Oh God, save me from my friends, followers and flatterers: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India is a 2011 biography of Indian political and spiritual leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld and published by Alfred A Knopf, Harper Collins | Pages: 452 | Rs. 699

“Oh God” God”, Gandhi once said, “save me from my friends, followers and flatterers”. It’s remarkable how Gandhi—someone who seems to transmit a clear, direct message, whose life seems to follow a defined parabola, whose place in history we are sure we know—continues to surprise and unsettle. In his own life, he went through a parade of identities, and so too in his afterlife. But it’s not just that each age will have it’s own Gandhi.

There is something deeply discomfiting about the life as it was actually lived—before it was tidied up by his self-appointed friends, followers and flatterers into a Life that now apparently requires protection by our politicians.

Gandhi appeared to embody harmony and unity, yet his own life consisted of anything but those qualities—often impulsive, inconsistent, conflictual, fragmented. He would launch political initiatives like satyagrahas and civil disobedience, then abruptly end them; he would establish communities and ashrams, and move on; he would win the leadership of the Congress, and then retire to spinning and toilet cleaning; he would enter into intimate friendships, then turn away. He insisted that his own life and action was of a piece with his thought and principles—yet repeatedly they pulled in different directions.

So it is common to search for some unifying thread to his life: something that can explain the eccentric shape of a life at once monumental and elusive to the naked eye. Some have delved into psychology, some look to religion and ethics, others to political opportunism. Joseph Lelyveld, in his new portrait, hopes to find it in Gandhi’s fundamental feeling for the lowliest—and he wants to show that such empathy wasn’t a natural stance for Gandhi, but one won (and only ever partially) through his experiences—and which required Gandhi to struggle with his own prejudice-bound self.

That emphasis leads Lelyveld to focus his intellectual energies on the twenty-two years that Gandhi spent in South Africa. Those years, Lelyveld claims, were formative, taking Gandhi to the belief—well-founded, but never quite as well-founded as Gandhi himself liked to think and put about—that he could see the world from the bottom up, that he could fathom as few others the needs and hopes of the most oppressed, and that he had therefore an unquestionable right to speak for them.

Lelyveld, a former senior journalist and editor with the New York Times who has done stints in both South Africa and India, ought to be well-placed to bring news of Gandhi’s time there, and the first third of his book, devoted to Gandhi in South Africa, is by far the most illuminating and worthwhile.

Worthwhile for two reasons. Lelyveld shows in a more thorough way than before Gandhi’s deeply ambiguous, struggle-filled efforts to deal with religion, caste and race in South Africa. What Gandhi experienced in South Africa, through his close encounters with the Muslims, lower castes and indentured labourers of the Indian community, and more incompletely through his more distant relations with Africans (whom he largely excluded from his struggles to win rights), would serve as the psychic material out of which he forged his distinctive universalism—a universalism rooted in the claims of the minority and the marginal.

Don’t reduce a deep, intimate friendship and Gandhi’s experimentalism to the cosiness of a gay relationship, warns Sunil Khilnani.

The second reason is that this book helps us to better understand the steps by which Gandhi came to experiment with and ultimately dispense with that bedrock of any—and especially Indian—society: the family. Gandhi treasured domesticity, but despised the family. He came to see the family as the channel through which were transmitted the poisons of caste segregation, religious intolerance and material possessiveness—the entrapments of purity and property. Breaking the family’s monopoly over domesticity was perhaps Gandhi’s most socially radical move—and it was only possible for him to do this in South Africa. There, he could discover new forms of domesticity—with individuals, couples, communities.

In 1904, Gandhi met Henry Polak, an erudite 21-year-old Johannesburg editor, who discussed Tolstoy with Gandhi and introduced him to the work of John Ruskin—which immediately inspired Gandhi to set up Phoenix Farm, his first experiment in communal living. His own family, Kasturba and their four sons, drove him batty—and even before Phoenix Farm got going, Gandhi had invited Polak into his household. A couple of years later, Gandhi would himself walk away from Phoenix, leaving behind his wife and children, to move in with Polak and his young wife—the first of a procession of inventive menages that Gandhi would create for himself.

The oddest—and yet in some ways most direct—of these domestic try-outs was the almost two years he enjoyed with Hermann Kallenbach, a ‘muscle Jew’ from East Prussia—gymnast, athlete, successful architect and wealthy bon viveur. Gandhi closed down these last two of his companion’s activities, but not before Kallenbach’s wealth was used to purchase the 1,000 acres that became yet another communal laboratory, Tolstoy Farm. Before the farm, the two men lived together in several properties of Kallenbach’s, and for a while also in a tent.

For anyone who has read Gandhi’s letters to Kallenbach (unfortunately we don’t have Kallenbach’s—Gandhi destroyed them), full of playful teasing (Gandhi, ‘Upper House’, always addressed his partner as ‘Lower House’), anyone who has seen the careful way in which Kallenbach preserved everything and anything to do with his time with Gandhi, it is impossible not to conclude that this was indeed an extraordinarily deep and loving friendship. It clearly involved physical intimacy—though whether related to reasons of health, or to passion we shall never know. Gandhi had by this point adopted celibacy, and he imposed it upon Kallenbach—though with what rigour we also cannot know.

It’s actually rather wonderful to notice these things about Gandhi. It confirms him as one of the greatest experimentalists that India has ever produced, experimenting with truth, in pursuit of truth, in a way that was more radical than perhaps any Indian before or after him. It seems absurd to reduce Gandhi’s profound and vast existential experimentalism to the cosiness of a gay relationship—as we’ve done, ahead of reading Lelyveld’s book and led by the suggestions of a sour British historian-reviewer.

Friendship is the crucial word here. For what we can see is how, for Gandhi, friendship would become the highest form of human relationship—a bond devoid of instrumental aspects, purely voluntary, and between equals: compelled neither by legal contract nor instinctual passion. In later life, it was friendship that Gandhi insisted on as the basic political relationship—one that could convert the enmities of religion, inequalities of caste, or injuries of imperialism, into mutual human recognition. It was friendship that Gandhi sought with Jinnah, Ambedkar and Mountbatten—as well as with those more intimate with him.

His interest in celibacy, though usually explained in terms of his interest in Brahmacharya, was not merely about abstinence: it was about abstinence in order to enjoy the pleasures of disinterested companionship, friendship.

Gandhi was prone to infatuations—after brawny Lower House, in later life it would be more ethereal creatures like Esther Faering and Saraladevi Chaudhurani. But at the end of the day—as his letters to Kallenbach and to others display, letters concerning what Gandhi perhaps mock-solemnly called the ‘food question’, which detailed precisely how many nuts he had eaten, how much milk he’d consumed, and railed against ‘full-mealers’—Gandhi was more interested in his digestive rather than his sexual organs: in mastication, not masturbation.

Lelyveld is gently persistent in his efforts to elicit gaps between Gandhi’s life as it was lived and as he later chronicled it—between Gandhi the activist and the memoirist. In the case of Gandhi’s South African life, Lelyveld concludes that while it was transformative for Gandhi himself—furnishing him with perceptions, commitments and methods, that would later define his Indian politics—it had, contrary to what Lelyveld terms ‘Gandhi’s somewhat rosy version of his heroic personal history’, decidedly less impact on the politics of his adopted home.

