INDIANS HAVE NEVER TALKED ABOUT INDIA IN THIS WAY BEFORE: VS NAIPAUL
Times of India, Dec. 5, 1993
Mr L.K. Sharma (LKS)'s remarks:...Naipaul's remarks about Hindu resurgence were
all the more shocking because they came in the aftermath of the demolition of
the Ayodhya mosque, when India was emotionally surcharged. The context can
change the message. Now after months have gone by, I met Naipaul to let him
eleborate on his comments:
LKS: If the present assertion by a section of Hindus is to be seen as a
reaction to repression by past rulers belonging to a different faith, why
did it take so long? Why now and not 25 years earlier?
VSN: Things take an immense amount of time. Things do not occur in a month.
<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>Essentially the awakening to history and getting to understand your place in
the world depends on the re of your society, and societies change over
generations. </span>From what I notice, everyone in India is feeling these stirrings.
This is what development over the past decades has led to. Development is not
simply something that you talk about. It does not occur in isolation. It
affects everything. When people begin to have more food and more security,
they begin to have a greater sense of themselves.
And you have to go back to recent history. When Iqbal began to do his
thinking in the 30's, he laid the foundation of some of the problems we have
today (by providing a theoretical underpinning to the idea of partition on the
basis of religion). Iqbal said that the Islamic religion is not a matter of
private conscience like some other religions. Islam required a society on
its own because of the nature of its beliefs. What is happening in India now is
a delayed response to Iqbal. Why not 10 years earlier? Because things were
wretched. Things have got better. People were not ready earlier. The better
things get, the more these feelings of self become accentuated...
LKS: Some may say that time is a great healer and if one goes on talking
about the historical burden and about a history that is not kind, one will
only be licking one's wounds. It will interrupt the process of reconciliation,
progress and modernisation and set the stage for perpetual conflict of a
somewhat tribal nature.
VSN: No, I don't see it like that. The absence of a sense of history and of
a feeling of responsibility for your people has led to the enslavement of the
country. History is not a matter of licking your wounds. It is matter of self
knowledge, self-appraisal.
Many groups in India now have a very rudimentary idea of their past. Many of
them believe in a golden age. That actually is the opposite of the historical
sense. But when there is a movement which starts from b like this, and is
so profound and is affecting millions of people - am I right? - You can't deal
with these deep emotions by abusing the people. This particular argument in
India - between secularists and their opponents - is becoming a rough shouting
match. There is a kind of village, hatred that is coming out. I can't get
involved in a thing like this.
LKS: Then what is the real battle? What is your vision of India or of Indian
society?
VSN: If you have spent decades, perhaps even a century moving economically,
educationally and politically - very important in a country like India, with
all its wounds - once it starts moving, there is a convulsion. You do not get
people behaving nicely. There is a movement forward now. It is wrong to
abuse it. It has immense creative capacity and it has to be understood by
every one, especially by the people trying to manipulate it.
LKS: Is there a link between violence, upheaval and creativity?
VSN: There can be no rules about these things. To me the creative side is that
in India they are talking about India. Indians have never talked about India
in this way before.
The actual creativity occurs when people apply their minds to the state of
India and do not speak mantras alone. Probably you are worried about something
else. May be you are worried that elements in Hindu movement are pushing
people backward intelelctually?
LKS: There are many worries. No social movement is promoted by a religious
impulse which is destructive and not constructive. Sitting in London, one can
recall Europe history. How can one say that the fate of this religious or
pseudo-religious impulse will be different?
VSN: It is part of the interest of what is happening now. One has to see what
happens. If you have a huge intellectually-aware section of population, I think
this can be managed. Various expressions of this religiousulse can be
contained.
LKS: Religion of the post-reformation period was a source of social strife
and division which led to a century of religious warfare and chaos. They
learnt the lesson that hope of peace and order lay in the establishment of
some form of mutual tolerance, a tradition inherent in the Indian tradition.
They discovered that even the spiritual unity of Christendom could not be
restored by war and diplomacy. Thus evolved the concept of secularisation of
the state.
The rise of secularist tolerance brought religious strife under control.
