India by V.S. Naipaul Read Free Book Online

an ordered, continuing world. Chaos has come to Jagan’s world; his act is an act of despair; he runs away in tears.
    ‘The entire country went down under the fire and sword of theinvader … But it always had its rebirth and growth.’ This was how, in pre-Independence India, the hero of
Mr Sampath
saw the course of Indian history: rebirth and growth as a cleansing, a recurrent Indian miracle, brought about only by the exercise of self-knowledge. But in independent India rebirth and growth have other meanings and call for another kind of effort. The modern world, after all, cannot be caricatured or conjured away; a pastoral past cannot be re-established.
    Bangalore, the capital city of the state which contains Narayan’s fictional small town, is also India’s scientific capital. In 1961 – when Narayan told me that India would go on – there were perhaps two scientists of distinction at work in Bangalore. Today, I was told, there are twenty. It was at Bangalore that the first Indian space satellite (named, typically, after a medieval Hindu astronomer) was built: more impressive as a scientific achievement, it is said, than the Indian atomic bomb, more revealing of the technological capacity that India has developed since Independence. The dedicated chief secretary of the state, a man of simple origins, sees himself and his family as the products both of Independence and of India’s industrial revolution. He is committed to that revolution; the changes it is bringing about, he says, are ‘elemental’.
    From Bangalore there runs a five-hundred-mile highway through the Deccan plateau to Poona, the industrial town on the edge of the plateau east of Bombay. There are almost no cars on this highway, many bullock carts, many lorries. The lorries are hideously overloaded; their tyres are worn smooth; and the lorries often overturn. But, through all the old pain of rural India, the industrial traffic is constant. Change has indeed come to people like Jagan; their world cannot be made small again.
    But what to the administrator is elemental change, and urgently necessary, can also be seen as violation. Narayan is an instinctive, unstudied writer: the lack of balance in
The Vendor of Sweets
, the loss of irony, and the very crudity of the satire on ‘modern’ civilization speak of the depth of the violation Narayan feels that thatcivilization – in its Indian aspect – has brought to someone like Jagan. And how fragile that Hindu world turns out to be, after all! From the outside so stable and unyielding, yet liable to crumble at the first assault from within: the self-assertion of a son to whom has come a knowledge of the larger world, another, non-Hindu idea of human possibility, and who is no longer content to be part of the flow, part of the Hindu continuity.
    Some of the gestures of rebellion might seem trivial – driving in motor cars, meat-eating, drinking – but to Jagan they are all momentous. Where ritual regulates the will and so much of behaviour is ceremonial, all gestures are important. One gesture of rebellion, as Narayan seems to suggest, brings others in its train, and very quickly they add up to a rejection of the piety and reverences that held the society together, a rejection of
karma
. Such a fragile world, where rebellion is so easy, a mere abandoning of ritual! It is as though the Hindu equilibrium required a world as small and as restricting as that of Narayan’s early novels, where men could never grow, talked much and did little, and were fundamentally obedient, content to be ruled in all things by others. As soon as that world expands, it shatters.
    The Vendor of Sweets
, which is so elegiac and simplistic, exalting purity and old virtue in the figure of Jagan, is a confused book; and its confusion holds much of the Indian confusion today. Jagan – unlike the hero of
Mr Sampath
in pre-Independence India – really has no case. His code does not bear examination.
    Everything rests on his