Amitava Kumar on Salman Rushdie's 'Shalimar the Clown'
Tehelka, August 6, 2005
Is Salman Rushdie God?
That is the question people think you are asking and they try to set you right. When all you have done is ask whether Salman Rushdie is good.
Why is this so?
It is possibly because those who think of him as good also make that same mistake. Here is one of India's most popular news-weeklies, in the year 2000, telling its readers why Rushdie is on their list of the principal Indian news-makers of the past twenty-five years:
"Because no writer had been more—or less—read. Because Midnight's Children shook India, Shame shook Pakistan and Satanic Verses shook much of the world. Because no writer of Indian origin in living memory has made such a deep impact on our lives. Because it's easy to dislike him for being arrogant, nit-picky and self-absorbed, but what major writer isn't? Because his brilliant, complex prose makes characters come alive like a frenetic genie. Because a man who rarely visits the subcontinent has the ability to set eerily real political and social contexts for us to smile at, think about and—if we are honest—accept. Because 'writers like Rushdie' or 'not like Rushdie' is still the yardstick Indian writers of English are judged by. Because without him, there would be no Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy, or many recent literary goldfish that now live off fat literary advances and public disdain of Rushdie. Because he totally freaks out fundamentalists and critics, and that is such a wonderful, brave thing to do."
Ah, the tell-tale clubbing together of fundamentalists and critics in that last line!
Sorry, but you have to slow down and reconsider many of the assumptions, parochial and also stupid, that lie behind the rationales offered for celebrating this writer. By now, Rushdie has been writing for twenty-five years and by any yardstick, he is a writer of major significance. Of course. But you do not do his writing any service by repeatedly mistaking celebrity for critical and aesthetic breakthroughs. Nor do you advance the discussions around reading or writing in your culture as a whole by being complacent about the ways in which a writer is received or reviled.
Let us return to the laudatory paragraph above from the magazine that can remain unnamed. I am reluctant to celebrate the number of readers Rushdie has in India when the truth is that among writers in English Anurag Mathur's atrocious juvenilia The Inscrutable Americans is the book that has broken all publishing records in the country; I refuse to gloat over the number of readers that Rushdie does not have, readers who nevertheless know him as a writer and have wanted to do him harm, because this is much, much worse and horrifying than simply enjoying The Inscrutable Americans; I cannot enter into a discussion about Rushdie's presumed arrogance because I don't know him and his "arrogance" or "nit-pickiness" (about what, pray?) has nothing to do with an intelligent inquiry into his books; I'm not interested in letting a remark about the complexity of Rushdie's prose stand as it is without saying anything about language and invention on our streets, and in literature, and also in art and in advertising; I do not agree with the idea that Rushdie (is the writer being described as the "frenetic genie" or weirdly enough his prose itself?) makes characters come alive on the page because although his pages are often full of energy many of his characters are only walking-talking metaphors.
"Because a man who rarely visits the subcontinent has the ability to set eerily real political and social contexts for us to smile at, think about and—if we are honest—accept." I have trouble accepting this. Like much that is admirable in Rushdie, I find his engagement and knowledge of everything that is newsworthy (and also not) in the subcontinent impressive and often bewildering. However, the contexts that he constructs as well as the magical realist resolutions that he presents betray only the anxiety of the expatriate who is unable to recognize, or is simply ignorant of, the messy and actual realities of real people. This is a great failing in Rushdie's fiction.
I agree that "writers like Rushdie" or "not like Rushdie" continue to be categories under which most hacks prefer to slot Indian writers. But isn't this a short-coming and shouldn't we be critical of this habit? To begin with, Rushdie's own writing is populated by diverse voices. His heterogeneous influences range widely from writers like Kipling to Desani to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Gunter Grass. There are, in fact, many Rushdies. Should we not be more discriminating when we treat that name as a fixed highway sign on a giant board saying "Bombay" or "London" or "New York"?
And don't the writers who have emerged in India in the past two decades deserve more than what is given them when we treat them as clones? Yes, it is true that the writers who followed in the wake of Rushdie were inspired by his example, but it is important to take serious note of the different directions in which their work has gone. Their work, I believe, is a creative comment on Rushdie and his extraordinary output. Today, it is impossible to read any new work of Rushdie without also bringing into the discussion the new works by those who are patronizingly regarded as his literary offspring.
Tolstoy once said, "A man in good health is all the time thinking, feeling and recalling an incalculable number of things at once."
