VS NAIPAUL –views on India 1990  EXTRACTS from Naipaul’s India- a Million Mutinies Now (Hienemann/Minerva 1990) [Chap 1- Bombay Theatre, pg6-9] I had gone as the descendant of 19th century indentured Indian emigrants. They had been recruited from the 18860s on, mainly from the eastern Gangetic plain, and then sent out from depots in Calcutta to work on 5-year indentures on plantations in various parts of the British empire… to Fiji in the Pacific; Mauritius in the Indian Ocean; South Africa; and to the West Indies, principally the Guianas (British and Dutch), and Trinidad. It was to Trinidad that my ancestors went, starting sometime from the 1880s, as I work it out. These overseas Indian groups were mixed – Hindus and Muslims, and people of mixed castes and without a political representation. They were isolated by language and culture from the people the people they found themselves among; they were isolated, too, from India itself (many weeks away by steamboat from Trinidad). In these special circumstances, they developed something they would never have known in India: a sense of belonging to an Indian community, overriding religion and caste. I was born in 1932 and grew up with two ideas about India. The first idea – not one I wanted to examine closely – was about the kind of country from which my ancestors had come. We were an agricultural people. Most of us in Trinidad were still working on the colonial sugar estates, and most of us were poor; many lived in thatched, mud-walled huts. Migration to the New World had made us ambitious but in colonial Trinidad, during the Depression, there were few opportunities to rise. With this poverty around us and with it a sense of the world as a kind of prison, the India of mu ancestors became a most fearful place. This India was private and personal, and this anxiety about where we had come from was kike a neurosis. The second India that balanced the first. This second India was the India of the independence movement, the India of great names. It was also the India of the great civilisation and the classical past. It was this India by which we felt supported. It was an aspect of our identity which in multi-racial Trinidad, had become more like a racial identity. It was this identity that I took to India on my first visit in 1962. And when I got there I found it had no meaning. The idea of an Indian community made sense only when the community was small, a minority and isolated. In the torrent of India, with its hundreds of millions, with the threat of chaos, that continental idea was no comfort at all. People found stability in smaller groupings – of region, clan, caste, family. There were groupings in 1962 I could hardly understand. The poverty of the Indian streets and the countryside was an affront and threat. Two generations separated me from that kind of poverty; but I felt closer to it than most of the Indians I met. My idea of an Indian identity, with the nerves continually exposed, would have made it hard for me to do worthwhile work in India. But the Indians, remaining themselves, could work in conditions which to others might seem hopeless – as I saw during many weeks in the countryside when I stayed with young Indian Administrative Service officers. Many thousands had worked like that over the 40 years since independence and the results of that effort were now noticeable. The increased wealth showed; the new confidence. [p10-70 Selected expressions] [p10] Papu’s office was in the stock market area of Bombay. The lobby of the tall building had a special Indian quality: in the name of cleaning, the place had been rubbed down with a lightly grimed rag and given a touch of black grease to the folding metal gates of the elevator. The upper floor, where we got off, still hinted at that grimed rag. Mouthfuls of gritty pan juice had been spat out at corners or broadside in arcs of red. [p15] The rail coaches were broad and basic; with undisguised poles and brackets; the flats were mildewed and grimed. [p16] the weathered concrete frame of a projected building [p17] Mr Patil was frowning – the frown could be read as an expression of his authority. [p24] Two cats entered the sitting room and were walking about inquiringly. [p58 on Dharavi slum] We set out on foot… and then suddenly came the margin of slum, so sudden, so overwhelming like a film set – with people acting out their roles as slum dwellers; shacks and shelters, a general impression of blackness and greyness; mud, narrow ragged lanes; then a side view of the main road dug up with adults ands children defecating on the edge of the black lake, swamp and sewage, with a hellish oily iridescence. The stench was unbearable... Petrol and kerosene fumes added to the stench. Dharavi was also an industrial area of sorts, with many unauthorised businesses, leather and chemical works. Many bare-armed people were at work in the stench; gathering or unpacking cloth and cardboard waste – it was large scale rag-picking. It had been hard enough driving past the area. It was harder to imagine what it was like living there. Yet people lived with the stench and had careers there. Even lawyers lived there, Was the smell of