Indian Culture 101. Review on India: A Million Mutinies Now - V S Naipaul

It has been my goal over the past year to try to get the merest glimpse into Indian thought and culture. I've spent seven of the past eleven months in Mumbai, and next week am returning for another four months.

During this time, with the exception of a steady diet of Wodehouse, I've read virtually nothing except books on India: No Full Stops in India, by Mark Tully, The Elephant Paradigm and India Unbound, by Gurcharan Das, India: The Siege Within, by M.J. Akbar, The House of Blue Mangoes, by David Davidar, India's Struggle for Independence, by Bipan Chandra (an exceptionally difficult book for one who is unfamiliar with Indian history), several novels by Anita Desai, Goa and the Blue Mountains, by Richard F. Burton (an especially execrable example of the sheer ugliness of British colonial prejudices), and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, to name a few of the 30-odd books I've devoured.

Perhaps it is time to admit defeat. How can a Westerner, working for a foreign company and staying in five-star hotels in Mumbai (itself only one tiny corner of India) expect to gain any understanding of the Indian mind? However, I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet, and if I can't gain first-hand knowledge of Indian ways of thinking through experience, at least I can vicariously explore her highways and byways through literature. Two books by V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness and India: A Million Mutinies Now have been invaluable aids to the quest for India.

I know that Naipaul isn't a popular figure among Indians. His criticisms seem overly harsh, and he is very spare in his praise of any aspect of Indian society. A descendant of Indian laborers and merchants who settled in Trinidad, he has a basic knowledge of some of the ways of Indian society and religion, and speaks the language (well, Hindi, at least), so his travels in India do have a good deal of value for the uninitiated.

However, one of the chief criticisms of his writings is that he brashly makes sweeping judgments of Indian society from the posture of an Indian native, when it is clear that his cultural sensibility is no more Indian than mine is British--my ancestors came to the U.S. many decades ago from England, but to use that as a platform from which to judge British society would be presumptious in the extreme. Naipaul rarely finds much that is good or noble in the Indian character, and often betrays a very First World irritation towards the decayed infrastructures and idiosyncrasies he finds in his travels.

However, if the reader is willing to take Naipaul's opinions with a very large grain of salt, much can be learned from his writings. It is clear to Naipaul from the outset that India is not just one culture, but a country made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of widely divergent cultures. Knowing this, Naipaul's modus operandi is to spend a great deal of time with a few select individuals from differing cultures and locations, and attempt to extrapolate universals about all of India from their thought and behavior.

The ''million mutinies'' of the title are the countless ways by which the various Indians Naipaul profiles have departed from either the status quo imposed by generations of British rule or the traditions dictated by culture, caste, and religion. Among his profiles are Papu, a successful Jain trader and Anwar, a Muslim from Mohammed Ali Road in Bombay; Rajan, a displaced Brahmin in Calcutta; Kala, a Tamil woman who has thrown off the chains of tradition; Dipanjan, a West Bengali science professor; Rashid, a Shia Muslim in Lucknow; and Gurtej Singh, a Sikh in Chandigarh. He ends the journey in Srinagar, at the hotel on the lake from which he wrote An Area of Darkness.

For one who has only limited knowledge of Indian history and culture, Naipaul's books are informative. He has a classic journalistic style: Naipaul will generally open each section with a brief background of the event he is about to incarnate for the reader--the Periyar Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu, the devastating effects of Partition on Calcutta and Lucknow, the influence of Dr. Ambedkar among Dalits, the Sikh uprisings in Amritsar--and then let his leading characters speak without much comment by the writer. It is an effective strategy: the reader feels (perhaps inaccurately) that s/he has gained some knowledge of India's troubled history, while also feeling the results of these events upon individual lives.

I cannot begin to know whether Naipaul's examinations of Indian life are correct--after all, my entire experience of Indian personalities is based upon the few people I know, MBA's who live in places like Bandra, Juhu, and Churchgate--but whether it is because of the tricks of the accomplished stylist, or because the observations are in fact accurate, the stories and events recounted in the book have the ring of truth. One problem with the book (by no fault of its own) is that, even though it was only written 16 years ago, it already seems terribly dated. Again, I have no way of knowing, but it seems that India has changed more in the past decade than in any time since Partition.

Still, despite its faults, India: A Million Mutinies Now is an excellent starting point for the novice who wants a crash course in recent Indian history and culture. The reader just needs to remind himself that Naipaul's views are not the whole story, and if he wants to celebrate the glories and beauties of India, he will have to look elsewhere.

Note to Mouthshut.com readers: If you have any recommendations for further reading along these lines, please pass them along. I'm looking for authors that are good at providing a realistic view of India, where she's at and where she's been, either fiction or nonfiction. I realize I've just scratched the surface, and am seeking to dig a little deeper.