Author: Khalid Hasan
Publication: The Friday Times
Date: Feb 27 - Mar 4, 2004
Could Naipul see Islam working out
a reconciliation with other faiths on the subcontinent? His reply was blunt,
"There can be no reconciliation"
Sir Vidyadhar S Naipaul, winner
of the Nobel Prize for Literature and husband to our own long-lost Nadira
Khanum Alvi, is at it again. In his "last interview in India", he told
an Indian journalist who asked about India's "fractured past, fissured
present" and future that "fractured past" was too polite a way to describe
India's "calamitous millennium". The millennium began, declaimed Naipaul,
with the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture
of the north. "This is such a big and bad event that people still have
to find polite, destiny-defying ways of speaking about it. In art books
and history books, people write of the Muslims 'arriving' in India, as
though the Muslims came on a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim
view of their conquest of India is a truer one. They speak of the triumph
of the faith, the destruction of idols and temples, the loot, the carting
away of the local people as slaves, so cheap and numerous that they were
being sold for a few rupees."
Warming to his preferred theme,
Naipaul said, "The architectural evidence - the absence of Hindu monuments
in the north - is convincing enough. This conquest was unlike any other
that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated
people never write their history. The victors write the history. The victors
were Muslims. For people on the other side it is a period of darkness.
Indian history is written about as a matter of rulers and kingdoms shifting
and changing. This is why it all seems petty and boring to read and hard
to remember. But there is a larger and more tragic and more illuminating
theme. That theme is the grinding down of Hindu India."
Naipaul said that in 1565, Vijayanagar
in the south was destroyed and its great capital city laid to waste. In
1592 the "terrible Akbar" (this must be the first time Akbar the Great
has been called Akbar the Terrible) ravaged Orissa in the east. The wealth
and creativity, the artisans and architects of the kingdoms of Vijayanagar
and Orissa were destroyed, their light put out. Those regions are still
among the poorest in India.
Asked about the Hindu resurgence
and militancy in India, Naipaul replied that India did not have a secular
character, and whether Hindu militancy is "dangerous or not, it is a necessary
corrective to history". As to whether an un-partitioned India would have
worked or not, Naipaul replied, "No. As soon as the poet Iqbal, the convert,
had made his speech calling for a separate state, that state more or less
became inevitable. And considering the Islamic movements of the last 30
years, nearly all the energy of an un-partitioned India would have fruitlessly
gone into holding itself together."
Asked why Pakistan so easily slips
into martial and dictatorial ways, while democracy is never threatened
in India, Naipaul, finding himself on his favourite wicket, answered that
West Pakistan was not particularly well-educated. It had almost no political
thinkers. It had had only about 90 years of British rule and institutions.
It was easy for those institutions to be brushed aside. Jinnah was in many
ways an attractive, secular man, but the snare of the Islamic movement
he unleashed was like the snare of the Islamic movement in Iran. It assumed
that out of a perfect Islam everything would flow: good institutions, good
laws and a model citizenry. There was no need to think further; everything
would come with the faith. It was also worth remembering that Islamic societies
are not democratic in the modern way. Islamic societies need the Quran,
the Law and a severe ruler."
Could he see Islam working out a
reconciliation with other faiths on the subcontinent? Naipaul's reply was
short and blunt, "There can be no reconciliation. Islam is a religion of
fixed laws. This goes contrary to everything in modern India. Also, the
convert's deepest impulse is the rejection of his origins." He also defended
India going nuclear, arguing that it is important for India to operate
at the limit of technology. "India must never again fall behind. I actually
think that the subcontinent is safer now," he added.
He said the Mughal buildings are
foreign buildings. "They are a carry-over from the architecture of Isfahan.
In India they speak of the desert. They cover enormous spaces and they
make me think of everything that was flattened to enable them to come up.
Humayun's tomb is, I suppose, the chastest and the best. The Taj is so
wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be
there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of
the people."
Naipaul can't go without kicking
someone highly revered in the face, so he called the saintly Vinoba Bhave
"half-witted, the mimic mahatma" and Jyoti Basu "the mimic Marxist", who
might be embalmed by his followers like Lenin and put on show in the Calcutta
Maidan.
When asked if he agreed that Christianity
and Islam had enriched India, Naipaul said "Christianity did not damage
India the way Islam had. When you talk of Islam's enriching of Indian culture,
you are thinking of things like the food and the music and the poetry."
He, however, conceded that Islam and Christianity had "altered the world
forever" giving it the social ideas of brotherhood, charity and the feeling
of man for man. He also felt that these two revealed religions had "done
their work" and had "little more to offer".
He called Mahatma Gandhi "uneducated
and never a thinker". Gandhi, he explained, was a historical figure who
came at a particular moment and turned all his drawbacks into religion.
He used religion to awaken the country in a way that none of the educated
leaders could have done. "He has absolutely no message today. People talk
too much about Gandhi and study him too little." He called Gandhi's first
book "so nonsensical it would curl the hair of even the most devoted admirer".
He said he knew of no Indians who actually read Gandhi. "They take from
him some vague idea of a great redeeming holiness and they are free to
ignore the practical side - Gandhi the hater of dirt, the hater of public
defecation. That last is still very much an Indian sport. In fact, the
Gandhian idea of piety and a very holy poverty is used now to excuse the
dirt of the cities, the shoddiness of the architecture. By some inversion,
Indians have used the very idea of Gandhi to turn dirt and backwardness
into much-loved deities." That sounds like Naipaul should sound and has
always sounded, his nose up in the air sniffing the clouds.
- This is a regular column by TFT's
Washington correspondent. He can be contacted at khasan2@cox.net