Indeed, Lelyveld’s account of Gandhi’s South African life is far more subversive not for what it has to say about the Kallenbach connection (details of which have after all been known for quite sometime), but in his claim that Gandhi left South Africa at the end of 1914 not as the victorious leader of a satyagraha movement that had delivered rights to indentured Indians, but rather as part of a deal with Jan Smuts, one that in fact left Indian labourers worse off. South Africa helped make Gandhi, but he had less impact upon it than he liked to claim, or than post-apartheid South Africa—which has made Gandhi one of its heroes—would prefer to think.

The Gandhi that Lelyveld brings back to India is a man fitfully awakened in his human empathy, and also one coming quickly to a sense of his political command. What is striking is to see how Gandhi—the most exotic, weird human the Indian subcontinent has ever produced—soon after his return to India, had acquired for himself an undisputed claim as the man who knew the Indian masses best, and could speak on their behalf. “Without any impertinence I may say I understand the mass mind better than anyone amongst the educated Indians”—yet, coming from a man back in the country a mere five years after over twenty abroad, it was an assertion full of impertinence. How on earth did he manage to make such claims credible to so many for so long?

No one—biographer, historian or acolyte—has ever really managed to explain this. Was it all a rhetorical performance—as the rising scholarship on Gandhi’s symbolism, body, theatricality, would have us think? Was it his ideas—as the studies of his philosophical, religious and ethical beliefs claim? Was he just a masterly political fixer—as accounts of his capture and manipulation of Congress tell us? Sheer force of personality, charisma? Or was it that goat’s milk he had begun to drink—as Kasturba, who encouraged him to indulge, might have liked to think?

Lelyveld himself concentrates on Gandhi’s social vision. He explores the Indian Gandhi through a series of episodes which he believes reveal both Gandhi’s inner conflicts and his struggles with fellow Indians: his standoff with Ambedkar at the London Round Table Conference and then at Poona; the Vaikom satyagraha and Gandhi’s attempts to breach upper-caste barriers to temple entry; his running skirmishes with Jinnah; and his final epic failure to stop communal violence by exiling himself to Noakhali.

Like all who write about Gandhi, Lelyveld has to confront the shifting meanings, obscurities, ambiguities, inconsistencies, of Gandhi’s actions. And it is one of the virtues of Lelyved’s book that it does not try to tidy these up in a simple ‘message’. Nor does he opt for the other easy judgement: which would see Gandhi’s inconsistencies as evidence of his hypocrisy. Yet what he does end up with is less than remarkable. As he traces, for instance in his interesting exploration of Gandhi’s Vaikom satyagraha, the different messages Gandhi was sending to different interlocutors and audiences, his seemingly calculated fluidity of position even while claiming to stand for principles, Lelyveld finds himself concluding: “What really shows here is the difficulty of being Gandhi”. No one, I think, ever did imagine it was easy.

Like every good journalist, Lelyveld is a skilled rhetorician in the art of knowingness. Wherever information is sparse, he resorts to the leading question, planting an idea even as he denies it evidentiary status: “Could this have been such an occasion?”; “Did it involve the day’s events? We’ll never know”; “Could the example of the white mine workers have served as Thambi Naidoo’s mustard seed” (and that’s all just on one page, admittedly a passage that represents a rather critical—if non-weightbearing—bridge in his interpretative narrative). The reader will encounter a fair sprinkling of terms like “possibly”, “probably”, and “it’s not far-fetched to think”. Leyveld’s style can be engaging, but he is also often at risk of achieving a certain sophisticated banality.

In assessing Gandhi’s legacy, Lelyveld marks its severe limits. And yet. It is true, as Lelyveld insists, that Gandhi did not abolish untouchability. But he did de-legitimise it. It is true, as Lelyveld tells us, that Gandhi did not succeed in cementing Hindu-Muslim unity. But he did make all thinking Indians feel embarrassment and shame when religious violence and bloodletting occurred. Unlike a Lenin or a Mao, Gandhi’s chosen instrument of change was not the state, but the imagination. His work was to transform belief: more difficult, slower, but perhaps in the end, more enduring?

Joseph Lelyveld’s book arrives in India apparently already pre-read and certainly pre-judged. We need to put aside that false knowledge—so we actually read and genuinely discuss it. We can then, finally and thankfully, hope to move into a new phase of biographical scrutiny of figures like Gandhi—where basic questions can be raised, taboos explored, and where we can start to see them as humans in hard times. Studies by Rajmohan Gandhi, Narayan Desai, Tridip Suhrud, and now Lelyveld—all let us see Gandhi not as the prim pope of non-violence, but as a more subtle being, often in emotional turmoil, ragged in his personal relationships and cruel to his family, a better starter than finisher, dependent on entourages of aides and adorers, selfless and egotistical by turns—and always able to command the deepest loyalty.

The idea that a politician like Narendra Modi can self-erect to defend Gandhi’s legacy, that he and Gujarat are Gandhi’s guardians against supposed charges of perversity and racism, is laughable. I well remember sitting in a Gandhinagar cinema a little more than a decade ago, at the very time when Modi was manoeuvring himself into power in that city, watching the film Hey Ram—and can never forget how, at the very moment when Godse is shown pumping bullets into Gandhi, the cinema hall erupted into wild applause to celebrate Gandhi’s death. I remember too watching the West Indies playing a Test match at Ahmedabad’s Motera ground—and when they took to the field, being pelted by bananas and greeted by monkey whoops. Today’s Gujarat, before it can imagine it has any claims to Gandhi, let alone to defending his memory, has a long way to go.

(Sunil Khilnani, In Outlook, under Books/Reviews/Essays on May 02, 2011)

Beyond controversy: The Hindus: An Alternative History

Before we starts, just a minute on this Controversy:

The Hindus: An Alternative History is a book by American Indologist, Wendy Doniger which the author describes as an “alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they tell.” The book was initially published by Viking Penguin in 2009 and later in India by Penguin's Indian subsidiary, Penguin India.

In February 2014, it was the subject of litigation in India by the group Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samithi (Hindi, literally, "Committee for Struggle to Save Education"), alleging violations of a law which punishes "deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage the feelings of any religious community." 

The book was criticised by Shiksha Bachao Andolan arguing that the work was "riddled with heresies" and that the contents are offensive to Hindus. Certain content and wordings in the book were challenged by Dina Nath Batra, the head of Shiksha Bacho Andolan in a lawsuit and the publisher Penguin India agreed to destroy all the existing copies within six months commencing from February 2014.

And remember this was year 2009, when Sunil Khilnani was reviweing this book.

Can one tell a history of the Hindus through their stories? That is the challenge that American scholar and Sanskritist Wendy Doniger sets herself in this book, a culmination of many years of teaching and engagement with Hindu thought and writing. One thing those years have made clear to Doniger is the difficulty of defining Hinduism. The term itself lacks any roots within India—only after the seventeenth century can we find the first usage of the title ‘Hindupati’ or Lord of the Hindus—and there is no agreed doctrine, founder, or church-like institution with which it is identified. There is no Hindu canon. Nor do the Hindus themselves form a race, or inhabit a narrowly specified territory.

