Jaundiced focus

The Masque of Africa — Glimpses of African Belief by V.S. Naipaul; Picador India; Price: Rs.595; 325 pp

Like Livingstone, Stanley, Conrad, Rhodes and other intrepid Victorian chronicler-explorers, Nobel laureate Sir Vidiadhar S. Naipaul is an explorer of Africa. Except that in terms of education, intellect and acuity of insight — not to mention sheer felicity of prose — Naipaul is streets and miles ahead. Taking advantage of the revolutionary invention of jet travel, he has not only thoroughly explored and interpreted post-colonial Africa in two great books, A Bend in the River (1979) and In a Free State (1971), but has also covered an extensive geographical canvas including the intellectually stagnant societies of the Islamic world in Among the Believers (1981)  and Beyond Belief (1998); the left-behind islands of the Caribbean (The Mystic Masseur, A House for Mr. Biswas, Miguel Street among others); moribund societies of South America (The Loss of El Dorado, The Overcrowded Barracoon, The Return of Eva Peron) and perhaps most famously, post-independence India in An Area of Darkness (1964), India A Wounded Civilisation (1975) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).

Yet these are just a few of the 29 seminal works of fiction and non-fiction that Trinidad-born Naipaul, who since he single-mindedly set out to be a full-time writer in metropolitan London after graduating from Oxford University in the early 1950s, has produced in over 60 years during which he has altered and re-shaped the contours of contemporary English language writing. In particular, over the past half century, Naipaul has established an unrivalled reputation as an uncompromising   explorer-chronicler of nation-states and societies attempting to cope with the imperatives of 20th century modernisation ideals and the newly-emergent post-industrial world.

The dominant theme of Naipaul’s exploratory narratives and the bleak picture he paints of post-colonial societies is of betrayal by their ruling elites, who after assuming the trappings of office from their erstwhile colonial masters have expeditiously resorted to shamanism, animism and witchcraft to consolidate power. Implicit in this line of narrative is a criticism that the colonial powers departed post-haste without preparing the natives to run modern states and nations. With the leaders and intelligentsia of contemporary Africa who should exemplify and rigorously impose modernisation ideals, themselves falling back upon voodoo, shamanism, and ‘throwing the bones’ in times of political and economic stress, it’s hardly surprising that the Black Continent is synonymous with anarchy, savagery, animism and corruption. And compulsions of political correctness don’t prevent Naipaul from telling the Africa story like it is.

More of the same is what Naipaul finds during the course of his latest expedition across the Black Continent, which begins in Uganda where he had been a writer-in-residence at Makerere University in 1966. Four decades later, he doesn’t find the progress and prosperity he expected in this scenically beautiful country described by Winston Churchill as the pearl of Africa. On the contrary, Makerere University is in a shambles, the kingdom of Baganda has been destroyed by the independent country’s cruel first president Milton Obote who was overthrown by the even more cruel Idi Amin who summarily expelled over 70,000 Indians residing in the country for several generations, and who were in an insufficiently acknowledged act of extraordinary generosity, accepted as new immigrants by the British people. Curiously, in hot pursuit of his dominant theme of “African belief”, Naipaul makes no reference to these cataclysmic events.

He is hell-bent upon proving that even after the people of these countries having nominally converted to Islam, Christianity and perhaps democracy, just below this veneer is the strong influence of shamanism, ancestor worship and practice of the black arts which have little respect for human or animal life.

Yet even as one respects the single-mindedness with which Naipaul pursues his line of enquiry, and although it’s an act of lese majeste, one can’t help but question whether shamanism and black magic is as mainstream an activity in the newly emergent nations of Africa, as Naipaul makes out. It’s arguable that shaman mumbo-jumbo is as mainstream in Africa as it is in India. If one goes looking for them, there’s no shortage of astrologers, diviners, soothsayers, witches, wizards and magicians in India. Or of the Ku Klux Klan, Amish, Mormons and witches and wizards in the US or UK. But to conclude that these pagan, esoteric practices dominate the Indian, American and British social discourse and dictate major political and economic decisions, is a bit far-fetched. True, most African nations are anarchic, cruel and despotic. But for several historical reasons including the slave trade which siphoned away their working age population for centuries and prompted intellectual stagnation including the non-development of writing scripts and written histories, the nations and people of Africa deserve sympathy and constructive criticism rather than pitiless assessment of the Naipaul genre.

Naipaul’s harsh, unsparing criticism of third world societies struggling to come to terms with contemporary ideologies, technologies and modernity is perhaps driven by his philosophy, famously articulated in one of his best works of fiction A Bend in the River (1979), also set in Africa. “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it,” he wrote. But despite his analytical Western background, he seems to lack awareness that the onus is not merely on people to raise themselves to cope with hostile environments, but also on educated elites to improve unconducive environments to enable the weak, vulnerable, gullible and ignorant to cope.