On the strength of that observation, you can safely say that Salman Rushdie is a man in wonderful health. But the statement also provides a way of looking at Rushdie's aesthetic. "I've always had a weakness for synchronicity," Rushdie had written in Jaguar Smile, his book about his travels through Nicaragua. In fact, synchronicity is his weakness as well as his strength.
In Midnight's Children, the book that first brought him to the attention of a wide readership, the protagonist Saleen Sinai is born at midnight on August 15, 1947, at the precise moment of India's independence. His fate is linked to that of the nation. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru sends him a congratulatory letter a week after Saleem's photograph appears in the Times of India: "Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own."
The letter from Nehru is a remarkable text. It is emblematic of Rushdie's talents, displaying his ear for pitch-perfect parody, but also his instinct for the marvelous conceit. The life of an individual—the author—as the mirror of the nation. In an epic story that draws upon elements of autobiography, this can be considered an enormously egotistical gesture, and it is, but it is also a brilliant and imaginative opening-up of narrative space.
In book after book, Rushdie has laid claims on public memory. His attention to synchronicity has mostly meant that characters of his own making come to inhabit moments that have wider resonance in culture. This could be regarded as an interpretative gesture or a moment of retelling of catastrophe so as to offer redemption. In the opening pages of The Satanic Verses, when a bomb blows apart an airliner in mid-flight, as had happened with Air-India Kanishka, killing all on board, in Rushdie's version two men tumble out into the cold air and one of them, the actor Gibreel Farishta, begins to sing "To be born again, first you have to die."
It is impossible to escape the suspicion that the one who is to be redeemed most often seems to be the writer himself. Rushdie's main maneuver in relation to time or history is similar to his project regarding the land from which he has migrated: he writes to reclaim what he has lost and one way to do this is to introduce his own creations into the momentous flux of the past. Hence, also, the tic of self-defensive proclamations that first appeared in his writings, designed to pre-empt attacks, as in this long, eloquent, nervous passage from Shame:
Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! ... I know: nobody ever arrested me. Nor are they ever likely to. Poacher! Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign tongue wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies? I reply with more questions: is history to be considered the property of the participants solely? In what courts are such claims staked, what boundary commissions map out the territories?Can only the dead speak?
I tell myself that this will be a novel of leavetaking, my last words on the East from which, many years ago, I began to come loose. I do not always believe myself when I say this. It is a part of the world to which, whether I like it or not, I am still joined, if only by elastic bands.
This intrusion of the authorial voice, which can be described, depending on your tastes, as postmodern self-reflexivity or as playful engagement with the reader, has one specific consequence. It legitimates Rushdie's aesthetic. One can also find a certain kind of charm there and certainly directness and style.
Among readers in India, Rushdie's mode of lively, witty, digressive narrativization found a responsive audience because it broke free from the dull conventions of more staid writing that had been the dominant norm. What Rushdie did was not exactly new in Indian writing in other languages or even in Indian drama, but its intensity and range was novel in the tradition of English writing that had been inaugurated by the likes of R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao, and Mulk Raj Anand. In a land allegedly in thrall to babu English, here was someone who was having fun with the English language. Reading him was a bit like coming across a giant ad for Amul butter on an Indian street—except that Rushdie was in command and kept doing it for five hundred pages. It made sense to me when a young novelist in Delhi said that until he encountered Rushdie he had thought that English was a language to be used only to do home-work assigned at school.
I was in college in Delhi when Salman Rushdie came to the city after the publication of Midnight's Children. He was a guest of the British Council. Rushdie was to read at Triveni Kala Sangam but the audience was too large for a small room. I saw him for the first time when he climbed up on a table in the packed corridor to address us.
Till Rushdie won the Booker Prize, I didn't even know that such a prize existed. It is true that his arrival on the literary scene allowed many Indians to imagine that they could also be writers. This happened again when Arundhati Roy got the same prize. And once more, I would imagine, although to a much lesser extent, with the Pulitzer going to Jhumpa Lahiri. But back when Rushdie won the Booker, there was no talk about heavy advances and there was little sense of stardom. Writing was still not burdened with the goal of overnight glamour that seems to be its sad fate now.
