In his actual meetings with people, however, Naipaul never brings up these broader topics. Instead, he encourages his interlocutors to produce “a connected narrative” of their lives.5 In other words, he is interested in his interlocutors as individuals; they are not merely “people chosen as typical of an aspiring community or interest group.”6 Naipaul is interested in the complex selves he encounters, treating them with the eye of a novelist who is interested in telling stories that are irreducibly “heteroglossic,” where the individual is not simply made to stand in for one ideological standpoint.7
By paying attention to the sensibility and the quality of thought of the people he meets, Naipaul gains insights into the texture and complexity of the broader movements in society. When he meets Mr. Raote, a member of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena organization in Bombay, the latter is initially “a little rough” with Naipaul because he thinks Naipaul, an English-speaking foreigner, wants to discuss politics.8 However, when Naipaul persuades Mr. Raote that he is primarily interested in his “background and development,” the tone of their conversation changes.9 Naipaul is exercised by the fact that Raote “was interested in his own story; his idea of himself was of a man who had struggled.”10
A very different interlocutor, Subroto, a sensitive but unsuccessful Bengali writer of film scripts, is a man “who talked of his craft with so full a heart and mind” that Naipaul feels drawn to his struggle.11 Naipaul is struck by Namdeo Dhasal, the Marathi-language poet and leader of the Dalit Panthers, who tells Naipaul he “wishes to search out his own roots”12 and is “detached from his own life, and observing it from a distance.”13 Namdeo’s partner, Mallika, born into a communist family, her mother an upper-caste Hindu and her father a Muslim, speaks at length about her life and then writes Naipaul a long letter in Marathi to supplement her remarks. Through a dialogue with the “solitary” Kala, whose mother suffered abuse after she was married at fourteen, Naipaul gains a new perspective on the Indian family, a topic at the heart of A House for Mr Biswas.14
Naipaul uses these interviews as a lens to explore new ideas of selfhood and achievement that had been in the making for some decades in India. He wishes also to describe the new social tensions and possibilities that may have resulted from this development. Naipaul revises his earlier criticisms of caste affiliation and identity, which he had regarded as an obstacle to “individuality and the possibility of excellence.” Now, he concedes that such a peremptory attitude may have blinded him to the ways in which this dominant feature of Indian culture and society has contributed to positive social developments.15
Although Naipaul personally feels as negatively as ever about casteism, in Mutinies he feels compelled to take seriously the complicated role caste identity has played in the creation of a more dynamic and, counterintuitively, a more equal society in India:
The caste or group stability that Indians had, the more focussed view, enabled them, while remaining whole themselves, to do work—modest improving things, rather than revolutionary things—in conditions which to others might have seemed hopeless…many thousands of people had worked like that over the years, without any sense of a personal drama, many millions; it had added up in the 40 years since independence to an immense national effort…the increased wealth showed; the new confidence of people once poor showed.16
Naipaul is also struck by the fact that marginalized groups are now asserting themselves and demanding a place in the visible life of the nation. He supports this type of self-assertion because these mutinies are, in his view, “reformist”: they look to existing institutions, notably the state, for help and redress.
More than any other colonial territory, Naipaul believed, India had produced generations of elites who had benefited from the new learning imported by the British. Parliament, an independent judiciary, a free press, and educational institutions were established during the colonial period. People inducted into the new learning, in their capacity as judges, lawyers, civil servants, professionals, intellectuals, scientists, publishers, and journalists, constituted an institutional core that was, he believed, probably robust enough to withstand the potentially destabilizing effects of mutinous social movements “from below.”
Despite Naipaul’s hopeful attitude at the start of the work, the overall impression conveyed by Mutinies is one of ambivalence. Naipaul is aware that the political ascendancy of social groups often takes troubling forms. Many Indians complained that legitimate efforts to improve conditions for the poor had also brought criminal elements into democratic politics. It had also made corruption, unprecedented greed, and the overturning of old reverences a feature of daily political life. Overall, a hardening of disparate religious, regional, clan-based, caste, and kinship identities had taken place across the country, and the long-term implications for liberal democratic culture were impossible to predict. Naipaul pointedly notes that the Shiv Sena, a movement claiming to represent poor Maharashtrians, had burnished its political credentials by attacking poor South Indians as outsiders who came to Bombay looking for work.
