An Area of Darkness is a disturbing pessimistic novel written by V.S. Naipaul about his first visit to India in 1962. This was India not too long after the Independence with it’s freshly minted Constitution, trying to make a transition from an English past to an Indian future. Naipaul shares the sentiments of West, the tone of the book is not unlike Slumdog Millionaire (a very unpopular movie in India).
As his ship drifts onwards from Egypt towards India he writes
“One can feel that men are no longer brothers.”
He writes about Indian neglect, social decay and the lack of argumentativeness, the superficiality of conversations, the suppressed, intermittently erupting violence, about Indian obsession with Maya - the illusory world, their reluctance to change and lack of any work ethic, their symbolization of tradition, the symbolization of their symbolization, the replacement of religion with tradition, spirit with form, arguments with scriptures. He argues that it is this escape from and denial of reality, as facilitated by the Indian religions, which is at the core of Indian social stagnation. He quotes Camus’ The Rebel
“For the Inca and the pariah the problem never arises, because for them it had been solved by a tradition, even before they had had time to raise it—the answer being that tradition is sacred. If in a world where things are held sacred the problem of rebellion does not arise, it is because no real problems are to be found in such a world, all the answers having been given simultaneously. Metaphysic is replaced by myth. There are no more questions, only eternal answers and commentaries, which may be metaphysical.”
(I just realized I wrote their instead of our. It’s easy for me to pretend that I’ve been far away long enough from my country but you can’t really shrug off your past so easily. Even now, quite contrarily to the American consumerism ideal, I have no debt and am reluctant to throw things away when they get old, even if there are barely any Indian ideals I’m still attached to, my instincts are very much Indian.)
This book is deeply personal and exaggerated but not everything he writes is a caricature, there are words in here which ring true to me as an Indian, our habit of speaking before listening, our denial of our past defeats, our arrogant rationalizations of social failures. Perhaps this book was rightly banned in the country. It goes against everything Indians stand for, it forces us to question ourselves and introspection has been given no importance in our religions and hence it’s existence is unjustified, an onerous burden for the Westerners to carry.
On his way out he writes these parting words bidding farewell to the contradiction that is India,
“Out of its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink; the mere thought was painful.”
Most Indians here in the US are aware, even if they consciously deny it, of this bitter-sweet dichotomy that we have the eyes to see, as being once a part of and now an outsider to the Indian society. It is a world where there is a constant knowledge of a need for change and a constant lack and reluctance towards achieving it.
A land where life itself is cherished but individual lives have no value, but it is also a land of beauty for chaos can be beautiful in it’s own way.