Farzana Versey December 29, 2002

Tags: Struggle , Doubt , Longing , Love , Health , Women

Why Naipaul and Rushdie's armours have chinks

rel="tag" href="/tag/pop">pop culture.

Both Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul belong to the streets. Their books are burned there or their supporters perform a road show of solidarity. Art imitates art here while all the time pretending to uphold reality. An “off with his head!” for one effortlessly gets transposed with the headiness of the other’s proprietorial puffiness.

Both are clinging to roots they have no claims over. And they don’t give a damn about the soil.

Sitting in grey England, V.S.Naipaul has the audacity to comment on the burning flames of Gujarat so insensitively: “The original thing that started it was a terrorist act and must be considered so. It was meant to create a reaction.” He goes on to say that “every liberal person should extend a hand to that kind of movement from the bottom.”

I would dearly like to see this man come and live here and then give us his two-bit nonsense. And who is he to teach us about India when he does not have the basic decency to acknowledge the place he was born and brought up in? Trinidad is: “A billion people and a little island, which has done almost nothing for me.” Naipaul wants everyone to do things for him. And no one is quite up to his supposedly high standards. Apparently we, the idiots, were not intellectual enough to understand his books on India. What he fails to understand is that his books were not intellectual; they were reports written with a degree of panache.

Salman Rushdie had said once that the Indian attitude towards his literary endeavours had been the worst aspect of his incarceration: “Nothing about my plague years has hurt more than this rift. I felt like a jilted lover left alone with this unrequited, unbearable love. You can measure love by the size of the hole it leaves behind.”

Why does one get the feeling that for him that hole is a circle rather than a deep well?
The last time he visited with his son, he wrote in a London paper, “Exile…is a dream of glorious return. But the dream fades, the imagined return stops feeling glorious. The dreamer awakes. I almost gave up on India, almost believed the love affair was over for good. But as it turns out, not so.” What is this about exile? Who banished him?

If Rushdie had any self-respect he shouldn’t have bothered coming to India under the patronage of a government that was blissfully using him. How can you debunk extremist forces of which you have been the victim and accept such behaviour in others? There can be no doubt that Khomeini’s fatwa against him was most unfair and uncivilised, but surely he must find it ironical that while his ‘interpretation’ made him a victim, that of the fundamentalists in his ‘motherland’ make them the victimisers?

Interestingly, Naipaul’s rediscovery of his roots resulted in an alliance with a Pakistani, a knighthood from the British Empire and a Nobel Prize – some would say that the latter two are rather late in their appearance. But the other trophy, in the form of Nadira, has been a master stroke. The moment he is propped up as supping with the saffron brigade he can bring out his ace. But does he really belong? Does he even want to? Isn’t all this longing a lame excuse for riding on a convenient bandwagon? He is known to throw away
people as much as ideas.

How many Trinidadians identify with him? How many Westerners? How many Indians? The problem is that he tries to coalesce them together and ends up with intriguing theses that sound interesting, but have little substance. For example, he has spoken about how Western thought influenced Hinduism. One wonders how then dowry, sati and child marriages still exist. But Sir Vidia obviously believes that having rummaged through the filth of darkness he has suddenly seen the light. I call his ideas ‘Naipaul’s Malgudi – an
imagined town’. There are real people in it, but he places them where he wants to. It is his conformist plan, and conformist he is. Any educated man who can say that “Islam destroyed India” has got to be sucking up to someone big time.

Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, is a political statement. Any normal creative person would start worrying, but not this one.

He loves scars. We got evidence of it when a tall, lissome woman of the world, Padma Lakshmi, drew attention to the 14-inch long healed wound that has left its mark on her upper arm. That, along with the rest of her, seems to constitute Rushdie’s Yankee phase. The martyr let loose in Manhattan with a mistress who is her own person, which ought to be a non-sequiter.

Just as when Naipaul says he hates banality (while discussing gender oppression at that) he reveals just how banal he is. His treatment of women is never discussed because everyone is onto this huge thing about how the poor man slogged over words and was rewarded after 30 years. His wife reads aloud to him -- and guess what happens? “He’s amazed by what he’s written. And sometimes he’s so moved, he cries.”

His conceit and nonchalance are frightening. His reminiscing about his first wife of 40 years wanting a kid is dismissed off with “the thought was very disagreeable to me.” And current wife, Lady Nadira, laughs. She laughs when he talks about going to whores, she laughs when she says, “He’s not worried about big things like anthrax and plane crashes. He’s worried about little things. A cold neck.” Sure. She should probably tell him that our ancient civilisation is not a stiff shoulder he has to worry his clouded head over.

As for Rushdie, does he really consider India his motherland? As he wrote in ‘The Guardian’, “I am conscious of shifts in my writing. There was always a tug-of-war in me between ‘there’ and ‘here’, the pull of roots and the dream of leaving. In that struggle of insiders and outsiders, I used to feel simultaneously on both sides. Now I’ve come down firmly on the side of those who by preference, nature or circumstance simply do not belong.”

“India is the prize” for him. And if he stopped fooling himself, he’d probably admit that had the Brits been kinder and made him into a hero rather than a protected species, he would not have felt this tug of roots. It wouldn’t strike him that, unlike the little people who, despite having set up corner stores and motels which grew into big businesses, have to ‘pretend to be rehabilitated’ in their new environs, he has been co-opted by the colonialists. So he can call Britain a bitchy society as one would someone who knows too much about the dark recesses of one’s mind.

He did not contribute to their technology, health care, education, but had become a showpiece. He is repeating this feat in the United States with an ace up his sleeve in the form of a woman who legitimises his need for, and keeps him moored to, his ancestral exotica. I can understand an aspect of this quest -- the one that is straightforward -- of a man looking for a part of himself that not he but somebody else has left behind. Like the need to look for a lost object. But it is not the key that will unlock the mind. So, whenever he is ‘seeking’ his homeland, he is like any other John or Thomas looking for the tomb of a quarantined memory.

It is time for RIP-ing the knights, the knaves.