Whereas in his earlier work he had seen the cosmopolitanism of a Pan-Indian identity as the only antidote to the divisive claims of kin, caste, and region, Naipaul’s observations now cause him to entertain the possibility that the two modes of being are locked in a dialectical relationship, combining opposition with supplementation. This tension is captured by Naipaul’s richly unsettling description of the way the new politics had thoughtlessly reordered architectural symbols of colonial rule. This long passage also gives the reader a flavor of the prose of the late Naipaul, in which description discloses submerged and unresolved ideological tensions:
The [Bombay Municipal] corporation building was in the confident Victorian-Gothic style of British Bombay. A wide, solid staircase, with Victorian metalwork below a polished timber banister, led to the council chamber…. The councillors’ chairs were upholstered in green. But the Mayoral chair had a saffron cover. Saffron is a Hindu colour, and here it is the colour of the Shiv Sena. Saffron satin filled the Gothic arch below the gallery on one end wall of the chamber. In front of the saffron satin was a bronze-coloured bust of Shivaji; above the bust, on the satin, were a round shield and crossed swords, also in bronze colour….
The council chamber was so perfect in its way, so confident, its architectural details so considered, it was hard to imagine that it had all been negated by the simple saffron of the Sena. It made me think of the Christian cathedral in Nicosia in Cyprus, taken over by the Muslims, cleansed of much of its furniture, and hung with Koranic banners.17
Naipaul draws a disquieting parallel between the Shiv Sena’s appropriation of the colonial monument and historical or ethnic “cleansing.” To the outsider, he notes, India looked like “the unending smallness of men. But here in the corporation chamber, in the saffron and crossed swords of the Sena, were the emblems of war and conquest”:18
It made the independence struggle seem like an interim. Independence had come to India like a kind of revolution; now there were many revolutions within that revolution. What was true of Bombay was true of other parts of India as well: of the state of Andhra, of Tamil Nadu, Assam, the Punjab. All over India scores of particularities that had been frozen by foreign rule, or by poverty or lack of opportunity or abjectness had begun to flow again.19
Despite his reservations about these tendencies, Naipaul is genuinely intrigued, even excited, by the ways old complacencies are being newly challenged by disadvantaged groups.
One stance that remains unchanged from Naipaul’s earlier writings, however, is his view that the revival of a decimated “Hindu India” owed more to the British period than Indian nationalists of any stripe were willing to concede:
Portugal had arrived in 1498 and triumphed in 1509–10. Just over half a century later the great Hindu kingdom in the South, the empire of Vijayanagar was defeated and physically laid waste by a combination of Muslim rulers; almost at the same time, in the North, the Mogul power was entering its time of glory. It might have seemed then that Hindu India, without the new learning and the new tools of Europe, its rulers without the idea of country or nation, without the political ideas that might have helped them to preserve their people from foreign rule—it might have seemed then that Hindu India was on the verge of extinction, something to be divided between Christian Europe and the Muslim world, and all its religious symbols and difficult theology rendered as meaningless as the Aztec gods in Mexico, or the symbolism of Hindu Angkor.20
These words recall the earlier quote featuring the Bombay Municipal Court. Naipaul’s rebuke appears to extend to those nationalists whose exclusive views of identity implies a rejection of the hybrid formation to which they owe so much of their sense of themselves. This rejection is represented in this instance by their refusal to acknowledge those values and ideas imported from Europe during the colonial period: “through the unlikely British presence in India, a Hindu India had grown again, more complete and unified than any India in the past.”21
In an interview several years after the publication of Mutinies, Naipaul suggested a way of taking this view of Indian hybridity further. He argued that Hindus had benefited from an idea of human equality that was unique to Christianity and Islam, and that Hinduism’s consequent hybridization through contact with these religions was a positive development:
The two great revealed religions, Islam and Christianity, have altered the world forever, and we all, whatever our faith, walk in their light. Over and above their theology, these religions gave the world social ideas—brotherhood, charity, the feeling of man for man—which we now all take for granted. They are the basis of our political ideas and our ideas of morality. Those ideas didn’t exist before, not in the classical world, not in Hinduism or Buddhism. 22