excrement only from the iridescent lake? NO; it went right through Dharavi [p60 – the Shiv Sena official’s residence] Mr Ghate was a high Sena official who lived at the top of the chawl block. Without Charu, I don’t think I would have made it even to the inside staircase – I was so demoralised, so choked, driven to a stomach-heave by the smell at the entrance, with wet mangled garbage and scavenging cats and then in the dark passage catching the thick, warm smell of blocked drains… [p68] With the affirmative Indian side-to-side swing of the head, he added … ============== [CHAPTER 5 After the Battle, p280+ Selected] On British architecture: In India in 1962, I took much of the British architecture for granted. I saw Lutyens’ great achievement in New Delhi in  grudging way, finding the scale too grand and evidence of vainglory. The lesser architecture in the bungalows and houses built for officials in the districts were pleasant to stay in. With their porticoes and veranda’s, thick walls, high ceilings and sometimes additional upper windows or openings, they were well suited to the climate. But they seemed too grand for the poverty of the Indian countryside. But with the years, new ways of feeling and looking can come. In free India, for 40 years, Indians have built like people without a tradition; for the most part, they have surface imitations of the international style. Unlike the British, Indians have not built for the climate. They have been obsessed with imitating the modern – the dull, four-square towers of Bombay, packed too close together. The concrete nonentity of the Lucknow, Madras and the residential colonies of New Delhi can make hard tropical lives harder to bear. [- evidence of the failure to grasp modernity.] Far from extending people’s ideas of beauty and grandeur, much of the architecture of free India has become part of the ugliness and physical oppression of India. Bad architecture in a tropical city is more than anaesthetic matter. It spoils people’s day-today lives; frays their nerves and generates rage. If one then considers the range of British public in India, the time span, the varied styles – the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, the Gateway of India in Bombay; the legislative buildings in Lucknow and Delhi – it becomes obvious that British architecture is the finest secular example in the sub-continent. Calcutta is the British-built city of India. It was steadily embellished and was the caital until 1930. The British worked with immense confidence, ot adapting the style of the Indian rulers but creating Indian adaptations of the European classical style as emblems of the conquering civilisation. To me at the end of 1962, Calcutta gave an immediate feel of the metropolis, with all the visual excitement, suggestions of adventure and heightened human experience. [This part had appeared in the Sunday Telegraph Aug1990 under the heading Death of a City] But 26 years later [1988 when this essay was written], the old avenues, open spaces, public buildings, could seen in a ghostly way at night after the crowds had retreated to their nooks and crannies, to rest from the torment and vacuity of the Calcutta day – with its broken roads and footpaths; the brown petrol and kerosene haze adding an extra sting to the fierce sunlight, mixing with the street dust and coating the skin with grit and grime; the day-long screech of the horns of the world’s shabbiest buses and cars. So little had been added since independence. Calcutta had been living off its entrails. Certain buildings seemed to have received no touch of paint since 1962. On some walls and pillars, old posters and glue had formed a tattered kind of papier-mâché crust. You felt that if you tried to scrape off the crust, you might pull away the paster or stucco. The famous colonial clubs – Bengal Club, Calcutta Club – were in decay, and Indians had moved into rooms once closed to them. Calcutta in some places had the feel of an abandoned Belgian settlement in the Congo in the 1960s. There was no room by day on the streets or in the large sunburnt parks. There was no place for wlaking. You could drive very slowly along a dug-up road to the Tollygunge Club and there walk to the golf club. But the drive was exhausting and the drive back undid the little good you might have done yourself. People said that until 15 years ago, the streets of central Calcutta were washed every day. The British had built Calcutta and given it their mark. When they ceased to rule, the city began to die. [CHAPTER 7 Woman’s Era p388+ Selected] Indian Mutiny 1957: Russell’s account of the LUCKNOW operations & loot William Howard Russell, special correspondent of the (London) Times, had made his name in the Crimean War. Nine months after his return to England from Crimea, he was sent to report on the Indian Mutiny. He was 36. His ‘letters’ to the paper from India were duly published. The letters were part of Russell’s 800-page Diary in India (1858-59) which was published in two volumes in 1860 by Routledge, Warne & Routledge. [Naipaul writes] I discovered the two volumes in an antiquarian shop… I found the book difficult to read… I found the tactical