The Anglo-Indian Theme

An Area of Darkness.
by V. S. Naipaul.
Macmillan. 281 pp. $5.95.

From their duration, their intimacy, and intensity, an outsider might take Anglo-Indian relations to be one of the richest and most fascinating of historical themes. The British, after all, ruled India for some two centuries—sending out, not the riffraff of their cities, but many of their finest minds and wisest spirits. And India was not always unresponsive. The great Bengali reformers of the 19th century were equally determined to revive India's traditions and to bring India the best in modern European thinking—which tended to mean Bentham and the two Mills (the elder Mill, of course, was one of the greatest of all British servants of India). Yet, by the end of the century, the mood had gone sour. It was in Bengal that the first anti-British terrorist campaign was to break out. In Kipling's Kim there is an affection and respect for India and the ways of its natives—though not for the new, Western-educated “native”—that reflected the experience of many a British District Collector in the 1880's. How much of this was left by the 1920's may be judged from E. M. Forster's A Passage to India—an accurate book in this (though not in every) respect. Again, the powerful impress of British institutions on contemporary India can mislead, as the Englishness of a Nehru misled. Nehru's successor—and his possible successors—are distinctly less English, less Western, distinctly more traditional, more Hindu. The course of Anglo-Indian relations has its bursts of grandeur; but on the whole it is a wretched story. It never was a marriage of true minds; to many it seems in retrospect more like a squalid mésalliance.

That this is a sad, indeed a tragic, outcome for both Britain and India hardly needs to be stressed. And there are wider implications. After all, if India and Britain, with their long historical intimacy, understood one another so little, what of those other, briefer colonial relationships between the West and the Third World? Was each bedeviled by the same mutual misunderstanding? Will the outcome, mutual resentment and repudiation, prove to be the same? Perhaps it is still too early to say. It is perfectly arguable that each colonial relationship should be considered for itself. What Oscar Mannoni, in his Prospero and Caliban, says of French-Malagassy relations may, or may not, be true of French-Guinean relations, or of relations between Australians and aborigines, Dutchmen and Indonesians. India, in other words, may be a special case: the tragedy of the Anglo-Indian encounter may prove nothing. My own inclinations are toward the position taken up by Mannoni: that there are useful generalizations to be made about the colonial relationship. Prospero and Caliban can never be made equal partners by political decree—if only because, in Mannoni's psychological terms, Prospero has willed Caliban into being, and Caliban Prospero. What, even now, can be said with some assurance is that the act of independence does not put an end to the unequal relationship. Even the comparatively innocent American has to live with the psychological burden of colonialism bequeathed to him by his white brother-nations. Even for him, therefore, the question of whether or not India is a special case assumes some importance.

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Yet this potentially rich and fascinating field has been surprisingly little explored. In Britain, the generation under forty knows almost nothing of India, and cares less. For those over forty who once lived and labored in India, the Raj is a fading dream: there are still strong sentimental ties, especially among military men, but they will hardly survive their generation. In India itself, Britain might appear to loom large: the image of the Raj is still powerful, perhaps more powerful in the glow of retrospective emulation than in the days of its actual glory. But the Britain the new Hindu Raj emulates is not the Britain of Harold Wilson, Kingsley Amis, and the Beatles. The living link has snapped. The Britain that is admired is an abstraction—a textbook model of jurisprudential wisdom, welfarestate economics, and parliamentary etiquette. Thus the Anglophilia of educated Indians is both embarrassingly flattering, and finally shallow—because it refers to an England that does not, and indeed never did, exist. A charming Indian lady once assured me over the lunch-table, after her guest had told a particularly scarifying tale of corruption in high places, “You will find this hard to understand, I believe, we know that such things cannot happen in your country.” I did not like to disillusion her (this was about the time of the Profumo scandals). But in any case it would have done no good. What Indian editorials picked out was the fact that Mr. Profumo had actually got up in Parliament and confessed. How many Indian ministers, it was slyly suggested, would have been prepared to do a thing like that! And how much more, it was insinuated, would some of our ministers have to confess! How could one protest? Should one have insisted that these doings shed a rather murky light on the England of 1963? That would have been resented, and almost certainly not believed. These educated Indians were confident that they knew what the real England was: for them, whatever might happen, the real England would keep breaking through.

