…. that life in the Quad

It’s quite after a few decades that I happened to visit my school in Tenali. It was a Sunday. School gate was locked. There was an eerie silence all around. As I stood in front of that locked gate and peeked in…. a familiar touch ran all over …, a roller coaster ride of emotions overtook me. A tinge of nostalgia took me down the memory lane….    

  

It was June 1954. Water was released into canals and farming-activities were in full swing. In one of those busy evenings, Naanna (Father), returning from the fields, commanded: “Radha, get the calendar.” Staring at it thoughtfully, and being satisfied of the tithi (a lunar day) and Varjyam (inauspicious time of the day), said: “Radha, go and get ready! I shall get you admitted in the school today.” Dressed up nicely, as I came into veranda, he asked my amma (mother) to go out on to the road and to walk back as I and naanna step out of the house. Accordingly, she went out and as she started walking back towards our house, my father stepped out and I gleefully followed him with some unknown joy or should I say, pride?   With a smile writ large on her face, amma advised me, “Jagrattagaa velliraa” (Go and return watchfully!).   

The school is hardly 15 minutes-away from our house. I was to, of course, walk briskly to keep pace with my naanna. As we entered the school, there at the centre of the Quad, a peon was ringing the bell. As my father climbed the stairs, the peon greeted him. Opening the wicket gate of the headmaster’s room, he ushered him in. Asking me to wait in the corridor, naanna went inside. After a while, the peon came and took me inside. Nanna was sitting in front of the headmaster—a short but bulky person with gold-rimmed glasses draped in all whites—who is talking with a pleasant smile…

Turning to me, naanna said to headmaster, (“veedu maa rendovaadandi”) “this is my second son who is to be admitted now in the First form.” Then my father, giving me five rupees note, asked me to pay the fee.  As the peon shown me the way, coming out of the headmaster’s room I went to the window inside the quad and handed over the application form and five rupee note through the slit in the window. Giving me the receipt and also returning one and a half rupee, he told me to show the receipt to the teacher tomorrow morning in room no 10 and get my name entered in the attendance register.

Meanwhile, naanna came out of Headmaster’s room. As I was returning the balance amount to him, someone with books in arm pit came to naanna enquiring, (”emiti Satyanarayana garu ila vahharu?”) “What’s up Satyanarayana garu?” “Oh! nothing particular, came to get my second son admitted in the school”, replied naanna. While chatting with him in the corridor, he called somebody from the stores and said to that young man in pant and shirt: (“idigo Pantuloo maa vdiki first form books set ivvavayya… ne vastunna”) “give my son I^st form books …shall come in a while and pay you…”. The store man gave me a bundle of six new books. In the meanwhile, my father came and gave him ten rupee note towards payment. As the store in-charge returning the balance of three rupees and four anas, naanna said: “Eymayyaa Pantuloo  (What my dear young teacher…), what you will do with all those thick… brown sheets, give one or two to the boy… he can use them to wrap his books”.  Smiling and muttering… “Satyanarayana garuuu…” he gave me two sheets, neatly folding them. We then walked out of the school.

Coming on to the road and standing in front of this very gate, my father enquired if I can go home alone. I just stood silently. Then pointing towards the road, he said, “go straight on this road without turning your head this or that side and you will reach our park gate and the tank. Reaching the tank turn left and walk along the bund till you reach our Venugopalswamy gudi (temple), then turn left and the rest you know, OK! Go straight home, I shall come after attending to some work in the market. Nodding my head, started walking back, of course, quite jubiliantly. Half the way, I started running to reach home quickly and show my new books to everyone.  

Next day, tucking all my new books into a bag, I went to school merrily. Entered the quad – that stone building with long columnated-corridors … class rooms with high ceilings… tall doors and wide slatted windows on both sides … doors with a spine to pry them open … benches along the walls … with plenty of light… a central yard with sand spread for the students to play, perhaps – in all awe! In that indefinable wonderment I, like in my past school, keeping my neatly-folded bag on a bench in one corner, came out to see the happenings in the corridor and the ground in the middle.  As the 2^nd bell rang, everybody rushed into class rooms. Seeing them, I also came back to my room.

