India: A Million Mutinies Now (1992) - Plot & Excerpts
Two months ago, I’d lemmed this book in frustration and declared passionately on GR that this was the only book I’d abandoned so far with the clear intention of never picking it up. Now you can see that I’ve not only finished it in a day, but also given it a hefty 4 star rating. And that too to Naipaul, a vocal critic of India who later diversified and expanded his tirades against female authors recently. This book is India personified (bookified?)Don’t expect it to arrest you with either facts or style. Don’t expect to understand it, and certainly refrain from trying to gauge the direction it is headed in. I lemmed it earlier because I made the same mistake with the book that I’d done with India years earlier. I’d tried to comprehend the whole by looking at a part of it.No, go with the flow. Take in every chapter without trying to form an opinion. Because every single episode is a personal story, a story ridden with all the chaos India is, but from a closer, and therefore, a much narrower view. To understand and appreciate India, you need to be an Eagle that circles for hours over a large landscape patiently, gradually, imperceptibly zooming in towards the earth in wide, slow gliding movements until you’re ready to swoop upon the target of your choice. Look at India from a giddying height where you can capture the view of the entire land, and you’ll miss out on the nuances that characterize the intricate threads of a maddening world. Zoom in real close, and you’ll notice all the fine weaves, but without the advantage of a fair, panoramic view.Thus, I chose to give Naipaul a second try, with less expectations this time and more sincerity. To my delight, I didn’t find the Naipaul I’d imagined (this was my first brush with him) – not a caustic Paul Theroux, but a silent and deeply perceptive observer.Naipaul had earlier visited India in 1962. 26 years later, in 1988, he returned to the place and began his journey from Mumbai, and in this book, unlike either a travelogue/memoir or a historical/sociological analysis, he simply, plainly records the conversations with the people he met not fleetingly, but for days on end, and relates their past stories and present dilemmas as they intersect with the history of India. Through these interesting, widely different stories, we get a glimpse into personalized accounts of the events in different states that formed the backdrop of their lives, and altered the lives of millions of people, and the incompatibilities that plague a diverse and cluttered country.Partha Chatterjee wrote an amazing essay titled Indian Nation in Heterogeneous Time, deriving his ideas from Benedict Anderson’s brilliant book “Imagined Communities” – I kept on thinking of it all the time. Not only is India a country with fractured multiple identities, it also suffers from living simultaneously in multiple times. I think it necessary to give a little background to explain why India suffers from a Multiple Personality Disorder. Those who wish to skip it need not open the spoiler tag.(view spoiler)[Before the British consolidated their empire, there was no such place called India. Rather, there were about 600 little kingdoms, ruled by different ethnic tribes that had their own religions, their own gods, their own customs, constantly invading each other with sporadic success. With the coming of the Mughals, they faced their first real taste of consolidation. The Mughals were efficient rulers who knew how to keep their lands intact, and suddenly, the Mughal empire spread over what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Tibet, Bangladesh and if I’m not wrong, Burma/Myanmar. But it still remained a battle between kings, for the Mughals integrated themselves into the prevalent culture, adding to it and deriving something from it as well. In short, they mingled with the lands they conquered.But with the British, it was different. The new conquerors meant to keep the distinction between the ruler and the ruled clear, first by maintaining a policy of “non-interference in domestic affairs” and then interfering in way that consolidated its rule. With Gandhi uniting an erstwhile divided India into a singular entity with the singular aim of attaining Independence, it was only in the late 1890s or early 1900s that people began to think of themselves as belonging to a single country.But by then, everybody had consolidated their own peculiar identities. The Aryans were at loggerheads with the Dravidians ever since they had driven the latter down to the South, where they still remain. There was no such thing as Hindu Religion until the Mughals came along and gave all the non-Muslims the tag for identification of enemy camps. So essentially, anybody who wasn’t a Muslim was a Hindu, or a Jain, or later on, Buddhists or Christians. So there were crores (tens of millions) of Gods and Goddesses, each of the several castes in Hindus worshipping different Gods.There are nearly 30 states, and every state has its distinct culture, even if they happen to share a language. Even within a state, there are multiple big pockets with distinct sub-cultures. People unite and divide not just over religions and