India (3 page)

But Narayan’s novels did not prepare me for the distress of India. As a writer he had succeeded almost too well. His comedies were of the sort that requires a restricted social setting with well-defined rules; and he was so direct, his touch so light, that, though he wrote in English of Indian manners, he had succeeded in making those exotic manners quite ordinary. The small town he had staked out as his fictional territory was, I knew, a creation of art and therefore to some extent artificial, a simplification of reality. But the reality was cruel and overwhelming. In the books his India had seemed accessible; in India it remained hidden. To get down to Narayan’s world, to perceive the order and continuity he saw in the dereliction and smallness of India, to enter into his ironic acceptance and relish his comedy, was to ignore too much of what could be seen, to shed too much of myself: my sense of history, and even the simplest ideas of human possibility. I did not lose my admiration for Narayan; but I felt that his comedy and irony were not quite what
they had appeared to be, were part of a Hindu response to the world, a response I could no longer share. And it has since become clear to me – especially on this last visit, during a slow rereading of Narayan’s 1949 novel,
Mr Sampath –
that, for all their delight in human oddity, Narayan’s novels are less the purely social comedies I had once taken them to be than religious books, at times religious fables, and intensely Hindu.

Srinivas, the hero of
Mr Sampath
, is a contemplative idler. He has tried many jobs – agriculture, a bank, teaching, the law: the jobs of pre-Independence India: the year is 1938 – and rejected all. He stays in his room in the family house – the house of the Indian extended family – and worries about the passing of time. Srinivas’s elder brother, a lawyer, looks after the house, and that means he looks after Srinivas and Srinivas’s wife and son. The fact that Srinivas has a family is as much a surprise as Srinivas’s age: he is thirty-seven.

One day Srinivas is reading the
Upanishads
in his room. His elder brother comes in and says, ‘What exactly is it that you wish to do in life?’ Srinivas replies: ‘Don’t you see? There are ten principal
Upanishads
. I should like to complete the series. This is the third.’ But Srinivas takes the hint. He decides to go to the town of Malgudi and set up a weekly paper. In Malgudi he lives in a squalid rented room in a crowded lane, bathes at a communal water tap, and finds an office for his paper in a garret

Srinivas is now in the world, with new responsibilities and new relationships – his landlord, his printer, his wife (‘he himself wondered that he had observed so little of her in their years of married life’) – but he sees more and more clearly the perfection of nondoing. ‘While he thundered against municipal or social shortcomings a voice went on asking: “Life and the world and all this is passing – why bother about anything? The perfect and the imperfect are all the same. Why really bother?’ ”

His speculations seem idle, and are presented as half comic; but they push him deeper into quietism. From his little room one day he
hears the cry of a woman selling vegetables in the lane. Wondering first about her and her customers, and then about the ‘great human forces’ that meet or clash every day, Srinivas has an intimation of the ‘multitudinousness and vastness of the whole picture of life’, and is dazzled. God, he thinks, is to be perceived in that ‘total picture’; and later, in that total picture, he also perceives a wonderful balance. ‘If only one could get a comprehensive view of all humanity, one would get a correct view of the world: things being neither particularly wrong nor right, but just balancing themselves.’ There is really no need to interfere, to do anything. And from this Srinivas moves easily, after a tiff with his wife one day, to a fuller comprehension of Gandhian nonviolence. ‘Nonviolence in all matters, little or big, personal or national, is deemed to produce an unagitated, undisturbed calm, both in a personality and in society.’

But this nonviolence or nondoing depends on society going on; it depends on the doing of others. When Srinivas’s printer closes his shop, Srinivas has to close his paper. Srinivas then, through the printer (who is the Mr Sampath of Narayan’s title), finds himself involved as a scriptwriter in the making of an Indian religious film. Srinivas is now deeper than ever in the world, and he finds it chaotic and corrupt. Pure ideas are mangled; sex and farce, song and dance and South American music are grafted on to a story of Hindu gods. The printer, now a kind of producer, falls in love with the leading lady. An artist is in love with her as well. The printer wins, the artist literally goes mad. All is confusion; the film is never made.

