Fort St. Gorge: T.S. Subramanian

FORT ST. GEORGE is now under the control of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Chennai Circle. It is a protected monument under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (Validation and Amendment) Act, 2010. There are 13 protected monuments inside the Fort under the ASI’s purview. Three of them are under the ASI’s control. They are Clive’s House, St. Mary’s Church and the old British Infantry Officers’ Mess, housing the Fort Museum now.

The Army has occupied the remaining 10 monuments under an agreement with the ASI—the “Arsenal” building; Big Warehouse; Wellesley House; Chaplain’s House; Garrison Engineers’ Depot; Guard Room; King’s Barracks; Last House on Snob’s Alley; Nursing Sisters’ House; and the ramparts, gates, bastions, ravelins with vaulted chambers, moats and glacis.

There is a palpable sense of history in every nook and corner of the Fort. This despite the swirling mass of a few thousand people thronging the Tamil Nadu government’s Secretariat housed there and the Army trucks thundering up and down the narrow streets. Boards announcing the Army canteen are seen almost everywhere. A 10-storeyed building inside the Fort, housing the State government’s offices, incongruously spikes the air. The ASI allowed the Tamil Nadu government to build it right in the heart of the Fort in 1969. There are boards indicating St. Mary’s Church, Clive’s Building, Sea Gate Street, James and Charles Street, King’s Barracks, Fort Museum, and so forth.

The steeple of St. Mary’s Church towers over visitors entering Fort St. George from one of the two sea gates facing the Bay of Bengal. “Do write that services are regularly held in this church. It is a live church, not a dead monument,” a church official tells this writer. It is the oldest Anglican church in India. Reverend Charles Herbert Malden, in his handbook St. Mary’s Church and Its Monuments, published in 1905, says: “It is not only the oldest place of worship built by the English settlers in India and now in use, but it is believed to be the oldest British building of any kind in the whole of India.” It was a chapel that grew into a church. Streynsham Master of the East India Company, who became the Governor and Commander in Chief of Fort St. George and the town of Madrasapatnam, was instrumental in building the church. Its construction began in 1678 and the consecration took place on October 28, 1680. Its architect was probably William Dixon, Master Gunner of the Fort. The first marriage to be solemnised in the church was that of Elihu Yale to Catherine Hymners on November 4, 1680.

Yale started his career as a writer of the East India Company but rose to become Governor of Madras for five years from 1687. Yale University in the United States is named after him because he gave a handsome donation to it. Robert Clive, the clerk-turned-soldier who laid the foundation of the British Empire in India, was married to Margaret Maskelyne on February 18, 1753, in this church. A prized possession of the church is a reproduction of Raphael’s painting The Last Supper. There are marble monuments in memory of the Governors of Fort St. George, their families and the Swedish missionary Frederick Christain Swartz, a portrait medallion of Thomas Munro and paintings of George Pigot, Streynsham Master and Elihu Yale, who were all Governors of Fort St. George/Madras.

In the churchyard are laid a number of tombstones, with epitaphs carved in beautiful calligraphy. But there are no coffins below. Thereby hangs a tale. Glyn Barlow, in his book The Story of Madras, says that the “English Burying Place” in those days was where the present Dr Ambedkar Government Law College is situated. By 1711, these stately tombs were “turned into receptacles for beggars and buffaloes”. When the French under Comte de Lally besieged Madras from December 1758 to February 1759, they used the tombs as a cover for their attacks on Fort St. George. After the French siege was broken, according to Barlow, the English destroyed the tombs but brought the slabs that bore the epitaphs and laid them in St. Mary’s churchyard. Opposite St. Mary’s Church, on Charles Street, is Admiralty House, which is now called Clive’s House. Robert Clive, who went on to become the Governor of Bengal, lived in this building for some time. A circular plaque embedded in the wall of the building says: “Robert 1st Lord Clive lived in this building in the year 1753. Truly Great in Arms and in Council.” The façade of this tall building has Ionic columns. It has a spacious banqueting hall. According to ASI officials, the building was used for holding courts to deal with interlopers and hence it was called Admiralty House. It now houses the offices of the ASI, Chennai Circle. In a corner of the building, the ASI has organised a permanent exhibition on Clive.