Europe went on to develop a new literary culture, new scientific knowledge
and a new creed reflected in the works of Pope and Voltaire. Religious strife
inspired the men of the 18th century with ideals of humanity and a new social
order. India was lucky. Why should India, at the end of the 20th century, have
to go through that earlier cycle?
VSN: These historical comparisons have very little meaning. What is happening
in India is happening in the 20th century. The century is all around and is
leaking through to India at hundreds of points.
LKS: What about the danger to Hinduism itself? Many fear it is being distorted
- a task that has been made easy by the long neglect of classical learning
in India.
VSN: Your question is a fundamentalist question, in fact, I hope that Hinduism
is a living thing, a living culture. Such things constantly change. The neglect
of classical learning that you talk about is part of the degeneracy of recent
centuries. Debate about Hinduism now is necessary. It has to be gone through.
It is very good that it is occurring. These things have to be thought out and
fought out.
LKS: Hinduism can perhaps look after itself but what about the practicalities
of running a multi-religious nation? A strife-ridden polity has retarded the
constant process of the construction of Indian society. It may make the
nation more vulnerable to external and internal pressures. Do you have no
fears on that count?
VSN: A big country like India has to deal with the big issue. You can't deal
only with the village politics. You have to rise to these challenges - and
I feel the people will. Something will come out of this debate. Not tomorrow,
not in the next elections, but some form will evolve.
LKS: Those engaged in religious mobilisation seem to distrust a section
belonging to the same civilisation, same nation, sharing common languages.
But they are not talking of reform of Hinduism or of outdated religious
rituals or social customs. Not even of proper maintenance of undisputed places
of religious importance. Are they proposing new centers of learning or classi-
cal studies? Is there a movement for the cleansing of public life? They are
not debating western social influences or the new obsession with material
success. One may ask religious impulse for what? For invigorating culture
and civilisation or for narrow political ends and immoral violence?
VSN: I feel you are pinning in a Gandhian way for the simple old days of
poverty. But once the simple old days of poverty have gone, they have gone.
People will change. It is an aspect of a living culture that people should
change. That is why India is so interesting, so full of possibilities.
People are being forced to change. To you it may appear to be the problem, I
see it in another way.
I see the upheaval. I see even your feeling of despair as creative. You
despair, but what am I to do? There is this apparent mess in the world. But
you know there always has been. Consider the great turmoil in a country like
Britain over two centuries as a result of the industrial revolution. Major
countries have to regenerate themselves constantly.And India has been luckier than most in last 100 years. It has had a
period of comparative order. Would you have liked to be a Russian or a
German, with the histories they have had? Think even of France. Let us begin
at 1870 with the Prussian war and the mess of the Paris commune. Go on to
1914, the war, the depression, the second war, the German occupation and then
Indo-China and Algeria. Most of the world has been convulsed in the past
century. Only some small countries got away. India so far has had an easy
ride. Much easier than China for example.
LKS: Even if it is an awakening, I see no wise and charismatic leader who can
channelise this 'awakening' to reassert the genuine Indian tradition, carrying
the Indian society with him and sensitising it to that which is noble in our
civilisation.
VSN: I see you are not only pining for the simple old days but you also have
a feeling that some great leader should emerge and sort all this out, take
the burden from your shoulder, and put everything right. But no. India can't
have that kind of a leader. When you have this large educated body of people,
you can't have those charismatic leaders that you are talking about. Perhaps
this is the blessing of the situation. You do not have a great charismatic
leader who might do an awful lot of damage. We do not want that kind of a
leader at this stage. Peasant culture needs leaders. Tribal cultures need
leaders.
LKS: Does not communal hatred and violence appear to be tribal? What about the
hatred among the normal people, the new kind of discourse in the drawing rooms?
It is so far removed from the robust commonsense of the villager who says, you
follow your religion, I will follow mine.
VSN: You have a real problem now in India. Very few Hindus know what Islam is.
Very few Hindus have studied it or given it any thought. And you cannot appeal
to Muslim intellectuals. Islam is a religion of reveion. The Prophets's
revelations are final. The laws have all been issued.
