V.S Naipaul & Frantz Fanon

James Wood, quite startlingly, has found a similarity between V.S Naipaul and Franz Fanon-

He quotes this letter the young Naipaul sent to his first wife-

'Put yourself in my place for a minute . . .

Naipaul's place was far better than hers. She did not have a penis. She would earn about half as much as a man. Naipaul, being that rara avis- a brown chap with an Oxbridge degree- might rise rapidly. Since he wrote well- like his father, a successful journalist- he would soon be making good money writing for the American Magazines and Newspapers. His color was actually an advantage.  

If my father had 1/20 of the opportunity laid before the good people of British stock, he would not have died a broken, frustrated man without any achievement.

He did quite well- owning his own car and house. That was more than many 'good people of British stock' had achieved. His sons attended Oxbridge. His daughters either got scholarships or married well. The pity of it is that he died just when literary success of a substantial sort might have come his way. After all, he was from Trinidad. The Andrews Sisters had done a cover version of Lord Invaders' Rum & Coca Cola. What's more Boysie Singh- the infamous pirate who is thought to have killed 400 people- was at the height of his career. Shivprasad, with a little luck, could have got the inside story and made a lot of money and even ended up in Hollywood.  

But, like me, he had the opportunity—to starve. He was ghettoed—in a sense more cruel than that in which Hitler ghettoed the Jews.

Okay, okay. I too would often mention Hitler when I whined to my wife about having to pass Accountancy exams.  

But there was an element of rude honesty in the Nazi approach; and they at any rate killed swiftly. The approach of the Free World is infinitely subtler and more refined. You cannot say to a foreign country: I suffer from political persecution. That wouldn’t be true . . . But I suffer from something worse, an insidious spiritual persecution. These people want to break my spirit. They want me to forget my dignity as a human being. They want me to know my place.' 

Naipaul in this letter resembles no writer so much as Frantz Fanon,

who actually fought the fucking Nazis. The guy wasn't a whiner.  

the radical analyst of the “insidious spiritual persecution” wrought by colonialism on the colonized. The colonized subject, Fanon writes in “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961), “is constantly on his guard: confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world, he never knows whether he is out of line. Confronted with a world configured by the colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse, a sword of Damocles.”

The French thought writing in that way was super-cool. Fanon could do it just as well as the next man- if that man was highly intelligent and educated. 

Fanon believed in violent revolution, but Naipaul’s radical pessimism meets Fanon’s radical optimism at that point where the cut of colonial guilt, angrily resisted by both men, is converted into the wound of colonial shame—“a kind of curse.” Fanon had argued, “The colonist is an exhibitionist. His safety concerns lead him to remind the colonized out loud: ‘Here I am the master.’ The colonist keeps the colonized in a state of rage, which he prevents from boiling over.”

Trinidad only became independent in 1962- around the time the British clamped down on immigration from the New Commonwealth. In the Fifties, it was certainly true that being a White man in Africa or the West Indies meant receiving a much higher salary and the pick of the top jobs. India, however, had changed. There, a degree from Oxbridge meant accelerated promotion if one belonged to the dominant community. Naipaul himself was eligible to sit the Indian Civil Service exams and lord it over a District before rising to lord it over a Department of State and end his career as a U.N bureaucrat with a fat tax free salary.

The West Indies too were changing- Naipaul's maternal Uncles would have very successful careers and even his illiterate paternal uncles would die as wealthy men. His father, however, died young. Had he lived, he might have gained acclaim for his short stories and pungent journalism. Supposing his writing was not up to American standards, his Arya Samaji proclivities and knowledge of Hindi would have won him admirers in India. He might have been given a newspaper column and developed into a successful lecturer. Sadly, it wasn't to be and his eldest son deeply resented this injustice. Still, it wasn't as though it was the fault of the White man. Indeed, a White editor had spotted the young man's talent.

Naipaul certainly exhibits a psychic wound and Fanon, of course, was a psychiatrist. However, Naipaul's wound was one which time had already healed whereas Fanon was working in a country where the French were committing quite savage atrocities. Worse still, the OAS were trying to kill people like Sartre. His own neck was on the line. 

