Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (17 page)

Responses to India tend towards two extremes. The first response, promoting lack of imagination to intrepidity, takes a heartily sentimental pleasure in the dirt and distress — this is the response, in different ways, of the hippy and of the colonist. The second response involves immediate recognition of one's alarm and neurotic withdrawal: initially, one sees India through the mist of one's utter rejection of it. In
An Area of Darkness,
published in 1964, V.S. Naipaul passed on the story of the Sikh who, returning to India after several years abroad, sat down among his suitcases on the Bombay docks and wept; he had forgotten what Indian poverty was like. 'It is an Indian story,' Naipaul went on,

in its arrangement of figure and properties, its melodrama, its pathos. It is Indian above all in its attitude to poverty as something which, thought about from time to time in the midst of other preoccupations, releases the sweetest of emotions . . . Poverty not as an urge to anger or improving action, but poverty as an inexhaustible source of tears . . . India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value ...

In India, the easiest and most necessary thing is to ignore the obvious.

But to begin with, as Naipaul said, 'the obvious was overwhelming', and
An Area of Darkness
is a record not so much of Naipaul's attempts to see beyond the obvious (he would do that anyway) but of his efforts not to be overwhelmed by it. In the best and most admirable sense, the book is a labour of dramatic intellectual strain. Suppressed hysteria never leaves the narrative for long, and panic makes faces from its margins; for all the brilliance and humour, the voice of that book is skittish, febrile, wayward ('I was longing for greater and greater decay, more rags and filth, more bones'). Compared to
An Area of Darkness,
the new memoir is sharply focused, analytical and remote. But it is also angrier and less forgiving, written with a resolute coldness; and in the end it is an intransigently bitter book.

Inevitably so, Naipaul would claim, for only out of 'an eroded human concern' can any understanding start to come.
India: A Wounded Civilisation
is the result of a third visit to the country, from August 1975 to October 1976, the time of Mrs Gandhi's Emergency, the time when Indians were first asked to confront the startling fact of their own Independence. With the dismantling of its inherited institutions — and with no foreign conqueror for the first time in a thousand years — India 'is left alone with the blankness of its decayed civilisation'. Naipaul's ancestors migrated from the Gangetic plain 100 years ago, and 100 years 'had been enough to wash me clean of many Indian religious attitudes: without those attitudes the distress of India was - and is — insupportable'. Now, however, those attitudes are under threat for every Indian. The 'futility and limitless pain' of India has not changed, but attitudes to it have. India has begun to see the obvious, and is being duly overwhelmed.

As in the earlier book, Naipaul identifies the caste system as the main form of insulation . . . The bathrooms of a Bombay hotel are ankle-deep in excrement; but the hotel employs four sweepers; the bathrooms are therefore spotless. The fingers of a food-server are grimy and rank; but the food-server is of the designated food-serving caste; nothing served by the fingers of his right hand could therefore be unclean. Caste is a necessary blinker: it also secures the people in their self-defining roles. A street sweeper uses his fingers alone to lift dust from the road into his cart; a woman cleans a giant causeway with a tiny rag, achieving in a day what a child could do with a single push on a broom; but this is their function — it is what they are born to be. Such absurdities were, until recently, a source of reassurance rather than concern; like poverty itself, they were to be 'relished as religious theatre', in Naipaul's worrying phrase. 'Wanted a Telugu Brahmin Vellanadu non-Kausiga Gotram bride below 22 years', specifies a small-ad. Naipaul tells the story of the foreign businessman who educated his untouchable servant and secured him a better job. Before long the man was a latrine-cleaner again. He had been ostracised by his own caste, and no one else would have him.

During the Emergency, an opposition pamphlet was circulated giving details of alarming tortures suffered by political prisoners. A man had had his moustache shaved off! People were forced to walk the streets with shoes on their heads! A university professor 'was pushed from side to side with smearing remarks'! These of course are caste pollutions, 'more permanently wounding, and a greater cause for hysteria, than any beating up' (and not surprisingly, when you reflect that an untouchable can be killed for having a moustache of the wrong shape). The opposition pamphlet, though, as Naipaul says, serenely confuses its aims: a plea for humanitarianism becomes a cry of reactionary caste outrage. With every step forward, India always turns in on its own past.

