India: A Wounded Civilization

I have just finished reading ‘India: A Wounded Civilization” by V.S. Naipaul. It is second among the famous Indian trilogy of Naipaul. May seem insensitive and hurt “hurtable” sensitivities of a certain section of Indian population. It is actually good if they get hurt, for it may give them a chance to escape the clutches of their blindness towards India. If you think people pooping on the railway tracks are ‘just having their being’, you ought to be blind: blind to what India should be. In this case, stay warned from any further reading of this post and reading the book should be as bad as rape for you!

P.S.- The book was written during the emergency days. Please keep the circumstances and the context in mind.

I have put up my interpretation of the book and some 13 odd quotes from it. If you want to contest it, please feel free to contact me.

Summary

Part I - The rich cultural heritage and history of ancient India seems to just go on. The riches of the ancient world and the plunders of the medieval times do not seem to bury down with the burden of centuries which India has been through, since then. Indians, awed by their history, prefer to recreate it, rather than create a new future with some inspiration from the outside as well. Even the Vijayanagar capital, he says, was a recreation of past glory - built with ancient-looking monuments in medieval times. Looking at all the wrongs all around them the Indian attitudes inspired by the inertness of Hinduism’s concepts of whatever happens is god’s will do not let the average Indians act and make these wrongs right. They are so deep rooted that a “freedom fighter” refuses to pay sales tax, for he was never a ‘freedom fighter’ anyway. He was just following the Hindu tradition of following the sage, who happens to be Mahatma Gandhi.

Part II - The urban India of 1970s was represented by Bombay where Shiv Sena was assuming power on the streets and the chawls which were perennially ignored. At ground level, Shiv Sena’s inception was against the rejection the deprived class faced every day in Bombay. However looking at the chawls closely people lived among their own excrement because cleaning it was not their business – it was the sweepers’. Again the Indian attitude of inaction surfaces under the wraps of caste-system which Indians feel so secure in. This class divide is also present in the poorest and remotest of the villages. There are people who have land and people who do not have land. Amongst those who have land some are masters and some yet are not. The landless flee from the landlessness and the tyranny of the masters; the masters find solace in the feeling of being masters. They both still lead a pitiful life. In such a scenario came Naxalites who “knew solution better than the problem”. Suffering persists.

Part III - Looking at MK Gandhi the hero, the mahatma himself; he as a young man went to England and later to South Africa, to explore and returned with a reinforced conviction to focus inwards. This came from the ‘Hindu need’ to reassert, to protect its identity among hostility. It is often not the hostility but it is the Indian fear of being corrupted by the foreigners as expressed by his Gujrati merchant family for him. An Indian’s identity comprises of one’s surroundings. It is lost if the system, caste, background and relatives collapse. It took India a ‘foreign made Mahatma’ to assume independence. ‘Foreign made’ as it was only in England and South Africa’s unfamiliarity and hostility did Gandhi go through soul-searching and chose to become what he was.

Post independence for the benefit of masses the concept of ‘intermediate technology’ assumed shape. The concept seems good but the mix of imported science and Indian sensitivities are making ‘intermediate technology’ a hindrance rather than an enabler. In the ‘National Institute of Design’ which is an imported concept, students work on peasant’s equipments and the furniture is being repaired by somebody from the family of the wood smiths. A hotchpotch of two irreconcilable concepts indeed! To fulfill the needs of India the use of technology calls for the clearest vision and highest skills. Same is the situation with press, law and the administration. They have to match Indian needs with a very clear vision driven by the skills sets desired for the same. India has to break free from the past it has been clinging to, which probably has been given to Indians by the foreigners and which may not be true.

Post independence the Gandhian way has been talked a lot about. Gandhians hardly follow it in its true spirit though. They do of course practice the rediscovery of old ways – simplicity. It is exactly opposite of what India was committed to post independence. It was committed to glory. Only opposite of this simplicity is seen in the red-tapism and dirty politics. This sense of simplicity perhaps is the withdrawal from the challenges coming India’s way on road to development which seemed almost impossible. Same old Indian attitude of defeat and disconnecting from the external environment to preserve a false sense of calmness!