And to my utter shock, I could not find my bag on the bench. Inadvertently, as I started crying, a boy, perhaps taking pity on me, inquired, “What happened?” Hearing about my missing bag, he, pointing to somebody in the corridor, said: “he took a khaki bag from here”. At once, I ran to him, and holding my  bag asked him to give it back. Pushing me aside, he refused to give. Indeed, he bullied me down. Becoming helpless, I cried. To my luck, seeing me crying, Veeraiaha, a senior to me in my previous school, came inquiring, “Entra Radha what happened?” Hearing my story, he gave the fellow a good thrash and took the bag back from him. Passing it on to me, he said: “Radha, it’s not Basavsnakararao badi, here anything left to itself would be snatched away… you have to be careful with your belongings.” At last, recovering from the shock, entered the class room and got my name entered in the register by the teacher and sat through that period. Once it was over, I ran home and keeping my books in the cupboard returned to school with a single note book and pencil. 

Everything in the life has changed since I left the school…nevertheless, the memories that this campus gave me are still fresh in mind… indeed, they are so many and are all still intact… and even at the slightest provocation they pop up unstoppably. I can recall how gleefully we used to run around this building… playing with friends—Sridhar, YSR, Laala, Inumpudi, Ramanamurthy, MVLN  et al—playing pranks and laughing gleefully with them, our mastii (merriment) in the sprawling playground behind the quad ….all in gay abandon. 

Amidst that stream of memories …. … eyes searched for all those places that mattered most in those days to me and they all came alive one after the other… the mid-day interval bell: the moment  Ramulu rang the bell …   droves of boys rushed out of the class rooms from all sides and like a stream flow out through the gate onto the road…and once out of gate… some will rush to Guravaiaha baddi—Guravaiaha in a khaki nikker and a white shirt with his mother on one side and wife on the other side,  keeps himself ready to dole out aratikaya bajjis (banana snacks)… spiced with onion pieces, seasoned with red mirchi and a squeeze of lemon juice…or that Muntakinda pappu (Mixture of peanuts, pupped rice, lentils, onion slices, salt, mirchi powder… all seasoned with lemon juice) … and in no time the whole baddi will be devoured by the boys…Yutang was perhaps right when he said: “What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?”, for even today, I fondly recall the taste of that bajji and its very atmospherics though I hardly ate once or twice. But that very thought always helps me discover a smile.

As I stood there in front of that gate in the same awe with which I entered it for the first time in 1954… the images of all those teachers who taught me so much rolled before my eyes…as a poet said, “Gone days return, I have a sense of wheels / in motion, turning and rumbling and coming / full circle”….

My first form teacher, Vishnubhotla Srreramachandramurthy garu who taught us with warmth all about science and maths; the drab teaching of Kaaja mastaru of II form, the love and affection of Kesavaraju pantulu garu of III form… his waiting for me in the teachers room, rather  for the coffee that I am supposed to get from his home in a brass tumbler which I of course, brought with all bhakti (devotion); … the melodious narration of ‘Sri Krishna Leelalu’ by Mulukutla Sadasiva Sastry garu and the karuna rasa that he could generate in us by narrating how Garuda ate  Jimutavahana… pecking with his beak  bit by bit in a most tortuous manner, and yet Jimutavahana enjoying the torture, for his body could satiate somebody’s hunger, all that in his mellifluous voice; … the curt teaching of ‘BalaVyakarnam’ (Telugu grammar ) in IVth form by Janaswamy Subrmanyam garu… incidentally, his rule for correcting an erring boy in quoting a  wrong rule of grammar is: champaku cheyi parambinapudu kantiki neeraadesambagu… (As the palm reaches out to the cheek, tears swell-up in the eyes) is still ringing in the ears… …

The pleasure of carrying out science experiments in the laboratory under the guidance of Sreeramamurthy garu, of course, remained all through … similarly, the sessions spent with NHV garu  over those lengthy exercises from Wren & Martin grammar and his hitting actively with duster on the fingers for wrong conversion of active voice into passive voice and vice versa had seen me through the later life more comfortably….