India gets everything wrong. India never learns: its mimicry cannot rise above travesty. Naipaul has a devastating chapter on the new and expensively equipped National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad in Gujarat. Here, important projects include a portable spraying machine with an innovatory -and very heavy — internal motor, enough to cripple any labourer who strapped it on; another team is working on a pair of bladed reaping shoes, requiring a kind of bucolic gambol from the hale and happy peasant. 'Do you know', someone said to Naipaul in Delhi, 'that the investment in bullock carts is equivalent to the total investment in the railways?' Naipaul was about to comment on this melancholy proposition when his interlocutor went on wistfully: 'Now. If we could improve the performance of the bullock cart by 10 per cent . . .' And, sure enough, high science is now seeking to improve the bullock cart. At some open-air laboratory in the south, in an attempt to analyse the animal's stresses and pressures, there is a bullock as thoroughly 'wired up as any astronaut'. At the same time, on any Indian road, you can see the peasant improving the performance of
his
bullock

in the immemorial way, by pushing a stick up its anus. It is an unregarded but necessary part of the idyll, one of the obscene sights of the Indian road: the hideous cruelty of pre-industrial life, cruelty constant and casual, and easily extended from beast to man.

In some Indian villages children are preferred to men for the few available jobs, because they are cheaper; children become a source of wealth; suicidal overpopulation is guaranteed. Needy villagers still sell their wives to the 'cages' (the brothels) of the major cities to repay small debts to employers. Bonded labour, slavery as punishment, campaigns of terror against landless untouchables, deliberate starvation: 'none of this was new,' says Naipaul, 'but suddenly in India it was news.' Accordingly, the big cities have meanwhile begun to feel themselves 'under siege'. Every day, it is said, 1,500 people arrive in Bombay to live. They gather in packed, cloacal settlements, where the huts are so crowded that families often sleep in shifts. Now the urban poor have been disinherited even of their alms: 'by becoming too numerous they have lost their place in the Hindu system and have no claim on anyone.' A politician has predicted that the cities would soon 'be barricaded against the poor and guarded by machine-guns'. And, in Delhi, the expulsion of the poor has already begun.

Naipaul sees in India now the complete and graphic failure of Mahatma Gandhi, and of the Gandhianism cheapened by the likes of Vinoba Bhave and Mr Desai. In seeking to awaken India with the example of his courage and asceticism, Gandhi turned India back on itself, on its own atavistic self-absorption. He awakened the old India.

With or without Mrs Gandhi, independent India . . . would have arrived at a state of emergency . . . However it is resolved, India will at the end be face to face with its own emptiness, the inadequacy of an old civilisation which is cherished because it is all men have but which no longer answers their needs.

It is a sombre valediction to a sombre book. Although always measured and elegant, there is nothing writerly in these pages; there is no relish. In
An Area of Darkness,
Naipaul could play the country off against his own perverse anxieties and misplaced expectations; he could capture the almost definitive poignancy of the Indian people, with their teeming, incomprehensible dreams and hurts; he could 'ignore the obvious'. He cannot any longer. The early memoir was humbling because of its sheer quality, because it seemed chasteningly good.
India: A Wounded Civilisation
attempts something less congenial: it is a long and angry stare at the obvious; it is humbling in a different way, because it seems chasteningly right.

New Statesman, 1977

'FRANKFURT'

Publishers always talk of the Frankfurt Book Fair — or, more simply, 'Frankfurt' - with mystical awe and longing. If anthropologists were ever to make a study of publishers (and perhaps the subject
is
worth a paper or two), then 'Frankfurt' would have to be accorded totemic status, connected with race history and the birth of the universal mind, when the first publishers swung down from the trees. In one of the old myths, it is said that the Gutenberg Bible, on completion, was taken straight to Frankfurt, where they immediately had a book fair about it. Eden, Byzantium, Elysium, Oz, Frankfurt: to hear publishers talk, you'd think that Frankfurt was a place where only the best and bravest publishers go when they die.

The Frankfurt fable has three main components. First, the Book Fair is made to seem an event of scarcely conceivable glamour. The week-long jamboree is evidently a round of sumptuous hedonism: ensconced in ten-star hotels, the publishers gorge themselves on expensive food and drink, and have the kind of sexual encounters with each other that used to be characterised in novels by phrases like, 'Towards morning, he took her again.' You hear stories of... well, of what, exactly? You hear stories that, once decoded, sound like the usual fallout from the annual office party; heavy drinking, tearful passes made at secretaries, and so on. But how could the outsider understand? In the magical air of 'Frankfurt', these things must seem very, very different.