The originality of Mutinies rests on Naipaul’s attempt to convey the restlessness and dynamism of the nation through a medley of individual stories that interrupt, echo, and supplement each other. Some of these encounters have an element of comedy, as with the melancholy forty-year-old Jain broker named Papu, who feels guilty at how much money he’s made on the stock market. While he does not quite implicate himself in the inequality of his society, Papu fears that even the elastic fatalism of poorer Indians will not endure, given the sense of unrest that is pervasive everywhere. India, he gloomily predicts, will soon be confronted by violent upheavals aimed at mere destruction: “It won’t be anything. It will be total chaos.”23
Naipaul does not share Papu’s pessimism. Nonetheless, Papu’s outlook seems to color Naipaul’s description of Patil, a Bombay Shiv Sena leader for whom “the revolution had already started.”24 Patil is a midlevel activist for the right-wing Sena, and his lack of education is perhaps typical of the many lower-class people who make up the rank and file of this organization. He is a no-nonsense, plain-spoken man who informs Naipaul that there is a Muslim-led worldwide conspiracy to destroy Hinduism. Somewhat incongruously, he goes on to boast that the Muslims in his area donate money to the Sena, which he offers as proof of Muslim support for the organization. Asked if this amounts to extortion, Patil brushes aside the question.25
When Naipaul drives past the large slum called Dharavi, he is reminded that such areas serve a purpose for populist leaders who do not feel bound by truthful argument or consistency. Places like Dharavi are “allowed to exist because, as people said, it was a vote-bank, a hate-bank, something to be drawn upon by many people. All the conflicting currents of Bombay flowed there as well; all the new particularities were heightened there.”26
Naipaul feels dismay at the fact that the power of the Sena is not backed by a corresponding level of understanding on the part of its leaders. In the home of Mr. Raote, the Sena bigwig, Naipaul is shown book collections of the great Marathi poets Tukaram and Eknath. He is dispirited by the reverential manner in which Mr. Raote and his mother handle the books, who treat them as “sacred household objects rather than books to be physically read.”27 Observations of the intellectual limitations of members of this group recur in the text; they underscore Naipaul’s doubts about them. Naipaul does admit, however, that he is unable to fully appreciate the kind of religiosity displayed by the likes of Raote and his mother. It is entirely possible, Naipaul suggests, that he fails to grasp essential things when he complains about being completely unimpressed and unmoved by the intellectuals of the Shiv Sena, not least when one of them says, “Each and every Maharashtrian, even if he lives in a hutment, has a culture.”28
He seems to look for positive signs of the changing culture that are more familiar. The wider aspirations of men and women who seek to assert themselves is evidenced by the effort they take in decorating their modest homes. These were “the rooms of people who had begun to feel they were doing well and had begun to respect themselves”:29
There was a Sony television set, with a video. A patterned lace cloth covered the Sony, and there was a doll on the cloth. On the pink walls there were plastic hibiscus sprays on sections of plastic trellis-work…. On top of the cabinet was a very big multi-coloured candle, to balance the doll on the Sony. Among the things on the shelves were a set of stainless-steel tumblers and eight china cups with a flowered pattern. The glass cabinet and the things in it—leaving aside the aluminium tumblers—were like things I had known in my childhood. They were still here in a kind of wholeness: my heart went out to them.30
Despite the sentimental appeal of such scenes, however, the revolution feels thin to Naipaul because it is lacking in ideas and historical understanding. The energies and passions he sees all around, he muses, could go in many different directions at once.
At times, it seems to him that self-respect cannot be differentiated from narcissistic self-regard. Naipaul cautiously asks Patil, the Shiv Sena organizer, if his newfound self-confidence (the term Patil uses is atma-vishwas) led him toward “some fellow feeling” for Dalits. After all, hadn’t they been driven out of Hinduism by caste prejudice? Patil is dismissive. He declares that the Dalits “have no reason to be angry. They’ve not suffered as much as they say,” adding with some unhappiness that the Dalits had recently allied themselves with Muslim groups.31
Naipaul does not challenge Patil. But this is not necessarily because of his moral blindness to the dangers of ethnic majoritarian feeling. Naipaul’s inquiry at this point focuses on whether Patil might be willing to entertain wider notions of human association. What lies behind this quest is Naipaul’s temporary decision to suspend his judgment, set forth previously in An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization, that ethnicist thinking cannot result in broader forms of affiliation and must result in a debased form of nationhood.