military details hard to follow. I was looking for something else. But after my trip to India, and especially my walks in Lucknow with Rashid, the Diary became a different book. The engraved fold-out map in the book was labelled “Plan of Operations against Lucknow, March 1858”. I saw a number of places on the map that Rashid had shown me. The British army had encamped in the Dilkusha park (Heart’s Delight). The hunting lodge of the Nawabs, not yet in ruins, was the British commander-in-chief’s headquarters. “The Plunder of the Kaiserbagh Palace” was the title of one of Russell’s lithographs: ”It was one of the strangest and most distressing sights that could be seen but also the most exciting… Imagine courts as large as the Temple Gardens, surrounded with ranges of palaces, buildings well stuccoed and gilded, with fresco paintings on the blind windows… From the broken portals soldiers issue laden with loot or plunder. Shawls, rich tapestry, gold and silver brocade, caskets of jewels, arms, splendid dresses. The men are literally drunk with plunder… they smashed to pieces the fowling-pieces and pistols to get at the gold mountings and the stones set in the stocks. They made a fire in the centre of the court and burned the brocades and shawls for the sake of the gold and silver… Oh the toil of that day! It was horrid to stumble through endless courts amid dead bodies, through sights of the Inferno…suffocated by deadly smells of rotting corpses, ghee ro vile native scents but the seething crowd of camp followers was something worse – as ravenous as vultures.” Two days before, Russell had got a portrait of the King of Oude, which he cut out from its frame. He had taken it from a room “amid one of the finest of the King’s summer palaces”. ”The protective ditch around the Badshahbagh was filled with the bodies of sepoys, which the coolies were dragging out and throwing topsy-turvy, stiffened by death burning slowly in their cotton tunics…We crossed literally a ramp of dead bodies loosely covered with earth.” A more substantial piece of loot came to Russell from the Kaiserbagh: “a nose-ring of small rubies and pearls, with a single diamond drop.” He had a chance of getting an armlet of emeralds and pearls but the soldier who had looted it wanted 100 rupees in ready cash. Russell’s money was with his Indian Christian servant, Simon, who was in the camp. Russell later found a jeweller had bough the armlet from an officer for £7500, a very large sum in 1860. Before the destruction of Lucknow, Russell had described it from the top of the hunting lodge: ”A vision of palaces, minars, domes, azure and golden, cupolas, colonnades, long facades in pillar and column, terraced roofs – all rsing up amid a calm still ocean of the brightest verdure… Not Rome, not Athens, not Constantinople, not any city I have ever seen appears to me so striking and beautiful as this…” Of Kaiserbagh, Russell saw “a blaze of gilding, spires, cupolas, domes”. Now there remained only the wing where Amir and his mother lived. Rashid had told me that in the old days, there were not streets around the palace, only gardens. From Russell’s books, I could understand that royal Lucknow had beena city of palaces and gardens. [Naipaul’s reference to Indian servility: p393] With the British army marching to Lucknow to put down the mutineers was a host of Indian camp-followers. The Muslims among them were domestic servants. Among the Hindus were merchants and their families; drovers looking after the sheep, goats and turkeys for the British army; and there were “whole regiments of sinewy, lanky coolies” carrying chairs and tables, “hampers of beer and wine in boxes slung from bamboo poles”. Russell noted “the delight” with which these Indian camp-followers, making life comfortable for the army, “were pouring towards Lucknow, to aid the Feriinghee (foreigner) to overcome their own brethren”. [p395] The Muslims would some idea of unity of their faith. The Hindus would have no such loyalty except to their clan; no higher idea of human fellowship or responsibility of man to his fellow. And because of that missing large idea, the country works blindly on… It is hard for an Indian not to feel humiliated by Russell’s book… he recognised that the Indian system being overthrown has come to the end of its possibilities… and out of the humiliation of British rule, there will come to India the ideas of country and historical self-analysis, things that seem impossibly remote at the time of Russell’s march. Nine years after Russell’s book was published, Gandhi was born. In 1900, Russell had received a knighthood and Gandhi, after his law studies in London, was in South Africa campaigning for the rights of Indians who, some 25 years after the Mutiny, had been sent out as indentured workers to plantations in many parts of the British Empire. Looking back over the 100 years before the Mutiny, there is an unvarying impression of a helpless, trampled-over country, never itself since the Muslim invasions, with a serf population toiling in the fields, building forts for kingdoms with ever-shifting borders. Naipaul also outlined the biography of William Jones (see file in History folder)