There was this further difference. Unlike the British in India- who had made a point of promoting indigenous languages and knowledge systems and religions-  the French in Algeria had shown no appreciation for Islam or Arabic literary culture. 

Wood asks-

How could the assessment (of Trinidad) that he made in “A House for Mr. Biswas” not reflect these contradictions, which determined (and in some way, plagued) Naipaul’s entire life? If the snobbish and racist English students at Oxford looked down their noses at Seepersad Naipaul (if they noticed him at all), the young Vidia Naipaul was probably inclined to agree, squirmingly: seen from Oxford or London, Seepersad’s achievement was not only minor but perhaps laughable or humiliating.

I don't understand this. Shiv Prasad Naipaul was a good writer and journalist. His 'Gurudev' stories are very readable. Had it not been for war time shortages, they might have sold well in Britain. R.K Narayan, too, after a promising start, had to fall back on self-publishing because of the war. Had Shiv Prasad not died young, he might well have worked with an American editor to hit on a 'formula' featuring calypso singers and Voodoo rituals and Caribbean pirates and so forth. After all, Kipling got his start working for a pretty obscure provincial paper in India.

English students at Oxford probably were racist and snobbish. But would they really have turned up their noses at comic stories set in green and lush Trinidad?

But, as soon as the young Vidia put himself back in Trinidad, back in his father’s shoes—doing the imaginative work that the novelist does—how could he not passionately defend the achievement of his father’s life, a life all the greater than those of the snobbish Oxonians, because it was made out of so little?

I don't get this. Marcus Aurelius is Marcus Aurelius whether in Trinidad or by the banks of the Thames. Shiv Prasad may not have as much money as some of his relatives but he was a journalist just like Kipling. 

This double vision, moving between colonial rim and colonial center, between empathy and shame, pride and humiliation, brings extraordinary ironic power to Naipaul’s portrait of Mohun Biswas. The young man in South London was writing about his island, but, to some extent inevitably, he was not writing for his island; he was writing to be read by (the more enlightened of) his Oxford and London peers.

The point about Naipaul's Biswas is that a 14 year old anywhere in the world can read it. It is isn't directed at 'the more enlightened' amongst the Oxford or London literary set. It may be that one has to have be quite well educated to get all the jokes in 'Lucky Jim', but Biswas, surely, makes no such demands.

“A House for Mr. Biswas,” like much of Naipaul’s work, examines but also enacts this terrible dividedness. Much of Naipaul’s work is the baring of a wound by a man who, confoundingly, appeared to enjoy—or was unable to prevent—inflicting further wounds on the already wounded. This dividedness, the woundedness and the wounding, made the man something of a monster but fed his work: it is why he is a writer with conservative vision and radical eyesight. (And it is why “A House for Mr. Biswas” can be read alongside Frantz Fanon’s avowedly radical “The Wretched of the Earth,” also published in 1961, without a sharp sense of disjunction.)

Fanon would have seen the Afro-Carribean urban 'lumpenproletariat' as the true Revolutionary element to which people like the young V.S ought to have committed himself. The increasingly affluent Indian origin peasantry were bound to be reactionary and influenced by their ancestral Religion- which, in the case of Hinduism, also meant contamination by an almost 'racial' sense of caste. It is true that in Guyana, Cheddi Jagan was toppled by Churchill who thought him a Leftist- and Naipaul initially was sympathetic to him- but, from the Revolutionary point of view, it would be the more urban African origin people who deserved priority. Asians were more likely to acquiesce in the rule of Party bosses who had enriched themselves and thus established their ascendancy.

Naipaul would have been aware that compared to  the deep historical knowledge of an Eric Williams or a C.L.R. James, his uncle, the mathematician, Rudranath Capildeo was a light weight. The intellectual ascendancy- matching their prior urbanisation and access to education- made people of Afro-Caribbean origin the natural leaders- even if they no longer had numerical preponderance.

