Midnight's Knights?

hamidm: Much of what you say is fine. There is however a fine line between between (a) simply aping the west, and (b) understanding the key ingredients that have made western culture such a remarkable success. In your post what you suggest (music, language) keeps one on the (a) side of the line. To cross to the (b) side, one needs to understand why the west broke free from the rest of humanity around the 16th century and left it coughing in its dust. I am not sure if the current massive wave of immigrants to the west, along with the declining population of the westerners, is not going to convert, a few decades from now, the west itself into (a) while losing (b). Or maybe it is just the first generation immigrants who are at (a), and the next generation will grow up understanding (b) as well. One hopes.

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..........why do we care what naipaul and rushdie have to say about us? ......... why don`t we go out and write our own books and put all the good stuff about us in them? ........ and if, as gz suggests, this stuff is out there why don`t we just ignore the english language press and go back to reading masterpieces in punjabi and pushto? ..........

......... the fact of the matter is that mr simon and mr schuster publish more books than the entire arab/muslim world put together and there are more writers living in the village than in all of araby .......... and i am not holding my breath for a great punjabi genius to put the record straight for us ......... in two generation most families, like mine, have given up punjabi and pushto and adopted spoken urdu and written english ........and who gives a flip if my nieces and nephews have never heard of heer and ranjha as long as they know chris rock and pamela anderson ..............

.............you cannot separate the language from its sociopolitical and cutural baggage; you cannot separate westernism from modernity; you cannot have your cake and eat it too ..........if you think in english, you will think like an englishman ......... defeated and disgraced cultures have to accept the facts, make the necessary adjustments and move on .............let`s not continue to make fools of ourselves by whining and complaining ................go write a comic book like the japanese and work your way up from there .........

re: rsridhar

{Do not drag Indians into this. May be Pakis in US have a bad self-image. With INS squeezing their balls recently, this is not surprising.}

...hahahaha....

Sadna#21

Great post.

Naipauls early novels are possibly my favourite books ever, and I think that ``A Million Mutinies Now`` is a work of great insight and compassion. I do think he is misunderstood, but I also believe that his tacit endorsement of Hindu nationalism in its current form is a massive blindspot and suggests a succumbing to the areas of darkness and the unleashing of furies that he so acutely analyzes and decries in others. As an example of the fragility of the rational mind in the face of calls to ancestral and religious/ethnic ties, the revival of atavistic communal memories acting on the modern individual, and the way that the past can shape our present, how history can be exploited for political ends, it is instructive.

re; Rushdies remark on literature in Indian languages, I believe he has partially recanted. If you get the chance buy a copy of ``The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature`` edited by Amit Chaudhuri. It is an excellent anthology and worth buying for Chaudhri`s introductory essay alone, in which he challenges Rushdies assertions and promotes a large corpus of work from Indians not writing in English. It is very impressive and Chaudhri is an excellent guide (But he is a truly sublime writer, one of the best Indian writers alive)

It is the best anthology and introduction to modern Indian literature available today, although with some notable exemptions, like Anita Desai.

-h-

Samina#38

{{In truly satisfying and unnerving work, there is a decentralization of the writer`s voice}}

- I agree

-h-

Ghalib Zaman

Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah blah dont bother with the pompous flatulent rantings with me it doesnt wash.

You are excellent comedy although I do feel guilty for laughing at an impotent old man made incontinent by the tidal wave thats going to sweep him away.

take care

-h-

Aleph-Null

{{Even today they still make depressing reading. Had Naipaul only written `An Area of Darkness` and `India: a Wounded Civilization`, he would be right up there in Romair`s pantheon along with such dubious characters as Eric Margolis and William Baker, lauded for his brilliant observations and penetrating insights on India}}

- Good point.

What Naipaul says about India, and more acutely, about Hinduism in these books, would send Romair into paroxysms of delight, would not look out of place in a Urstruly post, and would excite GhalibZaman so much it would cure his erectile dysfunction.

