NAIPAUL’S PIO
STATUS: BELITTLING INDIA
Naipaul is once again in the news – this time for wrong reasons of his
own - he wants a PIO card from Indian government without any proof of being
person of Indian origin. The government has asked the High Commission in
UK for a status report after it was discovered that the author was refused a
PIO card for lack of documentation to prove his Indian
origin. It seemed that the government wanted to oblige Naipaul and might
issue the required status paper after paving a short
cut to acquire it.
In order to bring persons of Indian origin closer to their home land –
the mother land – of their forefathers and reinforce their emotional bonds, the
scheme of providing PIO card was launched by the government of India in
2002. It was expected that persons given the origin-status would create
better social, cultural and economic ties with rest of their brethren living in
India. It was an act of mutual respect to be shown towards each other.
So for, Naipaul had not indicated any inclination or even a remote
trait which might enhance India’s prestige within or outside the country.
On the contrary, he vituperated against Indian ethos and worked constantly
belittling the land and its people. We had never appreciated if an
artless and wounding vilification of our culture and icons were made without
any sense or justification. In that respect Naipaul had tried to erode India’s cultural grace and glory. Naipaul is a
colonially groomed writer freely paid for schooling and drilling at Cambridge,
paying debt by portraying acrimoniously against the long lineage of his
forefathers. He is neither a profound thinker nor a writer with
deep sense of research and academic justice.
Indian government must have rules equally applicable to all. Once
they are flouted, there will be no end to it. If you relax for Naipaul,
you have to do the same for thousands others. A curious question arises
here. Why does Naipaul want such a status? He was neither born nor
brought up in India. He is a Caribbean by birth. He had his
schooling in Trinidad, higher education at Cambridge and ultimately settled in
UK. Why does he express so much fraternity to show
himself being ‘Indian’ and wishes to obtain a certificate
of his origin? In a globalised world of today, who cares about the
country to which you originally belong? Naipaul is neither original
British nor Trinidadian. He cannot be technically
called Indian. By his name and fame, he may belong to the whole world,
but none of its region or country originally belongs to him. It is
difficult to ascertain Naipaul’s country of origin. He has also indicated
that his forefathers migrated from Nepal. If it is true how can he be
given the status of a PIO?
Naipaul’s predicament is that he has lost his very basis – the ground
which sustains an individual socially, culturally and
provides a sense of pride which he may call the land of origin – not the land
of his father or grandfather, but of his preceding generations belonging to
millenniums. A true Indian may boastfully pronounce that he belongs
originally to the land of Buddha and Mahaveer; Ram and Krishna culturally and
may also add recent metaphors like the land of Gandhi, Nehru and Vinoba or
Tilak and Tagore. One may mention thousands other icons too. But
Naipaul has none to quote. He originally belongs to the land of his
father or grandfather – Trinidad – a recognised fact – that’s all. It is
here one feels a vacuum and tries to remember the ‘mother land” – the land of
his origin – the land of his forefathers. One may not know his great grandfather
but knows Ashoka and Buddha well. He is proud of his ancient lineage. He
originally belongs to their land or the land originally belongs to him.
This is called the land of origin.
When a man loses his identity and basic ground – the land of origin, he
loses everything – name, fame and intrinsic self. He has to re-build
it. No amount of power, prestige, awards or prizes can compensate the
emptiness of soul that pines for the land of his forefathers. One may be
living in London or Paris, but when he sleeps, he dreams of the fields and
pastures of his native land, the meandering paths of villages of Gorakhpur,
Ballia or Motihari and Madhepura. He desperately tries to find out the
land of his origin in his dreams – is it UP or Bihar? Naipaul can claim
nothing of the sort, not even in his dreams. Like an empty vessel he
drifts to Trinidad, UK, Africa and India – such a great
man with such emptiness! The people of India have a grudge against
Naipaul. The basic point is that all men are equal before the law and no
extra favour should be given to him. The other fact is much deeper –
rather ticklish and difficult to express, but anyhow, the message must reach
him. He never identifies himself with India or Indians. His heart
never beats for his native land – Gorakhpur. A slave in shackles may
dream of his mother land, but Naipaul who brutally disregards the country of
his origin and its people cannot express the feeling of love towards the land
to which he originally belongs. Does he really deserve a PIO status?
When some time back, Naipaul’s book ‘The Writer’s people’ was to appear,
“India Today”- a prestigious weekly
of India had an exclusive preview of the same.