Fanon may have been prepared to engage with Marx, on the basis of a typically French Hegelianism, but Naipaul had no such intellectual equipment- though he was certainly capable of quite good historical research.

To my mind, there is indeed a massive 'disjunction' between Fanon and Naipaul which becomes clear in his three books on India. The British get a pass- but, for some reason, not the Turks- but the real enemy is casteism of both a bien pensant, complacent, type as well as the vengeful rage of the 'Dalit Panther'. Naipaul is prepared to admire the Shiv Sena's majoritarianism- because it genuinely helped the 'sons of the soil'- and this is perfectly in line with his own paternal class origins. By contrast, he has nothing good to say about the Left.

Indeed, his article on India after Indira, written after her assassination shows he had little understanding of the country and none at all of anywhere else. Thus, he wrote-

Indira Gandhi gave it stability; a strength at the center. Without her, that ceases to exist.
The country has grown intellectually and industrially, and for a long time there has been a balance between rationalism, the life of the mind and the pull of old barbarism.

The truth is India had stagnated intellectually and industrially under Indira. She herself had turned to Spirituality of a decidedly odd type- M.K Rasgotra, her foreign secretary, organised a peculiar conference of occultists to which Kahleen Raine, for some reason, was invited. She wrote a book to express her puzzlement at this outcome.

Naipaul, however, believed Indira was a sort of Catherine the Great.

Barbarism in India is very powerful because it has a religious side. This religion is not only a matter of communing with the Divine - it is often people's only means of identifying themselves, of asserting their individuality among the multitudes. That is why identifying marks of faith like turbans or cut of beard and style of hat are so important and can be worth dying for.

This is quite mad. Did Naipaul not understand that all Sikhs in the Punjab would look alike because they would be wearing the same sort of turban and sporting the same type of beard? Similarly, the Tamil would be indistinguishable from any other Tamil in his native dress and in his own Province. A turbaned Sikh in London, or a Tamil wearing a veshti in Washington, would be asserting his individuality. In their own natal districts they would melt into the crowd.

India has been very lucky in the Nehru family. Nehru was unique in recent world history: a colonial protest figure, a folk hero who did not appeal to fanaticism but was a reasonable, reasoning man.

So was Jinnah or Nasser or Nyrere or Kenyatta or the Shah, come to that. Nehru wanted the British to leave so people like himself could move into their mansions and lord it over the masses. On this point, he was quite fanatical.

A man committed to science, religious tolerance, the rule of law and the rights of man.

Who, however, had only risen to power by hanging on to the dhoti of the Mahatma.

Indira Gandhi, his daughter, carried on this way of looking at things.

How? Where? Indira specialized in vote bank politics. She put together a Brahman-Muslim-Harijan coalition so as to keep the 'AJGAR' (dominant peasant castes) out of power- or at least out of power at the center. Indian Science and Technology languished under her rule. The brain drain accelerated.

In Britain, she might have had the reputation of being domineering, harsh, even ruthless.

In India, she  had the reputation of cutting your balls off.

And you can easily make a case for her being authoritarian, antidemocratic, stamping out protest. But it isn't enough just to do that. One must consider what was on the other side. In 1975, some opposition parties wanted India to go back to some pre-industrial time of village life.

Which ones? The BJP? Nonsense! Atal was a good Defense Minister. What about the peasant's leader, Charan Singh? The guy published a book on agricultural economics which was on the Harvard Econ reading list. What about Morarji? If he was so stupid, why did her father promote him? Perhaps, Naipaul is thinking of Raj Narain- who was bat-shit crazy. However, Indira did not scruple to use him to bring down the Janata regime.

Piety can take odd forms. In the 1971 election, in a desert constituency, one candidate was bitterly opposed to bringing piped water to villages - ''Un-Gandhian, un- Indian, damaging to the morality of Indian women.''

So what? The guy lost his deposit. Did the village get piped water? Of course not!

Others wanted to combine the worst of the Holy Cow outlook with making the nuclear bomb. There were innumerable cults.

Including the cult of the dynasty.