Srinivas finally withdraws. He finds another printer and starts his paper again, and the paper is no longer the comic thing it had first seemed. Srinivas has, in essence, returned to himself and to his contemplative life. From this security (and with the help of some rupees sent him by his brother: always the rupees: the rupees are always necessary) Srinivas sees ‘adulthood’ as a state of nonsense, without innocence or pure joy, the nonsense given importance only by ‘the values of commerce’.

There remains the artist, made mad by love and his contact with
the world of nonsense. He has to be cured, and there is a local magician who knows what has to be done. He is summoned, and the antique rites begin, which will end with the ceremonial beating of the artist. Tribal, Srinivas thinks: they might all be in the twentieth century
BC
. But the oppression he feels doesn’t last. Thinking of the primitive past, he all at once has a vision of the millennia of Indian history, and of all the things that might have happened on the ground where they stand.

There, in what would then have been forest, he sees enacted an episode from the Hindu epic of the
Ramayana
, which partly reflects the Aryan settlement of India (perhaps 1000
BC
). Later the Buddha (about 560–480
BC
) comforts a woman whose child has died: ‘Bring me a handful of mustard seed from a house where no one has died.’ The philosopher Shankaracharya (
AD
788–820), preaching the Vedanta on his all-India mission, founds a temple after seeing a spawning frog being sheltered from the sun by its natural enemy, the cobra. And then the missionaries from Europe come, and the merchants, and the soldiers, and Mr Shilling, who is the manager of the British bank which is now just down the road.

‘Dynasties rose and fell. Palaces and mansions appeared and disappeared. The entire country went down under the fire and sword of the invader, and was washed clean when Sarayu overflowed its bounds. But it always had its rebirth and growth.’ Against this, what is the madness of one man? ‘Half the madness was his own doing, his lack of self-knowledge, his treachery to his own instincts as an artist, which had made him a battleground. Sooner or later he shook off his madness and realized his true identity – though not in one birth, at least in a series of them … Madness or sanity, suffering or happiness seemed all the same … in the rush of eternity nothing mattered.’

So the artist is beaten, and Srinivas doesn’t interfere; and when afterward the magician orders the artist to be taken to a distant temple and left outside the gateway for a week, Srinivas decides that it doesn’t matter whether the artist is looked after or not during
that time, whether he lives or dies. ‘Even madness passes,’ Srinivas says in his spiritual elation. ‘Only existence asserts itself.’

Out of a superficial reading of the past, then, out of the sentimental conviction that India is eternal and forever revives, there comes not a fear of further defeat and destruction, but an indifference to it. India will somehow look after itself; the individual is freed of all responsibility. And within this larger indifference there is the indifference to the fate of a friend: it is madness, Srinivas concludes, for him to think of himself as the artist’s keeper.

Just twenty years have passed between Gandhi’s first call for civil disobedience and the events of the novel. But already, in Srinivas, Gandhian nonviolence has degenerated into something very like the opposite of what Gandhi intended. For Srinivas nonviolence isn’t a form of action, a quickener of social conscience. It is only a means of securing an undisturbed calm; it is nondoing, noninterference, social indifference. It merges with the ideal of self-realization, truth to one’s identity. These modern-sounding words, which reconcile Srinivas to the artist’s predicament, disguise an acceptance of
karma
, the Hindu killer, the Hindu calm, which tells us that we pay in this life for what we have done in past lives: so that everything we see is just and balanced, and the distress we see is to be relished as religious theatre, a reminder of our duty to ourselves, our future lives.

Srinivas’s quietism – compounded of
karma
, nonviolence, and a vision of history as an extended religious fable – is in fact a form of self-cherishing in the midst of a general distress. It is parasitic. It depends on the continuing activity of others, the trains running, the presses printing, the rupees arriving from somewhere. It needs the world, but it surrenders the organization of the world to others. It is a religious response to worldly defeat.