What does connect them and set them apart, Doniger argues, is the fact that their imaginations, and many of their social practices, are structured by a vast web of stories—texts that spin across and through the languages and cultures of the subcontinent. Doniger calls it ‘intertextuality’, the self-conscious reference to stories that came before, all the way back to the Rig Veda. And from there on, the Brahmanas, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Shastras, Puranas, Tantric texts, the philosophical schools whose networks extended from the Tamil South up to Kashmir, the poetry and song of the Bhakti movements. There is no comparable output in any of the other great instances of the moral and religious imagination still available to us today.

Such texts can’t, however, be read as open windows on the societies that produced them. We don’t even know when some of the most fertile Hindu texts were composed. The Mahabharata and Ramayana, for instance, can only be dated to some time between 300 BC and AD 300 and 200 BC and AD 200 respectively. Still, Doniger is interested in the tensions between history (what exactly happened) and what societies tell themselves about what is happening. Her passion is the human imagination.

Doniger calls her book an ‘alternative history’ because she believes the other histories overemphasise the Brahminic wellsprings of Hindu stories. She argues, effectively, that the ‘high’ texts have quite often fed off low tales. She shows in particular how the voices of women, Dalits and tribals have energised many Brahminic scripts. So too, she makes us hear the voices of Buddhist and Jain thought, and later of Islam and Christianity, in dialogue with the Hindu texts. Just as those lower in society sought to Sanskritise and Kshatriyise, so the Sanskrit texts were permeable to what she terms ‘deshification’—the absorption of local, ‘small’ traditions.

Doniger’s capacity for a ‘shlesha’ of empathy and criticism fails in her treatment of Hindutva, though she pokes fun at it.

She draws out the layered cruelties and conflicting natures of Hindu texts with verve, among them the story of Ekalavya, the expert tribal archer in the Mahabharata. He displays his skill by unleashing arrows into the mouth of a dog. Arjuna, outraged that someone of lower caste can do this and threatened by his prowess, tells Ekalavya’s guru, Drona, to put a stop to it. Drona requires Ekalavya to cut off his thumb, which he does. The story reveals and revels in the injustice of caste. But Doniger also cites other versions—for instance, a Jain text in which Arjuna is shown as cruel and vindictive. These constitute what Doniger calls the ‘intertextual’ argument and conversation of the Hindus—with the Mahabharata as a central clearing house for this vast network of disputation. One of her arresting comparisons likens the Mahabharata to ‘an ancient Wikipedia, to which anyone who knew Sanskrit...could add a bit here, a bit there’.

But the central insight driving her argument concerns the Hindu way of telling stories, a capacity to make not just art, but ethics, out of ambiguity. It’s a characteristic embodied in the Sanskrit figure of speech known as ‘slesha’. Slesha—literally ‘embrace’—holds together at once two different stories or images, allowing the listener or reader to switch between them. This is essentially a metaphoric capacity: to see something as something else. It also offers a way out of any impasse. As E.M. Forster put it, ‘Every Indian hole has at least two exits’.

In such a universe, meaning is never settled—and so, neither, is authority. Claimants to authority, from the gods themselves to the human scribes who record their doings to modern-day gurus who hold forth on the texts, climb up ladders but also slide down snake chutes. This fosters an internal pluralism: within the individual, the possibility of internal conflict between the demands of society’s moral code and a more universal ethics is never resolved or far from the surface. The recognition of ambiguous meaning also enables, though in more complex and sometimes attenuated ways, an attitude of pluralism towards other moral cosmologies and religions.

The eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, put this capacity for pluralism down to polytheism, a religious view that saw nature as distinguished not by order and beauty, but “by the various and contrary events of human life”. “So sociable is polytheism,” wrote Hume, “that the utmost fierceness and aversion which it meets with in an opposite religion is scarcely able to disgust it and keep it at a distance”. Now, this sociability is hardly one that would guarantee survival in a biological species; and polytheism has been a characteristic mainly of ancient religions, which rarely got beyond the lower branches of the Darwinian tree of human belief systems. Why, then, has Hinduism been able to survive, with some vigour, across such a span of human history? Some, of course, over the past century and more have feared that it possibly cannot—and have hoped to make Hinduism more mono in its theism.

It’s precisely the capacity of the Hindu imagination to keep telling and re-telling stories, rather than to box them up into a single authorised narrative or code, which has kept it in business—and enabled it to flourish within a society at once of great internal complexity and which has also regularly encountered tough external pressures.

Doniger takes an obvious joy in the stories she analyses, and one of many pleasures in the book is her consideration to animals in the Hindu world—as objects of sacrifice, consumption, devotion and protection, sometimes all at once. The idea of non-violence, ahimsa, is first developed in relation to the treatment of animals—a matter of public concern to rulers, who encouraged forms of casuistry to justify animal sacrifice. The cow, of course, figures. But Doniger more interestingly tracks the importance of dogs. The Mahabharata, she notes, begins and ends with stories about justice for dogs. She also brings the horse back to the centre of the Hindu imagination. From the great Ashvamedha sacrifice, described in shudder-inducing detail in the Vedas, to the raging hooves of Kalki, it is the horse—an animal not native to the subcontinent—that has fascinated Hindus.

But for all the delights in Doniger’s scholarship, there is a deeper question she might have done well to confront. How did the Hindu capacity for moral pluralism actually stand in relation to Indian society? Doniger notes and celebrates the presence in many texts of challenges to hierarchy and caste. She shows that caste was not invariably an intellectual or philosophical prison. It was possible to think oneself out of it, to criticise its injustice, mock its absurdities. But she doesn’t probe a central paradox: Why did such critical thoughts and stories gain such little purchase on the social order? The astonishing plurality of Hindu thought—its vast ocean of polydox beliefs—is only matched by its equally staggering orthopraxy, the unchanging rigidity of social patterns and practices. The old Hindus seem to have perfected ‘repressive tolerance’ well before Herbert Marcuse discovered it in California.

Similarly, Doniger sets out but does not fully unravel some of the central dilemmas embodied in texts like the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata poses the problem of the world’s moral irrationality. If the concept of Karma appears to suggest a rational moral economy—that my present action will have a future pay-off—this idea is constantly subverted in the Mahabharata, where one more throw of the dice again and again determines the moral horizon. “The Mahabharata sees a vice behind every virtue, a snake behind every horse, and a doomsday behind every victory,” Doniger writes, and so every moral choice and act is somehow the wrong choice. In fact, the notion of Karma so diffuses the location of merit and de-merit, makes them such mobile and transferable qualities that it is impossible to track causality. Sinners too, can go to heaven, despite their intentions—if they happen simply to be in contact with some salvaging ritualistic practice. What sort of moral universe can be sustained if there is such a weak relation between intention and consequence?

