Lest the Past Kill

By William E. Smith

INDIA: A WOUNDED CIVILIZATION

by V.S. NAIPAUL

191 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

"It was a journey that ought not to have been made. It had broken my life in two." So wrote V.S. Naipaul, the West Indian novelist (Guerrillas, A House for Mr. Biswas) of East Indian heritage, after his first visit to India in 1962. And so it seemed. He visited the ravaged village in Uttar Pradesh from which his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as an indentured servant more than 60 years before, and fled in horror. He raged and fussed about the Indian bureaucracy. He was appalled by the emaciated bodies and starving dogs, by the filth and public defecation. He was exasperated by the religiosity and pretense of "a nation ceaselessly exchanging banalities with itself." Yet he keeps returning. In India: A Wounded Civilization, based on his fourth journey in 14 years, Naipaul, now 44, is as fascinating a traveling companion as ever; but this time he is vastly more composed as he describes what he perceives to be the Indian predicament.

His point of departure, as always, is the immigrant Indian community of his childhood: where the first bit of cooked food was sacrificed to the fire; where only a male hand could cut the pumpkin because (as he learned decades later in West Bengal) the pumpkin was the vegetable substitute for a living sacrifice. He remains the outsider--as indeed he is in most of his literary locales--but through his travels he has come to understand that "Indian memories, the memories of that India which lived on into my childhood in Trinidad, are like trapdoors into a bottomless past."

In Naipaul's fiction, the landscape, mental as well as actual, has grown ever more terrifying. By contrast, he approaches India with a calm, almost religious detachment. The narrative is often mordant as it describes the dissonance of Indian life: the mutilated beggar children and the fashionable holy men, complete with pressagents; the landless peasants fleeing the villages for the city pavements, the infuriating smugness of the privileged.

Hindu Killer. But the real horror is muted, deriving from the nation's perpetual state of helplessness. Hindu India was all but destroyed by 1,000 years of invasion and defeat, Naipaul believes, and Hinduism has perpetuated the resulting defeatism by encouraging withdrawal and human separation. Moreover, Gandhian nonviolence swiftly degenerated from a framework for social action to total laxity, in Naipaul's view, and helped lead India to "an acceptance of karma, the Hindu killer, the Hindu calm."

This journey took place during the early months of Indira Gandhi's state of emergency, and the book was completed before her dramatic electoral defeat in March. But that hardly matters. If anything, the author seems to have preferred the emergency to the old-style Gandhianism of Morarji Desai, now the Prime Minister. The real crisis, writes Naipaul sadly, is neither political nor economic, but that of a decaying civilization whose "only hope lies in further swift decay." There is no clue as to the shape of the approaching apocalypse; only the chill warning that "the past has to be seen to be dead, or the past will kill."

William E. Smith

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