Marieke's Art of Living

Ian Jack on the contradictions of modern India Ian Jack

The Guardian, Saturday January 14 2006

A great writer can profoundly influence the way you see a country or a culture,

and for a long time - too long, possibly - my view of India was coloured by VS

Naipaul. I am far from alone in this. When it was published in 1964, Naipaul's

An Area of Darkness gave the rest of the world its first compelling account of

post-imperial India. In literature, western or eastern, nothing else came close.

You could read Kim or A Passage to India or the autobiographies of Nehru and

Gandhi, and while all would contribute to your knowledge of Indian history and

society, none would let you feel the place's present texture, the detail of what

it might be like to live there. Other writers of that time tended to see India

spiritually and heroically, in terms of Hindu benignity, Gandhi's pacifism,

Nehru's socialism. Naipaul saw it from the ground up, sometimes literally.

"Indians defecate everywhere," he wrote. "They defecate, mostly, beside the

railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the

hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they

never look for cover." To Naipaul these squatting figures became as "eternal and

emblematic as Rodin's Thinker", and yet they were never spoken of or written

about. "They are not mentioned in novels or stories; they do not appear in

feature films or documentaries. This might be regarded as a permissible

prettifying intention. But the truth is that Indians do not see these squatters

and might even, with complete sincerity, deny that they exist."

India was sensitive to its foreign depiction then and for a long time after and

didn't take kindly to Naipaul, though he never became persona non grata like

Louis Malle a few years later, who was shunned for his series of documentary

films showing poverty and mess. Who was Naipaul after all, but some kind of

displaced Indian (and a country Brahmin at that) who had turned up from Trinidad

via London? In the west, he was sometimes written off by third-worlders as a

kind of too-fastidious fascist. Those reactions missed a lot that was wise and

sympathetic in the book, including the writer's disgust at his own disgust, as

well as the comedy in it, including the writer's irritation. Some memorable

characters were established: Mr Butt and his assistant Aziz at their lake hotel

in Kashmir doing their best to please and usually displeasing, Naipaul hammering

out references for them on his portable typewriter, scenes that would do credit

to the pages of the finest novel.

I thought of them this winter at a hotel in Kerala, at Alleppey (now Alappuzha),

which has become a centre for houseboat cruises on the lakes and canals of the

backwaters behind the coast. This is a relatively new tourist trade. Before the

late 1980s, the only houseboats in India were moored in Kashmir. But then

someone (usually identified as "a foreigner") had the bright idea of converting

an old rice barge into cruising accommodation by giving it an outboard engine

and a large hooped cabin made of raffia. Today there are about 300, gliding

slowly through the coconut groves like large armadillos, complete with crew,

beds, and cooks, and more are built every week. One in every 10 tourists to

India now heads for Kerala and their numbers are confidently expected to grow.

People speak of a thousand houseboats in future, each depositing human waste and

oil into nitrate-rich waters already carpeted with water hyacinth.

Naipaul would have described this scene beautifully; no writer in English has a

better eye. And then perhaps he would have turned to the hotel's manager for the

human element. Let's call him Mr Thomas, who had wayward English. "I revert to

your email of yesterday," he wrote, meaning reply. "I suggest you highlight at

Ernakulam Junction," meaning alight. In person, he was all moustached energy.

Nothing was too much trouble. "It is my duty, Ma'am." He was omnipresent. He was

confiding - his job wasn't easy, he specified the troubles of his career. And

yet when we needed him, he vanished. For our last days he could not be found.

"Where is Mr Thomas?" "He is in his cabin." "Is something wrong?" "Sir, he is

having a fever."

On our last day, shorn of Mr Thomas's help, we took a boat into town and tried

to see an exhibition of pictures of old Alleppey organised by the Preserve

Alleppey Society. It was advertised in the hotel, but no rickshaw knew the

address. We went to the tourist office, which also prominently advertised the

exhibition, but no official there could point us in the right direction either.

Nobody, it seemed, had ever wanted to see this exhibition. So instead we took a

rickshaw a mile or two to the beach, and there saw a twisted and rusting

Victorian pier, long disused, which was connected to some abandoned warehouses

for coir exports by lengths of railway line. We asked again about the

exhibition, but nobody had ever heard of it, though it later turned out to be

only a couple of hundred yards from where we stood.

The Naipaul of An Area of Darkness would have had fun with all this: the mystery

of Mr Thomas, the exhibition that interested nobody, the accidental discovery of

Alleppey's maritime past. But as a way of seeing India it will no longer do,

because perhaps the most striking thing to me about Alleppey was that I could

feed my British credit card into a machine and instantly withdraw 8,000 rupees.

I remembered that in Bombay in 1977 it had taken me two days to get a money

transfer encashed at a bank - two days of bureaucratic obstinacy and taxis

between several bank branches, which echoed Naipaul's experience of 15 years

before, brilliantly recounted in the opening of his book, when he tries to

retrieve two bottles of imported liquor impounded by the Bombay customs.

If its economic growth continues on its present course, India will join the US

and China in a new triumvirate of global powers within the lifetime of present

generations. In 1964, Naipaul described an altogether different country, quaint,

damaged (a favourite Naipaul word) and decayed. As a guide to the spirit of the

place, An Area of Darkness is now only marginally useful - as useful as Orwell

to modern Wigan. But as a work of literature and reporting it remains a

tremendous book.

Ian Jack is the editor of Granta.

Ian Jack on the contradictions of modern India

This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday January 14 2006 on p15 of the

Features & reviews section. It was last updated at 23:51 on January 13 2006.