An Area ‘Defecation’

AN AREA OF ‘DEFECATION’
(Anatomy of Mud-slinging as an Art)

Through the centuries of recorded history, India had exercised a strange fascination for the traveller from every part of the civilised world. The motley crowd, of this description, might make a formidable list of names from Fahien and Huen Tsiang, Nikitin and Travernier, Marco Polo and Nicolo Comti, to Katherine Mayo and Beverley Nichols, and now Ronald Segal and V. S. Naipaul. Rather like the message of Hinduism, the image of India could mean anything to any man, largely depending on his delicacy of perception, keenness of observation, depth of understanding and range of knowledge, not to speak of his quality of breeding, level of culture and refinement of taste. For some, it was a land of peace and tranquility, the El Dorado of the ceaseless seeker after Truth. For others, in the remote past, it used to be a land flowing with milk and honey and abounding in good hearts and great minds. In the less remote past, under the fevered imagination of the Western romancer of either sex, it had come to be the land of Maharajas and tigers, the cobras and the rope trick. The picture of a land of idolatry and untouchability, of purdah and polygamy, of epidemics and early deaths, painted by the self-styled evangelist and the intrepid do-gooder, has not been unfamiliar to us. For some others, it is a babel of tongues and a vast menagerie of tribes and castes. Some are amazed and astounded, some others are intrigued and amused, yet others are vexed and irritated. Miss Mayo was outraged and Beverley Nichols was tickled. To Ronald Segal (the Jewish emigrant from South Africa?), India is a picture of perpetual crisis. To V. S. Naipaul (the Indian expatriate fro Trinidad) it is “an Area of Darkness”.* It has proved to be largest ‘blind  spot’, as that of greater men before him.

What could it be that had impelled Mr. Naipaul, the successful author from the Carribean, now based in the sprawling city of  London, to persuade himself to a plunge in this area of darkness? Eagerness to improve his mind?–Obviously not, for he seems to be exulting in the feeling that he has a sensitive mind, which had received the correct training from the oldest (and best?) of the English Universities, maybe Oxford). Such a one will have a little to learn from the primitive waters of India. In search of pleasure?–He could get the best of it from Honolulu and Nassau, Monte Carlo and the French Riviera, if the closer Isle of Wight would not do for the purpose. Was it a sentimental journey to the land of his forefathers, to locate the village of his grandfather who had been the first in his family to leave for the promised land of Trinidad as an indentured labourer? Not likely, for the modern, rational and sophisticated Londoner has little use for such maudlin sentiment. Or, to write a ‘best-seller’, after a casual, hurried trip, based on first impressions, vague notions and juvenile prejudices? Not unlikely, for it would all be in the game of pot boiling, for an author who would make easy money, along with a quick notoriety.

With a plausible openness of mind that will not deceive the intelligent reader, he takes us into his confidence to explain why “as India had drawn near, I had felt more than the usual fear of arrival.” He does the reader the honour of letting him into a bit of his autobiography, in spite of that charming hesitancy, so characteristic of the cultivated Englishman:

“I came to London. It had become the centre of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. London was not the centre of my world. I had been misled, but there was nowhere else to go. It was a good place for getting lost in…All mythical lands faded, and in the big city I was confined to a smaller world than I had ever known. I became my flat, my desk, my name.”

Well, he now gets ready for a regular encounter with the mythical East with all the stoic resignation of a man in the dentist’s chair. Half-way, through his journey he has the anticipated foretaste of the East (which did not disappoint his lurid expectations, thank God for the frantic author in search of good, fresh copy):

“Feature by feature, the East one had read about. On the train to Cairo, the man across the aisle hawked twice, with an expert tongue rolled the phlegm into a ball, plucked the ball out of his mouth with thumb and forefinger, considered it and then rubbed it away between his palms. He was wearing a three-piece suit, and his transistor played loudly. Cairo revealed the meaning of the bazaar: narrow streets encrusted with filth, stinking even on this winter’s day….”