Aside of these pleasures… how can I forget …the nightmares that Vedantam  Lakshmipati mastaru caused me with his equations in composite maths classes of Vth form?  Oh, my god! … the very hint of those classes— his writing equations one after the other sans any explanation—makes me jump out of bed in horror even today…the very recall of his classes still sends chills down the spine; How can I ever forget Burra Subbarayasastry garu of School Final class, who used to aptly capture my bewilderment at solving some of those riders under Pythagoras theorem in his comment: “Talamunakalu … pukkilintalu” (Drowning head, spurting mouthful of water).  Amidst all that trauma in maths classes, the only relief, if any I had was listening to  Akkipeddi Radha Krishna garu  teaching us algebra in his evening special classes, which not only gave me a soothing relief but also instilled a belief in me that all is not lost…

Recalling all those teachers who taught me so many things about life and its living besides routine books, as I stood in front of that temple gate in all reverence…. in that sweet storm of the past, among those teachers … Sarvasri Puligadda Sri Ramachandramurthy, Kota Subramanyam, Annadaanam, Vemuri Radha Krishna,  et al. Among all, Sri Vishnubotla Hari prasad garu stood tall before me  …who in one of our classes, saying in his ringing tone to that student who could not takedown the notes for he had come to class with no pen: “Kshurakarma cheyatanikochhinina mangali kattulapodi marchipothdaa! (A barber who came to dress the hair will ever forget his tool-box!) mahurtam pettatanikocchina pourohitudu panchagam marichipootaadaaa!  (a priest who came to fix an auspicious time will ever forget his almanac!)Vidya aardhiki vocchina vidyardhi kalam marchipotaadaa! (a student who came to learn knowledge will ever forget pen!)”, gave his pen to him….Such was his concern for making us educated. …Yes, some teachers had lulled us, some had of course, irritated us with their teaching but all had taught us well, guided us with concern and did their best in instilling in us a sense of being responsible in whatever we do...… They simply made me civilized…  

When I look back at those six years of my formative phase at this campus… it became so very clear to me that how beautiful life used to be there… in it.  Before leaving the gate, as I looked around the whole school for one more time, it suddenly dawned on me that this was the place where I lived my life to the fullest and I miss it like anything…. Saluting it in all reverence… slowly dragged my feet away from that iconic building… that utilitarian campus with aesthetics of its own….

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Gita Gopinath: The First Woman Chief Economist of the IMF

Gita Gopinath is an Indian-American economist. The Mysore born 46-year old Gopinath is currently the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and Economics at Harvard University. She has been appointed as Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. She will take over as the Economic Counsellor and Director of the IMF’s Research Department from December after the current chief economist Maurice Obstfeld retires in December. She will be the second Indian economist after Raghuram Rajan, the former governor of Reserve Bank of India, to become the Chief Economist of the IMF. 

Naming her as the Chief Economist, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director, IMF observed: Gopinath is “one of the world’s outstanding economists with impeccable academic credentials, a proven track record of intellectual leadership, and extensive international experience. All this makes her exceptionally well-placed to lead our Research Department at this important juncture.”

Her research focuses on International Finance and Macroeconomics—mostly centered on exchange rate pass through, international price-setting, emerging market business cycles, monetary unions and debt crises. She is co-director of the International Finance and Macroeconomics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She, along with Kenneth Rogoff, co-edited the current Handbook of International Economics. She is the managing editor of the Review of Economic Studies and also co-editor of the American Economic Review. She also serves as economic adviser to many financial institutions and governments.

Gopinath is the economic adviser to the Chief Minister of Kerala, her home state. Reports indicate that she has advised the Chief Minister, who belongs to Marxist party of India, to take a leaf out of the Chile’s experiences—a country, which stepping out of its past socialistic framework embraced new economic policy that runs on the lines of the experiments carried out by the liberal economists, popularly called: ‘Chicago boys’. Obviously, such advices carry weight because, as she claims, she advocated such policies more as a “trained technocrat and professional economist.”