From this standpoint, Patil’s reaction does not provoke a challenge from Naipaul because it would represent a reversion to Naipaul’s earlier positions, the one that Mutinies purports to correct and leave behind. In the end, however, Naipaul inclines to the view that such ethnic forms of political empowerment from below may not possess the resources to produce a new idea of human association:
Alienation: it was the common theme. Mr Patil was triumphant now; but his blood still boiled. Even now he felt that his group might sink, and that others were waiting to trample on them. It was as though in these small, crowded spaces no one really felt at home. Everyone felt that the other man, the other group, was laughing; everyone lived with the feeling of siege.32
The stories of Mutinies implicitly offer commentaries on each other. Just as the Jain banker Papu’s gloomy prophecy about the dangers of the new political forces is confirmed by the appearance of Patil the Shiv Sena activist, so too is Patil connecting through his own “self-respecting” demeanor to the, in his view, troublesome “pride” of the Dalits.33
The Dalits had always been an object of pity or contempt. “There was a time when we were treated like animals,” Namdeo Dhasal, the Marathi-language Dalit poet, tells Naipaul. “Now we live like human beings. It’s all because of Ambedkar.”34 Naipaul returns more than once to the image of the Dalits on the street. Such a right had not always existed for Dalits; it had arrived, after they had gained a degree of wealth, education, and political awareness.
Now they regarded themselves as agents, indifferent to the other groups or peoples who passed them by on the street. Naipaul celebrates this grit and persuades himself that the degrading effects of caste discrimination can in this instance be diminished through the mobilization of caste identity, in the sense described by Namdeo—despite, or perhaps because of, the latter’s remark that caste prohibitions are replicated even in the slums.35 In such a context, emancipation can arrive only through the uneven and multiply fracturing effects of identity politics, the million mutinies working themselves out. But this process can result in new forms of internal polarization. Namdeo confesses that he has been marginalized within the Dalit community for attempting to enter the “mainstream.”36 This is because, he claims, “the reactionaries among the Dalits didn’t want to be in the mainstream. Their feeling was that, to break communal feelings, you had to be communal yourself.”37
Naipaul is aware that such positions do not always amount to an idea of politics he can accept. However, Naipaul’s meeting with a young Muslim man brings back memories of his own Trinidad years. The Muslim man in question, Anwar, lives in Dharavi, the Bombay slum referred to earlier. Naipaul meets and speaks with Anwar and then is taken to his home. There he meets Anwar’s father, who mentions in passing the bloody “quarrels” that constantly took place in their crowded environment:
I felt that if I had been in their position, confined to Bombay, to that area, to that row, I too would have been a passionate Muslim. I had grown up in Trinidad as a member of the Indian community, a member of a minority, and I knew that if you felt your community was small, you could never walk away from it; the grimmer things became, the more you insisted on being what you were.38
Akeel Bilgrami writes that “Naipaul’s colourful gloss on the withdrawal of Anwar and other Muslims into the insular shell of their religion is nowhere situated between the larger picture of a struggle between a minority and the will of an elite to perpetuate a majoritarian myth.”39 This is a misreading, for Naipaul sympathetically contextualizes the perspective of an embattled minority.
Naipaul is not interested in offering a political analysis that cites up-to-date social-scientific research by academics (the absence of which renders the book superficial in Bilgrami’s eyes). Naipaul appears to be attempting something different. He is trying to understand how individuals like Anwar conceive of and reflect on their predicament. Approaching Anwar as a novelist might, Naipaul is trying to imagine him, so to speak, from the inside, as an individual whose aspirations may be replete with inner tensions and contradictions.