languages, but along political, cultural, caste and professional lines as well, among other common divisive issues.So there were Bengali Hindus worshipping Kali, of Brahmin caste and god-knows-what sub-caste and gotra, or a Bengali Muslim of some caste, and though they led widely different lifestyles, they’d be closer to each other by common customs associated with a place than with their Tamil Brahmin or Tamil Muslim counterparts. And yet, a Bengali Brahmin will sympathize over a Tamil Brahmin when communal issues arise, while s/he will sympathize with a Bengali Muslim when there’s a Communist issue. Add to this conundrum the factor of class-clashes, historic rivalries of different mythologies and different interpretations of historical events that ended more likely in bloodshed than in peace. There are more threads than I have outlined here, making India a messy, incomprehensible collection of diverse specimens of collective unconscious. (hide spoiler)]
"It had been hard enough to drive past the area. It was harder to imagine what it was like living there. Yet people lived with the stench and the terrible air, and had careers there. Even lawyers lived there, I was told. Was the smell of excrement only on the periphery, from the iridescent black lake? No; that stench went right through Dharavi. Even more astonishing was to read in a Bombay magazine an article about Papu's suburb of Sion, in which the slum of Dharavi was written about almost as a bohemian feature of the place, something that added spice to humdrum middle-class life. Bombay clearly innoculated its residents in some way. I had another glimpse of Dharavi some time later, when I was going in a taxi to the domestic airport at Santa Cruz. The taxi-driver - a Muslim from Hyderabad, full of self-respect, nervous about living in Bombay, fearful of sinking, planning to go back home soon, and in the meantime nervously particular about his car and his clothes - the taxi-driver showed the apartment blocks on one side of the airport road where hutment dwellers had been rehoused. In the other direction he showed the marsh on which Dharavi had grown and, away in the distance, the low black line of the famous slum. Seen from here, Dharavi looked artificial, unnecessary even in Bombay: allowed to exist because, as people said, it was a vote-bank, and hate-bank, something to be drawn upon by many people. All the conflicting currents of Bombay flowed there as well; all the new particularities were heightened there. And yet people lived there, subject to this extra exploitation, because in Bombay, once you had a place to stay, you could make money."
What do You think about India: A Million Mutinies Now (1992)?
The third book of V.S. Naipaul on India, written 26 years after the first one in 1962 and 13 after the second in 1975, again shifts its writing premises and tackles its subject with a distinctly different approach from the other two books: While those had held up India to some kind of standard and measured it against that (the reality usually falling spectacularly short), India: A Milltion Mutinies Now attempts to take India entirely on its own terms, to not present it as viewed from the distance of an observer or analyst but to let it speak for itself, in its own words. And quite literally so: Most of this book consists of interviews Naipaul led with a large variety of people he met while travelling. There still are passages of anecdotes and descriptions like in An Area of Darkness or of analysis like in India: A Wounded Civilization. V.S. Naipaul, but the bulk of of India: A Milltion Mutinies Now simply consists of people talking to Naipaul.And of course it is not as simple as that: Immediacy is something hard to achieve and Naipaul, being the perceptive and scrupulous writer that he is, knows that very well, never forgetting to remind us that most of the interviews he presents us with have been filtered through translation. He constantly mentions and name-drops his translators until one gets the feeling that he is surrounded by them like a shark by pilot fish. Or maybe rather a turtle than a shark, for as has been often remarked, India: A Million Mutinies Now is not as biting in its criticism as the earlier books, seems even mellow in comparison. Personally, though, I think that first appearances are a bit deceptive here – a lot of this seeming mellowness is owed to the basic decision of presenting India and its people in their own words, and Naipaul hence chosing to let his interview partners destroy themselves rather than taking them apart by his commentary. He frequently shows that he can be as trenchant and incisive (not to mention nasty) as ever; and one cannot help but wonder whether the hopeful view of India’s future is really his or that of the people he interviews. Naipaul certainly perceives India in 1988 as a country in unrest and motion (the “million mutinies” of the title), seething with conflict and potentialities, but for my part I would be hesitant to say just how optimistic he really is about where this may lead for India’s future.In any case, this is also is the by far longest of the three books, and at the same the most tightly structured: Each of its parts has its emphasis an a