ŷ������

Is India more than the sum of its parts, or less?

In preparing for my first, Dec 2023, trip to India I read Rushdie and Mistry, The White Tiger and VS Naipaul’s India trilogy of essays/travelogues he put together over the course of three long trips between 1962 and 1988.

Before reading Naipaul, I first read “Midnight’s Children�� about a year in advance. I wrote in my review of that novel “I felt there was no conclusion or thematic resolution. Maybe that is intentional. Maybe the only lesson is ‘India coming out of The Emergency was in a really uncertain and fraught place, as opposed to where people had hoped to be in 1947 independence.�� and “Is it intentional that the whole doesn't live up to the sum of its parts? If those are the essential themes, then maybe the ending has to be unsatisfying?��

So I was unsurprised to see in Naipaul’s first two India books [An Area of Darkness and A Wounded Civilization], a big emphasis on Indian disunity and lack of collective agency. While Naipaul discovers an array of individuals with diverse, fascinating and rich inner-lives, this inward focus is sometimes presented as a curse.

Naipaul has been accused of ‘Orientalism�� and its easy to see why: he literally describes India as, well, a “Wounded Civilization��. After the mathematical, literary, and other great achievements of the Rajput era (around 6th to 12th century) Naipaul sees millenium-long dark age. The wounding of India was its rule by the extractive and regressive Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire and East India Company.

Naipaul thinks that India was so easily conquered by these small bands of invaders for a few reasons. First, he points towards an Indian introspection, languor and quietism, borne of their spiritualist religions that can prevent collective action. This is Naipaul at his most orientalist. I don’t necessarily think that’s a fair accusation (if used in the pejorative) -- if you want to talk about cultural differences you have to be open to talking about strengths and weaknesses of different cultures. And, at the risk of being too 4X-game about it, it makes sense that if you put too much of your social resources into discovering new religious technologies (as important as these are to ultimate human flourishing!), you might fall behind in the military and commercial game. Beyond the focus on meditation and prayer, Naipaul sees this theme in India’s weirdly labor intensive approach to wasteful and symbolic tasks. Servants spending all day wiping a corner with a dirty rag, while around them people disrespect the commons with trash (saw both of these, including ubiquitous roadside trash and trash-burning on my trip).

Next he points out that there wasn’t really an “India�� that people perceived as potentially worth working together to protect before the 18th century. Before the concept of nationalism, the Islamic Umma was the most powerful collective idea in the region. Later the British Empire's (which Naipaul relates through the eyes of Times of London Sepoy Mutiny war correspondent Russel) ideas also provided more unity than India could summon to overcome.

A brief aside about the British Empire in India. While Naipaul has nothing but bad things to say about what he sees as terribly regressive and extractive Mughal Empire (little time is spared for the IMHO fantastic architectural achievements of the Taj Mahal etc.) he is more balanced about the British. That was my sense of the contemporary view here too. While the Red Fort was covered in nationalist posters emphasizing the brutality of the English (from execution strapped to cannon, to death by force-feeding, to the Andaman cellular jail) and the cravenness of His Majesties�� allies (from the Nizam of Hyderabad to the Raj of Jaipur), the museums I visited in these particular areas took the opposite stance, emphasizing their role in development and the World Wars as British allies.

Indian academics I talked to were also ambivalent -- the British were brutal sure, but they weren’t as bad as the Mughals or as bad as another colonial empire would have been, and many of India’s best functioning institutions today (e.g. the Post Office, the train network, English language instruction, constitutional government etc.) they partially credit to the occupiers. One funny anecdote: in the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad -- the museum of the Nazim’s prime minister -- the BEC’s conquests are described as leading to a ‘splendid mixing of the accidental [sic] and Oriental��.

Perhaps most ironically, it is the western ideas of Nationalism and Socialism that finally allowed India to have a vision of itself as a collective and allowed it to finally join the world stage. (Though the mixing of Indian legacy with western style nationalism also leads to plenty of stupidities -- e.g. this hilarious article I read in the Hindustan Times during my visit: ).

VS Naipaul delights in the delicious ironies that he discovers in India. The idea that it took western ideas to make a strong independent India is just the start. There is the marketing executive for cigarettes who claims it would be unethical to create unnecessary desires in a poor country; the movie writer who is sad to see his slum set torn down; the Brahmins who are too purity obsessed to do basic cleaning; the strident Marxists who hold back the Bengali poor; the deceased radical atheist leader whose grave becomes a pilgrimage site where famous lectures are chanted. The figure of Gandhi himself, who discovered himself as the essential new Indian guru as a lawyer in South Africa. And the homespun cotton Congress uniform meant to show poverty and humility and now signifying unresponsive power.

The third reason that Naipaul thought India was so vulnerable was its fractiousness. These are the “Million Mutinies�� that he refers to: Atheism vs piety; Sikh vs Hindu vs Muslim; Jain hand-wringing over their lack of bloodlust; dead-end bengal commies vs Bombay capitalists; Navayana Buddhism vs. dalit-ness; Adhyatmika (the realm of spirit) vs Vyavaharika (the domain of pragmatism); Naxalites vs liberals vs corruption and landlordism; dethroned princes trying to find a place in the new india; the overpopulation of Kashmir idyllic ruralness; Brahmins vs toilets; Caste traditionalists vs progressives; philanthropists vs. slums; feminists vs conservatives. More recently I could add Congress vs. BJP.

Having read several other books that end right around the Emergency (plus “The White Tiger��, which, though set in the 2000s, is one of the most ressentiment filled things I’ve ever read) maybe it’s unsurprising that I saw these tensions pulling in a thousand directions as a destructive force. But in “A Million Mutinies Now�� Naipaul takes a more optimistic tack. Rather than being petty squabbles over resources (mostly) he sees these intellectual tensions as symbolic of a country “waking up�� and starting to, mostly non-violently, develop the ideas that will propel them in the 21st century.

Coming home from a visit to China I was impressed by its scale, wealth and sense of itself. The giant capital projects. It was a country all pointed in the same direction and in 2016 it felt that direction was world leadership.

Leaving India in 2023 I have the impression of a much less unified place, but also a more intellectually fecund place. A place with an extremely high level of “social and intellectual biodiversity�� if you will �� more so than the USA even and certainly China. (One small counter example- I saw much more of Modi in newspapers and posters here in 2023 than I saw of Xi in China in 2016). This may have disadvantages, but it also makes me optimistic about its ability to adapt to an uncertain and dynamic future.

At the end of "A Million Mutinies Now", Naipaul claims that India is more that the sum of its parts. His idea that India’s disunity actually signifies a deeper strength is the final and most profound irony he identifies. I hope and want that to be the case. Modi’s populist vision of a Hindustan is certainly not to my taste -- even if I understand the desire of some for a leader to bring a little more cultural unity to this incredibly diverse place.

It’s more than a cliche to say there’s “strength in diversity�� -- as a liberal I think and hope that’s true. Here’s hoping that Naipaul is right and that India continues to be more than the sum of its parts.