More disappointing in this important book is Doniger’s treatment of recent history. Kipling and Foster are her orienting stars in discussing the colonial period, and she conveys little sense of the intellectual ferment in India at the time—the many experiments with religion, politics, caste, and the different meanings that Hindu ‘reform’ came to hold. This leads directly to the book’s greatest weakness—the absence of any serious explanation of Hindutva. Doniger has a potent—indeed, quite felt—sense of its presence and projectile capacity, and has had occasion to reflect on it. But while she has roustabout fun at the expense of the adepts of Hindutva, she doesn’t stop to ask what it is about the potentialities within Hinduism, and what it is about the Hindus at this point in their history, that have conspired to breathe life into such versions of Hinduism. Her capacity for ‘double vision’, for empathy and criticism, here fails.

Doniger is an unstoppable teller of tales and a brilliant interpreter of them also. Yet, occasionally, one feels that, rather than delve deeper into the contradictions of history, she too, like her subjects stretching back many thousands of years, prefers just to tell one more story.

A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth

Patrick French reveals enough devil in Naipaul, the autocrat and the alchemist- Sunil Khilnani

"A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth,"

V.S. Naipaul once wrote, a myth that is ultimately in the keeping of others. Yet Naipaul has worked hard in recent decades to retain control over his personal story—producing numerous autobiographical essays and fragments, ever tucking himself into the folds of his writing. His books have set abroad the story of a poor sensitive youth of high-caste origin who wrenched himself out of a dissipated colonial-dominated black culture and, through sheer hard effort and dedication to his craft, clambered on to the ark of civilisation. He kept his helmsman's position there, in the myth, by his clear-eyed willingness to tell the truth.

Naipaul's tactic to appear helpless, get others to do his bidding, make them feel inadequate fails here. Patrick French is in control.

Notoriously secretive and controlling, Naipaul has seemed unwilling to cede to anyone else the authority to tell his life. So what could have possessed Patrick French to agree to write a life of Naipaul, authorised by his subject? French knew that an archive existed, largely closed to scholars and boxed away in the wilds of Oklahoma (the university at Tulsa had paid some half a million dollars for it). French told Naipaul he would only want to take on the project if he had access to all the available archival material, could quote freely, interview him at length, and retain full control over the book—which he proposed to take up to 1996. That year, Naipaul's first wife died, he sacked his Argentine mistress of 24 years, and married Nadira Alvi. Naipaul agreed to French's terms and, French notes, "stuck scrupulously to our agreement".

The result is gripping, magnificent—a triumph of the biographer's art. Patrick French's book peers unblinkingly at the dark, destructive energies that have sustained Naipaul's creativity. It counts and counts again the human—womanly—cost of Naipaul's drive to make himself and his work, and yet fully accords him, as a writer, his due.

It is not easy to make sense of Naipaul's life and work. Sprawled across four continents (the Caribbean and South America, England, India, Africa) it spans the eras of colonial rule, the struggle against that rule, the early decades of nationalist hopes and the brutal subsequent betrayals. What is so striking about Naipaul is how, out of this unprecedented diversity of experience, he has created and sustained a cohesive vision of the world—turning himself in the process from a 'regional' novelist of Caribbean street life to a maker of 'global' literature. On what authority did he ground his grand perspective—the fearless dissections of anti-colonialism, the future of Africa, the Muslim world—of civilisation itself? By labouring, in his own version, to be a disciplined writer, he proclaimed his fidelity to one enterprise: pen, pad, desk; nothing else.

French, through mastery over his materials and sources, restores to the purist tableau the messy stirring life—the mess that made the myth, and the books, possible. French weaves his myth-puncturing subtly into the narrative, knocking off Naipaul's poses one by one. Here, more crudely than French would want to note them, are at least half dozen that he addresses.

Naipaul's Brahminic origins and its lasting effects, part of his own self-image, have become a trope by which he and others have explained his mannerisms and attitudes. Paul Theroux made much of this in his vicious homage to his master. But as French delves into the lineages and history of the Naipaul family (an excellent portrait of the family—large, cantankerous, chippy, given to violence and habitually on the make), he sheds doubt on the idea that Naipaul's father, Seepersad, had Brahmin origins.

Naipaul has always stressed his devotion to his father—by all accounts a man of some charm, bookish, moody and severely impractical. As French suggests, he sentimentalised and idolised his father. Only very recently, to French, has he spoken of feeling 'great rage' at Seepersad's paternal incompetence. But even as a young man at Oxford, Naipaul often chose to ignore his father's requests—especially to help Seepersad fulfil his own writerly ambitions. Conversely, Naipaul distanced himself from his mother, erasing her from his self-creation myth (originally doting, she later more or less disowned him). Yet it was his mother and her rough-hewn family who dominated the Naipaul household—and made it practically possible for him to advance.

Another integral strand of Naipaul's auto-mythology was his rejection of his Caribbean origins, his denial that Trinidad shaped him in lasting ways (he refused any mention of Trinidad in his Nobel acceptance). Yet French is perceptive and convincing on just how profoundly he was shaped by Trinidadian culture. The rich dialect (which even later in life, in the company of fellow islanders, he could slip into), the styles of humour, and most significantly the ease with which the culture encouraged people to reinvent themselves without feeling any sense of lost authenticity. Naipaul adopted the idea of masquerade, 'playing ole Mas'; the persona of the Trinidadian 'smart man', a clever, stylish deceiver. He also perfected what French terms 'Trinidadian street style', 'picong' or piquant humour—an oracular outrageousness.

After he had moved to London, though, Naipaul took pride in keeping his fellow West Indian writers at arm's length. He saw early that if he was to achieve the success he was after, he must escape the trap of being a 'regional', Caribbean writer. Yet French, in his reconstruction of the lower reaches of London literary life in the early and mid-1950s, shows how close Naipaul was with other black and colonial writers—George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Edward Braithwaite, Jan Carew and others—and how much he learned from them about what it was to be a writer.

Here, French gives a more general correction to the founding myth of Naipaul and—his scrupulous self-reliance. It's a conceit most thoroughly undermined by the story of Naipaul's first wife, Patricia Hale. Her story becomes a biography within a biography, and French is able to tell this through letters and some 28 volumes of diaries left at her death. Naipaul met Pat while at Oxford, and after crushing her ambitions to be an actress, he manipulated her into abject dependence. Pat understood his methods: "If I'm unhappy you just say you can't bear other people being miserable and that I'm more or less driving you to drink"; but she was docile, and in awe (he became, in her diaries, 'The Genius'). French is able to show that Pat actually helped Naipaul in his writing—not just as a transcribing sounding board, but more substantively.

Finally, Naipaul cultivated the pose of the highly cerebral, reflective intellectual, aware of his history and circumstances, and willing to take responsibility for his actions. The unthinking, instinctual attitudes he claims to find in many parts of the world have evoked his deepest contempt. And yet: French shows again and again Naipaul's own surrender to instinctual urges, his inability to pursue introspection, and his unwillingness to take responsibility for his own actions. (One could argue that this biography is an attempt at rigorous self-accounting—but alas he had to commission someone else to do it for him.)

