INTRODUCTION:

“Hysteria had been my reaction, and a brutality depicted by a new awareness of myself as a whole human being and a determination, touched with fear, to remain what I was”. –

V S Naipaul, An Area of Darkness.

India was shocked of Naipaul because it countered his own idea of himself. The distinguistion between the imagined India of Trinidad and the real land were very broad areas to be confronted. The only remaining solution was to escape. This travelogue begins with a resting place for imagination and ends in flight. Naipaul reflects

“It was a journey that ought not to have been made; It had broken my life in two”. (AD 265).

It reflects the diasporic author’s engagement with a place of his origin, a phase that must essentially starts with an imagined idea of the land. It depicts the truth from Naipaul’s biased/ truth vision.

Naipaul’s travel book ‘An Area of Darkness’ can be regarded an attempt to delve into a past that must always remain out of reach. But India in the site of an impossible return; it is the subject to which Naipaul returns, nonetheless with an insistence. Shuttling between a point of origin and point of destination, Naipaul’s world weary traveller occupies an intermediary space between return and arrival. This book in a semi-auto biographical account of a year in India. From Naipaul’s point of view, India which served as the background to his childhood was not the real country but an area of imagination, that was considered as an isolated area that produced his grandfather and his ancestors who were born in India and had left as indentured labourers.

In a resting place for imagination, Naipaul portrays the characters of two persons, such as Golden teeth Nane and Babu. Through these characters he explains his views of India, which describes him as an alienated man from India in the minds of the people. India is present with more in things than in people, as the people produced by the land featureless and dark. His grandfather though abandoned India, but didn’t forget Indian customs and manners; that was clearly evident in his Trinidad house which did not have a glimpse of colonial style.

Naipaul was terrified to see Indian uncleanliness, darts people feed animals in plates that they themselves have used. The children shared many kinds of sweets with one another. Women were sipping from ladies with which they stirred their pots. Naipaul’s imagination towards the caste difference and religious rituals is highlighted. Caste in India meant harm and division but in Trinidad it did not affect the life style of the people. He was detested to see the Indians staining their hands with caste distinction. He had no regard for Hinduism and its religious ceremonies.

Naipaul fantasized India to be land of his fairytale. In An Area of Darkness, two unlike personals of Naipaul appear. One is a self cautions non believer with a healthy distance from the practiced rituals. The other is one who is outraged to hear that candles and those electric bulbs had replaced clay lamps for Diwali in Bombay; who silently backs a scientific experiment at school that required him to pluck from a common siphon; who could be angered of the verdict on India by Beverly Nicholas. But these two completely separate poles stayed together as long as Naipaul was in Trinidad or England. He puts stress on the two types of lives; public life and private life. But in India, the land separates these two apart. The uneficacy of his self proclaimed method was realised by himself, which was produced in India: A Million Mutinies now. The ‘flight’ marked the starting of a series of journeys to India.

“It is Mr. Naipaul’s unique achievement to have passed that amount of time in India without meeting a single worth while human being. He finds fault in almost everything that he sees; the people’s habits and their manners, the cities, the villages railways, bureaucracy, army. Even the Taj Mahal is not spared”.

Naipaul proposed to move Taj Mahal to the United States is marked as his hatred of the squalor of India. Natwar Singh missed out in his first work is that sought to delink to demean the architectural beauty of the Taj Mahal from its actual history, which in painful and hard to accept. Naipaul’s dream of transferring the Indian wonder the Taj Mahal to USA is not acceptable by its originated land.

The central point, which critics of both sides have missed out in the perspectives of vision. Vision can be divided into two separate parts or phrases like truths and half truths. Ezekiel’s India can’t be the India as Naipaul dreams. Naipaul’s attitude was sceptical, sardonic and he focuses on detachment. He can be regarded as a true outsider.

Naipaul relation with his ancestoral land was full with actions and reactions, recorded against the backbone that is similarly complicated. Naipaul’s vision was compelled with Hindu Brahmin idea that survived in a small area of self depiction. He also remarked that he had been brought up in a double world. Both these worlds were not equal and having different secrets. Both these worlds reacted differently to different situations. In this content Naipaul fractured sensibility and rejected it as being willful construction as the part of the author.

As per Naipaul, An Area of Darkness was double struggle. It was the struggle to set-up a perspective to look at the meaning of India and also it was a process through which the meaning could be unraveled. He put stress on the metaphoric degree 'an oblong piece of cloth’, which was a gift from Indian friend that portrays his inability to find an end to his dual struggle. Indian sensibility which remains impenetrable for him. For him, “The area of light is the area of his experience, in time and place”. (AD 30). Naipaul clearly states that he is unable to brief out the philosophy that is situated in the heart of India. He states “I feel it in something true which I could never adequately express and never seize again” (266-67). The travelogue in the portrait of a diasporic writer’s problematic bonding with the land of his own origin.

The predecament of assuming this estranged Indian self in revealed in his nervous outburst at the fear of being faceless in the Indian crowds at Bombay. Becoming indistinct in the “Sameness” with the Indians, his strangeness denied, Naipaul finds himself ‘Invisible’. Perhaps, for the first time his Indianness threatens to overwhelm his individuality.

He notes:

“I had been made by Trinidad and England; recognition of my difference was necessary to me, I felt the need to impose myself and did not know how”

(Naipaul, 1964, 39)

It seems the enigma of appearing in the 'Sameness' makes him long for ‘difference’. The moment of arriving at a sense of Indian identity is deferred as he realizes that this is not what he wants. The deferral is not only from his Indianness to something non- Indian; it is also a deferral from identification in terms of race, religion and culture to assertion of its unsuitability or inadequacy.

It seems, Naipaul is both, alternatively an Indian and a ‘western' in India and this fusion causes trouble. A critic on Naipaul, Chandra Chatterjee says “Naipaul’s perceptions about India are coloured by an in evitable insider- outsider conflict. He moans the way that Indians had to see themselves through European eyes to be aware of their own spirituality”. (Panwar, 2017, 108)

· It appears that Naipaul’s joy and exaltation come from his own Brahmin-self and his anger and negativity come from the inherent western-self.

· The book ends in ambivalence. There could not have been any other possible ending. The area of light is the area of his “experience, in time and place”. (Naipaul,1964,30). He says: “I felt it as something true which I could never adequately express and never seize again”. (Naipaul,1964,266).

CONCLUSION:

Naipaul’s remarks are completely of his own that comes out with a strong sense of commitment, where he sidelined the intellectual commitment. His strong stress on Hinduism shows a gradual progression on national politics. Naipaul can be defined a chronicler of the present literary as well as philosophic era. He derives ideas, thoughts and social practices from the present connotations. It shows his diasporic concern on India.

REFERENCE:

Naipaul, V.S An Area of Darkness. London, Andre Deutsch, 1964

Boxhill, Antony, V.S Naipaul’s fiction: In Quest of the enemy. New York. New York press,1983.

Received on 28.02.2023 Modified on 12.03.2023

Res. J. Humanities and Social Sciences. 2023;14(1)49-51.

DOI: 10.52711/2321-5828.2023.00010