India & Modernity V S Naipaul's views  VS NAIPAUL, novelist & travel writer, remarked to the New York Times in 2005:  “It is rather a calamity of India today that there are no thinkers. A big, powerful country but no thinkers.” (New York Times 09 August 2005)  1950s-60s: Naipaul married Pat Hayle (?) in 1955 but (according to BBC4 programme on 20Jul2008 entitled The Strange Luck of VS NAIPAUL), he was visiting prostitutes in the late 50s. His first book was The Mystic Masseur (1957) and the book that was better received was A House for Mr Biswas (1961). In 1962, N travelled to India to observe conditions for himself. The first of a trilogy on India was An Area of Darkness (1964) which expresses his shock at what he saw, such as defecation in public.The next two were: A Wounded Civilisation (1977) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). The following excerpts are taken from a long piece in Britain's Daily Telegraph magazine (August 1967): [On Maharishi Mahesh Yogi speaking to a a western group at the Spiritual Regeneration Meeting in Delhi] The Maharishi reproved his reverential middle-class audience for failing to keep in tune with the infinite... it always came to this - a moment when Indian journalist, poet and holy man abandoned intellect, observation, reason and became "mysterious". To see mysteriousness is to excuse the intellectual failure. The poverty of the Indian land also extends to the Indian mind. The simplicity of India disappoints and in the end fatigues. India lies all on the surface. [On Hindu beliefs] The holy cow is absurd, an ignorant corruption of an ancient Aryan practice. The caste marks and the turbans belong to a people who, incapable of contemplating man as man, know no other way to define themselves. Even I could anticipate much of what was said at the meeting. Where here is no play of the intellect, there is no surprise. While the West is many-featured, India possesses only mystery. In March 1962, the glossy Indian Hotelkeeper & Traveller produced a series “Seers of India”:             “India’s seers and sages have something to offer to the world. Th the spiritually rudderless foreigners, India’s saints and sadhus provide irresistible magnets of attraction. India, steeped in spirituality, ha singularly unique facet to project to the world…” The absurdity of India can be total. It appears to ridicule analysis. The onlooker is taken beyond anger and despair. [Visit to a rural family planning centre] The Hindi slogan on the wall said: Two or three and stop. I asked the officer in charge said he had 'motivated' people to undergo vasectomy. "How many people did you motivate?" "Three" "But your target is 100" "The people here, sahib, they laugh at me" "Tell me why should I do family planning" "It will raise the standard of living" "How would this raise the standard of living?" It was an unfair question, it was concrete and not asked before. He couldn't answer. He had only the abstraction about the standard of living.  ]Meeting the Literature professor of a district college] The prof said he taught the usual things. "We begin with Eshakespeare. And the Romantics (on being prompted). Eshelley." "What is the point of teaching literature in a country like India?" "Self-culture." (He had been asked this question before). "Even with dirt and filth, the cultured mind gets this purge. And this catharsis helps the self-culture." [His stay in in the North] Poverty could not explain the worn carpets of the 5-star Ashoka Hotel, the grimy armchairs in the lounge, the long-handled broom left there by the menial in khaki... Poverty did not explain the dirt in the first-class railway carriages, the absence of trees, even near the resort of Naini Tal. Poverty did not explain the open stinking sewers of the new middle class Lake Gardens suburb in Calcutta... It spoke of a more general collapse of sensibility. People had grown barbarous, indifferent and self-wounding... Here is a nation ceaselessly exchanging banalities with itself; regeneration is believed to come not from being receptive to thought but through magic. In a time of famine, hundreds of gallons of milk were poured over a deity while an Air Force helicopter dropped flowers. India is profoundly dependent on others, both for questions and answers. - a country held together by no intellectual current. There is no true aristocracy, no element that preserves the graces of a country... The state is withering away for lack of ideas.  Every discipline, skill and proclaimed ideal of the modern Indian state is a copy of something known to exist elsewhere. Indians, including the holy men, have continually to look outside for approval. Local judgment has no value. Without the foreign chit, Indians can have no confirmation of their own reality.  [Vivekananda] Swami Vivekananda from Bengal takes us closer to the Indian bewilderment and simplicity. He was pained by his country’s subjection and his own racial humiliation. He was also pained by the caste divisions of Hinduism, the holy contempt for the high for the low. V himself was of the Kayastha catse, whose status is till in dispute. He exported the Vedas to the West and found admirers. His essay Modern India (1899) links his political distress and its religious resolution. It is an interpretation of Indian history in apocalyptic Hindu terms, barely concealing ideas borrowed from the West. V states axiomatically that every country is ruled by the four castes of priests, warriors, merchants and shudras, the plebs. India’s top castes have decayed: they have failed in their religious duties and also cut themselves off from the source of all power, the shudras. India is therefore in a state of shudra-hood which accommodates the merchant power of Britain… So, out of mock-Western historical inquiry, our of borrowed ideas and personal pain, V reduces the condition of his country to a subject for simple Hindu religious contemplation. The failure was religious; redemption can only come through religion and through a discovery of India as the brotherhood of all Indians. V’s essay is considered to be part of the literature of Indian nationalism. It is not easy to read; it wanders,  Is frequently confused and full of Hindu metaphysical terms. But with India sages, the utterance is enough; the message is not important. Regeneration is believed to come, not through thought but through magic, through reverential contact with the wise and holy. Gandhi committed India to a holy philistinism that still endures. Gods and gurus, sadhus and swamis... [Exchanging banalities] Post election headlines: We must be educated to make democracy a success; Past mistakes responsible for current problems; Reverses attributed to lack of foresight. Here was a nation exchanging banalities with itself: it was the impression Indians frequently gave when they attempted analysis. They were either expressing the old world of myth and magic or interpreting the new in terms of the old. The concrete eluded them. The ritual of Indian life smothers the imagination, for which it is a substitute. The Delhi novelist, RP Jhabvala has moved away from the purely Indian themes with which she started; she feels unsupported by the material. Gandhi drops not one descriptive word about London in the 1880s, and even Nehru cannot tell us what it was like to be at Harrow before 1914. All Indian autobiographies appear to be written by the same incomplete person. The independence movement looked back to the Indian past but did not evaluate it, only proclaiming glory. Macaulay’s assertion that all the learning of India was not worth one shelf of a European library had not been disproved. His statement (on Indian learning) can be reaffirmed more brutally today. [Magic & ritual]] India is profoundly dependent. She depends on others now both for questions and answers. Here’s a country held together by no intellectual current. There is no true Indian aristocracy, no element that preserves the graces of a country… There have been parasitic landowners, tax-farmers. The rulers represented a brute authority. The aptly named ‘native princes’ have disappeared and nothing marks their passing. Every Indian, prince or peasant, is a villager. All are separate and, in the decay of sensibility, equal. Each trade (except entertainment) is borrowed. Every discipline, skill and proclaimed ideal of the modern Indian state is known to exist in its true form somewhere else. Cabinet government looks to Westminster. Indians had borrowed words like "democracy" and "science" from the West, without knowing what they meant.  The journals of protest look, even for their typography, to the New Statesman, Indians, holy men included, have continually to look outside for approval. Local judgment has not value. Without the foreign chit, Indian s have no confirmation of their own identity. A holy man claimed to be able to walk on water. A show was arranged. Tickets were not cheap. A film crew was there and the water tank was checked for hidden devices. There were none. At the appointed time, the holy man stepped on the water and sank. Magic is an Indian need. It simplifies the world and complements the intellectual failure – less a failure of the individual intellect than the deficiency of a closed civilisation, ruled by myth and ritual. [Interestingly, in Million Mutinies Now, there was a return to some of these themes: [p144): Religious myths touched every part of the land outside colonial Goa. Story within story, that was what people saw and felt in their bones. It was the myths about gods and the heroes of the epics that gave antiquity and wonder to the earth the people lived on.  EXTRACTS from Naipaul’s India- a million Mutinies Now (Heinemann/Minerva 1990) This last of the trilogy contains impressions from his visit to Bombay, Calcutta, Karnataka, Lucknow, Delhi etc. He had mellowed a great deal and more tolerant of what he saw. Sample [p149 written in 1988] Indian poverty was still visible, the middens (piles of dung & refuse), the broken-down aspect of houses and lanes. But the fields of sugar-cane and cotton and other crops looked rich and well tended. The village houses were often neat, with plastered walls and red-tile roofs. There was nothing like th destitution I had seen 26 years before when I had travelled on a slow bus.There were none of the walking skeletons with their deranged eyes… No corner iof this land was without its connection with the gods… tractors pulled trailers loaded with cotton  in big hessian-wrapped bundles. At the same time people in village yards  went on with their biblical-like tasks, threshing, winnowing. The land was almost beautiful, almost without pain for the beholder. [p171] I wondered whether the frustrations Pravas spoke about hadn’t been created by the smallness of Indian expectations, the almost pious idea that a country so poor needed very little. I wondered whether there wasn’t deep in India even now a psychology of shoddiness, an idea of holy poverty, the old religious feeling that it was wrong to provoke the gods to get above oneself