That was the white man’s burden which has now devolved upon the educated middle class and intelligentsia of the nations of Africa and the third world. And this burden can only be discharged through the spread of rigorous and real, rather than ritual, ersatz, education which self-serving governments and myopic intelligentsias are dispensing to people in the lower deciles of emerging societies, lumbered with the historical legacies of exploitation, plunder and inequities of the colonial era.

The historical process of devolution of the white man’s burden upon local elites and the intelligentsia — and the failure of the latter to shoulder it — has not missed the eagle eye of this sensitive writer, but he has chosen to focus his attention on the world as it is, rather than as it should be.

Dilip Thakore

Invaluable trove

Toba Tek Singh by Saadat Hasan Manto; Editor & Translator: Khalid Hasan; Penguin; Price: Rs.99; 149 pp

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-55) was one of the leading lights of the progressive Urdu writers’ movement in pre-partition India. This movement has died out with Urdu becoming, for all practical purposes, a language restricted only to a small minority of north Indian Muslims, particularly the lower madrassa-educated class. However Manto wrote at a time when Urdu was the literary language of north Indian elites including the emerging middle-class, transcending communal boundaries, making it the medium for promoting a new humanistic and socially progressive consciousness. Manto had to pay for his temerity and courage, suffering numerous spells in jail, and was reviled for his ‘unpatriotic’ views and ‘vulgarity’, both in India and Pakistan.

In a literary career spanning two decades, until his death at the early age of 43 in Lahore in 1955, Manto wrote extensively, producing 22 anthologies of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three volumes of essays, and two works based on personal sketches, besides scripts for Urdu/Hindustani films. This slim volume comprises a selection of 15 of his most memorable short stories, skillfully translated and edited by acclaimed Kashmiri scholar and literary critic, the late Khalid Hasan.

The twin events of independence and partition of India were marked by great turbulence, when new forms of collective identity, based on aggressive and intolerant interpretation of religion, community and nation, were playing havoc with time-tested traditions and ways of life. These exceptional circumstances and the alarming rise of religious intolerance which forced Manto to reluctantly migrate to the newly-promulgated state of Pakistan, form the background of many of these evocative stories. Manto never reconciled himself to partition, which took a heavy toll of lives and set Indians and Pakistanis permanently against each other.

His stories defiantly mock doctrinaire religionists and politicians whose preferred route to power is through stoking ethnic hatreds and communal passions. Manto’s sympathies were reserved for ordinary folk who people his stories, with whom he identified and in whom he reposed hope amid the pervasive gloom. His large cast of characters include drunkards, womanisers, pimps, prostitutes, petty thieves, and lunatics. whom ‘normal’ society regards with scorn and disdain.

‘Toba Tek Singh,’ given pride of place in this collection, is one of Manto’s most acclaimed stories. It revolves around the lives of several disreputable characters, through whom Manto evocatively questions the notion of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims as inveterate foes and the logic of partition that was based on this thesis. It describes the world of a group of lunatics who live together in an asylum. They are of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim persuasions and upon learning that their country has been partitioned, they roundly condemn it as an act of lunacy. Stiffly opposing the plan of the new governments of India and Pakistan to shift Muslim lunatics to Pakistan and their Hindu and Sikh counterparts to India, they obliquely mock the idea of nation-states based on religion.

Although Manto wrote extensively on the havoc and disruption of ordinary, everyday lives by the partition driven by the lust for political power and trappings of office, this eclectic collection of stories relies more on the linear narrative than dialogue. Indeed a dominant characteristic of Manto’s stories is sparse dialogue. ‘A Woman for all Seasons’ set in pre-partition Bollywood, and ‘Odour’, which recounts the brief encounter of a rake with a woman whose odour remains with him all his life, are related in breathless indirect speech without a single sentence of dialogue.

Manto’s vision is compelling and his themes certainly bold and earthy for pre and post-partition India. He writes about life’s ironies and human passions — sex, ambition, lust, rape, prostitution and the seven deadly sins in a matter-of-fact yet arresting style, rare even in contemporary English writing in India. And to think that he wrote with such fearlessness and integrity in Urdu! Little wonder the puritans and moral brigade couldn’t tolerate him and he had to do time in jail.

This is an invaluable trove of stories written by a yet insufficiently appreciated writer in the league of D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov, for his rare integrity and lack of hypocrisy. Penguin deserves kudos for bringing out this collection and that, too, at a very affordable price.

Yoginder Sikand