Frankfurt is also, apparently, a clearing-house for ideas, for creativity, for the exchange of geopolitical truths. In the tea houses and coffee shops of this spangled garden city, the thinkers and seekers of the publishing world can really get together and thrash out such topics as the meaning of life and the destiny of the planet. Liberated from the usual chores of the office, the great men can let their minds dance free upon the spume of things; for a week Frankfurt becomes a kind of Mensaberg, and the whole city thrums with high IQs.

Third — and here the publisher will feign a weary, regretful air — Frankfurt is the arena of super-deals, of mega-business, of transactions so high-powered that entire currencies are but pawns in the publishers' vast dream. Then, too, there are betrayals, twists, scams, stings. All day the stalls groan with egregious gullings, unimaginable skankings. Million-pound contracts, zillion-dollar auctions - these are commonplace. Wall Street looks to Frankfurt in terror as denominations boom and bust. Seen as a triple vertex of high commerce, high culture and high living - clearly, in mid-October, the Frankfurt Book Fair is the place to be.

Listening between the lines, of course, the outsider had always suspected that the whole thing was a goons' rodeo. And so it proved. Driving in from the airport, I brought to mind the descriptions I had heard of the main exhibition hall where the Fair is staged — the biggest exhibition hall in the world, the largest building in the world, the most enormous edifice in the history of mankind. Well actually the whole of outer Frankfurt resembles an exhibition hall. Corporation office blocks, like upended matchboxes in layered glass and steel, form the only extrusions on the flat land. Nestle, Olivetti, Eurohaus, ICI, IBM. These outbuildings of capitalist HQ are no more interesting than the architects'

models they were based on; they look like lots for sale, The taxi pulls up at one of the international, interchangeable four-star doghouses. I have seen the future (you can't help reflecting), and it stinks.

I didn't get to see Frankfurt proper until the next day, thanks partly to the wanderlust of the cabbie who drove me to the Fair. Expressively bannered as the Frankfurter Buch-messe, the exhibition area resembles an airport in dire need of renovation, and Halle 5 (the scene of all the international action) a windy hangar where half-a-dozen Hindenbergs might have slept. It was Tuesday, the eve of the official opening. Inside, the publishers hastily assembled their stalls. These were low-echelon men, naturally (the bosses tending to fly out later in the week); dressed in berets and chunky sweaters, they looked van-sick and liverish after two days of Belgian roads and Belgian meals. But they were cheerful, and very expectant.

You can say this for the Book Fair: it reminds you, with great force, of the extremes of human variety. With 8o-odd countries represented, and God knows how many hundred thousand books on display or stowed in boxes or as yet only twinkling in publishers' eyes, there is no gainsaying the superabundance of Earthling enthusiasms. Even before the opening it was a world tour in miniature to stroll through the half-completed stalls.

The Cuban stand was a shambles, featuring countless unopened boxes and two swarthy figures slumped over a bottle of Havana Club. The Kenya stand consisted of a dapper young black, a framed photograph of the latest tyrant, and nothing else. Decor varied: the Portuguese section was all bare brown wood softened by sashes and curtains; the Unesco stall, with its piping of light blue bars, typically combined the feel of a bamboo hut with that of a Habitat kitchen. One of the main Italian stands was completely deserted. The Nigerian stand had yet to be built.

But such glimpses of human multiplicity seemed as nothing the following day, when the actual
books
adorned the shelves in all their vulgar and radiant diversity. Every year there is an informal competition for the Most Unlikely Title (I spoke to one book-packager who talked fondly of an old favourite,
Industrial Sealants and Adhesives).
My search for a contender took me first to the stands sponsored by the emergent nations. In the Zimbabwean section there was a wide selection of books by and about Robert Mugabe, the odd novel
(Under a Raging Sky,
etc.), and monographs on Shona customs from the Mambo Press. More parochial still was the stand of neighbouring Uganda:
The Crisis of Secondary School Education in Uganda, 1960—70,
Abudu Kayizzi's
Revision Primary Mathematics.
Of course, these men weren't selling but buying, and hoping for distribution rights from other countries, the Third World presence at Frankfurt often being no more than a tentacle of international relations.