On the ground floor of Clive’s House were jail cells and strongrooms. The inner walls of the prison cells are sheathed with steel sheets and the ceiling is made of iron beams. The strongrooms are made of perforated iron sheets with iron grills and sturdy latches. There is a small tunnel too.

The Exchange building, housing the Fort Museum, is also replete with history. Upstairs was the “Long Room” or the Public Exchange Hall for the bartering of goods among the merchants of Fort St. George. On the roof was built the first lighthouse of Madras in 1796. P.S. Sriraman, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, Jodhpur Circle, said: “At its peak, the building was a beehive of commercial activity. On the ground floor were the offices, a warehouse, an auction room and a subscription library.” Madras Bank started functioning from this building in 1807. It later became Bank of Madras, and merged with Bombay and Calcutta Banks to form the Imperial Bank of India, now State Bank of India.

The Fort Museum is a period museum. Among the exhibits are uniforms worn by British Raj sepoys, their pistols, rifles, blunderbusses and flintlocks; expensive porcelain from the collections of the East India Company and the Nawab of Arcot; Clive’s letters, written with a wry sense of humour; aquatints of Thomas Daniell and William Daniell on the Madras of the 1790s; and portraits of Streynsham Master and Arthur Havelock, Governor of Fort St. George, done by Raja Ravi Varma.

-T.S. Subramanian

{As in Frontline, Commemorative Issue, Chennai at 375, September 5, 2014}

Making of Madras to Chennai: Geeta Doctor

Chennai turns 375 even as the old and the new stay ‘gridlocked by progress’

 From the air, Chennai—or old Madras—presents itself like a box of Diwali sweets waiting to be savoured. There are houses in cochineal pink, or ‘muttai pink’ (candy pink), as the colour is described, in iridescent greens, indigo blues, Gold Spot oranges, citron yellows, deep purples and many in combinations of one or two of these colours.

The colonial whites, the creams, the deeper municipal ochres on the walls have all been replaced in places where the government fiat runs by marshmallow pinks.

Chennai has now become a rainbow city of many different people, speaking in many tongues. You no longer look for the familiar signs of caste and community affiliations that once upon a time people wore proudly on their foreheads and wrapped around their waists to proclaim their sense of belonging. You no longer believe in the old Tamil saying­—“Every town is our hometown. Every man is our kinsman”—but glare suspiciously at the outsider and ask: where are you from?

There are enclaves now that are billed as ‘Little Korea’ and ‘Greater Japan’; sushi and khimchi are sold in supermarkets; less affluent pockets shelter the young men and women from the Northeast who find jobs in beauty parlours and restaurants trying to parlay their few words of English into recognisable sounds, “You want cold tea with Rhyme juice? No have Rhyme today,” even while others call them “chinky”. There are Thai massage parlours, Indonesian or Balinese spas, foot reflexology centres; and, just as macabre given the number of medical specialties that are on offer at the mecca of modern medicine that is now Chennai, discrete home-stays for the recently dead who may not have survived their treatment i.e. funeral parlours for different communities.

As seekers of old Madras (which turns a full, ripe 375 years this month) reach deep into the ann­als of the city’s past, pecking at the crevices of history like woodpeckers in search of grubs, what choices are there for the average citizen of Chennai?

The City has been gridlocked by progress. It’s currently being laced together by a steel and cement network of raised rapid transit systems of rail and road, tied into knots by the multiple arms of burgeoning flyovers. In a recent episode reminiscent of the more acrobatic efforts of those performing the ‘lungi dance’, a couple on a motorbike collided on a curve of one of the older flyovers (the Adyar flyover) and tragically, in the case of one of them, landed in a hospital; the lady, being more lucky, fell on the roof of a vehicle below, whereupon, in the best of film traditions, she fled the scene. Police sirens provided the background music.

Do you search for that perfect steel tumbler of decoction coffee or head for the latest counter at Starbucks and lick the froth from a global brand of the same stuff? Is this why this year’s Madras Heritage Week has seen a veritable explosion of exploratory walks along the dangerously eroded edges of the River Cooum that snakes its sulphurously perfumed sludge through parts of the city; is that why there are talks about the great and the good and group activities and performances that go way beyond the modest beginnings of what was seen by some as a retrograde hankering for a vanished colonial past? There are now over 150 separate events crammed into one week. Most of these are well attended, even if sometimes the participants seem to be of a certain age group and class.

