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