Naipaul asks Anwar why, despite his obvious intelligence and resourcefulness, he does not leave and try to make a life elsewhere, in a place less ravaged by sectarian tensions. In such a place, Naipaul thinks, Anwar might be able realize his true potential, without living in a state of constant anger. He comes to realize that Anwar cannot imagine making a life separated from his community. Strength for Anwar is defined exclusively in terms of the group, not the individual. By the same token, it is important that the group not acknowledge internal differences or contradictions. This applies as much to rampant majorities as to embattled minorities. Anwar is himself a victim of the disregard that he, a Sunni Muslim, apparently extends towards Shias. Naipaul begins to doubt whether intense group feeling of this kind can be channeled toward an idea of “wider human association.”40
As in his earlier writings on India, Naipaul offers acute descriptions of the pressures faced by rural peoples who have moved to the city to make a living. He describes the choking fumes and the extreme pollution to which the poor are especially vulnerable. In Bombay, he is overwhelmed by a vision of “black mud, with men and women and children defecating on the edge of a black lake, swamp and sewage, with a hellish oily iridescence”41 and is relieved to leave behind “the stench of animal skins and excrement and swamp and chemicals and petrol fumes, the dust of cloth waste, the amber mist of truck exhausts.”42
In contrast to An Area of Darkness, which focused exclusively on Naipaul’s emotionally overwrought reactions to urban blight, Mutinies seeks to describe or refract the emotions and states of mind of his interlocutors. Naipaul uses these reactions as a way to mediate his own thoughts and feelings. When they drive past an impoverished Muslim area with characteristics like those described in the previous paragraph, the despairing Papu offers Naipaul his interpretation of why so many Muslims are alienated and angry, which Naipaul records: “People will tell you that the Muslims here are fundamentalists. But don’t you think you could make these people fight for anything you tell them to fight for?”43
Toward the end of the book, Naipaul expresses ambivalence about the form that the social awakening has taken. The mutinous self-assertiveness of groups has energized societies in valuable ways. At the same time, the absence of broader syntheses makes unlikely a breakthrough that might enable a more inclusive idea of the national community to emerge:
To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups.44
Naipaul notes that the democratizing impulse emblematized by the “revolutions within the revolution” owe much to the legacy and lessons of British colonial institutions.45 Instead of regarding the new, fracturing politics as a repudiation of the old colonial institutions, Naipaul studies it as an elaboration or an intensification of its lessons. Elite anticolonial nationalism was the first revolution; the million mutinies were the revolution within the revolution. But it remains unclear if this second, internal act of decolonization necessarily has the potential to become something more than a destructive intensification of the politics of identity.
Naipaul hints at but does not elaborate these possibilities. The reader is led to suppose that preventing this destructive outcome requires that the elements and forces involved in the smaller revolutions move quickly to grasp the importance of the “New Learning”—a reference to scientific inquiry and historical analysis—that was introduced during the colonial period:
For 150 years or more Hindu India—responding to the New Learning that had come to it with the British—had known reforming movements. For 150 years there had been a remarkable series of leaders and teachers and wise men, exceeded by no country in Asia. It had been part of India’s slow adjustment to the outside world; and it had led to its intellectual liveliness in the late 20th century: a free press, a constitution, a concern for law and institutions, ideas of morality, good behavior, and intellectual responsibility quite separate from the requirements of religion.46
When Naipaul leaves Bombay and heads south, he meets with people like the South Indian scientists Pravas and Subramaniam, who are able to describe and reflect on the kind of interface of knowledge and affect that their Brahmin forebears accomplished by means of contact with the New Learning introduced by the British. Naipaul seems to think that the expertise and intelligence of this class of intellectual elites will stabilize the political energies he witnessed in Bombay—that they might serve as a kind of civilizational counterweight, with their moderation and their grasp of the connections between the different periods of Indian history as well as the ways in which the pressures of the cultural past continue to play an important role in the present.
In the concluding section of Mutinies, Naipaul interestingly adopts an optimistic tone that is at odds with the uncertain mood displayed in earlier parts of the book. He recalls from his earlier visits that after independence, better-educated Indians had tacitly relied on their particular identities for orientation, even if they overtly described themselves as working toward a cosmopolitan, “continent-wide” national identity. However, their effort to build this Pan-Indian identity ironically resulted in the proliferation of new particularities because of how they set about achieving it. Both the upper-caste Indian Administrative Service officers with whom Naipaul stayed in 1962 and the Dalits he observed in 1988 drew upon a fixed, pre-scripted idea of themselves, even as they sought to inhabit and expand an emerging idea of civil society.
Naipaul argues that this work had resulted in a new political culture, in which local and national forces were in productive tension. “Out of the political frenzy there had come a kind of balance: for the first time in the history of India, perhaps, most people felt that they or their representatives, someone of their group, had a chance of getting to the warm centre of power and money.”47 Naipaul is swayed by his encounter with a charismatic and intelligent South Indian politician named Prakash, who explains how the whole thing holds together. Prakash believes that the local forms of entrenched hierarchy and the wider demands for equality can be reconciled through the democratic process:
Caste, [Prakash] said, was the first thing of importance. A man looking for office or a political career would have to be of a suitable caste. That meant belonging to the dominant caste of the area…. And since it seldom happened that the votes of a single caste could win a man an election, a candidate needed a political party; he needed that to get the vote of the other castes. So the whole parliamentary business of political parties and elections made sense in India. It encouraged co-operation and compromise; the very multiplicity of Indian castes and communities made for some kind of balance.48
Because that work had been done within the regional caste- and clan-based associations, Naipaul had in 1962 mistaken it for a symptom of retreat and depletion. Now, visiting India in 1988, meeting men like Prakash, he persuaded himself that the new forms of empowerment were also expressing themselves in the language of ethnic particularity and pragmatic alliances between groups with distinct, self-consciously held caste identities. Members of vulnerable groups felt that they had gained a foothold in the power structures from which they had long been excluded. So the work had borne fruit in raising up those from below, despite having resulted at times in a hardening of separate identities and the intensification of a fractious identity politics.
