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304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1964
To me as a child the India that had produced so many of the persons and things around me was featureless, and I thought of the time when the transference was made as a period of darknessOne feels Naipaul´s grim, tight-lipped incantation "I shall go to India, I shall not like it, I will expose and destroy whatever childhood fantasies about India still lurk in the dark recesses of my makeshift patchwork identity". So the nameless, phantom-accompanied, narrator spends a year in India; after a few cautious, desultory sniffs around New Delhi, he flees into glorious, poisonous seclusion at a lakeside hotel in Kashmir -that seems to be the main extent of his exploration of India. To escape the invasion of the hotel by a rich brahmin family in the clutches of a worldly holy man, he goes on a himalayan pilgrimage to Amarnath Cave to see a "massive ice phallus", but in a typical twist of the novel, at the mouth of the cavern:
[...]
And even now, though time has widened, though space has contracted and I have travelled lucidly over that area which was to me the area of darkness, something of that darkness remains, in those attitudes, those ways of thinking and seeing, which are no longer mine [...]
I came to London. It had become the centre of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. London was not the centre of my world
[...]
But we did not take a houseboat. Their relics were still too movingly personal. Their romance was not mine, and it was impossible to separate them from their romance. I would have felt an intruder [...] I was not English or Indian; I was denied the victory of both.
Individual advance or retreat was impossible; a woman was sobbing with terror. I climbed up and held on to the iron railing: I could see only crowd and a low rock vault blackened by damp or incense. I climbed back down again [...] No sight of the god, then, for me: I would sit it out.Suddenly, Naipaul sets everything aside and inserts a prolonged, fascinating and twisted literary reflection on Fantasy and ruins trying to pin down exacty what British Empire meant for England, for Trinidad and for India:
With one part of myself I felt the coming together of England and India as a violation; with the other I saw it as ridiculous, resulting in a comic mixture of costumes and the widespread use of an imperfectly understood language.In a whirlwind of endeavour, the narrator ushers in Kipling, undermines him with an observation by Ada Leverson and a dismissive, cutting remark by Somerset Maugham, trips us up on E. M Forster, bedazzles us with a brief aside on British travel-writing in the nineteenth century, berates G. M. Trevelelyan for setting aside a mere page and a half to how the possession of an empire influenced British attitudes in the nineteenth century in his work on English Social History, "regarded, I believe," stage-whispers Naipaul with heavy irony "as a classic.":
So, at the height of their power, the British gave the impression of a people at play, a people playing at being English, playing at being English of a certain class. The reality conceals the play; the play conceals the reality.Now Naipaul is getting into his stride, and his alter ego lashes out at what he considers are feeble, "stupefied" Indian attempts to adopt alien art forms:
...perhaps the British are responsable for this Indian artistic failure, which is part of of the general Indian bewilderment, in the way the Spaniards were responsible for the stupefaction of the Mexicans and the Peruvians.He dismisses Indian novels in one fell sweep:
Indian attempts at the novel further reveal the Indian confusion. The novel is of the West. It is part of that Western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now. In India thoughtful men have preferred to turn their backs on the here and now and to satisfy what President Rahhakrishnan calls ´the basic human hunger for the unseen´. It is not a good qualification for the writing or reading of novels.saving only R. K. Narayan:
Indian failings magically transmuted [...] forever rescued by his honesty, his sense of humour and above all by his attitude of total acceptanceand Ruth Prawer Jhabvala ("And she is European", he adds sardonically).
One journey remained, and for this I had lost taste. India had not worked its magic on me [...] it was closing up again, as fast as I withdrew from it [...] In a year I had not learned acceptance. I had learned my separateness from India, and was content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors.So he buffers himself with IAS officials and in a week long visit to the area, reduces his visit to his ancestors´village, where he still has distant family, to a mere day and a half. So ends his trip to India, as, in my opinion, it started:
...in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight[...]It was a journey that ought not to have been madeOnly in Arthur Koestler´s The Lotus and the Robot does one find such a violent reaction against India, and Koestler is reacting against what he perceived to be sham spirituality, against nonsense and filth dressed up as religious sentiment; in Naipaul, his narrator twin seems to be in complete, preemptive denial of anything that could tie him to India.