Deception and self-justification defined his relations with women. French writes about these relations—with Pat, prostitutes, Naipaul's mistress Margaret, and the 'second Lady Naipaul', Nadira—with delicacy but spares no one. On the basis of Pat's diaries and letters, French judges her to be on "par with other great, tragic, literary spouses such as Sonia Tolstoy, Jane Carlyle and Leonard Woolf", without denying her own psychological errors. The diaries, he observes, are also "a record of a kind of blankness", evasive and self-deluding about the degree to which Naipaul's writing drew on life and especially his life with Margaret.

French pays considerable attention to Naipaul's liaison with Margaret, the central sexual relationship of his life. Asked how it started, Naipaul would say: "It was not a meeting of minds"; or, as French puts it, "A kink in his personality met a kink in hers, and snagged". Paraphrasing her letters, French reveals a sado-masochistic relationship—summoned to accompany him on his writing journeys, they would have several weeks together during which he would beat and sexually degrade her, before he would tire of her and despatch her back to Argentina or London. Again she would be called, again she returned, explaining her infatuation thus: "Being with you is like always being in a film." One wonders a little just what was being shown in the film houses of Buenos Aires.

Naipaul abused all the women close to him. French notes that when Naipaul recalled how he told Pat of his involvement with Margaret, Naipaul "characteristically, recalled the disclosure of infidelity in terms of his own suffering". He made Pat comfort him for what he had been doing. With Margaret, he asserted that he as much as she was the victim of his violence—he had been somehow forced to it. And, in a scene which is particularly macabre and perverse, French describes how, after Pat's death, Naipaul made his new fiance, Nadira, collect Pat's ashes, carry them in a gray plastic bag, and then scatter them in the Wiltshire woodland.

Naipaul came to perfect this stance: controlling a situation by appearing helpless, then getting others to do his bidding—while making them feel that they were doing it inadequately. In this biography, however, this method has failed him. This may be an authorised biography, but it is firmly and in every sense in Patrick French's control—and he has written a superb account of the life, as what it is. Now, knowing the myth, having read the life, one goes back to the work. That is Naipaul's monument. We are many, who lead less than exemplary lives; but very few are able to turn the matter of their lives into great work. Naipaul, as Patrick French lets us still better see, is one of them. 

Book Reviewed- 'The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul' by Patrick French, Picador, Pages: 576; Rs. 595. In Outlook Magazine | Apr 21, 2008

Liberating perspective :Leela Gandhi

From the last word..

IN his introduction to the recently published The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Amit Chaudhuri insists that "this anthology is not a riposte to any other anthology". But riposte it is. The thoughtful, if often provocative, organisation and presentation of modern Indian writing in this volume comes as a timely rejoinder to prevailing literary orthodoxies, held in place by a pantheon of postcolonial critics, commentators, editors and anthologisers. According to Chaudhuri, the current critical consensus on Indian literature is constrained by a series of lamentable "misreadings". 

Such misreadings are visible in, for example, the privileging of Indian-English writing over its vernacular counterparts; the valorisation of the novel form with its new found respectability (akin, Chaudhuri maintains, to dentistry) over other genres, specifically poetry; and, finally, in the unthinking celebration of postmodern pastiche over the quieter, and possibly more profound, pleasures of realism. This position, readers may recall, stands in stark contrast to the one assumed by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West in their controversial, The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997.

Where Rushdie and West informed their international audience that English "India novels" constituted a "more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 'official languages' of India", Chaudhuri, irascibly, begs to differ. How, he asks, would the "West" react, if , in the event of some unanticipated bibliographic disaster, all of Britain's modern and ancient cultures disappeared from view, leaving the rest of the world to judge English literature on the basis of a few paltry contemporary novels? What if Julian Barnes, Angela Carter and Martin Amis, alone, were entrusted with the literary labour of bringing England out of an apparent age of obscurity? An absurd prospect, but no more so than the situation where, "Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England and America and whom one might have met at a party, most of whom have published no more than two novels, some of them only one".

Why, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature seems to ask, should Europe alone claim the privilege of representing itself as a whole culture? And, even more important, why should the Indian reader/writer collude in the arbitrary fracturing of her complex and confluent literary inheritance? Once, writing in the wake of the barbarisation and ghettoisation of culture perpetrated by Nazism in Europe, the great German philologist Ernst Robert Curtius, extolled, as politically expedient, a composite view of European literature. Faced with the regional, cultural and religious divisiveness of the time, the critic, he believed, was ethically obliged to show the presence of "Homer in Virgil, Virgil in Dante, Plutarch and Seneca in Shakespeare, Shakespeare in Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen ... the Odyssey in Joyce; Aeschylus, Petronious, Dante ... Spanish mysticism in T. S. Eliot". Albeit on a lesser scale, the anthology under review is driven by similar convictions.

Refusing to indulge the false (and damaging) linguistic hierarchies so apparent in the Rushdie and West anthology, this volume draws our attention, anew, to the symbiotic development of vernacular and English literatures in modern India. If colonial education led directly to the rise of English in this country, it also provoked a concurrent efflorescence within the vernacular languages. So much so, that "many of the greatest and most interesting writers in the vernacular languages were or are students or teachers of English literature". The immediate benefit of this liberating perspective is that it opens up the very culture of Indian secular modernity to a vertiginous variety of voices and views. If the epochal publication of Midnight's Children conferred on modern Indian history, "the air of a fancy dress party ... full of chatter, music, sex, tomfoolery, free drinks and rock and roll", the diverse writers gathered in this collection complicate that vision. For the crisis of modernity also speaks its name, poignantly and eloquently, in Michael Madhusudan Dutt's self-divided cosmopolitanism, in Nirmal Verma's stark European landscapes, in O. V. Vijayan's mystical atheism, and in the Oriya memoirist Fakir Mohan Senapati's struggle against the hegemony of Bengali.

Aspects of this anthology may well alienate some readers. The editorial headnotes are chatty to a fault, and the selections themselves are fairly idiosyncratic. Bengal is predictably pre- eminent, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu literatures are clumped together under a featureless "The South", and there is something puzzling about the omission of Maharashtra from a volume devoted to the representation of Indian secular modernity. So too, one is not always persuaded by Chaudhuri's protestations about the very literary fashions of which he is, in some ways, a direct beneficiary as a new-Indian-writer-in-English. Nonetheless, the clarity of editorial purpose and the elegance of most translations are exemplary, and invite us to welcome The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature as a major literary event.

(Leela gandhi is Co-Editor of Post-Colonial Studies and teaches English at the School of English, La Trope University, Australia.) 

{As on the Online Edition of 'The Hindu', Sunday, August 19, 2001}

Vernacular Modernity: Girish Karnad

An anthology of modern Indian literatures, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, including the vernaculars, edited by noted novelist Amit Chaudhuri this time, tries to represent the complexity that is modern India. We present two reviews which look at the book from different perspectives. Girish Karnad feels the anthology tilts too much towards Bengali and English and lacks a cohesive organising principle. 

But, in going against currently prevailing orthodoxies and upsetting established linguistic hierarchies, the collection is a landmark, says Leela Gandhi. (Soon in the next post..)