A.P. Venkatachalapathy, the scholar who writes and speaks eloquently about the group of people he identifies as the “Anglophiliacs”, as if they suffered from some debilitating ailment that was bleeding the red blood corpuscles of the city of Chennai’s true inheritors, has this to say in his volume, Chennai not Madras—Perspectives of the City (Marg Publication, 2006): “The culture of this middle-class elite—its vegetarian food, coffee, the Music Academy, Bharatanatyam etc has come to stand not only for the city but Tamil culture as well. The anglophilia is well reflected in the extant histories of the city and in the skewed nature of conservation efforts.” By way of contrast, Venkatachalapathy avers, “The Dravidian parties, offshoots of the non-Brahmin movements with their agenda of social transformation that would empower backward castes, have been the dominant force shaping the city over the last half century. The Dravidian penchant for revivalist architecture and statue-raising, the spawning of a poster culture and public meetings marked by public rhetoric have given the city a distinct character, even if this has not exactly pleased the middle class.”

“Yes, it was all very much to do with nostalgia,” explains V. Sriram, the energetic co-convenor of Madras Heritage Week. An entrepreneur and writer who has written eloquently on south Indian music traditions, he leads groups of people around the narrow streets and bylanes of Georgetown, once known as Blacktown, or the inner city that serviced the White Town or colonial Madras, next to the what-is-now-called the Fort area, and incidentally still very much the centre of power. The Tamil Nadu government is located here since successive political leaders, while talking about finding a more suitable arena, have never been able to make a decisive shift to another location.

“But it is no longer a maudlin exercise,” Sriram insists. “It has become a celebration—warts of the city and all. Many presentations and talks focus on the positives and negatives of the past and present. The younger generation has taken to it in a big way by bringing in technology—photo shoots, tweets, FB posts, Flickr and Instagram images, mobile apps etc. They think it’s an opportunity to showcase the city in all its glorious colours.” It is still restricted to a small community, but no longer just an English-speaking one. The ratio of English to Tamil events is now 70:30, which is a good mix considering the city itself is cosmopolitan now. It’s also a completely voluntary event without any official sponsor. The very fact that Tamil media is focusing attention on it is a very big sign of change.

No right-thinking person would accuse the Dravidian movement of having run out of steam. Why, even as recently as a few weeks back, when a well-respected judge was turned away from attending a book release function at one of the older clubs run by the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association because he was wearing a white dhoti, or veshti, all the Dravidian parties roared their displeasure. The “sartorial despotism” was seen as a hangover of the colonial era and rou­ndly denounced. With almost immediate eff­ect, a judicial order was passed. Fines amo­unting to Rs 25,000 would be levied on any dissenting club official; office-bearers would face a one-year sentence in jail and the licence of the offending institution can­celled in the more extreme case. Cer­tain clubs were left bleating that the only reason to uphold the pants against the dhoti was to avert what they called “a wardrobe malfunction when in an inebriated condition”.

In this context, it’s curious to note that outside certain Tamil Nadu temples there are signs that say, ‘No wearing of lungis.’ We cannot even imagine what this might mean, unless the discrimination is against the wearing of the colourful variety of woven lungis, the checked and striped designs that were once famous in the region as ‘Madras Checks’ or even Bleeding Madras, a term that became fam­ous in the mid-20th century as exemplifying a fabric, where the colours would be guaranteed to run and therefore satisfying a certain segment of the North American public who sported shirts and dress materials of the same. Maybe some of these temples, conscious of these facts, would not want wearers to enter their precincts wearing ‘Bleeding Lungis’.

“I don’t think the heritage movement is a bad thing,” comments Pramod Balakrish­nan, a noted architect known for his environmentally sound buildings. “Looking after the old is as important for us as citizens of a city like Chennai, as is building for the future. In most European countries, there is an added responsibility in retaining the city centres and their historical buildings. After all, when you visit a new city, you don’t just want to wander through a mall. Unless you are in a place like Singapore or Dubai, you want to experience the older parts of the city to get a feel of what the place is all about. If you go to Georgetown today (old commercial heart of the city) it’s dead, but not so dead that you can’t revive it. It’s still possible. But you need the political will to do that.”