Other societies adapt as the need arises, as traditions change, as the
world changes. You adopt new attitudes to crime and deviance. This constant
reassesment is impossible in Islam. All you can do is to reinterpret the
Prophet's decrees. This is one reason why on the Muslim side reforms are not
talked about much. If someone says we have to rethink, the believer would say,
how dare you. You can be a reformist in the Hindu tradition and you will not be
considered a heretic. But any Muslim who talks about reforms in a fundamental
way will commit heresy. It was so in Christianity at the time of Galileo. It
is an immense intellectual problem for the educated Muslims of India. I would
like to hear more from them...
This matter of Hindu-Muslim co-existence has to be talked about. It is not
enough to talk about a tradition of tolerance. For Hindus, religion is a
matter of conscience. For Muslims, it is not. It is a matter of laws that have
been laid down. There can be no debate, no compromise. I was mentioning the
Shia emotion that buttressed social change in Iran? Do the Muslims in India
talk about reforms?
LKS: There is some movement in this direction. Just as there is a debate among
Hindus, there is one within the Muslim community also. Many young educated
Muslims want to resist orthodoxy. But I want to return to an earlier question.
What is your vision of the India of the future?
VSN: I would like Indian cities to be rebuilt. I do not know to what extent the
riots in Bombay were political or communal or to what extent they were also
Nihilist expressions of self-disgust at the conditions in which people are
living. As my Jain stockbroker guide to the slums of Dharavi in Bombay told
me: "They say, the people in this little part are fundamentalists, but if you
were livhere, don't you think you could be made a fundamentalist by just
about everything?" People are living on their nerves all the time. If people
liked where they lived, they would not like to burn it down.
I heard that in India architects have to build badly because it is a poor
country. You see how people are misusing their minds and the Gandhian idea of
poverty to lock the country in a prison house? You are a poor country, you
build badly, you therefore create pressure cookers which constantly explode.
LKS: Let me ask you about Hinduism, about your own beliefs. Some of your
readers interpret your enthusiasm for a Hindu awakening as a typical response
of an expatriate Hindu who is sinking under the load of insecurity in a sea
of lost identities and looking for a lifeboat in India.
VSN: I do not know whether the expatriate definition is valid. I am 100 years
away from India. I am not an expatriate in that way. I am an overseas Indian
and because of that, I do not have a sectarian view. I do not have a caste
view. I do not have a regional view. Because after 100 years, you do not
possess these things any longer. People like me have a more universal view,
as Gandhi discovered among the Indians of South Africa 100 years ago. That
is the view I have.
It is a distant view that sees a totality. I say Hinduism is a culture. And
that is how I would define my kind of Hinduism. I regard it as a part of my
cultural identity. I don't regard myself as a believer. I was born without
belief. Hinduism gives me a past. I think people should understand that to
discover the past should not be a wish to recreate the past. Many people
will thnk it means that, but it does not mean that.
The discovery of the sense of history means understanding where we have come
from, and also being able to put the gap of years and centuries between that
and what you are. is what historical sense means. The art scholars of the
European renaissance tell us that the renaissance took root in Europe when men
understood that the past was the past. The past was not simply living on in a
decadent world. That the past was therefore something to be understood and
analysed, and elements could be taken from it to create something new. The
discovery of history should make people understand that any culture is worth-
while only if it is constantly remaking itself, invigorating itself, becoming
new. Restating the past is the way of death.
LKS: What is your concept of Hinduism? Is it a religion? Is it a way of life?
VSN: It is a culture. There is always some kind of Hinduism. Everyone possesses
it in his own way. You will have to consider me also some kind of Hindu, though
I don't do the temple stuff...
Because it is part of a culture, the state of Hinduism depends on the
condition of the people. If they are educated and secure, it is humane and it
looks after itself. I suppose we are Hindus because we have a certain attitude.
One thing that is deep in us and one that we should really get rid of is the
feeling of negation. It is the consolation of the defeated man. We have lived
with defeat so long.