A fine piece of vivid writing indeed, from a writer who has a ‘nose’ for news, an admirable sensitivity to the sights and sounds and smells of the East! Naipaul could be almost as graphic as James Joyce in his descriptive passages (worthy of a latter-day ‘Ulysses’) and no less emetic. But the more juicy pieces are, of course, yet to come. Meanwhile, soon after descending from the dizzy heights of civilisation represented by London and touching the lowly and lost land of India, he is panic-stricken at the grave prospect of losing his personal identity (so well nourished and fondly cherished) amidst the nameless, faceless crowds of Bombay. He must be a heartless reader who will not shed his tears at this experience, so full of pathos and poignancy:

“–And for the first time in my life I was one of the crowd. There was nothing in my appearance or dress to distinguish me from the crowd eternally hurrying into Churchgate Station. In Trinidad to be an Indian was to be distinctive. To be anything there was distinctive: difference was each man’s attribute. To be an Indian in England was distinctive; in Egypt it was more so. Now in Bombay, I entered a shop or a restaurant and awaited a special quality of response. And there was nothing. It was like being denied part of my reality. Again and again, I was caught. I was faceless. I might sink without a trace into the Indian crowd. I had been made by Trinidad and England; recognition of my difference was necessary to me. I felt the need to impose myself; and didn’t know how.”

What a pity! No red carpet and tinkling bells or sounding brass for this rare guest. But Mr. Naipaul is being too modest, when he seems to admit defeat in declaring to be at his wit’s end. As a matter of fact, for this unpardonable omission on India’s part, represented by the lesser breeds without the law, he is to wreak his vengeance by looking down on India and her 450 millions, the whole lot of them where he is not able to rap them on the knuckles. Like a modern Voltaire, with a keener sense of comedy, he laughs at everyone he comes across-man, woman and child–wherever he may have gone. The Indian sense of duty (based on a conception that goes to the ‘Gita’) is ridiculous:

“–‘And do thy duty, even if it be humble rather than another’s even if it be great. To die in one’s duty is life: to live in another’s is death.’ This is the Gita, preaching degree 1,500 years before Shakespeare’s Ulysses, preaching it today. And the man who makes the dingy bed in the hotel room will be affronted if he is asked to sweep the gritty floor. The clerk will not bring you a glass of water even if you faint. The architecture student will consider it a degradation to make drawings, to be a mere draughtsman. And Ramnath, the stenographer, so designated on the triangular block of wood that stands on his desk, will refuse to type out what he has taken down in shorthand–.”

Everything and everyone Indian (with the possible exception ofthe friend in Delhi who had presented him with a jacket-length of Indian cloth as a parting gift) cause no end of amusement to the urbane and sophisticated Mr. Naipual, whose sense of the ludicrous must be the envy of the authors of ‘The Pickwick Papers,’ ‘The Human Comedy’ and ‘Don Quixote’. He is amused at his New Delhi hostess Mrs. Mahindra (whose paying guest he was–­first and last of his kind) who is proud to tell him, “I am craze for foreign, just craze for foreign….I want him (her eldest son) to marry foreign.” Her frantic and farcical struggle with a foreign medium (at which he is obviously expert, as to the manner born) tickles him not a little. He seems to forget, however, that were she not so ‘craze for foreign,’ she would not have cared to bestow on him all the officious attention, due to the brown sahib from London, but left him high and dry in the face-less predicament that he found himself in at the egalitarian, impersonal Bombay shops and restaurants! Not exactly the consummation devoutly to be wished for by one who would expect a ‘special’ response and treatment. To India, he himself has no response, only reactions. He is amused by the England-returned Sikh who goes out of his way to be hospitable to him as well as by the’ South Indians’ in Madras who would prefer to see him in his hotel room and not invite him to their own homes, by Mr. Malhotra, who must nees remain single on Rs. 600 a month as by the Engineer Sardarji (Rs. 1,300 a month) who can hardly get a nice girl to take out, by Mr. Butt the hotel proprietor as by Aziz (the cook, or is it the waiter?) in Srinagar, by the American girl (research scholar) as by her Muslim lover (Sitar player), by the I. A. S. Officer (who helps him in many ways) in Lucknow as byhis own poor relations (Ramachandra, whom her calls “a beggar”) and country cousins at his ancestral village, who receive him in tears and lionise him to the confusion and embarrassment of a superior being, a Londoner to his finger tips, with all the envied refinements of a cockney culture about him. During the whole Indian sojourn, Mr. Naipaul had successfully avoided the risk of running into any normal, sensible, cultured Indians–writers and others from the intelligentia. For, the novelist and comedian that he had made a virtue of stumbling upon clowns, morons, nitwits and other figures of fun.”

