Naipaul and India: A Million Stories Now

On August 11, the world said its bitter farewell to Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, a Trinidad-born British writer of Indian roots. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction and was awarded, among others, the Nobel and the Man Booker prizes.

As a way of remembering Naipaul and speaking about his legacy, I chose to discuss his well-known non-fiction book, India: A Million Mutinies Now. As it was published in 1990, it would be unfair and purposeless to consider it from the perspective of the time passed (even then, however, I would claim it has mostly aged well and it preserved its value). What I will focus on, instead, is how the book tells the stories of Indians.

The subject is of relevance now and always will be. Faced with a country of over 1 billion people, many writers – usually foreign, but some Indian as well – give up on seeking the single person and his or her story. What many do, instead, is pick the easier path of claiming that the people are only what groups – religious communities, ethnic groups, castes – mold them to be. Statistically speaking, this method may offer the only way to deal with the diversity of India in one book, but it also always ends up forming or reinforcing stereotypes. Naipaul, however, tried – not without unavoidable mistakes, but in all sincerity – to reach toward the person and the story she wanted to share.

Thus, I take up India: A Million Mutinies Now to consider it as an example of giving India – or any other country – its own voice.

Admitting One’s Lens

Born into a family of Indians who had migrated to Trinidad, Naipaul spent his childhood in an Indian community on a Caribbean island, moved on to study in the United Kingdom, and stayed to live there. Searching for his father’s roots and for stories to learn and tell, he visited the land of his ancestors on a number of occasions, witnessed historical events, and talked to many people, both important and anonymous. On his first visit to India, Naipaul was in a peculiar position: not fully Indian and not entirely foreign.

He was, therefore, equipped for the journey better than the average foreign writer, and shared a clearly emotional, though very specific, bond with India. However, having gone through the British education system, he had also imbibed many of the West’s preconceived notions about India. Sometimes, though rather rarely, these Western reflexes did emerge, like when Naipaul claimed that an Indian city does not need pavement (as if suggesting that the inhabitants are not capable of using them properly).

Fortunately, this was not the dominant mood of his work. It is fascinating to travel with him on that reverse journey through the land of his forefathers, whom he was discovering side by side with the reader. As he admitted, he knew the customs but did not know how to take part in them; he listened to the language but could only understand a few words. On one occasion, for instance, Naipaul, born into a Hindu family, admitted that visiting a temple in India was at first awkward to him, as his childhood experience of Hindu religion was based on rituals of adorations (pujas) undertaken privately, at home.

The first lesson from this for future storytellers, it would seem, is to be candid about ourselves: Where we came from, how it influenced us, how it is influencing the subject we are describing, how we felt when we first entered the country we wanted to describe. It is nearly impossible to be completely neutral, so it’s better to be aware of our lens and share that with the readers.

No Cherries to Pick

As for the second lesson: in India: A Million Mutinies Now, Naipaul did not attempt to write an overview of contemporary Indian society. These are the stories of Indians, told in their own voices, and shared in a journalistic fashion, as a chain of long, personal accounts. The author traveled, made connections, and recorded the words of his interlocutors – though he did not remain a mute spectator or refrain from adding his comments.

Twenty-seven years after the book was published, its stories, though lengthy and largely unconnected, are still gripping. Among others, Naipaul met the members of the aggressive, nativist party, Shiv Sena; interviewed former Maoists who had murdered a landlord; visited a faith healer who claimed to have knowledge of the future; and talked to an urban intellectual who had once left his pregnant wife to tour the villages preaching about the need for a violent Marxist revolution.

This is not the India from the brochures of the Ministry of Tourism. Lack of order, poverty, and the struggle for a better life are recurring themes. Neither is this the image of India as built by misty-eyed hippies or some Indologists: The peaceful land of lofty spirituality. There is a lot about violence, including the violence spread by the radical Left and the radical Right, by the radical Hindus or radical Sikhs (though much less about radical Muslims). Dipanjan, the communist thinker with whom Naipaul talked, visited rural families, asked them who was the most hated landowner in the village, and advised them to assassinate him. Some of the specific battles or wars may have ended, but the underlying poverty and religious tensions remain. I would risk claiming that, despite the fact that the oldest layer of the book comes from Naipaul’s first trip in 1962, most of India’s problems highlighted in the book’s stories are still relevant.

The advice from Naipaul is obvious, albeit many still do not heed it: Do not come to search for confirmation of what you already know, but dig deep and search for originality. Let the people tell you about their lives and retell their stories, rather than cherry-picking facts from their biographies to suit your narrative. The risk that Naipaul took, obviously, is that you end up with a book with hardly any central narrative. India: A Million Mutinies Now is a rather loose collection of stories.