It is hard to be a man, you know, to be responsible for one's destiny. It
is not only pleasure and raising a flag and singing an anthem. I met a
scientist in Bangalore who said Hindus, because of the past, are like bees in
a garden content to go happily from flower to flower without caring who is the
mali. But now we are all the malis.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Times of India, Dec. 5, 1993
Mr L.K. Sharma (LKS)'s remarks:...Naipaul's remarks about Hindu resurgence were
all the more shocking because they came in the aftermath of the demolition of
the Ayodhya mosque, when India was emotionally surcharged. The context can
change the message. Now after months have gone by, I met Naipaul to let him
eleborate on his comments:
LKS: If the present assertion by a section of Hindus is to be seen as a
reaction to repression by past rulers belonging to a different faith, why
did it take so long? Why now and not 25 years earlier?
VSN: Things take an immense amount of time. Things do not occur in a month.
<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>Essentially the awakening to history and getting to understand your place in
the world depends on the re of your society, and societies change over
generations. </span>From what I notice, everyone in India is feeling these stirrings.
This is what development over the past decades has led to. Development is not
simply something that you talk about. It does not occur in isolation. It
affects everything. When people begin to have more food and more security,
they begin to have a greater sense of themselves.
And you have to go back to recent history. When Iqbal began to do his
thinking in the 30's, he laid the foundation of some of the problems we have
today (by providing a theoretical underpinning to the idea of partition on the
basis of religion). Iqbal said that the Islamic religion is not a matter of
private conscience like some other religions. Islam required a society on
its own because of the nature of its beliefs. What is happening in India now is
a delayed response to Iqbal. Why not 10 years earlier? Because things were
wretched. Things have got better. People were not ready earlier. The better
things get, the more these feelings of self become accentuated...
LKS: Some may say that time is a great healer and if one goes on talking
about the historical burden and about a history that is not kind, one will
only be licking one's wounds. It will interrupt the process of reconciliation,
progress and modernisation and set the stage for perpetual conflict of a
somewhat tribal nature.
VSN: No, I don't see it like that. The absence of a sense of history and of
a feeling of responsibility for your people has led to the enslavement of the
country. History is not a matter of licking your wounds. It is matter of self
knowledge, self-appraisal.
Many groups in India now have a very rudimentary idea of their past. Many of
them believe in a golden age. That actually is the opposite of the historical
sense. But when there is a movement which starts from b like this, and is
so profound and is affecting millions of people - am I right? - You can't deal
with these deep emotions by abusing the people. This particular argument in
India - between secularists and their opponents - is becoming a rough shouting
match. There is a kind of village, hatred that is coming out. I can't get
involved in a thing like this.
LKS: Then what is the real battle? What is your vision of India or of Indian
society?
VSN: If you have spent decades, perhaps even a century moving economically,
educationally and politically - very important in a country like India, with
all its wounds - once it starts moving, there is a convulsion. You do not get
people behaving nicely. There is a movement forward now. It is wrong to
abuse it. It has immense creative capacity and it has to be understood by
every one, especially by the people trying to manipulate it.
LKS: Is there a link between violence, upheaval and creativity?
VSN: There can be no rules about these things. To me the creative side is that
in India they are talking about India. Indians have never talked about India
in this way before.
The actual creativity occurs when people apply their minds to the state of
India and do not speak mantras alone. Probably you are worried about something
else. May be you are worried that elements in Hindu movement are pushing
people backward intelelctually?
LKS: There are many worries. No social movement is promoted by a religious
impulse which is destructive and not constructive. Sitting in London, one can
recall Europe history. How can one say that the fate of this religious or
pseudo-religious impulse will be different?
VSN: It is part of the interest of what is happening now. One has to see what
happens. If you have a huge intellectually-aware section of population, I think
this can be managed. Various expressions of this religiousulse can be
contained.
LKS: Religion of the post-reformation period was a source of social strife
and division which led to a century of religious warfare and chaos. They
learnt the lesson that hope of peace and order lay in the establishment of
some form of mutual tolerance, a tradition inherent in the Indian tradition.
They discovered that even the spiritual unity of Christendom could not be
restored by war and diplomacy. Thus evolved the concept of secularisation of
the state.
The rise of secularist tolerance brought religious strife under control.
