For East Is West, And West Is East, And Ever The Twain Have Met

The history of the West's fictive dramatisations of the East begins in travelogue mixed with fantasy, such as those by Marco Polo, and culminates, for the present, with V.S. Naipaul. Of the bizarre travel account of Marco Polo to the court of Kublai Khan, across limitless deserts and limited linguistic skills, people have generally been sceptical, and thetraveller -- if he existed at all -- may have unintentionally undermined his own credibility by declaring on his deathbed, " I have not described the half of what I haveseen" -- an epitaph that Naipaul, reputed for his morose sense of humour, might chucklingly approve upon his own tombstone. Historians of medieval trade now tell us Marco Polo was not the medieval backpacker we always thought, but a fellow invented by the West to fulfil its thirst for a palatable understanding of the mysterious East. Switching centuries from him to Naipaul via the inescapable filter of Said's Orientalism, one can't help wondering if it might not be argued by post-Postmodernism, some years from now, that the twentieth-century reincarnation of Marco Polo was none other than V.S. Naipaul, an invention of the west to fulfil its prejudiced and deliberately fantastic understanding of the East.

How well the west has ever -- can ever -- grasped the complex realities of the East, andvice versa, must like Black Holes remain philosophical questions of the unsolvable sort, because"Who is to say what constitutes understanding?" is the question which stands like some unbudging Wittgensteinian sentinel the moment we attempt to grapple with ordinary human questions about the specific nature of Naipaul'sunderstanding -- not to mention our worry over whether the West hasn't shaded inseparable into the East and made the distinction yet another invention of the West, or of the East, or of the East-West. The foolhardiness of finalities has never been as apparent; opinions are not just safer, they're now the only things possible.

One may as well begin with E.M. Forster's opinions, for Forster's experience of theEast is as central to his oeuvre as Naipaul's. There seems, first, the coincidence of Naipaul being awarded the Nobel Prize just when the entire Christian world's hostility to the Islamic brown looks so entirely Naipaulean and contrasts so perfectly with Forster's unaggressive liberal-humanism. Who would deny Naipaul's writing skill or grudge him his award for a lifetime in the salt mines of literary endeavour? Still, the timing of the prize makes one wonder about the whole business of prize giving. It confirms the feeling that each time a Naipaul gets a prize, we need to remember the not-Naipauls who didn't. Forster is pre-eminently not-Naipaul, arguing the importance of human connections to undermine the stiffness of the imperial upper lip, upholding the egalitarian dimensions of Islam and the playful variety of Hinduismagainst the melancholic solemnity of Christianity.

Forster also comes to mind because, some days before the prize announcement, Naipaul added his name (alongside Joyce's) to the already considerable lists of religions, civilisations, andcountries -- mostly Eastern -- he dislikes. Forster, says Naipaul, has no understanding of India. His Indian novel is rubbish. He was a dirty little homosexual who travelled abroad in search of gratifications difficult to come by in Edwardian England. He was provided these in the form of young men as a sort of gift of state by the Maharaja of Dewas, under whom Forster worked as a secretary.

A genuine dislike of Forster's last novel is fair enough, and in that opinion Naipaul is not alone. Set aside the revealing mix-up in Sir Vidia's mind of writerly intelligence with sexual preference, for to take note of such slander might be as churlishly off the mark as asking how a reasonably avid heterosexual Trinidadian could hope to understand India after marrying first an Englishwoman and then a Pakistani. Perhaps we should be indulgent and recognise that Naipaul was only being wicked about Forster in the merciless Bloomsbury manner of a latter-day Lytton Strachey. Or perhaps we are meant to understand that political correctness is only a tenet in Naipaulean vision, within which queer Forster comes off no worse, really, than straight Joyce. The more substantial point remains, which is that not everyone takes to Forster'sPassage. Indians often complain that neither Aziz, the protagonist who represents Islam and the Indian Muslim, nor Godbole, who plays the corresponding role in relation to Hinduism and Hindus, are credible even as fictional characters.

Nirad Chaudhuri flagged off this opinion with his customary flamboyance in Passage to England, and some of the debate around the novel since then has been on the nature and depth of Forster's engagement with the East. Questions arising from the novel have led literary critics in a direction they now love more than everbefore -- straight towards philosophy, anthropology, and history. Students of Forster'sPassage, Chaudhuri's Passage, and Naipaul's many passages, who in Forster's day would have discussed plot, character, and imagery, are in Naipaul's day trained to write an opaque and unfluid academic prose which they confuse with philosophical profundity, and which is all that Forsterial and Naipaulean prose is not. The irony at the heart of literary criticism is that it trains people to write exactly the sort of prose that makes real writers wince and squirm, and even as the writers writhe, their critics, undeterred and immune, busily interrogate, problematise, intervene, and interpellate. And their interpellations and interventions, in our context, might be roughly paraphrased into a set of questions and answers which take us back full circle to our impossible philosophical question.