The book was regarded ‘good, bad and ugly’. Why? As usual, by
nature and habit, Naipaul degraded our icons specially Mahatma
Gandhi and Acharya VinobaBhave. ‘India Today’ issued a cover story
and the book was accepted with mixed feelings. Naipaul termed Gandhi as
‘mentally denuded’ and Vinoba as a ‘fool’ (see India today, Sept. 10, 2007).
The editor of the weekly, recalled when he was a student in London, that he was
enraged at Naipaul for having exposed Indians so brutally to the world through
his book which had appeared at that time, entitled ‘An Area of Darkness’ (1964). Naipaul’s memorable observation
was “Indians defecate everywhere… on beaches; defecate on the hills; they
defecate on river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for
cover.” Naipaul has special memory cells always glowing and active
to describe how Indians defecate. In his book ‘A Writer’s People’ too, he has charged
his memory to describe “Indians defecating, farting and belching “(page
177). He describes Vinoba as a foolish man’ (page 172) and ‘holy fool’
(page 175). His memory cells elaborate ‘the innocence of fart’ (page 174)
and finds Vinoba’s men “badly” ‘farting’ and ‘belching’ (page 175). May I
ask: does Naipaul produce ‘symphony’ when he farts? So high and great yet
farting! Naipaul forgets everything in the wake of his damaging remarks
against his own people – the Caribbeans, the Indians, the Africans and the
British. He came into great controversy over his book – ‘A Writer’s
People’ (2007). He is desperate to find out his roots and try to link
himself to the persons like Derek Walcott, HenerySwanzy and Samuel Selvon to
Gandhi, Huxley and Nirad Chaudhary. But he spares none; he kills them
joyfully like a monkey smashing the hood of a cobra. One can imagine how
frustration grasps the person who tries to find out his lost identity and gets
more and more engulfed into the labyrinth of nomadic human mode and social contact. How VidyadharSuraj Prasad Nai…and his
ancestors belonging to the rural hinterland of Eastern U.P. of Gorakhpur due to
abject poverty, swim over to the far reaching land of West Indies, and start
losing everything including name, occupation and fame is no surprise to anybody,
but such situations do increase the mental capabilities of migrants to
understand the home truth better than the native. How a Nai… becomes Naipaul
or Vidyadhar assumes the shape of Vidia is a form of common understanding, but
how a migrant treats his home icons and historical figures (like Mahatma Gandhi
and VinobaBhave) as ‘culturally denuded’ and ‘foolish’ or ‘holy fools’ is open to question and India as a Nation demands an answer, an
enquiry and an explanation from Naipual and so do I. Naipaul seems to be
intentionally bad and far away from portraying truthful account of Gandhi and
Vinoba. With the passage of time Naipaul’s concepts of home truths might
have blurred or sharpened (?), but who knows in future people might term him to
be an achiever of Nobel but remained culturally eroded, ethnically clueless and
all time idiot because of his continued damaging remarks on Indian culture,
icons and the nation without any research to support him. He tries to cut
off the very base of the branch of the tree on which he is sitting like a new
NRK (non-resident Kalidas).
What does Naipaul know about Vinoba? It ill behoves a Nobel
laureate to call Vinoba a ‘fool’. Does he find himself the wisest man on
the earth? Naipaul is incapable of understanding Vinoba. To
understand him is to understand the true culture and tradition of India.
Vinoba joins both the ends together – Buddha’s past and Gandhi’s present – the
Himalaya’s serenity and the massive power of non-violence – to change India.
Naipaul is miles away from our traditional spiritualism, our long past
and vision of society, economy, science and culture. We are not static
people. We had produced Tagore much earlier than Naipaul was born.
Even during colonial rule we had the capability of producing Raman and Nehru at
one end and Gandhi and Subhash at the other. They are our icons who guide
us. Naipaul has shown extremely poor interpretation of India’s historical
facts and relationship. If Gandhi (according to Naipaul) has no knowledge
of geography, Naipaul’s own approach to history seems to be imperfect.
