By

Jayashree B.KDept of English

GFGC, Rajajinagar,Bangalore – 560010.

A Paper Presentation on

V.S.NAIPAUL’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS INDIA

V.S.NAIPAUL

An Area of DarknessA classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India.Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul’s strikingly original responses to India’s paralyzing caste system, its apparently serene acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. The result may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.

“Even now, though time has widened, though space has contracted and I have traveled lucidly over that area which was to me area of darkness, sometimes of darkness remains, in these attitudes, those ways of thinking and seeing, which are no longer mine”.

MIGRATION TO THE NEW WORLD

“Customs are to be maintained because they are felt to be accident.”

“One day she noticed a tumbler of what look like coconut milk she tasted, she drank to the end, and fell ill; and in distress made a confusion… she had drunk tumbler of Blanco fluid,”

The image of colonial and Gandhi in Naipaul’s view:

“(Gandhi) looked at India as no Indian was able to; his vision was direct and his directness was and is, revolutionary, he sees exactly what the visitors sees; he does not ignore the obvious…. The beggars and the shameless filth…. The atrocious sanitary habit…. He sees Indian callousness the Indian refusal to see..”

India: A Wounded CivilizationA penetrating survey of this tormented continent by one of the literary heavyweights of our age. In 1964 V.S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness, his semi-autobiographical account of a year in India. Two visits later, prompted by the Emergency of 1975, he came to write India: A Wounded Civilisation, in which he casts a more analytical eye over Indian attitudes. In this work, he recapitulates and further investigates the feelings that the vast, mysterious and agonised continent has previously aroused in him. What he sees and what he hears - evoked so superbly and vividly in this book - only reinforce in him his conviction that India, wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, has not yet found an ideology of regeneration.

“India for me a difficult country. It is not my and cannot be my home: and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it. I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far….

Every open space we saw was a latrine; and in such space we came suddenly upon a hellish vision.

LITERATURE

“He examines… Gandhi and R.K.Narayan as more or less representing the old morality and Vijaya Tendulkar and Anantha Murthy as reflecting the incipient new morality.”

“Anantha Murthy has portrayed a barbaric civilization, where the books, the laws are buttressed by magic… and the civilization they have inherited has long gone sour… crippled by rules they make up a society without a head.”

“The world’s most populous country which now has little to offer the world expect its Gandian concept of holy poverty.”

“The right way which all men must follow according to their natures. As its noblest it combines self-fulfillment and truth to the self with the ideas of action as duty, action as its own spiritual reward… it touches the high ideas of other civilization. But dharma can also be used to reconcile men to servitude and make them find in paralysing obedience and the highest spiritual good.

India: A Million Mutinies NowIn this book, V.S. Naipaul returns to the country which continues to intrigue and inspire him and about which he wrote "An Area of Darkness" in 1964, a semi-autobiographical account of a year spent in India. Now, twenty-five years later, he goes back to that country, returning to the places he visited years ago and talking to people of all types and at all levels of society.

“Travel writing is new to me, and I did not see how I could find a narrative for a book about India… I had kept no journal, made few connected notes. But money had been spent and a book had to be written… calling up events day after day found a narrative.”

“In the political of alignment and realignment there were no principles or programs. There were only enemies or allies: penguin politics. What was true of this state, Karnataka, was true of other states as well.”

“Homespun clothes, once the clothes of the poor, now no longer worn by the poor, worn only by the men to whom the poor had given power.”

“Periyar preached a crude kind of socialism.”

Periyar had touched in these people something deeper than logic and a regard for historical correctness: that also had to be taken into account..

In twenty seven years I had succeeded in making a kind of return journey, shedding my Indian nerves, abolishing the darkness that separated me from my ancestral past.”

V.S.NAIPAUL