Unfortunately though, Naipaul is beastly/honest (take your pick) not only to the Hindoos but the Muslims, Sikhs, Africans, Argentinians, Carribeans, Irish, Mauritians, and Americans from the southern states too.

-h-

Thanks for some extremely incisive comments. Harish, temp, Samina...look forward to responding, but will take some time. Therefore, this short note. And thanks to romair (right!) and everyone else for reading.

Just btw, this was not about their literary efforts, which is why I have not mentioned a single book (except in the intro para).

tahmed32 (#25):
(You are even angrier than Naipaul and whatshisface. Why all people angry! angry! angry! Not good. So, no get angry at Nepal and Rushie. At least these two make money getting angry at muslim, indian, everybody. You just get angry on chowk and not get paid. So not get angry. Pliz!!)

You asking so naislee, I have no hart to reffiuse. So I have deal. I no getting angry for 24 hours...you pay me then? I haav to tell secret but. Maybe I getting paid secretly to get mickey out of mouse. Pliz at list u be kaind...why so much dhuaan everywhere when aag is inside my intestine, i not understanding...

whyfor someone saying women can`t accept unconventional women(typical macho man talk)...Padma and Nadira unconventional???? Playboy bunnies also unconventional -- not everyone can be like them, na? So....

I only getting more angry, so I going now.

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Farzana,

Ought this piece have been titled ‘Why N&R’s amours have chicks’…
For, to me too much is being made out of their respective current women. I do not know why you chose to be kinder to Padma Lakshmi than Nadira. By all accounts, she too is not exactly a woman of no substance…until she was caught in the crossfire of politico-literary criticism for her faith, rather than her nationality, after ‘Beyond Belief.’
And, while this piece is a remarkably well written piece, consistently crackling, its thrust has long known to be the main weakness of the biographical approach of literary criticism. Authors cannot attain even one percent of the completeness of the best created characters of imagination.
“Both are clinging to roots they have no claims over. And they don’t give a damn about the soil.”
Isn’t this a case of intentional fallacy? R&V chose whatever they chose because that was what held their concerns. Satyajit Ray has often been criticized for ignoring the leftist underground, the emergency, even the number of Bengali youth killed during the course of his working life. That he did not chose to film them merely means they did not hold his creative attention. Even if he chose to be safe rather than sorry, it was still a choice that Ray the citizen made. Ray the artist also made the same choice. But did he compromise on his creative freedom by NOT making political reality films? I should think, even if it were true, to be insignificant.
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 agree with what you say here. And yet, once you are a celebrity, people thrust the mike at you for everything. I have thought, in a Thurber mode, that if ever an Everest climber is asked what was his message for the youth of his country he should simply say “Leprosy is curable.”
Besides, like Shaw said, most men after sixty are scoundrels. I think we need to revise that age downwards…

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.”
Like the argument against television, shut him out. He is not going to come to India. And Indians need not listen to him. And about his decency, you are merely universalizing your idea of decency, projecting it onto another man, and then judging him from your vantage point. There are many who would think that is an honest confession.
Naipaul wants everyone to do things for him. And no one is quite up to his supposedly high standards.
He has the right, as long as he does not violate others’ right to ignore him. And, I think the media has played a big part in generating articles on issues of non-importance that he makes foolish, or off-the-cuff comments about too.
Why does one get the feeling that for him that hole is a circle rather than a deep well?
Brilliant sentence. As a standalone one, though.

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?
Well the Indian government refused him a visa for long after Satanic Verses. And, besides, exile can be of so many shades. There are political exiles, like Solzenitsyn or Kundera, and then there are exiles like Naipaul within Trinidad.
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.
And
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?

Again like “decency” “self respect” too can be merely one particular version, that cannot be universally applied. But, the bigger question, a far more valid question IMO you did not elaborate on was about the “patronage of a govt that was blissfully using him.” It was Narasimha Rao…or was it Rajiv Gandhi….who banned him from coming to India…but interestingly…it was LK Advani who issued him the visa.
Interestingly, Rushdie attacked Naipaul for his views about the Babri demolition being the sign of a resurgent Hinduism that was finally churning, asserting after years of suppression by all the world civilizations that could travel this far to adorn the already resplendent Indian chest with a few more cuts of sword and humiliation. Rushdie’s argument was that Naipaul was giving intellectual legitimacy to plain militant Hindutva.