particular group or juxtaposition of groups (Sena, brahmin / anti-brahmin, scientists, boxwallah / Maoists, Sikh) each of which is located in a particular region centered around a city (Bombay, Goa, Bangalore, Madras, Calcutta, Chandigarh). And the latter is not just contingent, but touches an essential of those groups and the people that speak for them in this book – India: A Million Mutinies Now is as much a book about space as it is about people. About real as well as symbolical space and particularly the ways in which they intersect, as in the case of the high Sena official who prefers living in a small worker’s tenement because it puts him in contact with other people while a bourgeois apartment leaves him isolated. Again and again Naipaul emphasises the way architecture and spatial environment shape and influence social space, the people who live in an area, and again and again Naipaul returns to the cramped living conditions, many people sharing a small space, something that can be both a blessing and a curse: “He would show both places to me later from the roof terrace: the drama of small spaces and short distances, the settings themselves always accessible afterwards, never really out of sight, and perhaps for this reason cleansed (like stage sets) of the emotions they had once held.” The Indian people are defined by the spaces they grew up and live in, whether they confine themselves within them, try to break free of them or attempt to change them.All of this fits together so very neatly that it immediately raises suspicion, and I believe is intended to: Paradoxically, this most experience-saturated and immediate of Naipaul’s books on India is also the most literary; and just by the way he has arranged his material, the author never lets us forget that this is not a simple reporting of facts but has been filtered and transformed into a work of art – the formal equivalent to the cloud of translators surrounding Naipaul on his forages into Indian life, both indicating a distance between Naipaul (and the reader) and his material, Entfremdung as well as Verfremdung, alienation both as being a stranger in a strange land as well as literary distancing technique.In the final chapter of the book, Naipaul becomes his own tourist attraction when he returns to the hotel in Kashmir where he stayed for several months in 1962 and which he wrote about extensively in An Area of Darkness. His second visit is both nostalgic and merciless, the sepia colouring of memory never quite glossing over the continued disparagement of the people he encounters, nor the keen awareness of his own ridiculousness in these surroundings, among those people If this was a novel, it would be a metafictional twist, but with this being a travel book one has to wonder if there might be such a thing as meta-non-fiction and whether Naipaul may not have invented it. Whatever you want to call it, it marks the brilliant conclusion to a brilliant trilogy of travel books which deserve to be read as such even if one has no interest for their subject matter.
—Larou
V S Naipaul has often been accused of being unsympathetic in his view/portrayal of India, judging from his works. It's quite clear that though this Nobel laureate’s ancestral roots were in India, he never treated it like home and his loyalties were always with Trinidad (the country he was born in) and then Canada, where he chose to settle down.Even then, Naipaul has had close cultural and literary connections with India and the fact that he has written at least three books on India is testimony to that fact.Considering this background, I was expecting to read something quite unflattering about India in his Million Mutinies Now...Heartreningly, the author only takes a dispassionate yet involved view of a changing India through its 80s and 90s, as he travels various parts of the country, meeting people identifying their roots, ideologies and making sense of the various religious, political and social institutions.Naipaul here takes on the role is a reporter, who painstakingly enumerates what he sees around him. A fascinating journey into India.
—Sandhya
Well... how to begin with this book.It is not a novel, that I can tell, it's not an essay, it's quite near to journalism, but I think the most accurate definition would be "documentary". The author explains his several trips to India, but focusing on the people he met, that he interviewed. The book is divided in 9 sections, each of them focusing in a particular aspect of India. We have the Brahmans, the untouchables, the communist movements, the Muslims, the Sikhs, women, cinema,etc. And to have an insight of that, told by the people he interviews is... incredible. All this variety, all these conflicts, the poverty, the religions, how people try to thrive.. And also all the violence that has been going on since, at least, the Independence (but that's the period the author focuses the most).But, to me, it felt too long, too descriptive (especially this)... But I guess it was worth the reading, the author draws a dreary portrait of the country, which is quite depressing, and yet, all the diversity that there is, that you feel reading through the pages, makes you want to visit it.
—Teresa
