By Pankaj Mishra - Mar 31, 2013
While reading a shocking report about extrajudicial killings and
torture by Indian security forces in Kashmir, I was reminded of V.S.
Naipaul's "India: A Million Mutinies Now," arguably the most
influential book about modern India.
More than two decades after the book was published, India is full of
ominous signs of the breakdown of governance and the increasing
recourse to violence by the Indian state as well as extremist groups.
And so it was strange to read Naipaul's optimistic take on an earlier
phase of this turmoil: "Many of these movements of excess strengthened
the Indian state, defining it as a source of law and civility and
reasonableness."
The special pleading here actually belies the prophetic cast of many
of Naipaul's observations, which have shaped much recent writing and
thinking about the country, from Sunil Khilnani's "The Idea of India"
to Suketu Mehta's "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found."
Naipaul traveled in the late 1980s to Mumbai, South India,
communist-ruled Bengal, Lucknow, Delhi and Kashmir. His interlocutors
came from a carefully chosen sample of Indians: poor Muslims,
upper-caste Hindus, Sikhs, Kashmiri Muslims, Punjabis, Tamils,
ex-communists and Dalits, formerly untouchable Hindus. Naipaul even
sought out the producers and consumers of women's magazines.
Simple Thesis
Out of these varied encounters, Naipaul drew a simple yet irrefutable
thesis about India: "People everywhere have ideas of who they are and
what they owe themselves."
You could argue with Naipaul about whether India's "civilization" had
really been "wounded" by decayed Hindu rituals, barbaric Muslim
invaders and a sterile Gandhism. Nevertheless, he seemed to have had
brilliantly intuited that many long-suppressed Indians, galvanized by
ideas of freedom and dignity, were now finally revolting against their
wretched circumstances.
Intriguingly, such upbeat assessments of India's latent energies
reflected a 180-degree turn in Naipaul's thinking about the land of
his ancestors. This was the same writer who had skittishly charged in
the early 1960s that "Indians defecate everywhere" -- and made this
proclamation, equally hyperbolic, in the mid-1970s: "India needed a
new code, but it had none. There were no rules; and India was
discovering again that it was cruel and horribly violent."
Cruising down the road to Damascus in 1990, Naipaul wasn't deluded
into thinking that there was anything nonviolent or benign about
India's million mutinies. In fact, they were "supported by 20 kinds of
group excess, sectarian excess, religious excess, regional excess."
Nevertheless, the eruptions of rage had to be contrasted with what
didn't exist before in India: "a central will, a central intellect, a
national idea."
"What the mutinies were helping to define," he wrote, "was the
strength of the general intellectual life, and the wholeness and
humanism of the values to which all Indians could appeal." So, as
Naipaul saw it, "the mutinies were not to be wished away. They were
part of the beginning of a new way for millions, part of India's
growth, part of its restoration."
It is worth asking today: Has a writer ever been more wrong and more
right at the same time?
In retrospect, Naipaul had chosen in 1990 a perversely unpromising
moment to bet on the Indian state's ability to arbitrate -- and
eventually defuse -- the million mutinies. Militant insurgencies in
Punjab and Kashmir, the assassination of a prime minister, and pogroms
against Muslims and Sikhs had made the 1980s the most violent decade
in modern Indian history.
New Inequalities
Two years after the publication of "A Million Mutinies Now," the Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party would demolish a medieval mosque in
North India. Then, rising on a wave of anti-Muslim violence, it would
assume power in Delhi in 1998 and immediately conduct nuclear tests.
Assaults on minorities, especially in Kashmir, would intensify,
culminating in the mass murder, assisted by the local government, of
more than 2,000 Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002. Economic
globalization, while benefiting a small minority, would graft new
inequalities of income and opportunity on to India's older hierarchies
of caste.
But Naipaul saw India, especially its Hindu majority, making another
tryst with destiny. In his own version of the Hegelian-Marxian
dialectic, conflict helped usher India into a higher stage of
progress. It was a kind of national development that, to use Lenin's
words, "proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by
leaps, catastrophes and revolutions."
To be sure, Naipaul hadn't relied on any grand teleology to hail the
progress of India's democratic revolution. He worked, as always, from
the story he had constructed of his own life. Phrases such as "central
will" and "national idea" always had a great emotional appeal for
Naipaul, who grew up with a bewilderingly mixed identity in a
politically insignificant country (Trinidad). He extrapolated from his
own improbable success as a self-made writer from nowhere to evoke a
future for India in which most of its citizens would, after some
necessary struggle, find happiness.
Indeed, Naipaul was much taken with the American idea of happiness. As
he said in a lecture at the Manhattan Institute in 1990: "So much is
contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice,
the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and
achievement. It is an immense human idea."
But, unlike most of his conservative audience that day, Naipaul did
not see big government as obstructing the private pursuit of
happiness. He partook rather of the assumption -- commonplace among
Third World intellectuals -- that the state was the prime agent of the
spirit of history, whose central intellect and will assist and protect
its citizens as they seek material and intellectual fulfilment.
Losing Legitimacy
Though alert to the failures and disasters of postcolonial regimes in
Africa, Naipaul strangely could not see -- the consequence, perhaps,
of his excessive reliance on individual encounters and near-total
indifference to political economy -- how the Indian state was rapidly
losing its credibility and legitimacy in the 1970s and '80s.
In "A Million Mutinies Now," he completely missed how the central
government had cynically encouraged, even helped create, the
secessionist minority of Sikhs in Punjab, or how it had routinely
rigged elections in Muslim-majority Kashmir, finally forcing its
peaceable population to take up arms in the late '80s.
As the '90s progressed, Naipaul confused his cherished "national idea"
and "central intellect" with irruptions of a xenophobic nationalism
among a minority of middle-class and upper-caste Hindus. Not
surprisingly, he hailed the BJP's vandalizing of a mosque in 1992 as a
great historical "awakening."
It is not clear what he makes of the demoralizing spectacle today of
the undermining of the Indian state's central will by crony capitalism
and allegations of gargantuan venality, and the replacement of the
national idea by private fantasies of rapid self-enrichment.
In 1990, Naipaul was perfectly placed to describe the magnitude and
vitality of India's experiment with democracy, if not foresee the
paradoxical result of its success: fragmentation into multiple
competing political and economic interests, and incoherence and
paralysis at the center.
Certainly, Naipaul's early predictions about politicized and motivated
Indians have been abundantly ratified. But, for all their literary
power, his writings cannot lighten the task of those who struggle to
decipher today -- in the larger postcolonial world as well as in India
-- the million mutinies that continue to erupt in the great void of
the national idea.
(Pankaj Mishra is the author of "From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt
Against the West and the Remaking of Asia" and a Bloomberg View
columnist, based in London and Mashobra, India. The opinions expressed
are his own.)
blooomberg
No comments:
Post a Comment