There is no link of Gandhi’s DandiMarch
to Vinoba’sBhoodan Movement. Both differ in respect to their approach,
content, purpose, planning and impact. All ‘Pad Yatras’ are not the same
and should not be confused. Even Buddha marched till late his life
spreading his message around the area now known as Bihar (traveller’s land) and
part of Eastern U.P. to which Sir V.S. Naipaul’s ancestors so proudly
belong. Naipaul has a lineage of such a great culture: such a great
nation. Why does he feel ashamed of Indians who do not have sophisticated
toilet habits? Is it everything in life? Why does he harp on the
same? There are reasons behind such maladies. Our culture developed in a
different way than the West. We have yet not created urban culture of
which the soft master- bed- room- toilet system is a part. There are
other compelling factors which check such sophistication. We belong to
the Tropics where everything goes open; it is geographical compulsion; we have
open houses, courtyards, open work places, fields and pastures, open theatre
and far off open toilets – more of air, water and sun and a lot of flora to
cover ourselves. Then there are other factors: our proverbial
poverty, growing population and illiteracy which do not allow us to become so
soft and urbanized. I have seen Vinoba using open toilet and heard of
Gandhi doing the same in his early years of Ashram life. It will
take centuries to change our poverty-stricken habits and create an altogether
urbanized culture. We are a settled people, not a nomadic. We
developed our culture not by fits and starts or in a jumping way. We had
experienced a long settled system creating a culture of its own over a period
of time. We had always lived a culturally creative aspect of life.
We have lived, experienced and changed ourselves from a well settled ‘Forest
Culture’ (ArarnyaSamskriti) into an
agrarian culture (slowly developed from forest to forest-cum-agrarian) spending
several millenniums . Past cultural habits don’t die spontaneously.
We have lived agrarian culture for long and still continuing the
same way, but slightly changing according to the pace of
industrialization. We are in agro-industrial stage of cultural set up in
spite of our boasting of globalization. We have not copied others
in cultural advancement or backwardness. Actually, culture can never be fully
copied or imported. It flows slowly and silently. One can pick up
some threads of other culture. But the settled people like Indians have always
preferred to generate their own culture. The westerners have changed
themselves in a jumping style, not experiencing the cultural aspect of any
epoch in a stable manner. Nomadic don’t create their culture: they jump
from one stage of development to another without generating a culture of their
own. It is because it takes millenniums to create a culture and the west
had not lived so long a particular stage of development as to create a culture
of its own. We have still a sense of ‘Buddha’ in our lives and it is for
this reason that we could create a Gandhi or a Vinoba out of our own.
Indian culture is an integrated whole and has not developed through piece meal
ways or in fractions. The people of the west cannot boast of even a
single ‘Junior Christ’ or a Christ like messiah again – the living embodiment
of love and sacrifice within its long history of about two millenniums.
It is because we have not jumped from one stage to another without
experiencing a settled position which generates the culture of its own.
Naipaul in this respect is an imitator, not a culturally grown man. We
had a fully grown cultural life during our ‘ArarnyaSamskrit’ and even lived
with lions and monkeys as friends and a family creating ecologically balanced
system of our green Planet. It is the western culture which has robbed of
the whole Earth. Even we lived a long epoch of an agrarian development
and created a specific culture. In spite of our poverty and hunger we
don’t kill our cows for food because we love them culturally. This
‘understanding’ of culture is missing in the west. Once a Polish girl
asked me crudely, “why people in India do not eat cows when they are so hungry
(poor)”? I asked her retaliating: “Why don’t you eat your
horses”? She had no answer to it because she had never ‘experienced’ the
cultural aspect of her horses. Naipaul is culturally illiterate in this
sense. He questions our so many culturally imbibed habits – good or
bad. Since these habits are with us over a long period of time, the bad
ones will take their own time to change. From Buddha to Gandhi, all
have used open toilets (covered with a lot of flora) and the future
environmental scientists would say that it was environmentally friendly
habit. Vinoba used to have a small garden trowel (Khurpi) while defecating and covering excreta in a pit
instantly. Only an environmentalist can appreciate, not a kind of person
as Nailpaul is. The modern sewage system is putting a lot of problems and
pressure on environmentalists because ‘whole of it’ cannot be recycled.
It is damaging rivers and polluting the oceans tremendously all over the
world. Has Naipaul any answer to it? It is the problem of the
whole world. Has Naipaul any idea of the work being done by
Bindeshwar Pathak? Surprisingly, he too belongs to Vinoba’s
camp.
