Naipaul's Historical Baggage

All this was much before the days of satellite communication and long distance affinity, for now bouquets and bricks can be couriered to Ayodhya, Surinamese Ramlilas mounted on the outskirts of Amsterdam, and sitar-vadan and sari-tying techniques imparted to the third-generation progeny of migrants from such villages as Boorah Dih and Pandepar, Paikauli and Malaon in the Nepal terai districts of north India.

Culture is, of course, tied as much to mores as it is lived over known and accessible places: a crude shrine beyond the village boundary, the parikrama of holy sites on the sacred paridhi of Kashi, or the urs of gharib-nawaz Muinuddin Chishti at Ajmer for that matter. Like some wandering hero of a medieval Arabian romance, Naipaul, our extraordinarily gifted traveller from the New World, braves the humans and ogres of distant lands, recounting other people's lives to return continually to the point of his own scattered origins.

Fairly early on in his latest excursions among the peoples converted to Islam, Naipaul visits a sacred spot in West Sumatra: "a big dip in the volcanic land with a hot spring...where the Minangkabau people were said to have come out of the earth." This visit induces the thought that the island that he grew up in the Caribbean had no such places that Naipaul could identify with: "the aboriginal people who knew about the sacred places had been destroyed on our island, and instead of them there were—in the plantation colony—people like us, whose sacred places were in other continents."

And it is this absence and search for sacredness, "rather than history and the past" that Naipaul now maintains that "we of the New World travel to the Old to rediscover". The central message of Beyond Belief, an intricate weave of stories told to Naipaul by Muslims living in Indonesia, Iran and Pakistan, is that for these people of these Muslim countries, as indeed for all Muslims all over the world, there is no colour, no life, no past, no memory, no joy, no suffering, no regrets—beyond belief in a monochromatic submission to Islam. The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism, as of Islam more generally (Naipaul uses the two interchangeably), is "that it allows only to one people—the Arabs, the original people of the prophet—a past and sacred places, pilgrimages and earth reverences".

It would be tedious to contest this as well as the other opinions of Naipaul about "the devastation caused by Islam in India proper" with facts and figures, as they used to say in the old days. The long litany of pirs (Muslim saints) invoked by Shankar Shambhu, one of India's greatest qawwals, in his qaul preparatory to the actual rendition, is full of Islamic holy men whose shrines are all located in the subcontinent. Were we to go by Naipaul's opinions, it would pay put to all the future international conferences on the local or regional face of Islam in South and South-east Asia! That might or might not be a bad thing. But for those of us with roots in this land (and there are millions of 'us'), turning west to the Kaaba, even two times a year or indeed five times a day, is not to turn away from pasts, practices and histories truly east of Suez. On the contrary, living in the aftermath of the bomb, and with the aggressive sectarian vandalism that preceded the current phase of nuclear jingoism, the creed of intolerance of diversity seems to be characteristic of the Indian variety of majoritarian nationalism.

Beyond Belief is a collection of stories that Naipaul gathered in his five months of travels through large parts of Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia in early 1995. Naipaul tells us how he tracks down old informants from an earlier trip, follows new leads, visits village-based preachers and air-conditioned executives, homes of lawyers and poets, takes down copious notes and reworks these stories into a connected narrative, often ringing up someone for further clarification, requesting another to fax an answer to a question left unasked in a previous encounter. The hard work, the seriousness of the enterprise, is clearly on view in the main body of the book, but so are Naipaul's opinions.

Most of the stories are about the mismatch between faith and technology, faith and nationalism, faith and history, faith and justice, faith and reasonable behaviour, faith and hygiene, even faith and good food!

Perhaps anticipating the charge that this is yet another opinionated tract, Naipaul assures the reader at the outset: "This is a book about people. It is not a book of opinions. It is a book of stories." And further on: "It is less a travel book; the writer is less present, less of an inquirer. He is in the background, trusting to his instinct, a discoverer of people, a finder of stories...a manager of narratives." The self-descriptions keep mounting, which is a pity, for no book, even by as accomplished a craftsman as Naipaul, requires such prolonged self-characterisations and prefatory statements of intent. As it turns out, Naipaul's prologue is as much about his opinions on Islam as it is about his own literary journey over the past four decades.

WONDERFULLY told, as most of these stories are, one is continually brought up short by a literary device or an otherwise felicitous turn of phrase which only Naipaul, with his old and acquired baggage about Islam could have written, and whose meaning skims the aesthetic to lodge itself like some primeval prejudice in the murky regions of the personally visceral.

In the first chapter, providentially called The Man of the Moment, Naipaul etches the complex Imaduddin, the right hand man of B.J. Habibie who the other day took over the reigns of power from General Suharto in Jakarta. Imaduddin, an old acquaintance of Naipaul's from 1979, gave up electrical for civil engineering, because it involves management of people and not simply the upkeep of coiled motors. He is now one of the foremost modern Islamic motivators of Indonesian intellectuals, both at home and abroad. He has a regular television show, and imparts 'mental training', i.e. Islamic precepts, to Indonesian students sent out to western universities by Habibie to acquire technology for the mother country. Naipaul visits Imaduddin's house, meets his petite wife, observes the two nervous maids, encounters Imaduddin's masseur, even witnesses Imaduddin's conversion to Islam of an Oklahoman besotted by a local beauty.

All this is wonderfully evocative. Sitting in Imaduddin's office, listening to his individual and religious journey of the past 16 years, Naipaul hears "no doubt from the carpeted and rumpled open space at the end of the corridor, hesitant scraping sounds develop into a shy chant"—an office-muezzin's call for the evening prayers—and his prose as much as his host in conversation with the distinguished visitor begins to feel the strain. "The chanting from the corridor became more confident. It could not be denied now. I could see that Imaduddin wanted to be out there, with the chanters and prayers... The chanting now filled the corridor. It was authoritative. It recalled Imaduddin from his narrative of times past... When he came back he had lost his restlessness. The prayers, the assuaging of habit had set him up for the happiest part of his story."

I don't speak from personal experience, but the fact that an otherwise reasonable human being could take time off for just five minutes, return to whatever he was up to without an irrational hiatus and be the man he previously was, is something that Naipaul and a lot of us can not handle without a degree of incomprehension.

Back at Imaduddin's house Naipaul visits the bathroom: "Ritual ablutions from a little concrete pool had left the place a mess, except for people who would take off their shoes and roll up their trousers." We are back here to the fastidious, culture-shocked Naipaul of An Area of Darkness, of non-air-conditioned taxis, the dust and grime and self-denials of the non-western world. And this is truly a pity, for Naipaul is such a good storyteller that for him to claim that he is absent in his stories is to undercut the ground from where he writes. Surely, he would not like to be remembered as that pre-Shakuntalam Kalidas who narrowly escaped sawing himself off from his preferred perch on an ancient Indian tree!