Europe went on to develop a new literary culture, new scientific knowledge
and a new creed reflected in the works of Pope and Voltaire. Religious strife
inspired the men of the 18th century with ideals of humanity and a new social
order. India was lucky. Why should India, at the end of the 20th century, have
to go through that earlier cycle?
VSN: These historical comparisons have very little meaning. What is happening
in India is happening in the 20th century. The century is all around and is
leaking through to India at hundreds of points.
LKS: What about the danger to Hinduism itself? Many fear it is being distorted
- a task that has been made easy by the long neglect of classical learning
in India.
VSN: Your question is a fundamentalist question, in fact, I hope that Hinduism
is a living thing, a living culture. Such things constantly change. The neglect
of classical learning that you talk about is part of the degeneracy of recent
centuries. Debate about Hinduism now is necessary. It has to be gone through.
It is very good that it is occurring. These things have to be thought out and
fought out.
LKS: Hinduism can perhaps look after itself but what about the practicalities
of running a multi-religious nation? A strife-ridden polity has retarded the
constant process of the construction of Indian society. It may make the
nation more vulnerable to external and internal pressures. Do you have no
fears on that count?
VSN: A big country like India has to deal with the big issue. You can't deal
only with the village politics. You have to rise to these challenges - and
I feel the people will. Something will come out of this debate. Not tomorrow,
not in the next elections, but some form will evolve.
LKS: Those engaged in religious mobilisation seem to distrust a section
belonging to the same civilisation, same nation, sharing common languages.
But they are not talking of reform of Hinduism or of outdated religious
rituals or social customs. Not even of proper maintenance of undisputed places
of religious importance. Are they proposing new centers of learning or classi-
cal studies? Is there a movement for the cleansing of public life? They are
not debating western social influences or the new obsession with material
success. One may ask religious impulse for what? For invigorating culture
and civilisation or for narrow political ends and immoral violence?
VSN: I feel you are pinning in a Gandhian way for the simple old days of
poverty. But once the simple old days of poverty have gone, they have gone.
People will change. It is an aspect of a living culture that people should
change. That is why India is so interesting, so full of possibilities.
People are being forced to change. To you it may appear to be the problem, I
see it in another way.
I see the upheaval. I see even your feeling of despair as creative. You
despair, but what am I to do? There is this apparent mess in the world. But
you know there always has been. Consider the great turmoil in a country like
Britain over two centuries as a result of the industrial revolution. Major
countries have to regenerate themselves constantly.And India has been luckier than most in last 100 years. It has had a
period of comparative order. Would you have liked to be a Russian or a
German, with the histories they have had? Think even of France. Let us begin
at 1870 with the Prussian war and the mess of the Paris commune. Go on to
1914, the war, the depression, the second war, the German occupation and then
Indo-China and Algeria. Most of the world has been convulsed in the past
century. Only some small countries got away. India so far has had an easy
ride. Much easier than China for example.
LKS: Even if it is an awakening, I see no wise and charismatic leader who can
channelise this 'awakening' to reassert the genuine Indian tradition, carrying
the Indian society with him and sensitising it to that which is noble in our
civilisation.
VSN: I see you are not only pining for the simple old days but you also have
a feeling that some great leader should emerge and sort all this out, take
the burden from your shoulder, and put everything right. But no. India can't
have that kind of a leader. When you have this large educated body of people,
you can't have those charismatic leaders that you are talking about. Perhaps
this is the blessing of the situation. You do not have a great charismatic
leader who might do an awful lot of damage. We do not want that kind of a
leader at this stage. Peasant culture needs leaders. Tribal cultures need
leaders.
LKS: Does not communal hatred and violence appear to be tribal? What about the
hatred among the normal people, the new kind of discourse in the drawing rooms?
It is so far removed from the robust commonsense of the villager who says, you
follow your religion, I will follow mine.
VSN: You have a real problem now in India. Very few Hindus know what Islam is.
Very few Hindus have studied it or given it any thought. And you cannot appeal
to Muslim intellectuals. Islam is a religion of reveion. The Prophets's
revelations are final. The laws have all been issued.
