Author: Farrukh Dhondy
Publication: Mid-Day
Date: February 22, 2002
V S Naipaul shares his thoughts
on happiness and Indian art
Vidya Naipaul has a considerable
though not vast collection of art. He asks his guests on occasion to share
aspects of the paintings with him. He wants to point certain things out
about a Japanese print he has bought, or about the line and craft of a
miniature he has acquired, framed and mounted in the house.
We are together at Neemrana, a country-house
fortress in Rajasthan, two hours' drive from Delhi, together with Indian
writers in English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese,
Malayalam and other languages.
We take a break from the sessions
and walk up the sloping rough slate and stone walkways to a terrace overlooking
the valley.
I have done interviews with VS before
and on this occasion I tell him I'll simply ask him if there are things
he would like to talk about.
There are two things he has been
thinking about, he says. He wants to talk about an extraordinary idea of
'happiness' and then about Indian art.
The idea of happiness is occasioned
by an observation made by a friend that the United Nations or some agency
thereof has formulated a quotient for happiness and has gone round the
world measuring the happiness of different people. This is, of course,
an absurd idea and may have, through what we used to call Chinese whispers,
become a parody of what it started out as.
Nevertheless, Vidya says, it started
him thinking, especially because the inventors of the quotient and the
reporters on the research had come to the conclusion that Bangladeshis
were the happiest people in the world.
This seems to me manifestly absurd.
Bangladesh is not a rich country. It was born very painfully. It's early
history makes a Jacobean tragedy seem like a feelgood Andrew Lloyd Webber.
It is subject to cyclones and floods. The only Bangladeshis I know well
are Sylhetis who have immigrated to Britain and seem inclined never to
return. It doesn't seem the sort of place that would push the mercury up
the thermometer of joyous delights.
If this was an essay about statistical
method I would research and query the definitions and criteria which
prompt such a grotesque conclusion. Naipaul says he doesn't know what criteria
were used but he has come to the conclusion that like Bangladesh, Pakistan
is a happy country.
Despite the problems, the cruelty
and the divisions of the society, not least the severe class divides and
the recent apparent necessity to take sides for or against fundamentalist
Islam, "Pakistanis are happy".
"In most places around the country,
they are happy that they have driven out the infidel. That in their towns
and villages, the traces of the infidel, the non-Muslim have been erased,
and the single thought makes them content. I have asked some Pakistanis
and they agree with me. It's true, they are happy."
And about Indian art?
"I have come to the conclusion that
Mughal art, the miniatures which we have looked upon as Indian art for
so long, are not Indian art at all in the sense that they never had anything
to do with the population of India."
The artists were commissioned by
the kings and the nobility, their patrons. Then the work was stored
away by these patrons and not seen or used by the population of India.
The common people had no familiarity
with this art and it had no function in their lives. There had previously
been artefacts and architecture which entered the life and daily ritual
of the people, but the miniature schools were for the vanity and amusement
of a very narrow elite.
These preserved pictures have now
gone in large quantity abroad, from aristocratic collectors to modern collectors
in Europe and America who want books written about them and classifications
done by museums so as to boost the monetary value of their Indian miniature
collections. They have become art commodities of a rare sort.
"The only real Indian art is that
of the modern artists today whose patrons are the galleries and the rich.
People buy their paintings to hang on the wall, they are seen in galleries
and exhibitions. The problem with these modern paintings is that it's too
late. The idea of paintings for walls ended with the great genius of Van
Gogh."
So what of the modern Indian painters
whom he acknowledges are in the popular sense 'real' Indian painters? Is
the art vanity or just in vain?
He repeats that they have come too
late. The movements of western art, medieval and Renaissance, which then
move on through the superb vision and technique of painters like Velasquez
and finally result in Van Gogh, have said it all. Picasso and Matisse are
attempting an absurd language in an age when all art is moving to the design
of everyday objects.
"This cigarette packet is designed.
This plastic bottle of water. It has a function but it's designed and has
a use. Its design is art put to use. The fabrics that we have in India,
this tablecloth and the textile print on it, these are the arts of our
century. Not paintings to hang on the walls. And you have connections with
the cinema. There's design there and it changes and develops. The costumes,
the set, the look of the film, that is part of our modern art."
So India traditionally has no art?
"Of course, it has art. The greatest
art was our architecture. The temples and the towns. We have no idea today
what a Hindu town would have looked like because it's all wiped out. Except
in Khatmandu. That's the one town that remains and one can see it, set
out in little squares where people can meet. There are ruins which demonstrate
the same pattern elsewhere but nothing is standing.
"If you go to Vijaynagar you see
the broad avenue or thoroughfare with the Nandi at one end and the temple
at the other. Today it's clogged with rubbish and the government itself
has put up ugly structures in the middle of the broad main road. All that
should be cleaned up so we can see it as it was."
And modern architecture?
"Indians have not proved themselves
good at it."
Vidya says he went to an architect's
house and it was built in a clumsy way so that one banged one's head on
protrusions and ill-planned low beams.
"Indian architecture and city-planning.
That's where the great public art of India's future will come from. I am
convinced of it."
