|
Magazine
Two cheers for Mr. Naipaul
RUKUN ADVANI looks at why it ought to take a lot more than the
prejudices of V.S. Naipaul and the glamour of the Nobel showbiz
to blind us to what remains valuable within the outlook and ideas
of E.M. Forster.
THE 75th anniversary, more or less, of the publication of E.M.
Forster's A Passage to India (1924) ties in rather ironically
with the award of the Nobel prize to V.S. Naipaul, a writer whose
experience of India is also central to his work. The irony is
especially apparent in the immediate context for two reasons.
First, it seems a rather odd coincidence that Naipaul should have
been awarded this prize just when the White Christian world's
hostility to the Islamic Brown chimes so entirely with Naipaul's
own — and contrasts so perfectly with the unaggressive
liberal-humanism of E.M. Forster, a writer who upheld Islam and
Hinduism against Christianity, and who argued for human
connections and the building of bridges between individuals and
religions. No one can deny Naipaul's writing skill or grudge this
award for a lifetime of literary hard work. But the timing of the
prize does lead one to idly wonder exactly how strong the
political dimension is within the business of prize-giving.
The second reason for the irony is that, a few weeks before the
prize announcement, Naipaul added Forster's name to the already
considerable list of people, religions, civilisations, and
countries he despises. Forster, in Naipaul's view, had no
understanding of India. He was just a dirty little homosexual who
ventured abroad in search of sexual gratifications difficult to
come by in repressed, Edwardian England.
Writers are liked or disliked for something much vaster than
their exceptional ability with language. The sense we get of the
person behind the writer, our feeling that his attitudes are
interesting and palatable, our empathy with his stories and
perceptions — these are more important than some bare
recognition of technical intelligence. We respond to books and
writers as we do to people. It was Forster, in fact, who said in
Aspects of the Novel: "Our final test of a novel will be our
affection for it, as it is the test of our friends and of
anything else which we cannot define." In these terms, it seems
to me that it is as easy to dislike Naipaul's work as to like
Forster's. Naipaul's deepest instincts are not to my taste, his
finest writing is a kind of inspired anger or melancholic
compassion which does not taste good on my tongue. Perhaps I am
deficient. Perhaps it is like not being able to develop a taste
for marmite or caviar or jackfruit.
But I dislike Naipaul for other reasons that seem just as good to
me. Naipaul's manifold prejudices have usually served to make his
own worldview clear. His obiter dicta on Forster have helpfully
clarified that Naipaul himself stands not just for elite, White,
European civilisation, but for elite, White, European
heterosexual civilisation. As a list of prejudices, this does one
better than Nirad C. Chaudhuri. There is a Ph.D. waiting to be
written on this brilliant renegade pair of conservative
collaborator — writers of the "Coconut Club" (Brown outside,
White inside) who have so singularly and similarly forgotten the
colour of their own skin. Who have so comprehensively shrugged
off the dust from which they have arisen. Who have disowned their
roots and ignored the subjugation of their own people by
colonialism. Who have praised upper-caste Hindu rule from upper-
class homesteads in Britain. Who have championed elite England,
accepted Her Majesty's honours, and become propah Englishmen in
top hats and suits. Who have shown us the defiling ignorance of
Muslims, lower castes, and all the pitiable masses untouched by
Shakespeare, Michelangelo & Co. And who have, not surprisingly,
been equally contemptuous of Forster's queer brand of sympathy
for the worlds that lie above and beyond the Mediterranean.
Writers like being outrageous. It stirs controversy and helps
book sales. Paul Theroux points out that Naipaul has regularly
thought it advantageous to provide the world with scandalous
additions to his list of hatreds in advance of each new novel.
The latest, Half a Life, apart from being a fictional counterpart
of the earlier three interrogatory Naipaulean passages —
dark, wounded, mutinous — to India, is also perhaps in need
of this low form of heraldry to appear as the antithesis of the
spiritual, sympathy-laden passages to India of Forster and
Maugham. Given Forster's continuing popularity (helped by film
versions of five of his six novels), there is no harm done to
royalty earnings by a little defamation of the bestselling dead.
It works as publicity, it enlivens the literary scene.
Except that, sometimes, writerly self-definition via slashing at
others can be plain bigotry, and large piles of prize money
sometimes flatten into carpets under which bigotry can be
brushed. It ought to take a lot more than the prejudices of
Naipaul and the glamour of the Nobel showbiz to blind us to what
remains valuable within the outlook and ideas of E.M. Forster.