In 2014, she was named as one of the top 25 economists under 45 by the IMF. World Economic Forum has chosen her as a “Young Global Leader” in 2011. In 2018, she was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Reacting to the generally held opinion of many economists that the “Great Trade Collapse” that happened during the recent global financial crisis was caused by cost shocks specific to traded goods, Gopinath, a “very independent thinker” who  “made herself a big player in international economics”—about whom Ben Bernanke, one of her doctoral advisers at Princeton University and the former Fed Chairman observed said: “Gita was certainly one of the strongest and most promising students I ever worked with”—argued that such price changes have almost no role in the drop in the trade. Her paper written along with Itskhoki and Neiman on trade collapse suggests that such decline in trade is rather quantity-driven owing to fall in consumer spending.

During the Eurozone crisis, Gopinath published a seminal paper along with Farhi and Itskhoki which argued that there are instruments other than exchange rate devaluations that a country can use to gain trade competitiveness. The paper proposed fiscal-devaluation measures such as an ad valorem tariff plus a uniform subsidy for exports as, of course, originally proposed by Keynes, or value-added taxes, plus lower payroll taxes for creating an equal impact as an exchange rate devaluation would do for the economy. But for the political challenges in its implementation, Gopinath argues that such an intervention delivers outcomes exactly like that of a currency devaluation. Incidentally, this suggestion was partly implemented by France.       

There is another interesting work that she did on monetary unions which commands our attention: Contrary to the commonly held belief that it is optimal for high-debt nations to join an austere monetary union that practices low-inflation policy, she argued that in some cases, particularly, when debt crisis is more owing to panicky reaction of lenders, it makes sense for high-debt nations like Greece to be in the mix of nations with similar high debt profiles like Italy and some low-debt nations like Germany.  And the recent news about Greece coming out of its debt-crisis is perhaps a kind of vindication of her findings.   

Interestingly, as India is now experiencing a continuously depreciating rupee, there is something relevant for its policy makers to adopt from her research:  In one of her presentations at the Fed’s Jackson Hole Symposium, Gopinath argued that it is the degree of imports denominated in the domestic currency versus foreign currency that defines its impact on domestic inflation. India, whose imports are mostly denominated in dollar terms, is obviously vulnerable for “pass through” of its currency depreciation vis-à-vis dollar to its domestic prices, which means rise in inflation in a scenario of depreciating rupee. She also turned down the argument that a weaker currency for a non-US economy is good for a country’s exports.  And she even advised that central bankers in developing countries must respond to such depreciations pretty aggressively.    

That said, it would be interesting to watch how the IMF and its member countries particularly the developed western countries would receive her—her line of economic argument that challenges the IMF-advocated wisdom of the advantages of flexible exchange rates.

Whether or not there are any takers of her research findings in our monetary policy committee, your most obedient joins the nation in congratulating Gita Gopinath on her appointment as Chief Economist of the IMF, particularly, at a time when the world is witnessing protectionism and trade wars where her sane economic-sense matters most   and wishing her all the success in her new role. 

A Tribute to Sir V S Naipaul

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, a Nobel Laureate in literature of Indian descent, who, as an astute observer of human condition, having written 30-odd books that indeed caused many storms in readers’ minds, died peacefully in bed on 11th August in London.

**

A while ago, as I was flipping through the morning newspapers, there came a message in the name of our Prime Minister stating, “Aaiye swachha Bharat kaa nirman kare, 15th Sept se swachhtaa hi seva se juden…” (Lets strive to create a Swachh Bharat…). It at once reminded me that I have over-delayed paying my tributes to one of the 20th century’s most admired and contentious story-teller, V S Naipaul, who died in his home in London, aged 85. And hence the following lines ….

Naipaul was the grandson of a Brahmin from the Benaras region who went to Trinidad in the 19th century as an indentured laborer. He was born in Chaguana, Trinidad in 1932 and later his family moved to its capital, Port of Spain. It is this shift which he claims to have transformed him from “a child [who] knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what [he] picked up in [his] grandmother’s house” to an acute observer of “the life of the street”—the outside world. No wonder, if it had become the setting for his Miguel Street— a collection of stories that won him Somerset Maugham Award in 1959.

