VS Naipaul, Nissim Ezekiel and a forgotten literary debate on post-independence Indian identity

In 1962, VS Naipaul left London on his first visit to India. At the time Naipaul was no literary behemoth; he could only fund the trip through a book contract from an English businessman. He had just found some success with his novel A House for Mr Biswas, much of which drew from Naipaul’s childhood, a migrant Hindu household in Indo-Trinidadian society, confronting an era of receding empire, and new, yet uncertain sense of the future.

Fame and notoriety

Naipaul’s reason to visit India stemmed from these post-colonial contradictions, searching for meaning in a land he knew best from his grandfather’s stories and his families’ traditions. The book that emerged at the end of the trip – An Area of Darkness – was in equal parts travelogue and polemic, a searing, pessimistic indictment of the poverty, corruption, and false spirituality of newly independent India.

Naipaul discovered neither the religious tone of his grandfather’s punditry, nor the mendicant pluralism of Gandhi. He felt that “India was sad, simple and repetitive”. His return to his grandfather’s village is a particularly piercing passage. Naipaul thought it should have been the return of a long-lost son, reconnected to a homeland from which his family had left under a rapacious colonial regime. Instead, he felt entirely disconnected, coming to a startling rejection of the India he had been attempting to connect with: “I had learned my separateness from India, and was content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors.”

The book set off a furore in the literary world. While readers in the West responded well, An Area of Darkness was banned by the Indian government, which inadvertently lent it even more fame and notoriety. It became a lightning rod of debate, with reviews and critiques from authors across the world. Although not well remembered today, the debate around An Area of Darkness was an important moment in post-colonial thought and the idea of “being Indian”, at a time both concepts were relatively new to the world.

Ultimately, a rather unexpected figure delivered the strongest response – so much so that Naipaul later claimed he did “not even want his interviewers to refer to him”. This man was Nissim Ezekiel, one of the founders of Indian English poetry, who wrote an essay in 1964 titled “Naipaul’s India and Mine”, published in Imprint magazine. The critique was a success for carefully responding to Naipaul’s writing, but also because both writers present fascinating parallels, offering insight into the state of post-colonial identity through their very careers.

Naipaul, never an Indian by citizenship, would be perennially at odds with his Indian and Trinidadian past, and ultimately live alienated from both backgrounds in the United Kingdom. Ezekiel, coming from an Indian Jewish family, on many occasions rejected making Aliyah to Israel, living for the entirety of his life in Mumbai while much of his community left after Independence. When Ezekiel wrote of India it came with intention, a sense of belonging that carried a horizon of cosmopolitan modernity; when Naipaul did, it stemmed from ancestral alienation, of frustration with India’s failure at achieving either the traditions he had seen in his grandfather, or the supposed modernity he lived in within the UK.

In “Naipaul’s India and Mine”, Ezekiel wrote of Naipaul’s sense of alienation from Indian identity as:

“[Naipaul’s] family became West Indian but retained some of its Indian customs and ways of thinking, retained in particular objects brought from India. These were ‘cherished because they came from India’ but they were allowed to disintegrate without regret. This kind of sterile continuity Mr Naipaul recognises as typically Indian, a continuity without cultivation…

My quarrel with Mr Naipaul, which I hope to conduct in a way that will be understandable to him, is not because of these condemnatory judgements of his, so fiercely, so blazingly expressed. My quarrel is that Mr Naipaul is so often uninvolved and unconcerned. He writes exclusively from the point of view of his own dilemma, his temperamental alienation from his mixed background, his choice and his escape.”

Typifying Indianness

Ezekiel locates Naipaul’s struggles with his singular understanding of Indianness. The “mixed” background of his family was a product of the British Empire, but also his Hindu Brahmin grandfather and his practices, of the cultural and physical goods brought over from India, but perhaps most importantly, of them existing within Trinidadian society itself. In attempting to reconcile this background, Naipaul reached not for the particularities of his existence, but to a generalised sense of being Indian. Thus, his visit to India would find him attaching every experience he had in his visit as a representation of Indian society in general, of it typifying Indianness at large.

