Nobel laureate V S Naipaul was in
India to attend the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas. He talks to Urmi Goswami about the
Indian diaspora, about the need to open up to overseas influences and discusses
some of his controversial ideas about rewriting Indian history.
Excerpts:
<b>The Indian diaspora can be broadly categorised as those
in the developed world and those in the developing world. They seem to integrate
well in developed countries, but in the developing countries they seem to hold
themselves separate. What explains this?</b>
If you go to a developed
nation, in a way you are being parasitic on that country, its law, institutions,
its economy are already developed. You fit in rather easily if you are gifted
and talented.
The Indian middle class is quite well educated and they will
fit in into an advanced country. A hundred years ago, when the peasantry went
out to agricultural colonies, the situation was entirely different.
In a
developed country there is a high culture to aspire to and to fit into. In an
agricultural colony say in the Caribbean or Fiji, they were primitive
societies.
There would be a resistance to falling into primitive
societies, they do not encourage people to aspire. There is a difference. The
current diaspora is successful but we shouldn't hesitate to call it parasitic,
because he finds everything ready-made.
<b>Do the first lot of Indian
emigrants, people who were taken to the Caribbeans or to Fiji, have a love and
hate relationship with India?</b>
Families that went abroad 120 years
ago have an ambiguous attitude towards India.
It isn't love and hate, we
mustn't simplify it. Our own communities are not so hot, we are not so
developed. But India is full of shocks for us, yet we are attached to
India.
<b>Just after the government allowed dual citizenship for
certain people of Indian origin, some people have started demanding political
and voting rights. What do you think about that?</b>
We're too far
away from that, I think it is just a nice and sentimental move.
I haven't
thought a lot about it but I think we can't allow people who live abroad, have
homes and careers abroad, to vote in India. I think they should have other
facilities but this voting facility I think should not be there unless it is
accompanied by a long period of residence.
I think this idea of being ruled
by Indians who are alien in spirit is a fantasy.
<b>Would you say
that India looks to the world outside for a developmental boost? Does that
explain this engagement with the diaspora?</b>
It is inevitable
because the modern world, our universal civilisation, was not created in
India.
All its tools have been gained from abroad. All its ideas of
science, human associations, law and rights are things that were not generated
here. We knew only despots here.
I know that sometime ago people were
talking of the great socialist Indian republic, the village republic, that is a
whole lot of hooey. We knew nothing but despotism. That is why the very rich
Mughal empire could break up into nothing. Turn to dust at the merest touch of a
foreign power. There was no institution, there was no creative nation, no
university, no printing press, there was nothing but personal power. We have to
accept that, so we need what is abroad.
<b>There is an ongoing
effort to deny history, particularly the last 800 years of the past, or present
them in a negative light. Instead what is going on is a kind of leapfrogging to
a certain construct of the past, perhaps a mythical past whose contours are
unclear. How does such selectivity affect a nation?</b>
How do you
ignore history? But the nationalist movement, independence movement ignored it.
You read the Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru, it talks about the
mythical past and then it jumps the difficult period of the invasions and
conquests.
So you have Chinese pilgrims coming to Bihar, Nalanda and places
like that. Then somehow they don't tell you what happens, why these places are
in ruin.
They never tell you why Elephanta island is in ruins or why
Bhubaneswar was desecrated.
So history has to be studied, it is very
painful history. But it is not more painful than most countries have had. Take
the history of Britain after the Roman withdrawal, a terrible period till the
restoration of reasonable rule, the Scandinavian looting expeditions coming
every year for centuries.
It isn't India alone that has had a rough time,
that has to be understood. But the rough time has to be faced and it cannot be
glossed over.
There are tools for us to understand the rough time. We can
read a man like Ibn Battuta who will tell you what it was like to be there in
the midst of the fourteenth century, terrible times. An apologist of the
invaders would like to gloss that over. But it would be wrong to gloss that
over, that has to be understood.
The recovery of past? We have had from
western historians and archaeologists an immense attempt to discover things that
have long been destroyed or superseded. Look at the amount of work that is being
done in Italy, to recover as much as possible of the Etruscan past. So that
mythical past can be made concrete again.
We must not be afraid to let
down these archaeological shafts into the past. You see, I am less interested in
the Taj Mahal which is a vulgar, crude building, a display of power built on
blood and bones.
Everything exaggerated, everything overdone, which
suggests a complete slave population. I would like to find out what was there
before the Taj Mahal.
Some work is being done I haven't gone through it.
The idea that India was a desert before these structures were built is foolish.
The world is never a desert really. So the past can be recovered.
I have
trouble with the past I must say, I find its sensibility alien to me. I have
tried very hard to read Kalidas, the plays. I don't get on with it at all, it is
outside my kind of mind. I'm actually more at ease with the epics, the Ramayan
and the Mahabharat, and the stories from the Panchantantra.
But I would
like to see this past recovered and not dodged. And I wouldn't like the version
of history that tells you: “Ibn Batuta came to India at this time and made
interesting observations”.
I want them to tell me what those
observations were, but they don't want to.
That foolish man Nirad
Chaudhuri, who wrote one good book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, then
went into kind of absurd fantasy, he built a whole book around somebody who came
with the invaders, Al-Beruni, who said, “the Hindus are very violent and
aggressive people”.
Their land is being taken away from them, they
are being destroyed and enslaved and he says this. This foolish man Chaudhuri
builds a book around this statement; that is the kind of absurdity we have to
avoid.
The last of your India trilogy, India: A Million Mutinies, was the
outcome of your travels in India in the late 80s. Since then India has undergone
many changes, chief being economic decontrol.
<b>Earlier you wrote
about racketeering, weakness for foreign goods, indifference to squalor. Do you
see any changes there especially in the mindset?</b>
It will take
time but I think it is beginning to change. Remember these things about squalor
cannot be ordered from the top, there has to be a demand from below. People have
got to need sanitation before they get it. Economic development solves many of
these things at the end.
But I haven't travelled profoundly after '89, so
I wouldn't like to make any comments
<b>Recently Mr Advani described
you as the second Indian Nobel laureate for literature after Tagore. How do you
relate to being co-opted by the land of your forefathers? </b>
I like
it. I find it very moving.