'Indian writers have no sense of history'

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, AUG. 12.The full text of Mr. V.S. Naipaul's widely reported interview to the Literary Review is now available and Indian writers are not likely to be amused by what Sir Vidia thinks of them. His controversial remarks about Britain's literary icons, in fact, seem small beer compared to his withering view of Indian writing which, he says, exists in a historical vacuum.

Mr. Naipaul singles out R.K.Narayan for lacking a sense of history, arguing that his writing ``hangs in the air'' because of a lack of historical perspective. He is also likely to infuriate the liberal opinion in India with his admiration for ``movements from below '' such as the Shiv Sena which, he says, are more authentic than the ``middle class chaps'' with no ``feel'' for the wretched of the earth.

In what many might regard as a sweeping generalisation, Mr. Naipaul says:``The thing about being an Indian, and it remains true of Indian writing now, is that it `seems to work without history, in a vacuum. Indian writers don't know why their country is in such a mess. They can't understand the poverty of India, they don't know why seventeenth and eighteenth century travellers talk of a derelict countryside. Very easy to think that it might be because of the British but much easier in fact to pay no attention to it at all. This lack in Indian writing, even Narayan's writing, is a fatal flaw.''

He points out that Narayan grew up ``a day's journey from Hampi'' where there are extraordinary ruins of Vijayanagaram, the capital of the ancient Hindu kingdom destroyed in the sixteenth century. ``I think a writer like Narayan should have understood what had happened, especially as he'd written a guidebook to the area. But he didn't respond to that....How can you write about your setting, your culture, if you can't see what happened 400 years ago? He has a really magical way of writing and looking, but his picture is incomplete...it stands on no history. It hangs in the air,'' Mr. Naipaul argues.

When the interviewer Mr. Farrukh Dhondy refers to Narayan's imaginary town Malgudi, he retorts ``yes, and he thinks it's eternal. In fact, his India is a ruin, he's writing about a ruin. And, indeed you should ask, who created the ruin? Why is there this ruin? The ruin wasn't eternal''.

Mr. Naipaul debunks the idea of India as represented by ``two cultures'' and says that to understand the ``calamity'' of India is to confront the fact that it was ``crushed by Muslims''. When it is put to him that his historical analysis of the Islamic conquests can be construed as divisive, he declares that ``people who say this have no wish to understand history'' and attacks Jawaharlal Nehru for encouraging a certain ``construct'' of Indian history which, he believes, is a refusal to facts. The Nehruvian idea of India, he argues, was constructed to get the independence movement off the ground. ``They had to get people together for the independence movement, and they had to tell stories.''

Asked if it isn't ``dangerous'' to keep harping on the ``Muslim past'', Mr. Naipaul says:``I think that the Muslims in India should know the history too, and in fact just across the border in Pakistan they know the history. They boast of the history. So, why should people just across the border in India pretend it doesn't exist?''

Recently, his wife Lady Nadira, a liberal Pakistani, was heard regurgitating the same theme - almost word for word.

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