In the enormous comedy that goes by the name of India, the author reserves a favoured niche for the ‘South Indians’ (not clear which particular linguistic group he has in mind, but that is a small matter, for Mr. Naipaul makes no such narrow, parochial divisions in the exercise of his comic spirit). Let us now gaze at the author’s picturesque reconstruction of what would be quite an ordinary scene (to us, without the gift of the Anglicised poet’s eye) in the dining car of a railway train:

“……In the dining car I sat with my to the entrance. South Indian languages, excessively vowelled, rattled about me. The South Indians were beginning to unwind; they were lapping up their liquidised foods. Food was a pleasure to their hands. Chewing, sighing with pleasure, they squelched curds and rice between their fingers. They squelched and squelched; in one swift circular action, as though they wished to take their food by surprise, they gathered some of the mixture into a ball, brought their dripping palms close to their mouths and–flick–rice and curds were shot inside; and the squelching, chattering and sighing began again.”

Lest he should be written off for being unchivalrous, rather a nasty thing for a true Englishman, this expatriate writer, who can easily out-English the English in their delicacy of taste and social decorum, turns his attention to the female of the species:

“A woman in a saree, with blue-tinted spectacles, and a baby on her knee, was lapping up sambar. She splayed out her fingers, pressed her palm flat on her plate, drew her fingers together, lifted her palm to her mouth and licked it dry.”

The mouth-watering sense of relish with which the scenes are captured, ever so deftly and ever so fondly, seems to betray the feeling of hurt at having to deny oneself this gargantuan indulgence on the part of the envious observer, who must needs make do with napkin and knife, fork and spoon to remain respectable in the eyes of his western compeers whom he has learned to ape in Trinidad and in London.

But this furtive relish is as nothing compared to the vicarious rill of ejaculation he seems to experience in the other human occupation, equally important but often more urgent, namely of evacuation of the bowels, which he prefers to call ‘defecation’, a word which seems to be his special favourite. (One can imagine him rolling it over his tongue gingerly, in his impeccable Oxford accent.) It enlivens his felicity of expression to the bright glow of Churchillian eloquence. Let us listen to this passage, which, assumes the rhythm (mock-heroic maybe) of the war-leader’s peroration (“We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the ills etc.,–but we will not take cover”):

“Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover….”
In this mystic ceremony, Mr. Naipaul discovers his India and the basic unity that binds the vast geographical and national entity from Kashmir to Madras and Goa to New Delhi. Now for the cool heights of Srinagar, where he spent more months than elsewhere:

“Shankaracharya Hill, overlooking the Dal Lake, is one of the beauty spots of Srinagar. It has to be climbed with care, for large areas of its lower slopes are used as latrines by Indian tourists. If you surprise a group of three women, companionably defecating, they will giggle: the shame is yours, for exposing yourself to such a scene.”