At that reading in the early eighties at Triveni, I remember the dust falling off a lamp-shade hanging from the ceiling when struck by Rushdie's prematurely balding head. I remember little of what he read, but this was largely my own failing. (I attended other readings of his at other venues over the next few days, but again, I absorbed little.) The reason for this was that although in a vague way I wanted to be a writer, I knew very little else and had no idea what I was looking for. I had recently read V.S. Naipaul's Finding the Centre and had been very much affected by his description of his struggle to become a writer. At the end of one of his talks, during a question-and-answer session, I raised my hand and asked Rushdie what he thought of Naipaul. This was at the India International Centre. He smiled thinly and said that Among the Believers, which was the last book that Naipaul had published at that time, "was the product of a sick mind." I had been exhausted by the effort to formulate an intelligible question, but not surprisingly, didn't know what to make of the reply.*
By the late eighties, when The Satanic Verses was published, I had entered graduate school in a mid-western American university. It was there one morning that I read in the New York Times an op-ed that Rushdie had written: it was in the form of an open letter to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, protesting the ban on The Satanic Verses in India.
Rushdie's words provoked a response in me and I quickly wrote a brief op-ed that I mailed to Delhi. This was several months before the pronouncement of the fatwa by Khomeini. In his op-ed, Rushdie had made the lifting of the ban the touch-stone of Indian democracy. I was opposed to the ban but I found Rushdie's appeal to Rajiv Gandhi wholly self-centered. Rushdie's letter had been written to a man who had become the country's leader after a bloodbath in which thousands of Sikhs had been murdered. None of the Congress leaders responsible for organizing the massacres had been persecuted. I wrote an open letter to Rushdie, which was published in a Delhi newspaper, where I asked, somewhat stridently no doubt, why his concern for Indian democracy had been entirely absent a year ago.
But as the years passed, Rushdie's significance in my life increased, and this was because he spoke very directly to my experience as a migrant in the West. More than that, he spoke to my academic concerns. In his fiction as well as non-fiction, he routinely provided lines of epigrammatic clarity that could serve to orient my work. In the first book of essays, Imaginary Homelands, I found words like the following that helped bring into focus what I shared, and sometimes didn't, with many others around me: "To migrate is certainly to lose language and home, to be defined by others, to become invisible or, even worse, a target; it is to experience deep changes and wrenches in the soul. But the migrant is not simply transformed by his act; he also transforms his new world. Migrants may well become mutants, but it is out of such hybridization that newness can emerge."
This kind of thinking was not unfamiliar to the new academic fields of inquiry in the American academy, but no one said such things with the kind of lucidity and easy economy that Rushdie did. (In his second essay-collection, Step Across This Line, to offer an example, you have pithy gems like the following: "The nation requires anthems, flags. The poet offers discord. Rags.") I often turned to Rushdie because no academic certainly delivered such thoughts with his panache and humor. Consider, once again almost at random, an early passage from The Moor's Last Sigh, which wittily conveys what postcolonial academics manage to articulate only in more turgid prose and over much greater length:
I repeat: the pepper, if you please; for if it had not been for peppercorns, then what is ending now in East and West might never have begun. Pepper it was that brought Vasco da Gama's tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon's Tower of Belém to the Malabar Coast; first to Calicut and later, for its lagoony harbour, to Cochin. English and French sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee, so that in the period called Discovery-of-India—but how could we be discovered if we were not covered before?—we were 'not so much sub-continent as sun-condiment', as my distinguished mother had it. 'From the beginning, what the world wanted from bloody mother India was daylight-clear,' she'd say. 'They came for the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.'
The trouble is that despite all his invention and exuberance Rushdie remains to a remarkable extent an academic writer. He is academic in that abstractions rule over his narratives. They determine the outlines of his characters, their faces, and their voices. Rushdie is also academic in the sense that his rebellions and his critiques are all securely progressive ones, advancing the causes that the intelligentsia, especially the left-liberal Western intelligentsia, holds close to its breast. This is not a bad thing, but it should qualify one's admiration for Rushdie's daring.
In the wake of the fatwa, writers all around the world sent letters to Rushdie and to the press, expressing their support for the man who had been forced to go into hiding. One of these letters was from Norman Mailer: "Many of us begin writing with the inner temerity that if we keep searching for the most dangerous of our voices, why then, sooner or later we will outrage something very fundamental in the world, and our lives will be in danger. That is what I thought when I started out, and so have many others, but you, however, are the only one of us who gave proof that this intimation is not ungrounded."
