India by V.S. Naipaul Read Free Book Online Page A

Gandhianism. Jagan, as we are often reminded, was a Gandhian ‘volunteer’ and freedom fighter in his time; and once, during a demonstration, he allowed himself to be beaten unconscious by the police. It was the genius of Gandhi: intuiting just where the Hindu virtues of quietism and religious self-cherishing could be converted into selfless action of overwhelming political force. Jagan, allowing himself to be beaten, finding in the violence offered him a confirmation of his own virtue, saw himself as a
satyagrahi
, ‘fighting for the truth against the British’. The stresswas on the fight for the truth rather than the fight against the British. Jagan’s was a holy war; he had a vision of his country cleansed and purified rather than a political vision of his country remade.
    Jagan won his war. Now, blinded by this victory to his own worldly corruption (the corruption that, multiplied a million times, has taken his country in Independence to another kind of political collapse), his Gandhian impulses decayed to self-cherishing, faddism, and social indifference, Jagan seeks only to maintain the stability of his world; he is capable of nothing else. To be pure in the midst of ‘the grime of this earth’, secure in the midst of distress: that is all he asks. When his world shatters, he cannot fight back; he has nothing to offer. He can only run away. Another Hindu retreat – like the Vijayanagar kingdom in 1336, like the pilgrims worshipping among the ruins of the Vijayanagar capital in 1975, like the
mantra
being chanted and written fifty million times to give life to the new image of the temple defiled during the last war.
    Jagan’s is the ultimate Hindu retreat, because it is a retreat from a world that is known to have broken down at last. It is a retreat, literally, to a wilderness where ‘the edge of reality itself was beginning to blur’: not a return to a purer Aryan past, as Jagan might imagine, but a retreat from civilization and creativity, from rebirth and growth, to magic and incantation, a retrogression to an almost African night, the enduring primitivism of a place like the Congo, where, even after the slave-trading Arabs and the Belgians, the past is yearned for as
le bon vieux temps de nos ancêtres
. It is the death of a civilization, the final corruption of Hinduism.
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    With the Emergency, there was a ‘clean-up’. And it was on this, rather than the political crisis, that the censored press concentrated.
    The former Maharani of Jaipur was then in jail, charged with economic offences and apparently without the prospect of a quick trial. The houses of the once ruling family of Gwalior were being searched for undeclared treasure. In Bombay the flats of government officials, bank officials, and businessmen – flats the newspapers described as ‘posh’ – were being raided, their contents assessed. Somewhere else – a touch of Hollywood India – an opium-fed cobra was found guarding (ineffectually) a four-kilogram hoard of gold and gold ornaments. Everywhere rackets were being ‘busted’: foreign-exchange dealings, smuggling, black-marketing, the acquiring of steel by bogus manufacturing units, scarce railway wagons shunted on to sidings and used as storage for hoarded commodities.
    Panic was general, but not everyone lost his head. One New Delhi businessman (with a brother already raided), when told by his chauffeur that he was next on the list, handed over all his valuables for safekeeping to the chauffeur, who then vanished. Day by day the censored press carried communiqués about searches, arrests, suspensions, and compulsory retirements. By the third week of August, fifteen hundred smugglers alone were said to have been picked up. At this inauspicious time an expensive new jewellery shop opened in the Oberoi-Sheraton Hotel in Bombay, to big advertisements in the newspapers. Almost immediately, and as though they had been waiting for the place to open first, the authorities sealed the