All this Mrs. Gandhi had to take into account. I was on her side at the time - not because she was authoritarian, but because I felt that while she was there, education and science had a chance of continuing.

So, Naipaul was as stupid as shit. He knew nothing about education or science- nor did Indira- but he just assumed that because she'd been to Cambridge, she must be on the side of the angels.

The achievement of the Nehrus has been fabulous: under them, India got its industrial revolution and with that came an intellectual revolution.

Wow! India got its industrial revolution long  before Nehru stuck his oar in. India produced more cars and trucks than Japan in 1950. Sadly, from '52 onward, the Planning Commission destroyed India's industrial development firstly by shackling the textile and other wage good industries and then by misallocating resources (the dangerous lure of 'free money') to the capital goods sector, while relying on food aid to feed the population, both of which had a massive crowding out and inflationary effect. There was no 'intellectual revolution'. India stopped producing Noble worthy Scientists and Technologists. The Civil Service took over existing research institutes and drove out actual scientists or mathematicians. US food aid meant that, after '65, 'trapped dollars' funded a massive brain drain.

Indians, more than they acknowledge, owe a lot to the stability that Mrs. Gandhi, following her father, created. Three or four generations have been permitted to flourish, thanks to that balance.

Three or four generations? Naipaul, obviously, could not count.

The Nehrus gave India time - consider Pakistan, which has had no scientific revolution, or Iran, which hardly had one educated generation.

Yet Pakistan produced a Nobel prize winning Physicist and was able to make its own Atom bomb and delivery system.

But here's the dreadful irony of societies starting from a low economic or cultural base - the minute men's lot improves at all and they have their eyes opened, then they learn anger.

Really? Anger is something learnt is it? Is Oxford really an utterly shite place to study? What Naipaul means is that outrage of a particular type is a 'learned response'. 

Self- awareness leads to self-assertion. Mingled with religion, it's a very explosive mixture - possibly suicidal.

Economic change leads to political change so as to secure even more rapid and beneficial economic change.

The Sikhs, whose demand for autonomy led to the present crisis, were quite a prosperous, flourishing group. There are 13 million Sikhs in India, 2 percent of the population. The target of Sikh autonomy is a kind of silliness, just not realistic. For a start, Sikhs are spread throughout India, far beyond their Punjab region; they are everywhere, in the army, as businessmen and in the professions.

The stupid Planning Commission refused to let Punjab industrialise. This created a problem of educated unemployment and a pull to addiction on the one hand and to extremism on the other. Mrs Gandhi backed a particular preacher, who it must be said was good at getting addicted young men to get sober, so as to split the Jat Sikh vote. She was destroyed by her own Frankentein's monster. Something similar had happened to Solomon Bandarnaike.

Subsidiarity- States deciding how best to develop by themselves- is a good thing. A stupid and corrupt Planning Commission is a bad thing. Modi is for subsidiarity and has scrapped the Planning Commission. That is a good thing.

Religion is probably less important than regionalism. There is trouble in the Hindu south and in the northeast.

There was no 'trouble in the Hindu South'. There was trouble in the North East because Muslim immigrants voted for Congress and thus the Dynasty refused to protect the rights of the indigenous people.

There is trouble among the city poor of Bombay.

Once again, there was no trouble once the indigenous community got the upper hand.

So a crisis like this would have come one way or the other.

Utter nonsense! Even Brigadier Dyer would not have been so crazy as to shell the Golden Temple!

As dangerous as religious or regional fanaticism is the dreadful Marxist simplicity, which attacks the newly educated and could undo all India's advances.

What advances? There was nothing but stagnation under Indira.

Nobody knows what will follow Mrs. Gandhi's assassination.

Everybody knew Rajiv would take over and consolidate the Hindu 'sympathy' vote. Not Naipaul, apparently. Why? He was a stupid man who did not understand politics or economics or even basic arithmetic. Fanon and the people he spoke for had a right to be angry and, such was the savage nature of the repression they faced, perhaps that anger might have been counter-productive. In India, not anger but complacency- stupidity of Naipaul's stripe- was the enemy. Ridicule, not anger, was the correct response.