See the role reversal…Naipaul always asks what any country has done for him….Rushdie says what can your interior minister do for me?
Though, that last line about attacking fundamentalist interpreters for misinterpreting his own interpretations…interestingly and flippantly called “a form of extreme literary criticism” by Naipaul…the man does separate from the author doesn’t he, here. Unlike Roy putting her money into NBA?
There was another Rushdie failing during the fatwa time. His then wife Marianne Higgins separated from him, and said about the fight against the fatwa, and the separation “I wish the man was as great as the event.” Men, and dare I say women, will never measure upto historical events. Like you say, it would be converting a well into a circle rather than a deep hole.

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.
Aren’t we claiming that anybody with a head as big as Naipaul should have a proportionate heart? And, if memory serves me right, Nadira was his before he was the target of criticism for his views on Islam. Besides, matters of the heart and matrimonial/sexual alliances an individual forms, rarely reflect his mental conviction, though the latter can possibly raise the probability of bringing two persons of same proclivities meeting…and perhaps even mating.
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?

A rolling stone gathers no moss. But a rolling stone does not care. Momentum is what it wants to gather. Same way, does he care to belong? Maybe he does. Maybe he does not. Either ways, its not too important, IMO. Does he speak to me, does he reverberate in me, is what matters between a author and his/her reader. If the work of art does, I read. If it doesn’t I present the book to a non-reader on his birthday. And, about identification, well not all readers are really interested in identification with the author. Ideas that interest, challenge, connect. All are good enough material to read. Agreement is not part of a reader writer relationship at all. If it is, it is still a very insignificant thing.


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.
I loved the Malgudi reference. I agree with it totally, and have myself felt the selfsame thing. But conformist, I am sure he must be. Even if he is not, he will be by another 10/15 years. But the sucking up to somebody…is too facetious a grandiosity on Naipaul. He is a clear, present and combustible danger to any party. Even when he is on his knees.
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.
True. But, if I remember correctly it was his outburst at over post-colonialism fuelled angst among Indian writers at that literary jamboree to Shashi Despande. Anyways, that is a matter most significant. About his treatment of women. But again, only if his real life is connected to his literary works. The reason you give, I suspect, maybe too tame, and more diatribe.

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.”
I have not been surprised by childish behavior from seventy year olds. Besides, a private emotional/sentimental response can become easy fodder for pamphleteers. If your point is that his self-love far outweighs his love for his Pakistani wife, then from all sparse accounts, his English wife had already discovered it long ago. He never mentioned her, and never shared stage with her. And, nobody seriously can disagree with his lack of emotions, and disdain for others.
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.

Who is to be blamed. Nadira, or him? And, as for our civilization, it has always been anybody’s for the licking. Naipaul has himself written and garnered reams for this precise point.

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.”

For argument sake, let us say Rushdie does not consider India his motherland. Remember, he even briefly relinquished Islam to see if it he was out of range of the fatwa. But, I think what he says is legitimate. There are many who feel similarly. And not all are drinking deep from foreign soil. Remember Arundhati Roy once declared her independence from India and called herself a “mobile republic.” This disconnect, you too have written about feeling. Muslim/Woman/India. If you also added geography to that confusion, is Rushdie’s dilemma so difficult to fathom? Pico Iyer, many many expatriates, Kundera has even started to write in French, abandoning his native Czech. So if an individual does not feel rooted, or belonging, or still further belongs to his belongings and not to the place he stays, does that make him worthless in any sense? Does that take away his right to comment,interpret, voice his idea of nationalisms, Japanese army, or Indian intolerance? I think, he has the right to say, and readers will decide whether what he says is worth listening to.
“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.
Coopted by colonialists. Wasn’t Nirad C Chowdhury a far easy target for this charge than Rushdie?
He did not contribute to their technology, health care, education, but had become a showpiece.
Like the Kohinoor?

