In Light of India

"If one were to put these books into an order in which they should be ideally read, I would actually put the Octavio Paz book In Light of India as number one. That is easily the most accessible and stimulating book or introduction to India that you can read. It is very briskly done, with a kind of poet’s brevity, and covers astonishingly wide regions of politics, art, literature and the economy. Yes, and he visited India previously, in the 1950s. He was also a regular visitor to India after he retired from his ambassadorship. So he kept up this connection and I think he wrote this book quite late in his life, just before or after he was awarded the Nobel Prize. The book is also important because it offers a perspective that is very rarely found in books about India, which are mostly written by Europeans and Americans. Paz comes from a society which has had a somewhat similar experience to India – in terms of dealing with an extremely conservative-minded colonialism, and coming out of that and trying to construct a modern nation state. His is also a deeply traditional society and if you read his The Labyrinth of Solitude you’ll find some really interesting similarities between the experience of Mexico and that of India. For someone like Paz, from that kind of background and culture, to be looking at India, not surprisingly he comes up with some interesting and stimulating ideas and insights that would not be possible for someone from an American or European background. Speaking very generally, the kind of sympathy he brings in describing the imperative of modernisation that a young country like India has been faced with. I think most people in the West think of modernisation as something quite natural, and because it happened quite a long time ago in America or in Europe nobody alive now has much memory of premodern Europe or America. They’ve forgotten what a traumatic thing it was, how many people were forced to move from villages to the big cities, to work in extremely degrading circumstances and what a struggle it was for everyone, for the working classes, for women in particular. Not to mention the great World Wars that modern European countries fought among themselves over access to land and resources. I think countries like India, Mexico and Indonesia are still going through that very painful, very difficult process, with no end in sight. Paz is alert to that pain, in a way that some of the very celebratory accounts written about India today are not: they actually tend to cheerlead this process and assume that Western consumer society in general is the height of human achievement. What these Western accounts do is annex the past, present and future of India to the grand and triumphalist narrative of Western modernity. And even the more sympathetic accounts of India written by Western writers just don’t see how really arduous, how difficult it is for people in a tradition-minded, largely agrarian society to step into the modern world: to try to become this individual without any consolations of community, of family, or caste groups or regional groups. “What these Western accounts do is annex the past, present and future of India to the grand and triumphalist narrative of Western modernity.” And, as we know from the experience of the West itself, all this immense effort is often made without any guarantee of success, of happiness or fulfilment – indeed with a high likelihood of distress, confusion, anomie. Both Paz and, in his own way, Naipaul, because they come from – to use a phrase no longer used much – a Third World background, are very sensitive, very alert to this aspect of India."