Then, to the hot plains of Madras, for which he obviously has a special likeness, and therefore his field work is rather more extensive. It is interesting to note the sight-seeing he had done in the State capital, from an altogether original angle:

“In Madras the bus station near the High Court is one of the more popular latrines. The traveller arrives; to pass the time he raises his dhoti, defecates in the gutter. The bus arrives; he boards it; the woman sweeper cleans up after him. Still in Madras, observe this bespectacled patriarch walking past the university on the Marina. Without warning he raises his dhoti, revealing a side bare save for what appears to be a rope-like G.-string; he squats, pisses on the pavement, leisurely rises; the dhoti still raised, he re-arranges his G.-string, lets his dhoti fall, and continues on his promenade; but no one looks, no face is averted in embarrassment.”

Not even the more civilised author’s! He would not then have been able to give us these gems of description. It is not a little naive on his part to expect the obviously less civilised onlookers to deny themselves an unruffled glance at a sight he himself has taken in with such eagerness. He would not be a party to doing any injustice in this respect, in the attention paid by him, to the comparatively new State of Goa:

“In Goa you might think of taking an early morning walk along the balustraded avenue that runs beside the Mandovi River. Six feet below, on the water’s edge, and as far as you can see, there is a line like a wavering tidewrack, of squatters. For the people of Goa, as for those of imperial Rome, defecating is a social activity; they squat close to one another; they chatter…..”

What about the nation’s capital, which has now become one of the world’s political and diplomatic capitals? He cannot help paying his tribute to it with an unerring eye for significant detail at the airport:

“….The briefest glimpse of the lavatories at New Delhi’s international airport is sufficient. Indians defecate every-where, on floors, in urinals for men (as a result of yogic contortions that can only be conjectured). Fearing contamination, they squat rather than sit, and every lavatory cubicle carries marks of their misses. No one notices.”

With the notable exception of the author, of course, who brings to the job the descriptive talent of a successful novelist. Worthy of a better subject, possibly more edifying to the poor reader. But it is no mere idle fancy that makes him indulge this aptitude. He finds enough material in these unlovely scenes to philosophise and pontificate thus, in his derisive tone of irony and sarcasm:

“These squatting figures–to the visitor, after a time, as eternal and emblematic as Rodin’s Thinker–are never spoken of; they are never written about; they are never mentioned in novels or stories; they do not appear in feature films or documentaries. This might be regarded as part of a prettifying intention. But the truth is that Indians do not see these squatters and might even, with complete sincerity, deny that they exist: a collective blindness arising out of the Indian fear of pollution and the resulting conviction that Indians are the cleanest people in the world...”

By the same token, this ingenious critic might find fault with the author of ‘Paradise Lost’, and ‘Paradise Regained’, for his deliberate blindness (in addition to his physical blindness) to the daily acts of ‘defecation’, committed by Satan as well as the son of God, whose hunger and thirst are well described in his classics. He might also, with equal justification, join issue with Shakespeare for making the Prince of Denmark indulge in too many soliloqueis in ‘Hamlet’, and hardly any solitary exercises in defecation (which no human being could avoid for long), and showing King Claudius and Queen Gertrude in constant intrigue but never in ‘companionable defecation’ (like Naipaul’s giggling women near the Dal Lake or the rows of men on the river bank in Goa). And the Ramayana would not be satisfactory enough as a work of art for this author, mainly because Rama, Sita and Lakshmana have not gone on record in Valmiki as having used the shelter of the Dandakaranya or the waters of the Sarayu river for the eminently Indian purpose of the author’s extra-realistic conception. If this criticism be any guide we need no enlightenment on what this novelist’s character will mainly do in his future books.