Squandered Opportunity: Girish Karnad

IN his Introduction to the Vintage Book of Indian Writing ( 1947- 1997), Salman Rushdie declared that the one point he wanted to establish through his anthology was that "the prose writing - both fiction and non-fiction - created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what is being produced in the 16 'official languages' of India, the so-called 'vernacular' languages, during the same time: and indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, 'Indo-Anglian' literature represents the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books". The storm raised by this obviously unsubstantiatable statement hasn't yet settled down. So, although Amit Chaudhuri dissociates himself from "the sanctimonious outrage and self-congratulatory response to the remark in the liberal, middle-class India", and declares, in his Introduction to The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, that "this anthology is not a riposte to any other anthology", Rushdie's contentious presence is very palpable in the background when Chaudhuri asks, "Can it be true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful writers who write in English?" Again and again, throughout this anthology, Chaudhuri is at pains to explain how deeply his sympathies lie with the "vernacular" literatures and how his anthology is only an attempt to bring those riches to the attention of the English-reading world. 

This raises the question of how faithfully an anthology of this kind can be expected to mirror this rich and complex entity. Even allowing for the fact that, despite its claim to be an anthology of Indian "literature", the volume contains no poetry or drama and focuses entirely on prose, it would be unrealistic to expect every Indian literature to be represented within the confines of a single volume. Omissions are inevitable, but, I fear, one is less than persuaded by the reasons offered by Chaudhuri for his. "This is not a representative anthology," he tells us, "there is nothing, for instance, from Assamese, Gujarati, Marathi and Punjabi....This is so partly because I couldn't find enough translations of quality in these languages from which to make a selection, and partly because there wasn't enough space...."

This book has 632 pages of main text. Of these, 130 are devoted to Bengali, and 300 to English. It is hardly surprising then that there isn't much space left for other languages. And yet Chaudhuri adds, "This slight tipping of the scale towards 'regional' or 'vernacular' writing is not strategic or premeditated, but a numerical fact that has emerged after the completion of the selection". Can cramming six vernacular languages into a third of the book, while the remaining two- thirds is devoted to the two languages with which Chaudhuri is familiar, be described as "tipping of the scale towards" the vernaculars ? Is he being ironic? Naive? Insensitive? Or is he - a suspicion that becomes stronger as one goes along - merely justifying his laziness?

An editor of an anthology such as this is not merely expected to select from what is ready at hand and then yield to the "numerical fact that emerges". Once he has done his groundwork, he is expected to decide how much weightage should be given to the different literatures he is choosing from, and when he has made his final choice, give the reader some idea of the basis on which the weightage was distributed. The extraordinary thing about this anthology, however, is that, apart from a scrappy two- and-a-half page apologia, there is no Introduction explaining why a particular piece was chosen, how the editor relates to the work and, most important of all, how the work chosen fits into the editor's total perception of the state of Indian literature. Instead, we are presented with two reprinted articles, which were originally written for and published in totally different, unrelated contexts.

One of these is about the development of the Indian novel in English! The other is titled "Modernity and the Vernacular", but is devoted entirely to Bengali, bringing home to us once again how for Chaudhuri the only vernacular which merits attention is Bengali . His complacent assumption that the experience of the Bengali renaissance has national relevance ( if not, what is the article doing at the head of this anthology?) does great injustice to literatures such as Urdu, whose confrontation with colonialism was far more violent, far more traumatic. Since he goes back to the 19th Century to trace the origins of modernity in Indian writing, a balanced perspective could only have been achieved by taking into account a non-Bengali classic like Mirza Hadi 'Ruswa' 's Umrao Jan Ada, which fiercely engaged with contemporary history and altered the subsequent development of the Indian novel. (And there are several translations of the book available, including one by Khushwant Singh, called The Courtesan of Lucknow.)

The extracts are generally well chosen, but safe. The English section includes the works of a few young writers, such as Sunetra Gupta, Aamer Hussein, Ashok Banker and Rohit Manchanda, on which Chaudhuri should be commended, for otherwise the choice of extracts is so predictable as to be dull. It is difficult to see what new insight a Western reader interested in Indian literature could possibly gain from being offered such chestnuts as Midnight's Children, The Golden Gate, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, The Serpent and the Rope, or The Engish Teacher. The same scarce space could have been made available to writers from other vernaculars, or to other, lesser-known writers in English, or, if these marquee names were inescapable, to their lesser-known works.

The impression that not much serious thought has gone into the book is further strengthened by the chaotic organisation of the material.The first section, marked "Introduction", is followed by sections titled, "Bengal Renaissance and After", "Hindi", "Urdu", "The South" (in which three South Indian languages are lumped together in a manner reminiscent of the days when anyone South of the Vindhyas was called a "Madrassi") and finally "English". The basis for classification would thus seem to be linguistic, except that wedged in the penultimate position, without any explanation, is the section, "Autobiographies"! It's not as though this rubric enables the editor to reach out to other languages. For, although we are told ,"Some of the most important and creative work in modern Indian writing has been done in the genre of autobiographies", three of the four items included are again from English. Large statements about "Indian writing", followed by a quick reversion to Bengali or English, is a recurrent feature of Chaudhuri's editorial method. If he was sincere about finding good vernacular autobiographies, surely it wouldn't have taken much effort to locate Lakshmibai Tilak's magnificent Marathi autobiography, Smriti Chitre? Lakshmibai was an illiterate Chitpavan Brahmin, whose husband converted to Christianity in the late 19th Century. Her autobiography vividly describes her struggle not only to cross caste and family barriers to join her husband but also to realise her own potential in the new and unfamiliar world opening up in front of her. And we have an excellent translation by Josephine Inkster, called I Follow After, which is still in print after 50 years.

Again, if the appearance of the autobiography as a distinct genre is an index to the emergence of modern self-consciouness, some consideration would have been in order of what is probably the first Indian autobiography, Ardhakathanak, a 17th Century record by a Jain trader called Banarasi Lal. This book too is available in an excellent English translation by Mukund Lath.

Talking of this genre, probably the most significant development in the last half century of Indian literature has been the appearance in Marathi of "dalit" autobiographies, which for the first time in the entire history of Indian writing have given voice to the world of the untouchables. Dalit contribution to contemporary Indian sensibility is so unique that if no satisfactory translations were available, fresh ones should have been commissioned. As for Dalit fiction, A. K. Ramanujan has rendered into English several short stories by the Kannada writer, Devanooru Mahadeva.

Chaudhuri's excuse that "translations of quality" are not available simply won't wash. On the contrary, he doesn't seem to have made the minimal effort to equip himself for the task he has undertaken. The volume has been beautifully produced.

The authority of Picador will no doubt get it a wide distribution. It's a shame then that such an opportunity should have been so thoughtlessly squandered. 

(Girish Karnad is a playwright, actor and director who has received many awards for his plays, including the Jnanpith Award in 1998.)

{As on the Online Edition of 'The Hindu', Sunday, August 19, 2001}

Is Indian Modernity Working: Shashi Tharoor

Books Reviewed: The Idea of India: Sunil Khilnani, 1997

A mid the popular ferment that forged an Italian nation out of a congeries of principalities and statelets in the nineteenth century, the novelist Massimo Taparelli d'Azeglio memorably wrote, "We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians." Oddly enough, when the British pulled down the Union Jack in 1947, no Indian nationalist succumbed to the temptation to express the same thought-"we have created India. Now all we need to do is to create Indians." 

