Naipaul on Indian Narcissism

In India, the reason behind self-absorption is not self-love, but due to the incorporation of the world itself inside the structure of the self. This was probably why V.S. Naipaul reacted so narcissistically on his first trip to the subcontinent. T.G. VAIDYANATHAN writes.

IT was in his first India book that Naipaul gave us his controversial profile of the early Gandhi. Drawing freely from the famous autobiography, Naipaul declared that Gandhi was nothing, if not self-obsessed, on his first arrival in England. His 1888 voyage to England is transformed in Gandhi's rendering of it — as Naipaul sees it — into a purely ``internal adventure of anxieties felt and food eaten with not a word of anything seen or heard that did not directly affect the physical or mental well-being of the writer''. But, for Naipaul, this kind of reaction is not just confined to Gandhi: ``It is the Indian way of experiencing'' he editorialises with some asperity. This was probably why Naipaul himself — nothing, if not Indian, in his gut reactions — reacted so calamitously, so narcissistically, on his first trip to the sub-continent. For this is how he writes in An Area of Darkness (1964) on his touching shore in Karachi: ``Hysteria had been my reaction, and a brutality dictated by a new awareness of myself as a whole human being and a determination, touched with fear, to remain what I was.'' To remain what I was! The inward concentration is fierce, the self-absorption complete — Naipaul's own description of Gandhi's self-absorption on his arrival in Southampton — could be applied to describe Naipaul's arrival in Karachi as well. It is still an internal adventure for both men. Maybe travelling overseas is disconcerting for all human beings; maybe we should look at the Indian under ordinary, normal conditions. Naipaul should have saved his heavy artillery for Gandhi's foremost disciple, Vinoba Bhave — ``the authorised version of Gandhi'' in Naipaul's own telling description — who never went out of India. Vinoba's self-absorption certainly reached epic proportions, because, unlike Gandhi who was made ``by London, the study of the law, the 20 years in South Africa, Tolstoy, Ruskin and the `Gita', Bhave was made only by Gandhi's ashrams and India''. Asked about the aims of the university — not far from the site of the Buddha's Enlightenment — for which he had been given land, Bhave merely said: ``The ground is there, the well is there. Whoever wants to drink will drink. What more do you want?'' Not really surprising in a man who, sent by Gandhi to Benares to study as a young man, promptly consulted a hermit on the banks of the Ganges on how to raise the Kundalini at the base of the spine!

Perhaps we should be looking at some of our famous sportsmen — not introverts like Gandhi or Vinoba — to find out if they, at least, are free of this nagging Indian self-absorption. It is true that Indians are not naturally extroverted or gifted at things that take them outside themselves — as witness our dismal performance in the Olympics. Is this why we are pressing for the inclusion of kabbadi in the Olympic calendar of events, `kabaddi' — a highly introspective sport which calls for breath control more than anything else? Perhaps cricket — our national ``mania'' as some of our intellectuals believe — could provide a clue. The career of the record-breaking Gavaskar could be instructive here. Faced with a truly mind- boggling 334 by England in the inaugural match of the First World Cup in 1975, Gavaskar opened the Indian innings and batted all through the 60 allotted overs for an equally mind-boggling 36 not out in an Indian total of 132 for six. It is not simply enough to call it ``the worst innings ever played in my life'' as Gavaskar has since done; it shows the fierce self-absorption of every Indian in the never-ending quest for self-aggrandisement. The full extent of this quest I was to discover at first hand when I came to guest-edit his official biography — by Dom Moraes — in 1986. I had picked a particularly attractive photo of Gavaskar's in a white T-shirt with fetching horizontal black stripes to set it off for the back cover. To my consternation, I was told by his publishers, Macmillan, that Gavaskar wanted the Sai Baba locket that dangles from his neck removed. I stuck to my guns and would have none of it, although I am not a votary of the Puttaparthi saint. I have never since regretted my editorial valour.

To love oneself, observed Oscar Wilde in a famous aphorism, is the beginning of a life-long romance. In India the reason behind self-absorption is not self-love (most Indians hate themselves in so far as they have a self at all) but, as Desai and Collins point out in their penetrating essay, ``Selfhood in Context'' (included in my recent collection Vishnu on Freud's Desk (Oxford, 1999)) due to the incorporation of the world itself inside the structure of the self. To catch the Indian at his self-absorbed best, you have to catch him having a haircut or, better still, when he is having his weekly oil-bath. The distinguished Kannada novelist, U.R. Anantha Murthy has, in a recent collection, Stallions in the Sun (Penguin, 1999), described in loving detail, this weekly South Indian ritual in the title story. Here Venkata Joysa (``After all, isn't he the one who did the massage and bath for K.T. Bhasyam when they were in jail together during the freedom movement? There is hardly an important person in the whole of Karnataka who has not had himself massaged by Venkata Joysa.'') administers the oil-bath with the Bringamalaka oil to the narrator of the story, Ananthu, ``a professor in Mysore'' who ``had left the place long ago to live in the city and had been to foreign countries'' — clearly an author-surrogate: ``Tickling, pinching, plucking, pressing, patting, pulling, pushing and scratching, his agile fingers worked all round my head.'' (The description of the oil-bath occupies fully four pages in this slim 33-page novella). The object of all Venkata's frenetic exertions is nothing mundane, mind you, like an innocent oil-bath, but ``to raise the six coils of your Kundalini'' as Venkata explains to a wholly compliant Ananthu. Raising the Kundalini! We are not far from Vinoba and his hermit on the banks of the Ganges on how to raise the Kundalini. As the French say, ``Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.''

The writer is an academic based in Bangalore.

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