Other societies adapt as the need arises, as traditions change, as the
world changes. You adopt new attitudes to crime and deviance. This constant
reassesment is impossible in Islam. All you can do is to reinterpret the
Prophet's decrees. This is one reason why on the Muslim side reforms are not
talked about much. If someone says we have to rethink, the believer would say,
how dare you. You can be a reformist in the Hindu tradition and you will not be
considered a heretic. But any Muslim who talks about reforms in a fundamental
way will commit heresy. It was so in Christianity at the time of Galileo. It
is an immense intellectual problem for the educated Muslims of India. I would
like to hear more from them...
This matter of Hindu-Muslim co-existence has to be talked about. It is not
enough to talk about a tradition of tolerance. For Hindus, religion is a
matter of conscience. For Muslims, it is not. It is a matter of laws that have
been laid down. There can be no debate, no compromise. I was mentioning the
Shia emotion that buttressed social change in Iran? Do the Muslims in India
talk about reforms?
LKS: There is some movement in this direction. Just as there is a debate among
Hindus, there is one within the Muslim community also. Many young educated
Muslims want to resist orthodoxy. But I want to return to an earlier question.
What is your vision of the India of the future?
VSN: I would like Indian cities to be rebuilt. I do not know to what extent the
riots in Bombay were political or communal or to what extent they were also
Nihilist expressions of self-disgust at the conditions in which people are
living. As my Jain stockbroker guide to the slums of Dharavi in Bombay told
me: "They say, the people in this little part are fundamentalists, but if you
were livhere, don't you think you could be made a fundamentalist by just
about everything?" People are living on their nerves all the time. If people
liked where they lived, they would not like to burn it down.
I heard that in India architects have to build badly because it is a poor
country. You see how people are misusing their minds and the Gandhian idea of
poverty to lock the country in a prison house? You are a poor country, you
build badly, you therefore create pressure cookers which constantly explode.
LKS: Let me ask you about Hinduism, about your own beliefs. Some of your
readers interpret your enthusiasm for a Hindu awakening as a typical response
of an expatriate Hindu who is sinking under the load of insecurity in a sea
of lost identities and looking for a lifeboat in India.
VSN: I do not know whether the expatriate definition is valid. I am 100 years
away from India. I am not an expatriate in that way. I am an overseas Indian
and because of that, I do not have a sectarian view. I do not have a caste
view. I do not have a regional view. Because after 100 years, you do not
possess these things any longer. People like me have a more universal view,
as Gandhi discovered among the Indians of South Africa 100 years ago. That
is the view I have.
It is a distant view that sees a totality. I say Hinduism is a culture. And
that is how I would define my kind of Hinduism. I regard it as a part of my
cultural identity. I don't regard myself as a believer. I was born without
belief. Hinduism gives me a past. I think people should understand that to
discover the past should not be a wish to recreate the past. Many people
will thnk it means that, but it does not mean that.
The discovery of the sense of history means understanding where we have come
from, and also being able to put the gap of years and centuries between that
and what you are. is what historical sense means. The art scholars of the
European renaissance tell us that the renaissance took root in Europe when men
understood that the past was the past. The past was not simply living on in a
decadent world. That the past was therefore something to be understood and
analysed, and elements could be taken from it to create something new. The
discovery of history should make people understand that any culture is worth-
while only if it is constantly remaking itself, invigorating itself, becoming
new. Restating the past is the way of death.
LKS: What is your concept of Hinduism? Is it a religion? Is it a way of life?
VSN: It is a culture. There is always some kind of Hinduism. Everyone possesses
it in his own way. You will have to consider me also some kind of Hindu, though
I don't do the temple stuff...
Because it is part of a culture, the state of Hinduism depends on the
condition of the people. If they are educated and secure, it is humane and it
looks after itself. I suppose we are Hindus because we have a certain attitude.
One thing that is deep in us and one that we should really get rid of is the
feeling of negation. It is the consolation of the defeated man. We have lived
with defeat so long.
It is hard to be a man, you know, to be responsible for one's destiny. It
is not only pleasure and raising a flag and singing an anthem. I met a
scientist in Bangalore who said Hindus, because of the past, are like bees in
a garden content to go happily from flower to flower without caring who is the
mali. But now we are all the malis.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]