Naipaul ultimately moves toward a synthesis of this position with a view of history with which he is more familiar. He offers an argument for the ultimately regenerative force of the British period because of the intellectual tools it provided to the diversely synthetic or hybrid movements that had begun to flourish across India by the late twentieth century.49 Colonialism presupposed racial hierarchy, but it nevertheless brought the alien idea of equality. It is this idea that Naipaul ultimately values above all others in Mutinies.
It is with this in mind that Naipaul offers an assessment of the colonial period, beginning with a discussion of a famous English journalist’s treatment of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Naipaul describes how, only a few days’ travel from Calcutta in 1857, William Howard Russell found himself “among people to whom the wider world is unknown; who are without the means of understanding this world; people who after centuries of foreign invasions still cannot protect or defend themselves; people who—Pandy or Sikh, porter or camp-following Hindu merchant—run with high delight to aid the foreigner to overcome their brethren.”50 Similarly, as evidence of a broken society, Naipaul comments, “the Muslims would have no obligations to anyone outside their faith. The Hindus would have…no higher idea of human association, no general idea of the responsibility of man to his fellow. And because of that missing large idea of human association, the country works blindly on, and all the bravery and skills of its people lead to nothing.”51
Naipaul believes that the survival of this old India would have “le[d] only to more of what ha[d] gone before”;52 hence, the Indian system that the British overthrew had “come to the end of its possibilities.”53 In contrast,
the India that will come into being at the end of the period of British rule will be better educated, more creative and full of possibility than the India of a century before…it will have a larger idea of human association, and…out of this larger idea, and out of the encompassing humiliation of British rule, there will come to India the ideas of country and pride and historical self-analysis, things that seem impossibly remote from the India of Russell’s march.54
This passage encapsulates why Naipaul is reluctant to criticize the colonial period, even though he regards it as a period of “encompassing humiliation.” For all its injustices, it was colonial rule that made possible new opportunities for many vulnerable groups, including groups like his, which had long been “without representation”: “It fills me with old nerves to contemplate Indian history, to see…how close we [Trinidadian Indians] were to cultural destitution, and to wonder at the many accidents which brought us to the concepts—of law and freedom and wide human association—which give men self-awareness and strength.”55
Naipaul’s judgments on India are greatly influenced by his West Indian background. He traces his origins to a dispossessed peasantry who had “no idea of a state of glory from which there had been a decline or a break…no easy idea of an enemy.”56 He seems to be channeling the experience of displaced peasants, for whom ideas of civilizational greatness or cultural wholeness—whether “ancient” or “modern”—would have made no sense. Naipaul believes that neither he nor his father would have been given the chance to fashion their own lives had the British not broken up a settled hierarchy and, armed with a distinct set of ideological principles, replaced it with institutions that, despite their often violent or unjust attributes, indirectly freed up wider resources within the society. Naipaul implicates himself in the analyses and suggests that his view of the past cannot but color his analysis of India’s present.
Rashid, the sensitive native of Lucknow who is Naipaul’s guide, cannot regard the past with the same equanimity. Rashid, one of whose ancestors served at the court of the Nawab of Oude, regards the British plunder during the Indian Mutiny of the Nawab’s summer palace in Lucknow as an act of desecration, one of many events that contributed to the long decline of his community. Naipaul takes note of this history and is not dismissive of it. However, for Naipaul, the British period is “full of ambiguities.” As the book moves toward its conclusion, Naipaul becomes increasingly focused on individuals who, like him, are able to capitalize on their colonial formation and are less focused on criticizing its injustices.