I do hope, however, that this trend of letting Indians speak for themselves will grow stronger. More recent books follow a somewhat similar solution. One could point out to William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India or Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. Nine Lives, true to its name, tells the stories of nine very different Indians. Maximum City focuses on one megacity – Mumbai/Bombay – and is in a few ways similar to India: A Million Mutinies Now. Mehta, just like Naipaul, went back to India as the country of his roots (he had spent his childhood there) and to write a book. Just like Naipaul, he interviewed the city’s gangsters, Shiv Sena members, filmmakers, and believers from the Jain community. He did, however, remain focused on one city, while Naipaul also wrote about other places. In certain ways, Mehta’s focused approach was better than Naipaul: His storytelling is more coherent, while Naipaul’s was broader but internally less connected.

The Paint and the Painting

It is impossible, however, to share the facts without interpreting them at least in some degree (and Naipaul never claimed that as his goal). It is like a painter who must select the colors for his work. Picking the facts themselves – or, as in this case, people with their stories – is an act of interpretation. The broader canvas – the history, the social fabric, the political and economic background – must be described. And here the problem arises: How can we show people as part of the landscape, without losing them to it?

Naipaul did his best to tell us about the background of the people he interviewed. Sometimes we are flooded with names and facts, often served in a disorderly fashion, and still feel it would be better to know more. The chapter about the religious community of the Sikhs is perhaps particularly weak in this regard: A lay reader with little or no knowledge of the Sikhs will find it hard to navigate through the somewhat chaotic introduction and will still not know enough to understand the background of the story. Once again, perhaps it was not the wisest choice to write about India in its entirety. Focusing on one subject, one group, one place, one item, or one custom, would work better.

Such a focus does not have to mean that a story will become an academic essay, will lose its background, its color, and will remain limited to one theme. A good example beyond the pages of books is a recent series published online by Supriya Sharma, titled “A Village Votes.” Sharma, a journalist, chose a very limited geographic area, a specific period (the election campaign), and hence an underlying, connecting subject (state-level politics). Yet, what she really told us about was the lives of the people in all their diversity, and how they highlight very different issues during the only time when the politicians seem to care about what they say.

Another shortcoming of telling stories as we were told them is that, like Naipaul, we can seem to sometimes believe too much in the interpretations presented by individuals. Here, unfortunately, Naipaul does at times treat people as emanations of their communities. The Hindu priests (Brahmans), are depicted as if they had some common and unchanging features and customs, such as not being violent and vengeful. A low-caste guest had left Naipaul’s bathroom dirty and the author trusts the interpretation of another person as to the reasons for that act. Rashid, who showed Naipaul around Lucknow and introduced him to the buildings destroyed by the British during the Sepoy Mutiny, was outraged by the deeds of the British army as a Muslim – so the author claims (since the destroyed buildings belonged to a Muslim dynasty). Was his outrage a “Muslim” one or an “Indian” one, or a bit of both, and how did Naipaul assess this?

This will always be tricky and necessary: to show people as part of their communities but not only as such, and not guided by the feelings and customs of the community as if they were some biological instinct.

On most occasions, however, Naipaul did his best to go against the grain and to show many layers of social life. He wrote about Periyar, a highly controversial figure from Tamil Nadu who fought against religious superstitions and began each of his speeches by repeating thrice that God does not exist. Naipaul also interviewed people who supported Periyar and showed how his struggle was not only against faith (in a country known to be very faithful), but against priests and upper castes, and against the dominance of northern Indians and the Hindi language over the Tamils and Tamil. Some of the people, Naipaul points out, supported or were inspired by Periyar because they were Tamils or were of a low caste, despite the fact that at the same time they were believers whose religion Periyar routinely mocked.

Naipaul met Namdeo Dhasal, a famed leader of the Dalit Panthers (who struggled for the betterment of Dalits, the so-called untouchables) but also talked a lot to his wife, Malika, who had written an autobiography in which she criticized her husband. Dhasal allowed this to happen despite the fact that it hurt his reputation. Namdeo was a man and Malika a woman; he was a low-caste Hindu, she hailed from a Muslim family. Though some of these factors are important to their narrative as presented in the book, we see the two primarily as people.

Twenty-seven years after India: A Million Mutinies Now was published, many authors still do what Naipaul usually, though not always, avoided: Writing about Indian communities rather than Indians. Regardless of its shortcomings, Naipaul’s method of storytelling can still serve as a role model, and not only when writing on India. And, just like India: A Million Mutinies Now, there are still millions of stories to be told.