Because we take to novels our own ideas of what we feel they must offer, we often find, in unusual or original work, only what we expect to find, and we reject or miss what we aren’t looking for. But it astonished me that, twenty years before, not having been to India,
taking to
Mr Sampath
only my knowledge of the Indian community of Trinidad and my reading of other literature, I should have missed or misread so much, should have seen only a comedy of small-town life and a picaresque, wandering narrative in a book that was really so mysterious.

Now, reading
Mr Sampath
again in snatches on afternoons of rain during this prolonged monsoon, which went on and on like the Emergency itself – reading in Bombay, looking down at the choppy sea, and the 1911 Imperial rhetoric of the British-built Gateway of India that dwarfed the white-clad crowd; in suburban and secretive New Delhi, looking out across the hotel’s sodden tennis court to the encampment of Sikh taxi-drivers below the dripping trees; on the top veranda of the Circuit House in Kotah, considering the garden, and seeing in mango tree and banana tree the originals of the stylized vegetation in the miniatures done for Rajput princes, their glory now extinguished, their great forts now abandoned and empty, protecting nothing, their land now only a land of peasants; in Bangalore in the south, a former British army town, looking across the parade ground, now the polo ground, with Indian army polo teams – reading during the Emergency, which was more than political, I saw in
Mr Sampath
a foreshadowing of the tensions that had to come to India, philosophically prepared for defeat and withdrawal (each man an island) rather than independence and action, and torn now between the wish to preserve and be psychologically secure, and the need to undo.

From the
Indian Express:

The two ideas – responsibility, the past – were apparently unrelated. But in India they hung together. The speech might have served as a commentary on
Mr Sampath
. What had seemed speculative and comic, aimless and ‘Russian’ about Narayan’s novel had turned out to be something else, the expression of an almost hermetic philosophical system. The novel I had read as a novel was also a fable, a classic exposition of the Hindu equilibrium, surviving the shock of an alien culture, an alien literary form, an alien language, and making harmless even those new concepts it appeared to welcome. Identity became an aspect of
karma
, self-love was bolstered by an ideal of nonviolence.

To arrive at an intellectual comprehension of this equilibrium – as some scholars do, working in the main from Hindu texts – is one thing. To enter into it, when faced with the Indian reality, is another. The hippies of Western Europe and the United States appear to have done so; but they haven’t. Out of security and mental lassitude, an intellectual anorexia, they simply cultivate squalor. And their calm can easily turn to panic. When the price of oil rises and economies tremble at home, they clean up and bolt. Theirs is a shallow narcissism; they break just at that point where the Hindu begins: the knowledge of the abyss, the acceptance of distress as the condition of men.

It is out of an eroded human concern, rather than the sentimental wallow of the hippies and others who ‘love’ India, that a dim understanding begins to come. And it comes at those moments when, in spite of all that has been done since Independence, it seems that enough will never be done; and despair turns to weariness, and thoughts of action fade. Such a moment came to me this time in North Bihar. Bihar, for centuries the cultural heartland of India (‘Bihar’ from
vihara
, a Buddhist monastery), now without intellect or leaders: in the south a land of drought and famine and flood, in the north a green, well-watered land of jute (like tall reeds) and paddy and fishponds.

In the village I went to, only one family out of four had land; only one child out of four went to school; only one man out of four had work. For a wage calculated to keep him only in food for the day he worked, the employed man, hardly exercising a skill, using the simplest tools and sometimes no tools at all, did the simplest agricultural labour. Child’s work; and children, being cheaper than men, were preferred; so that, suicidally, in the midst of an overpopulation which no one recognized (an earthquake in 1935 had shaken down the population, according to the villagers, and there had been a further thinning out during the floods of 1971), children were a source of wealth, available for hire after their eighth year for, if times were good, fifteen rupees, a dollar fifty, a month.