In 1950, winning a government scholarship Naipaul went to study at Oxford. Later, it is at BBC World Service where he analyzed West Indian Literature that he found his footing as a writer. His breakthrough as a writer came with his first published novel, The Mystic Masseur in 1957. In it, he presented a dialogic intercourse between two cultures: the conservative Indian culture and the European liberal capitalist culture that treats the reader with an authentic history of the powerless people in a Trinidad ghetto. It is through caricature and irony that he presented “the aspirations, energy, vulgarities, inconsistencies and corruption of characters who belong to a rapidly changing society in which there are few stable values.” Ganesh Ramsumair, the protagonist of the novel presents himself as the bundle of all the controversies of the colonial society as he, oscillating between his traditional Indian values and the lure of the modern consumer capitalism, rises from “teacher to Masseur, from Masseur to mystic, from mystic to MLC” quite spectacularly. As the novel comes to an end, this struggling Pandit Ganesh Ramsumair, becoming G Ramsay Muir—a complete “transformation into a colonial puppet”—even defends British colonial rule. Interestingly, while narrating these two cultures, their institutions, process and products, Naipaul never sided wholly with either the Hindu way of life or the European way of life.

Drawing up on his real experiences among East Indians in Trinidad, Naipaul went on writing his earlier novels—The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959), A House for Mr Biswas (1961)—narrating the struggle of charlatans, braggarts and dreamers to eke out their life with social respectability in their new world of settlement. However, it is his fourth novel, A House for Mr Biswas—a treatise on the pangs of exiles—that had won him major recognition. Drawing from the experiences of his father, Naipaul, narrated the struggle of the protagonist of the novel, Mohan Biswas, an Indo-Trinidadian, to free himself from the predicaments of the family, custom, and religion. Being the son of a poor laborer and having lived as a guest in one inhospitable house after another, Biswas vows to “get a job on my [his] own. And I am going to get my own house too.” And finally, journeying through a variety of jobs from a sign painter to journalist, Biswas acquires a house of his own, which in his view is the signpost of his independence. But under the stress of getting the house repaired and the burden of repaying the debt, he suffers a heart attack and dies soon afterwards but leaving a house behind for sheltering his family for generations to come. Naipaul, while narrating the struggle of Biswas for dignity and independence, successfully explored the themes of family, poverty, and the impact of colonialism on the economy of the vanquished colonial-world from the post-colonial perspectives. The novel could thus succeed in making an entry into Time magazine’s “Time 100 best English-language novels from 1923-2005.”

Moving away from Trinidad, Naipaul used other national settings in his subsequent novels—In a Free State (1971), Guerrillas (1975), A Bend in the River (1979), A Way in the World (1994) —but continued to explore the relationship between violence, contingency and politics and the emerging personal and collective alienation experienced by the victims in the new milieu emerging out of the struggle between native and Western-colonial heritages. In a Free State (1971), a novel with two supporting narratives and set in different countries that won him Britain’s Booker Prize was hailed by Neel Mukherjee as “remarkable, clear-eyed, truthful and brutal meditation on exile and displacement.” He accomplished this task by resorting to three techniques: in “One Out of Many” , he resorted to first-person narratives through the voice of Santosh, an Indian servant in Washington; in “Tell Me Who to Kill” it is the poor Indian-Trinidadian who narrates the story in London; and in the “In a Free State” he adopts a third-person narrative to tell about a long car journey undertaken by two English persons, Bobby and Linda across an unnamed African country, and mind you, in all this narration, one hardly comes across the author’s presence.

