India - A Million Mutinies, A review

Viraj has sent a copy of the review he had made of V S Naipaul's book "India - A Million Mutinies" in 2005.
What he had said at that time is very pertinent to what is now going on in India and worth a second look.

Radheshyam

A View To India : A Million Mutinies Now!

Democracy, after the first exciting flush of its birth struggle, is often fractious, frequently inefficient and unstable, a maelstrom of "disruptive lesser loyalties." Its great strength lies in its willingness to tolerate this messiness in the service of an ideal of fair government. Democracy's toughest test case is India, with its population of one billion, with more than a dozen major languages and hundreds of dialects, with many faiths and religious traditions in conflict and symbiosis. In "India: A Million Mutinies Now," V. S. Naipaul is an erudite and sensitive guide at a time when the strain of accommodating the revolutions within the revolution -- the growth of that internalized awareness of the meaning of independence, the sometimes violent clash of competing rights and entitlements, the "million mutinies now" -- is particularly intense.
Independence had come to India like a kind of revolution," V. S. Naipaul says in the introductory chapter of his elegant account of a journey around the world's largest democracy. "Now there were many revolutions within that revolution. . . . All over India scores of particularities that had been frozen by foreign rule, or by poverty or lack of opportunity or abjectness had begun to flow again." From winter to spring: it is a comforting image, reassuring, suggestive of natural cycles and an inevitable movement toward warmth and light. The ground thaws, the sap flows, then comes the leaf, the bud, the full flowering of national and individual entitlements, an unstoppable surge toward the glorious fruition promised by the idea of independence. And yet blight intrudes: "Disruptive, lesser loyalties -- of region, caste, and clan -- now played on the surface of Indian life."
The book is a compilation of interviews or conversations with the people of India, from different walks of life. He meets with Hindu and Muslim extremists, with Atheists, rationalists- anti-Brahmin rebels, Gangsters, Sikh terrorists, communist leaders and with former ‘Naxalite’ rebels. Ordinary people like government officials, filmmakers, stockbrokers, and holy men. Naipaul succeeds in bringing a common thread to all the interviews; he goes on from one to another almost seamlessly. He sees things with a rational point of view, does not romanticize, or sugarcoat facts for the sake of political correctness. He doesn’t hesitate in talking about the sorry state of affairs in the country; accusations made are sometimes harsh and he has no qualms in expressing them.
Naipaul crisscrossed the nation, from the West, Bombay to the East, Calcutta, and from Kashmir in the North to Madras in South. The unpredictable Indian scenario is has been very meticulously captured in this striking, comprehensive, and unforgettable book.
By its very title, India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) would seem to be still another study of the sinking Indian ship, yet it is, surprisingly positive and provides a critical evaluation of the successes and failures of the Indian government at many levels. Retiring the familiar, infuriating, immobile face of India, the book paints a fresh picture of human spirit and dramatic change that should become the new starting point for thinking about India’s future.

A review by:
Dr. Viraj P. Thacker (International Relations)