How well can a white Western historian understand the native East he writes about? How fully does a Western anthropologist understandan Eastern tribe in the course of fieldwork? How much do Western writers who put Eastern people and civilizations into their fictions and travelogues really know about the areas they flitthrough or traverse? These inquiries into what academics call the 'discursive nature of truth' are characteristically postmodern, which, as we saw, means they cause endless debate and opinion without, in the end, leading to some ultimate truth. It all seems to depend on your point of view--andthat, then, makes reading a much more democratic activity than it used to be. Who defers now to some Cambridge pulpit-thumpers called Leavis tellings us Jane Austen is good, Alfred Austin bad? Some fellow called Harold Bloom proclaims only Shakespeare's the real goods. We chew gum, we wonder how much he gets paid, we think of the Queen of Hearts inAlice who, whenever peeved, shouted 'Off with their heads'. In our heads we echo her all the time. Empowered by postmodernism, we feel the same sort of immunity, and impunity,vis-a-vis the old high-and-mighties that Naipaul feels in relation to Forster and Joyce. And so, when Sir Vidia spoutshe understands India, Forster didn't, we can all be the Queen of Hearts.

From Forster to Kipling via Orwell is an easy step, and it helps us in relaxation to the West's passages East. In his essay on the other enNobelled old India hand Kipling, Orwell points out that though he was much trumpeted as the poet who truly understood Anglo-Indians who ruled the country were baffled: they said Kipling had no understanding of the country whatsoever. In the discipline of modern Indian history, to offer a different example, the dominant Cambridge understanding of Eastern nationalism used to be that nationalism was the product of disaffection among those of the country's educated elites who had failed to get jobs within the imperial bureaucracy. Later, Indian nationalist historians overturned this 'Nameierist' Western understanding by showing ideology and idealism rather than petty personal gains as the supposedly real cause of nationalism. Now theSubalternists -- an amazing amalgam of historians of the East nurtured by institutions in theWest -- have chucked this view of nationalism out of the window by showing Indian nationalism's opportunism with workers, peasants, tribals, and subaltern communities.

The disciplines have all merged, so we may slide effortlessly from literature and history into anthropology. For many years, it seemed established that the culturalist Margaret Mead had got hold of the truth about the Samoans and shown that gender roles were culturally constructed rather than genetically given. But then the anthropologist Derek Freeman came along and queered her pitch, saying she hadn't got her natives at all, that she'd just idealised them. The world of anthropology is nowawash --  asurf must be the new word -- with academics who believe Freemen always had it in for Mead, and that it was she rather than he who understood the eastern communities upon whom they'd cast their short-term westernised gaze. Bloating this wide sargasso sea are other bits of flotsam and jetsam, saying Freeman understood the natives about as much as Mead. Cut from these scenarios to Naipaul's reading of Foster, and we're getting nearer the ephemeral truth. We're dangerously close, in fact, when we ask why Naipaul should want to lash out at poor dead Foster.

It may be because there's always been something alive about dead Foster, kept going by the heart-and-lung machine of Merchant-Ivory-Jhabwala. The vehemence with which Forster's vision of India has been rubbished by writers like Naipaul and Chaudhuri certainly reminds us of the deep discomfort that Forster still causes among Rule Britannia and Raj sympathisers, particularly among arch-conservative brown-skinned collaborators who, reversing Tilak, have silently cried 'England is my birthright and I shall have it'. And who, adopting Britain as Motherland, have lived there as Englishmanmanqué. And who throwing stones from chandeliered glass houses, have sneered at the brown world for being made up of mimic men unsuccessfully attempting to form themselves in the image of departed white men. If anyone has inherited the journalistic mantle of Kipling and modified it to suit his own time, it is Naipaul. And so it seems worth remembering that Forster, who turned the Kiplingesque view of imperial India on its head, possessed an attribute that Naipaul cultivatedly lacks: a sympathetic, generous, liberal and humane view of people in general and the East in particular.

Writers are liked or disliked for something vaster than exceptional ability with language. The sense we get of the person behind the pen, our feeling that his attitudes are interesting and palatable, our empathy with his stories andperceptions -- these are more important than some bare recognition of technical intelligence. We respond to books and writers as we do to people. It was in fact East Man Forster (as Edward Morgan Forster was once called) who said in Aspects of the Novel: 'Our final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends and of anything else which we cannot define.' In these terms, it seems as easy to dislike Naipaul's writings for their view of the East as to like Forster's. Naipaul's deepest instincts are uncharitable, ungenerous, unkind, his finest writing on the East is a kind of inspired anger or grudging compassion which I have to force down my gullet. Perhaps it's like not caring for champagne and caviar.