Just as instinctively as Naipaul made his career around a refined
form of literary loathing, Forster made his around the countries
and people he loved and admired. Unlike Naipaul's, his
travelogues and fictions are located in the regions and religions
with which he felt some aesthetic kinship and intellectual
sympathy — Italy and Greece, Egypt and India, Islam and
Hinduism. In India he travelled for three months in 1912, lived
in Dewas for nearly a year in 1921, and made a short trip in
1945. It is perfectly true that he found sexual happiness over
his second tenure in India, but Naipaul must know he had found it
earlier too, as a Red Cross worker in Egypt during the First War.
How successfully did Forster analyse and understand these
cultures? Did his dramatisations get their nuances or do they
caricature and essentialise? These are not questions that should
be confused with a writer's bodily predilections and his natural
quest for happiness within a context ridiculously hostile to what
it considered sexually deviant. And to such questions there can
be no conclusive answers, only a body of opinions and some sort
of consensus arrived at over a reasonable stretch of time.
Naipaul's insensitive and intolerant opinion does not disfigure
the settled consensus that Forster was a subtle thinker who
caught the "clash of civilisations" at an early moment,
captivatingly fictionalising the strange and dark social
possibilities when imperial Christianity confronts Islam and
Hinduism. He was an oddball Englishman of immense learning and
hellishly independent opinions who always — as he said
admiringly of the gay Greek poet C.P. Cavafy — "stood at a
slight angle to the universe". He was outspokenly anti-
imperialist, anti-Fascist, anti-fundamentalist. He loved his
countryside more than his country. He was a sceptic liberal who,
in Two Cheers for Democracy, reviled Churchillian nationalism and
powerfully argued the social value of being tepidly rather than
ardently nationalist. Most importantly, the prose in which this
man's eccentric sanity is couched is capable of a musical
profundity to which self-absorbed people like Naipaul are
probably immune.
Apart from A Passage to India and The Hill of Devi, Forster wrote
a large body of essays on things Indian, some of which appear in
Abinger Harvest. He inspired one of his gay friends, J.R.
Ackerley, to work in India, which resulted in the wickedly comic
masterpiece Hindoo Holiday. Among his devotees was W.H. Auden
who, when Forster turned 80, said what he most admired about
Forster was the writer's steadfast refusal to become anybody's
holy cow.
The contrast between a Forsterian vision of the world-tolerant,
humane, sympathetic, androgynous, eclectic and genuinely
cosmopolitan — and a Naipaulean vision — excoriating,
condescending, snide, and mercilessly fault-finding — has
been given brilliant expression by the poet Nissim Ezekiel in his
essay "Naipaul's India and Mine". Naipaul, Ezekiel shows, is not
easy to please. He is not amused by Islam; urban India he
dislikes; rural India pleases him not at all; everywhere he looks
the lower classes proliferate and defecate. Worse still, Naipaul
believes only he notices them being so dreadfully themselves. The
problem, says Ezekiel, speaking for a great many Indians, might
lie less among those beheld than within the eye (and nose) of the
beholder.
Over the years, Naipaul seems to have got more used to the Hindu
rate of growth and its smell. He now admires the society's
resilience, specially when it forms itself into mobs which pull
down mosques in order to bury their past. Naipaul likes people to
selectively bury their own pasts. His writing shows nothing
better than how well this can be done. Amitav Ghosh, whose
sympathetic view of Islam in In an Antique Land is the very
reverse of Naipaul's in Among the Believers, is dispassionate
enough to point out that Naipaul's value lies in "finding words
to excavate hidden areas of experience". Yet it seems equally
true to say that Naipaul has repressed and buried as much as he
has excavated.
Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival contains a compelling description
of what migration means psychologically, specifically what it has
meant for him to forge home anew in Wiltshire. With the
superhuman effort this has entailed for Naipaul and characters
such as Mr. Biswas, most readers have devoutly sympathised. But
from the singular direction of the journeys he has made, one can
not help feeling that Naipaul's next desired stop is the
Christian heaven. I get the sense of a man who expects there will
be a throne right next to the one which seats St. Paul. A throne
which is being kept warm for St. Naipaul.
Rukun Advani is the author of Beethoven Among the Cows and runs
Permanent Black, a publishing house in New Delhi.
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
|