There can be no doubt that the threats that Rushdie faced and also the book-burnings and other protests were shameful and unacceptable. But I do not for a moment support Mailer's assessment. I don't believe that Rushdie has even found his most dangerous voice. In fact, I don't believe that Rushdie's is the most dangerous voice writing today. His is no doubt a powerful voice; often, it has been an oppositional voice; but it is a voice of a celebrity promoting commendable causes; more seriously, in some fundamental way, it is the voice of a metaphorical outsider, and therefore incapable of revealing to ourselves, in an intimate way, our complicities, our contradictions, and our own inescapable horror. I don't deny that it is a voice that can engage and delight and of course annoy, and yet it is very important to make a distinction: what Rushdie writes can easily provoke, but it is rarely able to disturb.
Rushdie's soon-to-be published novel Shalimar the Clown opens with an account of a murder. A former American ambassador to India has his throat knifed open on the door-step of his daughter's home in Los Angeles. The murderer is the ambassador's Kashmiri chauffeur and his name is Shalimar the Clown.
Max Ophuls, the ambassador, is a legendary hero of the French resistance against the Nazis. He has transformed himself into an arm of the American empire. Part-Galbraith, part-Malraux, Ophuls represents a type in Rushdie's fiction. He allows Rushdie to inhabit the voice of a polymath and also entertain at length the romance of fame and incredible wealth. The murderer, Shalimar, also represents a stock type in Rushdie's writing. He is the villager. And through him Rushdie is able to present the folk, the masses, who are nevertheless complex in the sense that they are so exotic. Shalimar is, literally, a clown in a village drama troupe. Shalimar's nemesis is Ophuls's daughter, India. India was the by-product of the short-lived romance between Max Ophuls and Shalimar's wife, Boonyi Kaul. This young woman also performs to type in Rushdie's book. She is extraordinarily beautiful and also nearly monstrous in her martial abilities. At the book's end, in a scene reminiscent of Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs, India sheds her demons and fights for her life. Boonyi, too, carries the burden of superwomanhood for quite a while. This too is a Rushdie trademark. Like a pretty conventional plastic surgeon playing god with the woman's looks, Rushdie endows his female creations with magical properties. Boonyi steps onto the stage of history and the book tells the tale of how "a faithless wife from the village of the bhand pather began to influence, to complicate and even to shape, American diplomatic activity regarding the vexed matter of Kashmir."
From your reading of the above few paragraphs, you can be forgiven for wondering whether Rushdie has written a story about American geopolitics, Islam, and a murder by a Kashmiri man. The truth is more prosaic. Rusdhie's Shalimar was cuckolded in love. His wife, a dancer in the same drama troupe, left him for the American ambassador. He joins the Kashmiri liberation movement in order to kill and regain his honor. It is a little bit like being told that Mohammad Atta had died of a broken heart at the hands of an attractive American girl long before he flew a plane into the Twin Towers.
Actually, it's worse than that. We read in Shalimar the Clown: "Everywhere was a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete. This unsettled people. There were collisions and explosions. The world was no longer calm." Yes. And I'm sure graduate students will write extended theses invoking such lines. Three cheers for them. But are we to find the truth of these lines in a young Kashmiri woman's unconvincing seduction of a celebrated visiting dignitary?
And are we really to accept uncomplainingly the fact that everything Rushdie says here about the violence in Kashmir finds its apotheosis only in a bloody honor killing?
In an interview in Artforum after the publication of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie described his first novel which has remained unpublished in the following words: "It was set in a Third World country, in which a consortium of military and business types choose a small-time holy man to lead a coup. And then the holy man becomes too powerful. It was rather prophetic, in fact—I was predicting Khomeini fifteen years before he took over. Had I written the story relatively straight, it would have been good. But instead, I pushed all kinds of modernist nonsense around—internal monologues, abstract passages, and so forth."
I'm often reminded of those words when I read Rushdie now. If he begins to write the story relatively straight, he would have to write without the alibis that magical realism provides him. He would probably be forced to be a more honest writer.
If Rushdie wrote a story relatively straight, he would have to recognize the inflated and unreal, didactic nonsense he dishes up, as when a village chef or waza in Shalimar the Clown decides to resist the fundamentalist mullah:
... this was a king with kitchen knives and cleavers stuck in his belt, with kitchen kettles and cookpots strung around his body in place of armor, and with a big kitchen saucepan on his head. The fresh blood of slaughtered chickens dripped from him, he had smeared it over his hands and face and over all the kitchen equipment too, and had brought along a small leather wineskin full of even more blood, to make sure the effect wasn't lost ahead of time.... 'Look at me,' shouted the waza Bombur Yambarzal. 'This thickheaded, comical, bloodthirsty moron is what you have all decided to become.' For years afterwards, the men of Shirmal spoke of Bombur Yambarzal's great, and unusually selfless, feat. By turning their familiar world of pots and pans into an effigy of horror, by sacrificing his own much-treasured dignity and pride, by insulting them with the weapon of himself, he awoke them from their strange waking sleep, the powerful hypnotic spell woven by the harsh seductive tongue of Bulbul Fakh.