Since Independence there have been, I think, only three books which have done justice to the Anglo-Indian theme. The first, in point of time, was Nirad C. Chaudhuri's great Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, perhaps the best book in the English language ever written by an Indian. The second was The Men Who Ruled India, by Philip “Woodruff,” an eloquent, erudite, romantic monument to the British administrators of imperial India—perhaps the most convincing apologia for imperialism (though its author, Philip Mason, is no “imperialist” in the contemporary, pejorative sense) that has ever been composed. V. S. Naipaul's new book, An Area of Darkness, deserves to take its place as the third in this pantheon. It differs from its predecessors, each written shortly after Independence, in that it records a contemporary India, the India of Nehru's last years, of the Sino-Indian border dispute. But it differs also in the quality of the author's involvement. Both Mr. Chaudhuri and Mr. Mason were children of the British Raj—indeed their books may prove, with Kipling's and Forster's, its most enduring monuments. Mr. Naipaul, too, is a child of British imperialism, but in rather more indirect fashion. He is the grandson of a Brahmin from the Benares region who went to Trinidad in the 19th centry as an indentured laborer. But his education is British and he confesses that he lacks sympathy with much that is deeply Indian—he has no religious sense, no liking for metaphysics. Nevertheless, admirers of his earlier books must have hoped that he would one day write about India. They have been richly rewarded.

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The strengths of Mr. Naipaul's book lie, then, where one would expect them to lie—in his novelist's ear for talk, in his shrewd, observant eye for detail. The descriptions of that lakeside hotel in Kashmir where he stayed, of that first agonized encounter with the sights and smells of the Orient in Bombay and Alexandria, are done with a sureness that is equal to anything in his fiction. But it is above all Mr. Naipaul's account of his return to the ancestral village (“the Village of the Dubes”) that seems certain of a high place in any anthology of English writing about India. Until the very end of his journey, the author seems to cling to the illusion that somewhere, somehow, he will discover what it is that connects him, through his Brahmin forebears, with this sprawling, defecating, inchoate India of today. Arrived in the village, he finds the shrines erected by his grandfather, with money sent from Trinidad, still standing. But the village and its Brahmin community are not quite as he and his Trinidad family had been brought up to believe. A traditional welcome is laid on: but it is soon apparent that this prodigal's return is seen as a financial opportunity not to be missed. It is the final humiliation. The shameless beggary of India—as it must appear to a Westerner—could not be more cruelly brought home. Mr. Naipaul, who is nothing if not candid, admits that he panicked: from that moment he wanted only to get out of India as fast as he could.

In the best of his descriptive episodes Mr. Naipaul—and there is no higher praise—is not far inferior to Kipling. But the book has the defects of its virtues; it is interested largely in the immediacy, the accidents of life. Now that, in an Indian context, is very strange. For the Hindu sets little store by appearances—the world of maya. To the Hindu, essence is all. That is why most reportage, most descriptive writing in modern India, is so bad. In other words, the average Indian writer is weak precisely where Mr. Naipaul is strong. (Whether he is always strong where Mr. Naipaul is comparatively weak—in historical speculation, in philosophical contemplation—I would not care to say: though these gifts are certainly generously developed in Mr. Chaudhuri's books.) But it does seem that Mr. Naipaul is deaf to a good deal in the complex music of India—think, for instance, of the breathtaking aesthetic appeal of Satyajit Ray's films-because his own gifts lie in quite another direction. For all his Brahmin ancestry, Mr. Naipaul is very English in his sensibility (he is primarily a comic writer). In one sense, then, his book is intensely personal. It is the record of an attempt to clear that “area of darkness” which India, since childhood, had represented in the author's mind. The attempt succeeded, disastrously well: the darkness of ignorance yielded to the more painful darkness of knowledge. In that sense, Mr. Naipaul's journey was justified: he will hardly need to go back. But there is more to it than that. It is not chance that Mr. Naipaul's personal Odyssey conforms to the pattern of so many other attempted explorations, so many other passages to India, both in its high expectations, and in its final humiliation and rejection. Indeed, it appears to echo the tragedy of the British Raj itself. Mr. Naipaul's book is the latest, but not the last, nail in the coffin of that brave, but ill-favored endeavor.