India: A Million Mutinies Now

"No. The book that comes closest to having the narrative energy of a work of fiction on my list is India: A Million Mutinies Now by V S Naipaul, which is why I chose it, in part. There’s this idea of the ‘Great American Novel’, which is deeply flawed because we know there isn’t one America. There are many, many Americas and no novel can hope to capture them all. This difficulty is even more pronounced in India. No novel can really capture the different textures of life there. But A Million Mutinies Now does an excellent job of describing the lives, the hopes and aspirations and frustrations of a diverse cast of Indians who have lived through the last 60 years. Some of them are even older figures, who can recall a pre-1947 India. Naipaul himself is very much a figure in the background in this particular book; he just lets people speak. And what you get through the stories that these people tell to Naipaul is a nuanced picture of the many different personal and political journeys since 1947. It’s probably the closest thing you can get to a good book of fiction about India. Yes, and Naipaul is primarily a novelist so he brings a novelist’s gift for narrative and for organisation to the stories. I’m sure the interviews themselves took a long time and were full of all kinds of detail. He’s edited those stories down and carefully sifted through the details to create some really compelling narratives. They actually read like well-constructed fiction narratives. There is an account of a Dalit poet early in the book (Dalits are untouchable Hindus). Naipaul goes to his house in Mumbai and talks to him and his wife. He talks to him about his radical politics, about his poetry. And there is something incredibly moving about this whole little chapter about this man who comes out of nowhere, who is an untouchable Hindu and comes from the most despised and, for a very long time, the most trampled upon people in this country. And although Indian society has been liberalised a great deal since 1947 and some formerly untouchable Hindus have become politically very assertive, still it’s been a really terrible, very difficult journey for many of them. And in just a few pages – with this very keen eye that he has for the telling details, his instinct for memorable scenes – Naipaul really creates an extremely vivid picture of this man, his life, his aspirations, his frustrations, his dreams. It’s really beautifully done."