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| Victor Banerjee, Amit Chaudhuri and V.S. Naipaul at the book-reading on Thursday. Picture by Aranya Sen |
An evening with Sir Vidia Naipaul leaves you contemplative. Looking inward. He stirs without stirring; he moves when confronted with banality; he is silenced by the inquisitive who hide, sheltered in the shadow of their questions.
There is an intensity in Naipaul that reveals an area of darkness behind his dancing pupils. It is as if the bend in the river has eroded its banks and become an isolated lake that beads his furrowed brow. All that is left for him to do is cast a few magic seeds amongst us all, hoping, midst all the barrenness that has engulfed contemporary ?socialinduisim?, that some should take root and perhaps bring new thoughts to fruition.
His disillusionment with the modern world of teaching and learning that restricts rather than broadens our perception of social realities is the cross his weary consciousness carries from one social event to the next, from one book release to the autographs he signs on puddles that blur the images of those who hover parasitically around his publicised greatness without the ability to get their own feet wet, dirty and coated with the very soil that gives them their identity ? an identity that they shun for acceptance in an unreal middle class.
A class born from an abortive social revolution that cushions its members from above with beatitudes from the rich while they are shod so they may tread on humanity that subsists beneath an understanding of economics and capitalism.
Middle-class obesity, parading on the treadmill of social depravation, has the marvellous propensity to transfer its fat cells to its frontal lobe of creativity. Naipaul laments the evolution from native and national instincts to the un-thinking and unresponsive class that is ?free?: undetermined by experience or history or even the fantastical hypotheses derived from mythology, traditional art and literature. It is as if the most influential members of society, originally patrons of the arts, were now floating in space with neither the gravitational pull of the clay that molded them nor any attraction to the celestial bodies, to reach out into the unexplored realms of consciousness.
I tried to probe a little into the wit of an irascible wanderer who in search of his roots had dug up skeletons that he described objectively and we refused to confront because our subjectivism is suspended from a historic tree on whose allegorical branch sits our suicidal ego, Shakechili. You can sense an irritation in Naipaul, born from decades of yearning to find the origin of the seed, when he looks at how we cling to a history distorted by Europeans, ignored by the social upper classes and rewritten by politicians on both sides of the L.O.C. Not only is the current generation depriving itself of historic truths but, they seem content to live without purpose and direction in a mock world where East affects the West and the West slides superciliously along the surface of our myths and beliefs with sermons in the air that they breeze through in search of the primordial and original ?Big Mac?, on the proverbial Mt. Meru.
When Naipaul blushes for our denial, his wife Lady Nadira is the protagonist that he relies on to express his misgivings over how Pakistan has refused to teach its youth about an undivided subcontinent where their ancestors lived until irreparable divisions were created by an alien force that nurtured and fomented our divisiveness to the point where the creation of geographical boundaries ripped pages out of our historical, cultural and religious heritages.
When I suggested that the next century would see a coming together of the peoples of South Asia and a Pan-Asian culture is what our great grandchildren would inherit, Sir Vidya?s eyes grew misty and I recalled the lines Keats penned after the revolutionary fire of the Romantics was quelled by the Proletariats in the final stages of the French Revolution. Suddenly, common sense and piety were the only solace for consciences crying out for liberty and freedom.
?None can usurp this height?, the shade returned,
?Save those to whom the misery of the world
Is misery and will not let them rest?.
One recalls lines from the comic scene in Mystic Masseur, from an epilogue that really is the writing on the wall for most of us in this generation who look the other way and proudly proclaim allegiance to the ?globe?.
?As the passengers got off the 12.57 from London I looked among them for someone with a nigrescent face. It was easy to spot him, impeccably dressed, coming out of a first-class carriage. I gave a shout of joy.
?Pundit Ganesh!? I cried, running towards him. ?Pundit Ganesh Ramsumair!?
?G. Ramsay Muir,? he said coldly.?
Naipaul, an Oxonian, said the study of English Literature today no longer contained a grasp of Latin or French or even old English. Thus, without any knowledge of the foundations of a language, writers were building mansions on modern usage that might never stand the test of time. One recalls that even Shelley and Coleridge, in Prometheus Unbound and Kubla Khan were influenced by the revelations of Indian thought by the likes of William Jones and were among the very first to describe Kashmir as a paradise on earth.
That paradise may not be lost yet, but, the turmoil within fuelled by the greed of those who see lands as property and people as mere numbers, is a veiled extension of the same colonialism that we abhorred, shunned and finally were liberated from.
It is in the light of the same neo-Platonist scheme that the final ride of Aziz and Fielding, in Forster?s A Passage to India may be read. In answer to the question of whether the two men can be friends, the earth in its hundred voices says: ?No, not yet? and ? to show that the timing of their reconciliation is not, as Aziz suggests, dependent on the coming of political independence to India ? the sky says: ?No, not there?. On the face of it Forster is being even more relentless than Kipling, who at least excepted ?strong men? from his conclusion that East and West should not meet before earth and sky stood together on Judgment Day.
Having read some of his works and also Magic Seeds, I think Sir Naipaul will reluctantly agree that the chronological ending of a novel is far from being its real conclusion. He too, may well have his own last novel in mind.
There shall come a day when the Naipaul of Miguel Street is no longer with us but, I can see his spirit sit in Humphrey Bogart?s little room in Casablanca, spreading the cards over seven continents of a small blue planet beneath him and asking: ?What?s happening there, man??