Gandhi was able to do what other leaders of that time could not because he was not representing a religion, caste or region. He was representing the Indian race. This concept was alien to Indians who always saw differences amongst each other. After Gandhi was long gone, his followers through their actions exhibited that they do not follow Gandhi’s version of Gandhism. Gandhism to them was a solace still of the conquered people. This happened because Gandhi though awakened India, he did not leave an ideology behind. Or probably his ideology got diluted when he practiced his Hindu version of nationalism and was declared a mahatma. His uniqueness of being the leader of Indian race was engulfed by the Hindu traditions which has been fostering Indian attitude of withdrawal. The bottom line is that the attitudes (religious and political) Indians have been sticking to are like the trap-doors to the bottomless past and Indians need to shut them for once and for all.

Quotable Quotes

1) “No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and leaned so little from its disasters.”

2) ‘India in the late twentieth century still seems so much itself, so rooted in its own civilization, it takes time to understand that its independence has meant more than the going away of the British; that the India to which Independence came was a land of far older defeat; that the purely Indian past died a long time ago.”

3) “It (non-violence) is only a means of securing an undisturbed calm; it is nondoing, noninterference, social indifference’.

4) “These modern-sounding words (non-violence), which reconcile Srinivas to the artist’s predicament, disguise an acceptance of karma, the Hindu killer, the Hindu calm, which tells us that we pay in this life for what we have done in past lives: so that everything we see is just and balanced, and the distress we see is to be relished as religious theatre, a reminder of our duty to ourselves, our future lives.”

5) “Hinduism hasn’t been good enough for the millions. It has exposed us to a thousand years of defeat and stagnation. It has enslaved one quarter of the population and always left the whole fragmented and vulnerable. Its philosophy of withdrawal has diminished men intellectually and not equipped them to respond to challenge; it has stifled growth. So that again and again in India history has repeated itself: vulnerability, defeat, withdrawal.”

6) “It was the business of the sweepers to remove excrement, and until the sweepers came, people were content to live in the midst of their own excrement.”

7) “Hindu India, decaying for centuries, constantly making itself archaic, had closed up; and the rules of Gandhi’s Gujrati merchant caste- at one time great travelers – now forbade travel to foreign countries. Foreign countries were polluting to pious Hindus; and no one of the caste had been to England before.”

8) “’We Indians’ Kakar (a psychiatrist) says, ‘use the outside reality to preserve the continuity o the self amidst an ever changing flux of outer events and things.’

9) “To match technology to the needs of a poor country calls for the highest skills, the clearest vision”.

10) “At its core were the old Indian attitudes of defeat, the idea of withdrawal, a turning away from the world, a sinking back into the past, the rediscovery of old ways, ‘simplicity’.

11) “But perhaps this idea of simplicity – though backed up in the Indian way by quotations from Western sources, and presented as a basis for political action – was something more debilitated, something older. Perhaps it was no ore than a turning away from the difficulties of a development that had been seen to be impossible, a consequent intellectual surrender, a religious giving up, a yielding to old Indian fantasy: the mythical sense of the Indian past, the idea of eternal Indian forever spontaneously having its rebirth and growth, the conversion of the destitution and serfdom of rural Indian (and the heavy-footed vultures squabbling in the rain over the bloated carcasses of dead animals) into a memory of pastoral: a memory of the time, so recent, just out of reach, when people knew the undefiled gods, and the gods gave Brahmins all the answers, and the bull drew the plough and the cow gave milk, and the manure of these animal enriched the fields, and the stalks of the harvest thatched the simple huts of the pure.”

12) “Gandhism to them was a solace still of the conquered people.”

13) “Gandhi swept through India, but he has left it without an ideology. He awakened the holy land; his mahatmahood returned it to archaism; he made his worshippers vain.”