Such a sentiment would not have occurred to the preeminent voice of Indian nationalism, Jawaharlal Nehru. India's first prime minister would never have spoken of "creating" India or Indians, merely of being the agent for the reassertion of what had always existed but had been long suppressed. Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time, that separated Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time, that asked the Keralite peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri Pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time. Creating Indians was, in fact, what the nationalist movement did.

After all, this was the India that Winston Churchill had once dismissed as "a geographical expression"-a land that was "no more a single country than the Equator." Churchill was rarely right about India, but it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the range of levels of economic development that India does. The Indian nation is not united by a shared ethnicity (it incorporates almost every conceivable racial type), a common language (it has at least 17, according to the constitution, or 35, if one counts all languages spoken by more than a million people), or a single religion (India is home to every faith known to mankind, and Hinduism, the majority religion, itself reflects the country's diversity).

And yet India is more than the sum of its contradictions. It is a country held together, in the words of Nehru, "by strong but invisible threads . . . a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive." That nebulous quality is what the analyst of Indian nationalism is ultimately left with. It is an idea-the idea of India. But what is that idea? Nehru articulated it as pluralism vindicated by history, seeing the country as an "ancient palimpsest" on which successive rulers and subjects had inscribed their visions without erasing what had been asserted previously. A generation of nationalist historians echoed him, making "unity in diversity" the most hallowed of independent India's self-defining slogans.

In the 1950s and 1960s came the skeptics, almost all based abroad, who began to take scalpels to this sanctified idea of India. Nirad Chaudhuri, the iconoclastic author of The Continent of Circe and other volumes of largely autobiographical social commentary, excoriated India's nationalist presumptions and what he saw as its civilizational inadequacies.

V. S. Naipaul, a descendant of Indian indentured laborers in the Caribbean, visited his ancestral homeland and chronicled his disappointment in An Area of Darkness and the even more savagely negative India: A Wounded Civilization. A host of Western writers portrayed the problems and limitations of India's modernization as portending the imminent breakdown of the nation and the inevitable collapse of its political institutions. Despite the doomsayers-and there were many who predicted India's disintegration well before the twentieth anniversary of its independence from British rule-the country survived, withstanding political, military, and economic challenges. By 1990 Naipaul was writing in celebration of the "million mutinies" through which Indian diversity was working to transform the democratic society he had so recently been prepared to write off. 

How did India preserve and protect a viable idea of itself in the course of the last 50 years, while it grew from 370 million people to 970 million, reorganized its state structures, and sought to defend itself from internal and external dangers, all the while remaining democratic? Explaining this is central to the task taken on by Sunil Khilnani, the author of The Idea of India, a title probably borrowed from Amartya Sen's celebrated lecture at Oxford in 1993. "Reflective and incisive nonfictional interrogations of India's distinctive modernity have yet to be produced," Khilnani claimed recently, setting the stage for his own work. This comment was-as I informed the editor who offered me this review-in a dismissive notice of my own book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium. Though I mention this to declare an interest, I rather like Khilnani's slender volume, an amiable disquisition on Indian modernity structured as four essays on democracy, political economy, urbanization, and Indian identity.

RETELLING TALES 

"This book," Khilnani tells us in his introduction, "is an initial venture into the task of retelling the political history of independent India." The qualification is necessary; Khilnani competently organizes a series of reflections on well-worn themes, and despite the occasional lapse into the turgid prose that afflicts all political scientists, generally does so with style. Style is central to both the pleasures and the pitfalls of his narrative. Khilnani is charmingly self-indulgent, fond of sweepingly colorful generalizations. (The Government's Planning Commission is a "retirement home for the socially benevolent," whatever that may mean.) His penchant for sweeping one-liners is fetching in an academic-who can resist a chapter that begins with the sentence "India in the 1950s fell in love with the idea of concrete"?-but he cannot resist an epigram, even when it is more witty than wise. "Like the British empire it supplanted, India's constitutional democracy was established in a fit of absent-mindedness," he declares, ignoring the overwhelming weight of evidence to the contrary in nationalist literature.

Khilnani tells us he is working on a biography of Nehru, and he is sound on the lasting contributions made to the Indian state by that remarkable man, whose extemporization of Indianness remains an enduring legacy to so many Indian liberals. A highly self-aware scholar, Khilnani ends his book with an assertion of the value of Western political theory and a useful if contentious bibliographical essay that students of Indian politics will appreciate. But the unwary should be warned that Khilnani's glibness sometimes trips him up. Any reader of Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography knows that he did not "discover" vegetarianism in Holborn; Nehru was never a head of state; Chandigarh is not "400 kilometers north of Delhi," which would put it in Kashmir; the Mughals entered India in 1526, not 1528 (this would be like a British historian placing the Battle of Hastings in 1068). This sort of carelessness is disconcerting, for it undermines the reader's willingness to take some of the author's more esoteric suggestions seriously. For instance, Khilnani attributes the existence of "less stark inequalities" in the Indian state of Kerala to its "own cultural forms of matrilineal property inheritance"-a dubious proposition at best, since not all Kerala communities are matrilineal and inheritance per se has few redistributive implications, but one made worse by being wholly unsubstantiated.

THE FAILURES

More important, Khilnani's exegesis on Indian modernity inadequately examines its failures. Nehru's legacy to India was a mixed one. It consisted of four major pillars-democratic institution-building, staunch secularism, nonalignment, and socialist economics. The first two were indispensable to the country's survival; the third (not examined by Khilnani) preserved its self-respect and enhanced its international standing, though without bringing any concrete benefits to the Indian people; the fourth was disastrous, condemning the Indian people to poverty and stagnation and engendering inefficiency, red-tapism, and corruption on a scale rarely rivaled elsewhere.

In the five decades since independence, Indian democracy has failed to create a single Indian political community. Instead, we have become more conscious than ever of what divides us: religion, region, caste, language, ethnicity. The Indian political system has become looser and more fragmented. Politicians mobilize support along ever-narrower lines of political identity. It has become more important to be a "backward caste" Yadav, a "tribal" Bodo, or a sectarian Muslim than to be an Indian. This is particularly ironic because one of the early strengths of Nehruvian India-the survival of the nationalist movement as a political party, the Congress Party serving as an all-embracing, all-inclusive agglomeration of the major political tendencies in the country-led to this situation by undermining the evolution of a genuine multiparty system. Had the nationalist movement given birth to, say, three parties-one right of center, one social democrat, one communist-a culture of principled and ideological contestation might have evolved in India's polity.

Instead the Congress Party's dominance stifled this process, and opposition to it (with a few honorable exceptions, like the pro-free enterprise Swatantra Party between 1959 and 1974) was largely based on the assertion of identities to which the Congress was deemed not to have given full expression-regional, religious, or caste-based. With the increasing weakness of the Congress, politicians have been tempted to organize themselves around identities other than party (or to create parties to reflect a particularist identity).