Vinoba’sBhoodan Movement had
no political mission while Gandhi’s Salt march had political intent – a call
against the government. The pity was while portraying Vinoba, Naipaul
exhibited only superficial understanding of the Saint’s life and his
works. Naipaul did wrong reporting by mentioning that the movement of
Vinoba was not backed by legal process (page 174). All the state
governments where the saint marched had passed Bhoodan Act and the donation of land used to be finalized through
legal documentation by filling up a pledge form – land donation deed (Dan Patra) – duly signed by the donor
along with the witnesses (see the specimen of land donation deed in appendix
to the writer’s book ‘Bhoodan
Movement in India’, S. Chand & CO, New Delhi 1972). The other
fact which Naipaul distorted was Vinoba’s taking one-year leave from the Ashram
to study Sanskrit and Philosophy under Narayan ShastriMarathe of PradnyaPathashala at Wai (not at
Banaras). Naipaul put it in a manner to create an impression that Vinoba
due to hard work got ill at the Ashram and Gandhi had asked him to leave and
regain health first (page 17 2). It was not correct. The
facts were distorted by Naipaul so as to paint a person to project his wrong
image, providing nothing but hollowness of the author himself in treating
his ‘People’ or the subject material. Why did Naipaul choose such a
subject of which he had no clear idea or understanding?
Vinoba was active with his mission when Naipaul visited India
for the first time. If this subject was so fascinating to him, he should have
tried to gather more knowledge, understanding about the non-violent content of Bhoodan and should have personally
contacted Vinoba. Naipaul has miserably failed in creating an in-depth
study of his chosen characters or the ‘people’ (with many of them he had not
even remotest link) in his book – ‘A Writer’s People’ specially Gandhi and
Vinoba.
Vinoba lived the life the way he explained human existence in his ‘Talks
on the Gita’. Life is a force, a journey and it is not ‘what
it is’ , but what it ought to be; how do you take it; what do
you make out of it? It is to be shaped through your efforts – Karma – a
difficult concept to be understood by Naipaul. At the fag end of his
life, there is little time left for him to understand the nuances of Indian
Philosophical approach to life and instead of acquiring a piece of paper
relating to his origin, Naipaul should have engaged himself deeply in true
efforts to understand life, going through Vinoba’s ‘Talks on the Gita’ keeping
aloof, unmindful of his origin, status, and history. If he pursues the
path truthfully, he would be labelled as a true Indian, born and brought up in
Trinidad, lived in SW of London, but his heart had a sense of smell of
the land of Gorakhpur – Eastern U.P. – India – the land of his forefathers –
the land of Buddha and Mahaveer – the land of his own origin. Naipaul
must know that Vinoba means by spiritualism, an orderly control, a brake on
one’s body and mind. Every vehicle has a brake to keep the speed in
order. Naipaul is recklessly driving his pen, damaging India, its icons –
killing his own people. Would he put restraint on himself? If this
does not move him, he should retire to his study; take out the old volume of
his schooldays companion, the book – a terse Victorian anthology – which he
keeps but desists ‘Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury’ and there is much for him to
revise, but just concentrate on a line of the verse by T. Gray for instance:
“The paths of glory lead to the grave”. Nothing else can sound him
better. Had Vinoba been alive today, he would not have taken ill of what
Naipaul opined about him. He was above all such mundane
considerations. He would have rather blessed Naipaul for his good life
and brighter future and asked him to work for love, truth and compassion and propagate
world peace. One may find the reflection of the same Indian spirit and
culture among the disciples of Gandhi and Vinoba when he visits Rajghat (New
Delhi). Unmindful of Naipaul’s attack on their Masters, they still keep
Naipaul’s books along with Gandhian literature at their bookshop near the
Samadhi in New Delhi with equal reverence. This can happen only in
India. As it is difficult for Naipaul to understand Vinoba, so is for
others to know clearly the inner self of Naipaul without going through the
history of human migration, the colonial rule and mass exodus to the far
reaching lands, the geography of human settlement and psycho-analytical study
of the migrants and their character influencing society, getting recognition,
gaining popularity and achieving success or failure. He should also have
well grounding in human sociology, individual and community culture, ups and
downs of human aspirations, formation and breaking up of families and societies
and rise and fall of human groups and sentiments. Naipaul as an
individual represents a force relating to human civilization that has lived its
past and projects a vision of future through his hooded eyes. Naipaul
knows very little about himself and his origin as he lives and acts on
instincts and impulses and is the product of fragmented ideologies and borrowed
nationalism. It is a riddle to ascertain him: who is he? Is he a
Trinidadian? No. Is he an English man? No. Is he an Indian? No.
He is a living embodiment of self-esteem personified in his own
works of fiction and non-fiction. He is a reservoir of intellectual force
ready to open the flood-gates of knowledge to generate power through churning
ways of his worded turbines. His writings produce electric shocks as he
himself does so. It is like curing a wounded and paralyzed civilization
through power-shocks. And he is shockingly truthful.
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