Among his other novels such as The Enigma of Arrival (1987), A Way in the World (1994), Half a Life (2001), he examined carefully his inner demands and analyzed even his deceptions through the protagonists. Some critics consider The Enigma of Arrival as his masterpiece. Here, the narrator—is perhaps no other than Naipaul—in his own melancholy sense of rootlessness takes many journeys, starting from colonial Trinidad, both imaginary and real, to the English countryside to become a writer! Interestingly, the narrator-migrator, choosing to inhabit a pastoral England, invents the earth below his feet and in the process feeling as though the new piece of land has given him “a second chance, a new life, richer and fuller than any I had had anywhere else”, he practices his writer’s trade. Later, in the second part of the book, the narrator, under the spell of sickness, observing the world around him from the perspective of an outsider—perhaps, more as an anthropologist—describes in a sad, melancholic tone the collapse of an old coloniser.

It is his non-fiction works that are large-sized narratives of his travels to different countries over different periods of time—An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1976), India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990); The Five Societies in the West Indies (1963), Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998)—that had attracted for him immense critical hostility and anger, particularly from the postcolonial world. But first things first: let us first examine what he had written under these titles.

At the time of publishing his first book on India, An Area of Darkness—a chronicle of his first visit to his ancestral homeland—India was indeed passing through darkness: it was just limping back from the humiliation inflicted by the Chinese aggression. Owing to the widespread drought and the resulting shortage of food grains, we were then living off the American wheat supplied under its PL480 program. And it was this despairing and hungry India that confounded him when he landed in Bombay airport and yet Naipaul with his declared state of mind—“I am profoundly Indian in my feeling, profoundly Indian in my sensibility…but not in my observation”—said, “from the railway train and from the dusty roads, India appeared to require only pity. It was an easy emotion, and perhaps the Indians were right: it was compassion like mine, so strenuously maintained, that denied humanity to many.” At the very outset of his landing in Bombay airport, he encountered bitterest experience: despite having permit for the two bottles of liquor that he had brought with him, they were confiscated by custom authorities stating that “transport permit” is needed for which he had to run from office to office, table to table facing every official behaving either indifferently or arrogantly. Thereafter, it was the all-pervading poverty and squalor that gave him a rude shock. He wrote: “I had seen the starved child defecating at the road side while the mangy dog waited to eat the excrement.” What was more distressing to him was that it was not only a village scene but such habits could be seen on the slopes of Himalayas, at the bus-stand of Madras and in the beaches of Goa. He went on penning:

Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover… the peasant, Muslim or Hindu suffers from claustrophobia if he has to use an enclosed latrine.

In the same vein, he loathed the corruption prevailing in the country and pained to note that no shame is coming to those corrupt people, instead a lot of social prestige and status is bestowed on such unscrupulous officials:

It is estimated that in Kashmir, as in the rest of India, one-third of development funds drains away in corruption and the exchanging of gifts. No disgrace attaches to this. The Kashmir tailor spoke with envious admiration of his patwari friend, a surveyor and type of records-keeper, who in one day might collect as much as a hundred rupees; a lorry-driver had a similar admiration for a traffic inspector he knew who received monthly protection money from various lorry-drivers.

He thus concluded that corruption has become deep-rooted in the Indian system of government and society. And now, however sore we may feel about these observations, can we deny the fact that the same system of defecating is prevailing in the country even after about 50 years of Naipaul’s visit? And even after 70 years of independence, the malady of corruption is haunting us albeit, with more ferocity.

By the time he wrote his second book, India: A Wounded Civilization (1976), the nation was passing through the pangs of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi. And, of course, poverty was relentless, while corruption mounted up in all walks of life. While the leaders were tweeting socialist slogans, the country-side presented a grim scenario of undernourished children. And visiting India for the second time but under such testing times, Naipaul continued to be dismissive of India. Reacting to the emergency imposed by Ms Gandhi, he pronounced: “The dismantled institutions—of law, press and Parliament—cannot simply be put together again.” Speaking about the Indian civilization as a “wounded civilization”—decayed and dying Naipaul states: “No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters. Five hundred years after the Arab conquest of Sind, Muslim rule was established in Delhi as the rule of foreigners, people apart, and foreign rule—Muslim for the five hundred years, British for the last 150—ended in Delhi only in 1947.” He pessimistically concludes his book stating: “The crisis of India is not only political or economic. The larger crisis is of a wounded civilization that has at last become aware of its inadequacies and is without the intellectual means to move ahead.” No wonder, if such comments attracted outrage from the Indian readers: “He seems to me to write for the same reason that many ossified academics publish are else they must perish”, said CD Narasimhaiah. Nevertheless, one may have to admit that what Naipaul wrote about India is not wholly untrue, for India did suffer under the yoke of foreign rule by withdrawing into itself and as a result suffering from self-deception.