But I dislike Naipaul for other reasons that seem just as good. The trolley full of prejudices he wheels around has usually served to make his own worldview clear, and his obiter dicta on Forster have clarified that he himself stands not just for elite, white, European civilization, but for a heterosexual version of this. As a list of biases, this is even better than the bundle of chips on Nirad Babu's shoulder, Naipaul's counterpart, Kipling's other successor. These renegade star members of the Coconut Club (brown outside, white inside) have singularly and similarly forgotten the colour of their own skin, comprehensively shrugged off the dust from which they have arisen, ignored the oppressions of colonialism, praised upper-caste Hindu rule from upper-class homesteads in Britain, acceptedan alien queen's honours, become Englishmen in top hats and suits, and enlightened us by revealing the defiling ignorance of Muslims, lower castes, and the pitiable masses untouched by Shakespeare & Co. It is not surprising they've both been untouched by Shakespeare & Co. It is not surprising they've both been contemptuous of Forster's queer brand of sympathy for the worlds that lie east of the Mediterranean.

Just as instinctively as Naipaul made his career around a refined form of literary loathing, Forster made his around the regions and religions with which he felt some aesthetic kinship and intellectualsympathy -- Italy and Greece, Egypt and India, Islam and Hinduism. In India he travelled for three months in 1912, lived in Dewas for nearly a year in 1921, and made a short trip in 1945. It is true he found sexual happiness over his second tenure in India, but he had found it earlier too, as a Red Cross worker in Egypt during the First War.

How successfully did Forster analyse and understand the East? He wrote a book on the history and culture of Alexandria, a novel and a memoir on India, and a large body of essay on the East in general.Did his work recapture the nuances of our culture or does it caricature and essentialise? Can these questions be confusedwith a writer's bodily predilections and his quest for happiness within a context puritanically hostile to what it considered sexually deviant? To some questions, surely, there can still be only one answer, some settled consensus. Naipaul's opinion doesn't disfigure the consensus that Forster was a subtle thinker who caught the East-West clash at an early moment, dramatising the strange and dark social possibilities when imperial Christianity confronts Islam and Hinduism. He was an oddball Englishman of immense learning and hellishly independent opinions whoalways -- as he said admiringly of the queer Green poet C.P. Cavafy--'stood at a slight angle to the universe'. He was outspokenly anti-imperialist, anti-Fascist, anti-fundamentalist. He felt much love for his countryside, a little for his country. A sceptic liberal, in Two Cheers for Democracy he refused Britain the third cheer in order to debunk Churchillian nationalism and argue the social value of being tepidly rather than ardently nationalist. Most important, the prose in which this man's eccentric sanity is couched is capable of a musical profundity to which self-absorbed'eastanthropes' like Naipaul are probably immune.

The contrast between a Forsterian vision of the world -- tolerant, humane, sympathetic, androgynous, eclectic and genuinelycosmopolitan -- and a Naipaulean vision -- excoriating, condescending, snide, and mercilesslyfault-finding -- has been given fine expression by Nissim Ezekiel in 'Naipaul's India and Mine'. Ezekiel compares the famous Marabar Caves scene as dramatised by Forster, and as it might be dramatised byNaipaul:

Adela accuses Aziz of having tried to rape her. Later she confessed that her behaviour was like that of certain women who honestly believe they have received offers of marriage when none were intended.. Mr Naipaul...dealing with the same material, would probably relate how an Indian took two English ladies to see some caves and tried to rape one of them there. It would not be an implausible story, only an appalling one...I am not in fact doubting his (Naipaul's) veracity, only his approach towards the discovery of the truth.

Naipaul's East, Ezekiel shows, is the medieval hell the West climbed out of-- rather like Naipaul himself. So Naipaul is not amused by Islam; urban India he dislikes; rural India pleases him not at all; everywhere he looks the lower classes proliferate and dedicate. Worse still, Naipaul believes none but he notices them being so dreadfully themselves. The problem, says Ezekiel, speaking for a great many Indians, might lie less among those beheld him than within the Western eye (and nose) of the beholder. Contrast this with the Forsterian approach: it is dated and old-fashioned, yes, but it is human and compassionate, it looks with sympathy at the struggle of those who fail. Forster's Passage ends with that memorable episode of disillusionment when Aziz and Fielding, for all their desire to forge a Wagnerian bridge across their faiths and nationalities, are parted by a politicised cosmos which segregates East and West because it denies the equality of nations and religions.

Over the years Naipaul seems to have become more used to the Hindu rate of growth and its smell. Admirers of India: A Million Mutinies Now point out that where he once denigrated, he now tolerates. But Naipaul is the last man to accept being claimed by the ideologically virtuous. There'sa worm in him that will make him turn, perversely if need be, to prevent being pigeonholed into aDefinitely This or a Definitely That.