If Rushdie wrote a story relatively straight, it would become necessary for dramatic and electrifying passages like the following, again from Shalimar the Clown and written in a conscious or unconscious parody of Amiri Baraka, to be made more ordinary and filled with the thousand surprises that even a handful of answers would provide the questioner:
Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear? Who shot those boys? Who shot those girls? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who killed that youth? Who clubbed that grandmother? Who knifed that aunt? Who broke that old man's nose? Who broke that young girl's heart? Who killed that lover? Who shot his fiancée? Who burned the costumes? Who broke the swords? Who burned the library? Who burned the saffron field? Who slaughtered the animals? Who burned the beehives? Who poisoned the paddies? Who killed the children? Who whipped the parents? Who raped that lazy-eyed woman? Who raped that gray-haired lazy-eyed woman as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again?
A few pages into Shalimar the Clown, the reader finds out that when India was a child her father, Max Ophuls, would tell her stories when she was in bed. But these were not bedtime stories exactly. "They were homilies such as Sun Tzu the philosopher of war might have delivered his offspring." The fable that India remembers in her youth is one about the palace of power. It is a guide through the labyrinth that leads to power, and the obstacles that face the person who is looking for the room where power sits. Once the hurdles have been crossed, you are inside the room, "which is unimpressive and in it the man of power faces you across an empty desk. He looks small, insignificant, fearful; for now that you have penetrated his defenses he must give you your heart's desire." But once you have what you want, you must also make your way out with your prize while "half-human flying monsters, winged men with the heads of birds, eagle-men and vulture-men, man-gannets and hawk-men...swoop down and rip at your treasure." If you are successful in saving parts of what you have been given, you emerge from the palace of power into the real world. The father's fable to his child, in Rushdie's words, goes on: "And when you've made it and are outside again, squinting painfully in the bright light and clutching your poor, torn remnant, you must persuade the skeptical crowd—the envious, impotent crowd!—that you have returned with everything you wanted. If you don't, you'll be marked as a failure forever."
It is a remarkable passage, and because everything in Rushdie is ultimately about him, it can be said that the inhumanity of the fatwa and the celebrity that has been his fate has left him with a prize in his hands. Is this what he wanted? One cannot know. But his characters in the last few books—Max Ophuls, Malik Solanka, Vina Apsara, Ormus Cama—are all stars. All of Rushdie's books now are about the house of power and fame. On the strength of what he has written in the past, Rushdie has the right to feel contempt for "the envious, impotent crowd," but who is to bring him the sad news that he is only writing self-help manuals for those who want to be counted among the bold and the beautiful?
*Review of V.S. Naipaul's 'Magic Seeds,' Himal, July-August, 2005 Naipaul's Naxalites
A review written nearly twenty years ago—the book was V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival and the reviewer Salman Rushdie—ended with the observation that the word "love" could be found nowhere in the text and this was "very, very sad."
I am happy to report that that word occurs at least once in Naipaul's latest novel, Magic Seeds.
It comes toward the end of the book. The protagonist, Willie Chandran, is listening to his friend Roger, a lawyer in London, as he describes his feelings for his mistress. Roger says, "Having got to know Marian, I wished to know no other woman in that special way, and I wonder whether that cannot be described as a kind of love: the sexual preference for one person above all others."
There is little love in this novel, but I didn't miss it, and not only because there is such distance that divides Naipaul's characters from each other. The truth is that a greater distance divides Willie from himself—and Naipaul is exact, if not also exacting, in his mapping of the arid landscape of loneliness and dislocation.
Willie Chandran's early life, his unhappy boyhood in southern India, and his travels to England for his education and then his later stay in Africa, had been the subject of Naipaul's previous novel, Half a Life. The sequel, Magic Seeds, takes up the narrative with Willie in his early forties. The story is told in two parts: the first half is set almost entirely in India and is presented as an account of Willie's travels—and travails—with a murderous Maoist group; the shorter, second half follows Willie's return to London where he had spent his youth as an insecure, indigent student.
