An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India

"I chose this book because of my own experience of reading it. It upended the way I looked at things. It challenged so many things I took for granted about India. I read it relatively late in life. No book had challenged me the way this book did. Literature was a sort of parlor game, ‘What have you read? What have I read?’ I compared notes with friends. This is the first book I ever read that really crawled under my skin, it disturbed me in a way I never thought it possible. I would go to sleep and be thinking about this book. And it was so forceful that I would have to put the book down. It’s a very short book, it’s just over 280 pages in paperback. And I realized that the power to disturb me came from the book’s honesty. It just didn’t sugarcoat anything. I don’t think anybody had written about India with such honesty as VS Naipaul did. And everything he wrote, almost every observation of his, was freighted with truth. There were moments when I felt angry with him, there were moments when I thought, ‘You can’t talk about India this way!’ And, yet, I had to submit to the force, the power of his observation. All our fortifications against scrutiny, all the fortifications Indians have built up against foreign scrutiny, his vision could penetrate them. He was just so honest—about caste, about the comforting lies Indians tell themselves about poverty, about lies Indians tell themselves about India’s own history. They don’t discuss the medieval history in which Islamic invaders arrive. This is an argument Naipaul develops in a second book, India: A Wounded Civilization . But you see the beginnings of it in this book. It’s also the single best examination of the British in India. There have been volumes written about it, but it takes ten pages for VS Naipaul to detail the futility, the wastefulness of the British in India. He describes them as poseurs, people at play in India. “I don’t think anybody had written about India with such honesty as VS Naipaul did” Of course a lot of people see Naipaul as a reactionary. He said many provocative things in his interviews, and so many people say that he hates India, even that he’s a racist. But this book struck me as the work of a man who sympathized with ordinary Indians. He was the spokesman of the underdog. There’s a passage in which he’s traveling from southern India to Bengal, accompanied by Indian Army officers. India is then at war with China. He writes, “I did not want India to sink; the mere thought was painful.” That, I think, is the only time in the book where he becomes lyrical in his description of India and you can feel his affection for India leaping off the page in that passage. There’s also one passage that has always stayed with me. After leaving India and landing in Europe, he says, “How could I explain, how could I admit as reasonable, even to myself, my distaste, my sense of the insubstantiality and wrongness of the new world to which I had been so swiftly transported? This life confirmed that other death; yet that death rendered this fraudulent.” He looks at Europe and its fashions and its sophistication and its progress and he just cannot comprehend that all this can exist in a world that contains the distress he has experienced in India. He feels the mere existence of this is wrong after everything he’s seen. He is the spokesman, he is the champion of the Indian underdog, he has this fellow-feeling throughout for India’s poor. He is appalled and disgusted by the caste system. Most of all, he’s appalled by India’s Anglophone ruling elites, and thinks they are perpetuating a fraud against Indians. And there’s a warning for them. He says that if they do not openly deal with India’s wounded past, they will be overthrown. And he also warns Indians that the past must be seen to be dead, otherwise the past will kill. He wants them to deal sincerely and honestly with India’s experience of Islamic invasions. India’s Anglophile elites obviously hated Naipaul and, in the beginning at least, dismissed him. The secular state they boasted about has now gone, overthrown by the very furies Naipaul warned them against. And I don’t think there’s ever been a writer, since Gandhi , who looked at India with such sharpness and such clarity. And I’ve never read another that has moved me so viscerally. I think anyone who wants to understand India today should read this book."

"I read this before I met VS Naipaul , in East Africa. I have known him very well over the years, as you might know from my book Sir Vidia ’ s Shadow . This book really impressed me, and meeting him I then saw how he travelled – how he provoked people into saying things. His manner of travel was to put someone on the back foot, to ask questions like “Why do you do this?” and demand answers. He was very provocative in general when he was in East Africa. He was exasperated, discouraged – he’s a depressive person, and an angry one. But the book is wonderful. He knows how to write about landscape. He knows how to write dialogue. He’s funny. He has novelistic gifts that he brings to his nonfiction. Obviously he left a lot out – the main thing being that he was with his wife. He never mentions her. Absolutely. It’s a book about an Indian who goes to India and realises that he has no place there – it’s an area of darkness for him, because he’s lost his sense of caste. Naipaul writes well about being wrong. He goes on a pilgrimage and quarrels with people, and those quarrels are part of the book. A travel book is never all roses, and he writes very candidly about his foibles. Not all of them, but many of them. And that was helpful to me – like all of these books it taught me something. But knowing the writer, and having both the book and the person to compare it against, is different. No, of course not. Half of the time in Africa, Naipaul was so rude and provocative that I thought somebody was going to hit him. You can see a writer’s personality in their books, but the writer themself never matches up to it. They’re not all tall as you think they are going to be, or as urbane. They have foibles. They get cranky. They’re fussy. But the book itself feels whole, and you can’t help but think: How did this weak, flawed person manage to write this book? The writer as a person is more like the valet to the person who wrote the book. How could it be me? It’s a novel, and a man that I have invented. I’ve been there, but not in the same circumstances. I see it rather as a book about captivity. A man whose life is up the wall goes to Africa with good intentions, and isn’t allowed to leave. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That too. He describes his marriage as a digression – his real life was in Malawi, when he was alone. That’s the other thing about travel. You are, and can be, yourself. People don’t know you, so their expectations aren’t the same. He felt captive in his job and in his marriage, and he travels back to Malawi. But then he can’t get away. That’s the nightmare of a lot of travellers. You go to a place, and then they say you can’t go. You’re stuck."