Indeed, the same quandary often affects Indians in the diaspora, who come back from a visit to India and often develop deeply positive or deeply negative stereotypes of the country. Easier to judge a vast country with a wide-ranging judgement rather than deal with its inherent complexity.

Ezekiel goes on, contrasting his sense of belonging in India with that of Naipaul:

“Not being Hindu, I cannot identify myself with India's past as a comprehensive heritage or reject it as if it were mine to reject. I can identify myself only with modern India, a place with more things in it than are dreamt of in Mr Naipaul’s philosophy. I am neither proud nor ashamed of being an Indian. I am neither proud nor ashamed of being Westernised. History is behind me. I live on the frontiers of the future that is slowly receding before me.”

The tendency towards a future where being Indian or being Westernised becomes irrelevant may be a surprise to some. It would have shocked the sensibility of Naipaul, who referred to such attitudes as “Western mimicry” in An Area of Darkness, arguing that to follow Western habits was the rejection of a traditional way of being amongst Indians. Indeed, this sensibility is shared by many Indians today, where the desire to de-anglicise and de-Westernise the political and legal system has been vociferously advocated for (with the replacements founded on Sanskrit or Hindu precepts). Even Westernised cosmopolitans in India would baulk at saying they are “neither proud nor ashamed of being an Indian”, since national or linguistic pride seems to be implicitly accepted as an unvarnished good.

This suggests a profoundly optimistic nature to Ezekiel’s argument, that the future is palpable, and a way of identifying oneself beyond the confines of nation, beyond religious or ethnic belonging, is possible. In fact, it is “receding before me” – it is on its way to being achieved.

Ezekiel ends the essay with an almost post-national sense of belonging:

“In the India which I have presumed to call mine, I acknowledge with no hesitation the existence of all the darkness Mr Naipaul discovered. I am not a Hindu and my background makes me a natural outsider: circumstances and decisions relate me to India. In other countries, I am a foreigner… India is simply my environment. A man can do something for and in his environment by being fully what he is, by not withdrawing from it. I have not withdrawn from India.”

The idea that “circumstances and decisions” are what relate a person to their nation, that found one’s sense of citizenship, is a far wider sense of being Indian than the traditional-modern dichotomy that Naipaul seems trapped in. Belonging is not about affirming a religious, ethnic, or linguistic heritage, or about creating unity through a modern, westernised state – it is simply making the active choice to belong to a polity. Ezekiel transcends the boundaries of Naipaul’s sense of identity, coming to an existential notion – that the daily choice people make of living and working in India, of claiming that membership to a nation, is a more than sufficient claim to belonging to that land. Whereas Naipaul chose to separate himself from being Indian, Ezekiel chose not to, but it was the repeated affirmations of those choices that made their difference in identity truly clear.

All of this brings the question – why was Ezekiel’s impassioned, futuristic defence, written in 1964, so thoroughly praised? One could argue that Naipaul’s tendency towards traditionalism and singular, unifying notions of society – be it linguistic or religious – was a more apt prediction of the future. Ezekiel’s community of Bene Israeli Jews, from being a small minority in India in the 60s, is virtually non-existent today. Should this fact mean that his vision for a pluralist, choice-based social body, be considered a failure, victim to the utopian visions of the 20th century?

The value of this debate, however, cannot be in either side’s predictive value, but in the fact of the debate itself. Both Ezekiel and Naipaul capture differing attempts to grasp the epoch within which they lived, where waves of decolonisation and social and technological transformations allowed a former colonial subject like Naipaul to make a successful writing career in English in the United Kingdom, while another subject like Ezekiel would be essential to creating a distinct genre of post-colonial writing – Indian English poetry. Both would, at different times, and in very different ways, claim an identity of Indianness that would transgress religion, ethnicity, heritage, colonial background, even legal belonging itself. At a time when more insular, reactionary forms of nationalism seek to singularly define what it means to be Indian, there may be value in remembering just how widely that sense of Indianness was understood.

Corrections and clarifications: This article has been edited to include the information that Nissim Ezekiel’s essay was first published in Imprint magazine.

Rishabh Kumar studies International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and writes on contemporary culture and literature.