For most readers in South Asia, the first half of the book will be of greatest interest, not least for its critique of middle-class leftists, who for reasons of vanity and worse, attempt to foment revolution. Willie's, and Naipaul's, sympathy is for the poor, not for their protectors. (One of the leftist ideologues that Willie meets soon after his return to India points to his servant-girl and says, "She is fifteen or sixteen. No one knows. She doesn't know. Her village is full of people like her, very small, very thin. Cricket people, matchstick people. Their minds have gone after the centuries of malnourishment. Do you think you can make a revolution with her?") Scenes like this provide a prelude to the elaboration of the enduring Naipaulian theme of failure, and it must be said that the return to customary bleakness provides one of the lesser joys of reading Magic Seeds.
Half a Life had begun with the following line: "Willie Chandran asked his father one day, 'Why is my middle name Somerset? The boys at school have just found out, and they are mocking me.'" The story of the name turned out to be rich with ironies. In a rebellious act that was also an act of cowardice, Willie's upper-caste father had become a mendicant. This was in a princely kingdom in the India of the 1930s. But in that role he was visited by the writer Somerset Maugham and became the source for his book The Razor's Edge. Willie had been named after the well-known writer. When Willie was told the story, his father asked him what he thought of it. Willie said, "I despise you."
In Naipaul's work, the names of books and authors, and the record of their use, repeat the story of newness, distortion, and often, loss. This is another of the smaller pleasures of reading him, although I suspect this would make Naipaul more popular among literary-minded readers, readers who like being charmed by the names of Victorian and Edwardian titles.
There is a larger story that Naipaul is telling even in the story of names. This is the saga of miscegenation—of what happens when literatures and cultures and people travel and mix with one another. It is another of Naipaul's unhappy obsessions and it finds expression in Magic Seeds in various pessimistic, repeatedly alarming, forms. One could argue that the first half of the book is a narrative about the consequences of transplanting Marx and Lenin and Mao into the Indian countryside. It is also proper to Naipaul's vision that Willie joins the wrong guerrilla group by mistake‹he's blundered into a group that is described as made up of "psychopaths." The book's second half deals with the mixing of classes in England and how this process gets played out in bedrooms of convenience. Roger's painful experience with his working-class mistress is intended as an example of this thesis. But Roger's tirades are not limited to women‹they include immigrants, Arabs, the common people.
The tone throughout, but especially in the second half, is polemical and recalls some of Naipaul's own racialist statements in interviews. (We again meet Marcus, a West African diplomat, who "lived for inter-racial sex, and wanted to have a white grandchild." He succeeds. "His half-English son has given him two grandchildren, one absolutely white, one not so white." The novel closes with the marriage of the parents of the grandchildren. "It's the modern fashion. Marriage after the children come.") I'm tempted to say that the text is in equal parts misanthropic and misogynist, but it would be wrong, because the brutality is sharpened by what can only be described as honesty, not to mention tenderness, vulnerability, and even affection.
I found the book a pleasure to read. By now, you know what to expect in Naipaul. His themes, sometimes even his motifs, repeat themselves. Depending on your tastes, this can be satisfying or exhausting. I read him with the greatest attention because there is no one else who can turn, with such vividness and unsentimental intelligence, mere journalistic observation into novelistic prose.
Some years ago, I had heard that Naipaul had been interviewing members of the People's War Group in Andhra. The writer had told the BBC: "I met some of the middle class people who'd gone out to join the revolution and I wasn't impressed by them at all. I thought they were vain, I thought they were not a quarter as bright as they thought they were." This book is a report on the shallowness Naipaul encountered, but it begs the question. What if Willie had not "fallen among the wrong people" and had joined the right revolution, the one for which he had left Berlin and returned to India?
Would Naipaul's portrayal have been more sympathetic? I am inclined to think not.
And yet, before I end, I must note that although the word "love" occurs only rarely in Magic Seeds, one word that is often to be found is "beauty." Naipaul uses that word to describe: the turquoise flame of the furnace of a sugar factory where Willie performs hard labour; the scene in a weaver's colony; fields of mustard and peppers; poor villages; the black-trunked trees in the small garden that Willie sees when he returns to London; bound volumes of old magazines; the names of the streets in the great city, names like Park Lane and Grosvenor Lane; even the ceramic hobs on the cooker in the kitchen.
The list, unremarkable in itself, gives rise to another thought. I wonder whether its presence in the book cannot be described as a kind of love: observation and passion finding expression in elegant language which thoughtfully gives order to ordinary life.
Amitava Kumar
