Reduction, First Attempt: Like V.S.

I have quixotically hoped, during my time in India, to arrive at some confident assaying of the Indian character—the spirit of the nation, the psyche of its people, that sort of thing—knowing full well that it was, by its very nature, an impossible undertaking, and probably an undesirable one as well. I have wanted, in some sense, to do as V.S. Naipaul has so often done—to enfold an entire country, a people, in a single well-crafted sentence, to encapsulate them in a terse declaration, to reduce them to a single idea. Naipaul really has reduced entire peoples—that is the proper word—for he rarely has had much but scorn for the inhabitants of what people used to call the Third World. He has found them ignorant and superstitious and wanting for industry and originality; after having traveled much of the post-colonial world in the last half century, his assessment of the progress of its inhabitants is starkly uncharitable. They have grown and achieved little, he feels, since the lifting of the colonial yoke—the implication being that if a people clamor for independence, they should not then squander its dispensation.

It is likely that Naipaul has only escaped lasting opprobrium because, as a native of Trinidad, he was once one of the liberated peoples that he savages; just as only a black person can utter “nigger” and not be castigated, so can only a post-colonial describe his own country as a “picaroon society with its taste for corruption and violence and its lack of respect for the person” without serious censure (it also doesn’t hurt that his writing bursts with a rare intelligence and percipience). That’s not to say that Naipaul doesn’t acknowledge and tacitly condemn the deleterious colonial legacy, in particular its psychological effects; his position on the issue is not an extreme one, and yet his thinking does represent one particular polar strain—that the problems of the post-colonial world can largely be imputed to its people and culture—in the interpretation of its history. But in examining his work, one must accept, with the requisite grain of salt, Naipaul’s fundamental conservatism, his arrogance, his chauvinism, and the fact that these tendencies have only deepened with age (he has even gone so far as to recently deprecate the work of his erstwhile friend and fellow Caribbean native and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott).

An opposing strain of interpretation suggests that colonialism arrested and blighted the efflorescence of established and well-ordered societies the world over, where people lived largely peaceful and mutually reinforcing existences free from the taint of the unfettered pursuit of profit, the impulse to exploit the natural world, and the desire to master one’s fellow man. This romanticization possesses more than the whiff of the Noble Savage myth in it, and notwithstanding the slivers to be found in each of these strains of interpretation, it should be evident that the whole truth, as it invariably does, lies somewhere in between the two.

Naipaul has been especially critical of his ancestral homeland, and perhaps no nation has so embodied the frustrated promise of the pre- and post-colonial periods as has India. India’s value as a trading hub to the Portuguese, British, and French was enormous—it may very well have been the most precious jewel in the diadem of Empire—and few if any post-colonial nations have contributed more (both through its native population and its diaspora), in real terms, to the world economically and culturally since independence. Everyone is by now familiar with the presumptive narrative of Indian ascent: the still fecund IT industry, the febrile financial sector, the burgeoning professional class, the prodigious entertainment biz, the enlightened government (“the world’s biggest democracy”!)—we have entered the Asian century, even if it’s not yet evident.

And yet: the agricultural sector’s share of the economy is shrinking, even as it employs the majority (56%) of the Indian workforce. The epidemic of farmer suicides seems intractable, as does the scourge of female feticide. Primary school enrollment is abysmally low and the child mortality rate disturbingly high, particularly for a nation aspiring toward a position of global prominence--India was ranked only 128th out of 177 countries in the UN's most recent Human Development Report. The entire country has a mere 5,000 miles of four-lane highway; in comparison, China has constructed more than 15,000 miles of 4-6 lane access-controlled expressways in the last ten years alone. And while a staggering number of Chinese, 180 million, live on the equivalent of less than US$1 per day (the World Bank measure of extreme poverty), 370 million Indians contend with such destitution. That’s almost one-quarter again the entire population of the U.S. and considerably more than the 300 million living in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa—and people speak of this impoverished mass as the “other” India, as if it represented some aberrancy.

Sir Vidia, the Grand Belittler, would undoubtedly seize upon the recalcitrant residue of brutality clinging to Indian culture as evidence of its prevailing backwardness: the feticide of course, but also the preponderance of lynchings, the acid attacks of spurned suitors, the culture of scholastic bullying (known as “ragging”; it seems to inspire at least one prominent murder case each month), the temple stampedes, the so-called “communal” violence (to which we shall return). Such appeals are a double-edged sword, however, as most cultures harbor an atavistic bloodlust, even Naipaul’s beloved British; an accounting of the signifiers of contemporary American brutality would likely consume the better part of an entire post.

What is most distressing about India, then, is not its brutality, which is quite commonplace even among so-called “advanced” societies, or its dismal social indicators, or even the boggling number of poor; it is the very real fracturing of its populace along hundreds, if not thousands of fault lines, both visible and invisible—cracks delineating religion, caste, class, wealth, politics, geography, culture, and language, among other things—which, when coupled with a tendency toward brutality among certain segments of its population, is the greatest cause for alarm. Though perhaps I am alone in suggesting such a possibility, it seems that India possesses more than the necessary ingredients for fierce and protracted civil strife—though one not imminent or even near enough to be easily discernible, it might arrive twenty or thirty years in the future, when the forces of cleavage have had time to widen small fissures into unbridgeable chasms of discontent and alienation.