A distinctive feature of the Nehruvian legacy was its visionary rejection of India's assorted bigotries and particularisms. The Nehrus-displaced Kashmiris-were, by upbringing and conviction, completely secular. Not only did Indira Gandhi marry a Parsi, but her daughters-in-law were an Italian Christian and a Punjabi Sikh. The one strand of political opinion Nehru and his offspring abhorred was that of Hindu religious revivalism. Nehru himself was an avowed agnostic, as was his daughter until she discovered the electoral advantages of public piety. All four generations of Nehrus in public life remained secular in outlook and conduct. Their appeal transcended caste, region, language, and religion, something impossible to say of any other leading Indian politician. There could be no starker indication of the end of Nehruvianism than the fact that, 50 years after partition and independence, religion has again become a key determinant of political identity. Demolishing a mosque they say stands on a Hindu holy site, denouncing what they decry as the appeasement of minorities, clamoring for office and power for their "saffron brigades," Hindu revivalists have assertively attempted to convert the religion of the "majority" into a badge of Indian identity.

If the Nehruvian version of democracy is discredited, democracy itself is not. Amid India's myriad problems, it is democracy that has given Indians of every imaginable caste, creed, culture, and cause the chance to break free of their lot. There is social oppression and caste tyranny, particularly in rural India, but Indian democracy offers the victims a means of escape, and often-thanks to the determination with which the poor and oppressed exercise their franchise-of triumph. The significant changes in the social composition of India's ruling class since independence, both in politics and in the bureaucracy, are proof of democracy at work, but the poor quality of the country's democratic political leadership in general offers less cause for celebration. India's rulers increasingly reflect the qualities required to acquire power rather than the skills to wield it for the common good. Pluralist democracy is India's greatest strength, but its current manner of operation is also the source of its major weaknesses.

These new developments are ensuring a dramatic transformation of Indian society, but they imply another idea of India than the one in which the Nehruvians rejoice. The workings of Indian democracy have served to create and perpetuate India's various particularisms. The Hindu-Muslim divide is merely the most visible, but that within Hinduism, between caste Hindus and the former "untouchables," and now between the upper castes and the lower intermediate castes known as the "backwards," is actually transforming Indian society in ways the founding fathers did not anticipate. Caste, which Nehru and his ilk abhorred and believed would disappear from the social matrix of modern India, has not merely survived and thrived, but has become an instrument for highly effective political mobilization. Candidates are picked by their parties with an eye toward the caste loyalties they can call upon; often their appeal is overtly to voters of their own caste or sub-caste, urging them to elect one of their own. The result has been the growth of caste-consciousness and casteism throughout Indian society. In many Indian states, caste determines educational opportunities, job prospects, and governmental promotions; all too often, India's unique brand of affirmative action means you cannot go forward unless you're a "backward." Whether through elections or quotas, political mobilization in contemporary India has asserted the power of old identities, habits, faiths, and prejudices, which suggests a more complex form of "modernization" than that implicit in Khilnani's essays. 

SOCIALISM, INDIAN STYLE

In economics, too, the Indian idea described by Khilnani is fading. Self-sufficiency and self-reliance were the twin mantras of Nehruvian India, which shackled itself to statist controls that emphasized distributive justice above economic growth, stifled free enterprise, and discouraged foreign investment. The Government's reasons were embedded in the Indian freedom struggle: since the British had come to trade and stayed on to rule, Indian nationalists were deeply suspicious of foreign investment. (One of the lessons history teaches us is that history often teaches us the wrong lessons.) "Self-reliance" thus became a slogan: it guaranteed both political freedom and freedom from economic exploitation. The result was that for most of the five decades since independence, India pursued an economic policy of subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation, and distributing poverty. We called this socialism.

Socialism, Indian style, was a compound of nationalism and idealism. It was the conviction that items vital for the economic well-being of Indians must remain in Indian hands-not the hands of Indians seeking to profit from such activity, but the disinterested hands of the state, the father and mother to all Indians. In this kind of thinking, performance was not a relevant criterion for judging the utility of the public sector: its inefficiencies were masked by generous subsidies from the national exchequer, and a combination of vested interests-socialist ideologues, bureaucratic management, self-protective trade unions, and captive markets-kept it beyond political criticism.

The "permit-license-quota" culture of statist socialism allowed the ruling politicians to use politics as a vehicle for self-gratification. Over the years India has overflowed with the sort of professional politicians the educated middle classes have come to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in homespun who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing uncountable-and unaccountable-riches. Of all this, there is very little in Khilnani's book. His admiration for the Nehruvian project is boundless: Rajiv Gandhi, the impatiently modernizing prime minister, is mentioned precisely three times, whereas P. C. Mahalanobis, the socialist advisor to Nehru's Planning Commission, gets a fulsome seven pages, including the titles of the "technically striking but intellectually rather listless" papers he published as a statistician in the 1930s and 1940s.

In fact, India's misfortune, in Jagdish Bhagwati's famous aphorism, was to be afflicted with brilliant economists. And clamorous politicians: for every group claimed a larger share of a national economic pie that decades of protectionist economic policies prevented from growing. It is sadly impossible to quantify the economic losses inflicted on India over four decades of entrepreneurs frittering away their energies in queuing for licenses rather than manufacturing products, paying bribes instead of hiring workers, wooing politicians instead of understanding consumers, and getting things done through bureaucrats rather than doing things for themselves. The penny, or rather the paisa, finally dropped in the major financial crisis of 1991, which forced the Government to let sweeping dogmas die and to adopt new policies. India's economic liberalization since then has often seemed hesitant, but its essential repudiation of Nehruvianism now seems irreversible. 

INEVITABLE DIVERSITY

"The idea of India," Khilnani concludes, "has been constituted through struggles to balance contrary pulls in a coherent political project, to respect the diversities of culture with a commitment to a common enterprise of development." This unexceptionable proposition rests on an idea of India as, in essence, an ever-ever land, the product of a long history, a wide geography, and a short memory. This India is a plural nation, where diversity is as natural as sunshine and there is no alternative to democratic coexistence. The stresses and strains of competing identities are real. In pluralist India, it is essential that each citizen feels secure in his or her identities. But Indians have come to understand that while they may be proud to be Muslims or Marwaris or Mallahs, they are secure in these identities only because they are also Indians. It is their larger national identity that gives them the framework within which to work, trade, compete, and coexist with other members of the broader society, contend for political office, and feel safe behind defensible borders.

So the only idea of India that can work is that of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, costume, and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus-on how to manage without consensus. It is an India open to the contention of ideas and interests within it and unafraid of the power or the products of the outside world.

Our founding fathers wrote a constitution that gave passports to their ideals. Where Freudians note the distinctions that arise out of "the narcissism of minor differences," in India we celebrate the commonality of major differences. If America is a melting pot, then India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. Khilnani's four essays do not culminate in quite so direct an explication of his title. Yet his somewhat uneven, decidedly partial, but intelligent and readable book reveals that he belongs in a congenial camp, among those who cherish an idea of India as a land that safeguards the common space available to a medley of identities-an India that remains safe for diversity.

{From 'Foreign Affairs' January/February, 1998 Issue.}