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.
Again, I think the women on whose shoulders you lean too hard are being given a short shrift by you. Neither are bimbos. And, you assume too much of male manic energy in R&N to make them seem cavemen who dragged these screaming women from their Italian television studio, or Pakistani drawing room. And, also you seem to refuse to entertain a thought that it could have been a love interest, at least in one among each couple. The other had only to take a call. I do not think they were part of a strategy to wash guilt, or repair their rootlessness that these two men have these two women by their side.


Harish

re: #27 by Shah

``The world was shocked when the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya was demolished by a group of hardline hindu fanatics who claimed that it was the birthplace of the mythic hindu god Ram, an epic character in the Ramayana.``
Now, let us not exaggerate. The world does not give a damn about a mosque in a remote place in India. The world is coming to the view now that ``lesser the number of mosques, the better``.
Secular elements in India were shocked. Pakistanis were elated to point out India`s deficiencies in this matter. You fail to mention that more than 100 temples in Pakistan were vandalised after the Ayodhya incidence.
The other thing is: it is not the hindu fanatics who claim Ayodhya to be a birth place of Sri Ram. What kind of a frikking moron are you? Every hindu belives Ayodhya to be a birth place of SriRam. For milliions (including educated people like me), this is all that matters: faith. I do not care if it is factually correct or not. Can you prove if Prophet Md (PBUH) really had the revelation from Angel Gabriel? So, stick to what you know.
The debate is not whether to build a temple in Ayodhya. Majority agree that a temple needs to be built. It is inconceivable that a holy site like Ayodhya (regarded as a Mecca of hindu pilgrimage by many) does not have a single big temple dedicated to SriRam. There must have been one and it fell to the same fate that befell other temples under muslim rule.
The big debate really is: if a temple needs to be built at the exact same site as the babri masjid. This is where secular people like me differ from the saffron crowd. The latter want to rouse the emotions, making this into a Hindutva agenda, thereby garnering votes. There is no way of saying that SriRam was born at that exact site. So, a temple can easily be built somewhere else in Ayodhya and the present controversial site can be spared or converted to a memorial or given back to muslims to be turned into a mosque. I hope you get the picture now.

Sridhar

re:#29 by GhalibZaman
Since you are a Pakistani, you may speak for your community. Do not drag Indians into this. May be Pakis in US have a bad self-image. With INS squeezing their balls recently, this is not surprising. But India celebrates its culture, language, food etc at every possible avenue. Indians in US are highly respected. Spare me you nonsense.
Sridhar

Sameer,

You bring up an extremely important aspect to these issues; the role of political/social/ethnic/religious identities and his/herstories. How does one decide if one voice is valid? Arent all of them?

Also, How many voices exist in a text? Do we assume that the writer`s voice dominates the discourse? In truly satisfying and unnerving work, there is a decentralization of the writer`s voice; all the implicit voices exist within that text. When I read Rushdie for example, or even some of Naipaul`s earlier work, there is always dissonance, cacophonies, the narrator being upstaged by events, people, histories around him. It has not been my impression that Rushdie has ever considered his rendering of an event the final word in the manner that lesser writers mercurial in their control of their characters, plot, themes have.

Sameer,

You bring up an extremely important aspect to these issues; the role of political/social/ethnic/religious identities and his/herstories. How does one decide if one voice is valid? Arent all of them?

Also, How many voices exist in a text? Do we assume that the writer`s voice dominates the discourse? In truly satisfying and unnerving work, there is a decentralization of the writer`s voice; all the implicit voices exist within that text. When I read Rushdie for example, or even some of Naipaul`s earlier work, there is always dissonance, cacophonies, the narrator being upstaged by events, people, histories around him. It has not been my impression that Rushdie has ever considered his rendering of an event the final word in the manner that lesser writers mercurial in their control of their characters, plot, themes have.