In his final book on the trilogy of India, India: A Million Mutinies Now, Naipaul appeared to have mellowed down. Or, by the 90s India was on the cusp of evolving into a nation, a promise in the emergence, perhaps! Although he witnessed a new generation of intellectuals crying in hoarse empty words, he could see India somehow managing to survive, and indeed evolving: “Independence had come to India like a kind of revolution; now there were many revolutions within that revolution. . . . All over India scores of particularities that had been frozen by foreign rule, or by poverty or lack of opportunity or abjectness had begun to flow again.”

It is obvious that such a probing and the resultant writing brought a barrage of protests from the intellectuals of India. Some critics accusing him of “look [ing] at India through Western kaleidoscope which takes myriad unreal shapes when aimed at lighted areas”, questioned him: “Why use the Western criteria in determining India to be an area of light or darkness?” Even a reputed Indian critic as CD Narasimhaiah in his paper, “VS Naipaul: A Case of Bizarre Reputation” observed: “I must confess I was disturbed when someone spoke of the possibility of a Nobel Prize for Naipaul. I asked myself if the world’s most prestigious award was instituted to honor someone who has injected so much poison into the world’s body politic and seems to gloat over it?”

Amidst such widespread resentment among the Indian intelligentsia at what Naipaul wrote about India, it is equally essential to note what William Walsh said about Naipaul’s journey to India: “Naipaul’s return to India is as much as a research into himself as into another country. He is crawling on sensitive naked feet through the tunnels of his own self.” Equally, is it not right to say that even after 70 years of independence, we are still struggling to cope with the “long buried disruptive peculiarities”—of religion, region, caste, clan, subalterns, the chasm between the Center and States that has outgrown beyond the political sense of winning elections, etc.—and the resultant strife in building a new India, in redefining the very sense of our economic independence. Ironically, the present government’s call for “Swachh Bharat”— a call for ‘Clean India’ that comes 70 years after we began what Nehru called our “tryst with destiny”—very much vindicates Naipaul’s writings.

His other non-fictional writings such as Among the Believers and Beyond Belief attracted similar criticism. Writing these two big books on his Islamic excursions through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, Naipaul, approaching his subject from a secular enlightened perspective and perhaps going against the grain of “cultural and intellectual relativism” made “sharp and cutting” remarks on Islam. In the section on Indonesia, he said, “Islam sanctified rage—rage about the faith, political rage: one could be like the other. And more than once on this journey I had met sensitive men who were ready to contemplate great convulsions.” In the book, Beyond Belief, he observed: “The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only to one people—the Arabs, the original people of the prophet—a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages and earth reverences… It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism.” Reacting to his writings Edward Said said that while Naipaul, in the west, is “considered a master novelist and an important witness to the disintegration and hypocrisy of the third world, in the postcolonial world he’s a marked man as a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him—though that doesn’t exclude people thinking he’s a gifted writer.”

Naipaul, in his long career of almost half a century, trusting his intuition wrote about colonialism and decoloni-zation, exile and the struggles of people in the developing world to acquire political and moral freedom causing many a storm in the minds of his readers. And the extent of success that he had achieved can be gauged from what Nan Doerksen said: “Perhaps where Naipaul’s genius lies is in his ability to take an existing literary genre, or idea, and bend it to his own peculiar vision, finally creating something that is definitively his own as Shakespeare did.” All this accomplishment finally won him the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001 for his revelations about “suppressed histories.”

Let me now stop here by paying my tributes to Sir Naipaul, the “philosophe” who “transformed the rage into precision” and “allow[ed] events to speak in their own inherent irony” for the readers to react in whatever way they want.

Portrait by : Sathiraju Sankara Narayana garu.