There are two ribbons of intense architectural activity that lead out of the city towards the south. One of them is called the East Coast Road (ECR): it abuts the sandy coastline of the Cor­omandel coast and boasts of the enclaves of the upwardly mobile, the city’s own Chennaifornians, each with at least one swimming pool. The other parallel highway, further inland and separated by an artificial riverway called the ‘Buckingham Canal’ for transporting food and goods in the days of the Raj, is the Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR). Both link Chennai, symbolically perhaps, to the old Pallava seaport and now the major tourist destination of the south. OMR is where Madras that was Chennai becomes the Electronic City, neither middle-class, nor Brahmin, nor Dravidian but netizens of the world. They come alive during different time zones, inhabit faceless condominiums and commune with each other in sound bites and eat their chop suey while sitting cross-legged on ergonomically designed chairs. They belong nowhere and everywhere.

How does a planner integrate these different strands of the city? I ask Balakrishnan. There are both extraordinary models of architectural excess to be seen as well as examples of modernistic imagery, a building for instance by the world-famous architect Zaha Hadid at the OMR, with small temples wedged in between them with village communities still raising their buffaloes and chickens. No provisions have yet been made for providing the most basic of amenities, water and sewage, for instance. “I don’t think we are planning for the future. I don’t think we’re able to see the future. We are planning from the past. Yes, it’s true there have been Master Plans but by the time we implement them, the city has already moved ahead of them. The infrastructure requirements are sporadic, not because we don’t have ideas for them but because the city administration does not work together. We are retrofitting our cities.”

But Chennai still frequently comes up as the top city in magazine surveys and opinion polls. So, is there a Chennai model of development that has not been noticed in the clamour for political mileage? “There is a model that has never been talked about,” says business journalist Sushila Ravind­ra­nath, who is researching a book on how the perception of Tamil Nadu has changed after liberalisation. “It is about social reforms, combined with development. We thought of noon meal schemes, reservations, private engineering colleges, healthcare way ahead of others. Enterprise flourished quietly. The Namakkal poultry industry is just one example. Comm­unities like the Gounders and Nadars (traditionally farmers or land-owning communities) helped each other set up enterprises. They have rarely been been celebrated like the Marwaris,” she says.

Madras being the capital of the Madras Presidency whose footprint extended to all the four southern states, the foundation had been laid for it to take off after independence. Once India opened up, there was no holding back. But business practices continue to be low-key, often family-run, until very recently. They do not take major risks, for which reason there has been little labour unrest in the state. While innovation has taken place at a comparatively rapid pace in the IT industry as evidenced by the booming development on Chennai’s IT highway, the OMR, it’s lagged behind in areas like telecom, petrochemicals.

Amongst the groups of Chennai citizens looking at the past is one that is planning to celebrate the ‘Living Statues’ that line the Chennai beachfront or the Marina Beach, the second largest sandy beach in the world as the visitor is often told. Poets and writers have been invited to recite the poems of Thiruvalluvar, Subramania Bharathi, Bharathi­dasan and others. Statues are a popular form of public art in the city, painted in gold and mounted on pedestals at various traffic roundabouts (now public urinals with graphic signs on their swing doors are proving to be a minor competition). It’s extraordinary to find the number of famous women who have made it to pedestal glory. If not for the feisty image of Kannagi flinging her golden anklet filled with rubies at the throne of the King of Madurai, there are images of the old poetess Avaiyar and of Annie Besant to remind us of the role played by women who have stamped their feet, either in anger like Kannagi or in the spirit of dance like the incomparable Rukmini Devi, founder of Kalakshetra and the gentrified, classicised version of the old dance form now rechristened as Bharatanatyam, or the iconoclastic Chandra­lekha who, defying conventions, used them to turn the dance world on its head and live again with the fire of the martial arts. Chennai too, at 375, is trying to live again. It is rewriting its history while reaching out to the next phase of its journey. The Chennai Express rolls on.

{Source: Outlook Magazine, Sep 01, 2014,Cover Story, Chennai 375, 'What Does Madras Bleed For?'}

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