‘A Drain Inspector’s Report’ is how Katherine Mayo’s book on India was described by Mahatma Gandhi, only in a metaphorical sense, I believe. Even the Mahatma might not have anticipated that over three decades and more later it was going to be followed by a more formidable report of one who has qualified himself to be the Inspector-General of Indian Lavatories. Not that the author’s observations on the subject were factually incorrect in any material detail. Far from that being the case, he was deadly accurate, with an exasperating literal-mindedness, on what he had seen in Madras, Bombay or Delhi. The question, however, remains of what he had omitted to see or refused to see, wherever he chose to go in resurgent India–not only the temples, mausoleums and monuments (Ajanta and Ellora caves, the Taj Mahal and the Tanjore Temple and the like), but a whole nation, risen from the stupor of ages, engaged in the adventure of discovery and participating in the collective endeavour of economic planning and material construction. Surely, no one can be so blind as he who has eyes, but refuses to see. What could an unprejudiced observer think of a visitor to Madras from across the distant seas, having no eye for anything but ‘defecation’ at the bus terminus near the High Court, and ‘pissing’ by an aged passerby on the beach Road near the University?

It is difficult to imagine how seasoned English critics (like V. S. Pritchett, John Wain, among others) could go into raptures (‘brilliant,’ ‘lyrical’, ‘masterly’ and so on, proceeds the familiar litany) about this juvenile perpetration, so full of rash and facile generalisations, resting on the tenuous thread of isolated experience, private affront and personal irritation. A high degree of frivolity, centering round inconsequential (and irrelevant) personal detail, even in what is meant to be a serious discussion and balanced appraisal, is obviously a sure symptom of the occupational disease of western authors on their Indian jaunts–an earnest student of the world like Arthur Koestler not excepting. Readers of ‘the Lotus and the Robot’ would recall how Koestler’s provocative observations on the teachings of Hinduism and the ethics of Vedanta are liberally interspersed with descriptions of the mystic enigmatic smile of the Sankaracharya of Kanchi (as if the author were dealing with the presence of a Mona Lisa) and the nose-picking habit of a leading disciple (who had incidentally been instrumental in arranging the visitor’s interview), not to mention less readable incidents. Not long ago, it was given to the Indian-born poet Dom Moraes on a visit home, to write at length of the illicit stills of Bombay and the redlight district of Calcutta in quest of his India. His friend and frequent companion Ved Mehta (who happens to be blind) has a keen eye for equally spicy things in ‘Walking the Indian streets.’ All this falls neatly into the new pattern of Realism–bold, brusque, brazen and uninhibited.

But, the writing of Naipaul is all frivolity and no writing, like the Cheshire cat, which is supposed to be all smile and no cat. To give the devil his due, he has an undoubted flair for vivid description and his narrative has an easy flow, though the clipped and colloquial familiarity of tone may sound strange to the more old-fashioned. But, these gifts are worthy of a better subject and a saner treatment. As it is, his main observations make no sense to any sane reader who knows anything worth knowing of India. Criticism, however caustic and adverse, is welcome, provided it is thoughtful, reasoned and well-argued, as in the works (“The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian” and “A Passage to England”) of Nirad C. Chaudhuri. The thought content of Naipaul’s book on India is negligible by comparison. He gives the impression, at every stage, of the smart and spoilt boy from the Public School talking his head off to his country cousins during the Christmas vacation. He quips:

“...India, the world’s largest slum, had an added attraction: ‘cultural’ humility was sweet, but ‘spiritual’ humility was sweeter.”

The reader could hardly resist the temptation to tell him, as did the American girl, “Then, you shouldn’t have come.” Which was ‘unanswerable’. “My resentment had made me speak foolishly”, he admits once, and this applies to the whole narrative as well. If, indeed, it were only the Indian lavatories that wanted seeing it would not require the expert labours of a Naipaul come to judgment (from London or Trinidad). A local scavenger or sweeper woman would do as well. And the brilliant fiction-writer could well have saved the hard-earned passage from a generous award. The Upanishads said: “Lead me from darkness into light.” Mr. Naipaul (who had obviously discarded the Upanishads and such other junk) seems to say.….”Lead me from darkness to darkness.” Or, better still, From an area of Darkness to an area of “Defecation.”

* An Area of Darkness by V. S. Naipaul. (Andre Deutsch, London Pages 281. Price 25 shillings)