Naipaul’s attraction to individuals who display a more straightforward and robust conception of reform reasserts itself at the end of Mutinies. But this reappearance is softened by the fact that it now seems to be one version of the diverse ways Indians have of engaging with the past. Naipaul offers an admiring description of Vishwanath, a Delhi-based editor of a tough and practical women’s magazine—none too popular with more educated readers—that offers practical advice and guidance to lower-middle-class women about how to balance their modern aspirations for independence with the demands of traditional society:
Stage by stage, then, taking nothing for granted, the writer took the reader through the problems, in India, of personal hygiene. “An orderliness of surroundings is the first and essential step.” “Orderliness”—a euphemism. “Surroundings”—a strange word, but clearly “house” or “apartment” wouldn’t have suited everyone’s living space. So we begin to understand that the living conditions for the people for whom this article is meant are not always good. Some of the readers of this article would be at the very margin, would just be making do.57
In conclusion, we might recall how Naipaul speaks approvingly of the inevitability in the postcolonial period of people “awakening to history and new knowledge of their place in the scheme of things, refashioned history according to their need.”58 When Naipaul visits Kashmir in early 1989, it is the manners of individual people, rather than the fractured politics of the region, that interest him. He shows little interest in “the religious and political restlessness in the valley.”59 He also does not elaborate on the “secessionist group [that] had been setting off bombs in public places in the city,” and which had also been demanding the expulsion of all non-Kashmiri residents.60
Instead, Naipaul describes how local people interact as they go about their daily business, and how the urban landscape of the better-educated, prosperous, but increasingly crowded city has changed. All this is done in the company of the Kashmiri Muslim Nazir, the gracious son of Aziz, the hotel manager who took care of Naipaul in 1962. Naipaul is struck by the fact that Nazir, “with his own new ideas of elegance and self, couldn’t but be more complicated than my relationship with his father [Aziz]”:61
From his grandfather’s little shop to his father’s successful hotel career, to his own prospects as a graduate and accountant—there had been a step-by-step movement upwards. Would it continue?
[Nazir] had never been out of Kashmir…. Twenty-seven years after I had got to know him, [Nazir’s father] Aziz had remained more or less the same. It wouldn’t be like that with Nazir. Already he had intimations of a world outside…. New ways of seeing and feeling were going to come to him, and he wasn’t going to be part of the valley in the way he was now.62
Despite the political strife in which the region is embroiled, Naipaul suggests that the future lies with the likes of people like Nazir who have been won over to a sense of themselves as free and cosmopolitan individuals, from which there can be no turning back. Young men like Nazir are proof that “the idea of freedom had gone everywhere in India”63 and civic ideals would, over time, supplant the stultifying ideas inherited from the “trampled-over” Indian past. Naipaul suggests that Nazir’s sensibility is a long-term consequence of the interaction, at once complementary and antagonistic, between the colonial enlightenment and the Indian anticolonial tradition: “India was set on the way of a new kind of intellectual life; it was given new ideas about its history and civilization. The freedom movement reflected all of this and turned out to be the truest kind of liberation.”64
Building on what might be described as a dialectical approach, in the final pages of the book Naipaul argues that the violent mutinies from below reflect the process by which a “central will, a central intellect, a national idea”65 has taken hold across the country. This was the case even where it seemed that the “beginnings of an intellectual life” were “negated by old anarchy and disorder.”66 Despite appearances to the contrary, the mutinies do not portend social disintegration so much as the challenging process by which older conceptions of self and society are brought into being. Individual equality and local difference might, in an emerging dispensation messily created from below, exist in a continuously negotiated, productive tension:
The Indian Union was greater than the sum of its parts; and many of these movements of excess strengthened the Indian state, defining it as the source of law and civility and reasonableness. The Indian Union gave people a second chance, calling them back from the excesses with which, in another century, or in other circumstances (as neighboring countries showed), they might have to live: the destructive chauvinism of the Shiv Sena, the tyranny of many kinds of religious fundamentalism (people always ready in India to let religion carry the burden of their pain), the film-star corruption and racial politics of the South, the pious Marxist idleness and nullity of Bengal.
Excess was now felt to be excess in India. What the mutinies were also helping to define was the strength of the general intellectual life, and the wholeness and humanism of the values to which all Indians now felt they could appeal. And—strange irony—the mutinies were not to be wished away. They were part of the beginning of a new way for many millions, part of India’s growth, part of its restoration.67
By means of the novel process of self-fashioning that was underway, people like Nazir had come to embrace a universal idea of human association. It is clear that Naipaul regards this as a dangerous historical moment but one that is also charged with great potential.