The Indian Way of Seeing

By Utkarsh Adhrit

‘I have known nothing but what I’ve seen; and I wonder,’ she declared with some impatience, ‘that you didn’t see as much.’ —The Ambassadors, by Henry James

Born in Trinidad to third-generation, Indian parents, V. S. Naipaul, the 2001 Nobel laureate for literature, moved to London at the age of 19 to study literature at Oxford. This dislocation became a creative impetus—while costing him a past that he could ‘enter into and consider’[i], it fostered in him a versatile sensibility. Throughout his career, the thematic direction of his works came to be shaped by inter-cultural encounter. He writes that his journey from a distant land to ‘the metropolis’[ii] (London) led him to become ‘aware of different ways of seeing’[iii]. With little variety, the topic is addressed across four decades—from 1965 to 2005—and over the course of several essays. In every instance, the central thesis is the same: the Indian way of seeing is defective.

The thesis has its origins in Naipaul’s frustration with the complacency of Indian autobiographies, which he classifies as part of the ‘larger Indian habit of exclusion, denial, and non-seeing’[iv]. Unlike, say, John Berger, for whom seeing is pre-verbal, Naipaul regards it as an acquired skill, a body of knowledge how (as opposed to knowledge that). It is different from mere looking—a limited, reductive endeavour—and is more approximate to the ability to ‘withdraw and analyze’[v]. It requires a willingness to receive, an elasticity that engages both the readable and unreadable contrasts as more than mere facts. It is a process consonant with the world view that a writer develops.  

The point here is cultural. The Indian way of seeing—or ‘looking and not seeing’—is part of what Naipaul calls ‘the “ignoble privacy” of the Indian social organization’[vi]. The phrase—‘ignoble privacy’—is, in fact, Nirad Chaudhuri’s, whose autobiography, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), Naipaul singularly identifies as ‘the greatest penetration of the Indian mind by the West—and, by extension, of the penetration of one culture by another’[vii]. Growing up in Kishoreganj District of now-Bangladesh, Chaudhuri derided the absence of political industry in the community. ‘Politics or public affairs did not interest any one deeply’[viii]. Though there had been an ever-growing sense of citizenship, it had not yet given cause to political expression. The nascent independence movement had done little more than excite. A citizen’s life was instead ‘overwhelmingly dedicated to the pursuit of personal prosperity’[ix]. At all times, there was an ease of retreat into the private arrangement.

But this privacy, as both Naipaul and Chaudhuri point out, was ‘ignoble’ for it was occasioned by the material reality of caste, myth, and ritual that resiliently acted as an ersatz substitute for political praxis. Never on his own, ‘the individual [was] always fundamentally a member of his group, with a complex apparatus of rules, rituals, and taboos’[x] regulating his behaviour. While fettering political emancipation, this apparatus conditioned a ‘medieval’[xi] way of relating to one’s self, making withdrawal, a true withdrawal, and analysis—both necessary prerequisites for writing—difficult for Indians, and limiting the act of seeing.

For Naipaul, the paradigmatic case of this limitation is Gandhi’s autobiography. Within a single sentence—‘We reached Southampton, as far as I can remember, on a Saturday.’[xii]—Naipaul locates the cathexis of ‘a people that lack wonder, or more accurately, of a people that recognize only one kind of wonder: their own’[xiii]. It is this self-absorbed quality, ‘converted into a hectic self-love’[xiv], that makes the fact that it was a Saturday more important than the fact that Bombay had been exchanged for Southampton. Dictated in 1925, the autobiography accounts for the experiences of an ambitious young student who, rejecting the conservative wisdom of his community that forbade international travel, set out to study law in London in 1889. The prospect grieved Gandhi’s mother, and as compensation to her, he took a vow of vegetarianism and chastity. The journey, therefore, assumed spiritual colours, and Gandhi’s account, even decades later, remains attendant to them. He retains the embarrassed tenor of such traditional obsessions, converting London, the grandest city in the world, into a narrow psychic theater— ‘a series of small spiritual experiences’[xv], a set of incursions against the fortified self. Naipaul argues that this embarrassment comes at the expense of unsettlement—a more natural, and arguably, less self-absorbed reaction. In writing, it translated to an ocular veil. In Gandhi’s pages, there is little care for the landscape, small room for the people who are simply reduced to their functions. Instead, the narrative winnows inward, rendering the voyage ‘an internal adventure of anxieties felt and food eaten’[xvi]. Considered literarily, the work is anemic—whatever is on the page issues right out of the author’s mind, divorced from the world in which it is situated.

It is curious to note that Gandhi travelled to England in the late 1880s. Curious, because it was also in the 1880s, or more precisely, according to the historian Antoinette Burton, in 1886—the year of The Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London—that a number of Indian Anglophiles began to travel to the imperial centre and write about their experiences. The practice had become so widespread that by 1901, Viceroy Lord Curzon was complaining about the morality of the ‘well-known Indian flaneurs’[xvii]. These accounts were written for an Indian audience and contained detailed descriptions of life in England and continental Europe. Landladies (mocked bitterly as dreadful bores), the cheery and honest “bobbies”, the diligent shoe-blacks, the picturesque flower-girls, the architecture, the art (including the nude paintings of ‘unchristian moral laxity’[xviii] at Hampton Court), the wretched working class of East End and their ‘temptation’[xix] to suicide, and even the lives of the British Jews—all made their way into these travelogues. In no way can the interest in England be considered internal. But the most fascinating feature of these accounts is the shared metaphor of the “Indian Eye”. The titles of several of these manuscripts reveal an obsession with the act of seeing: England and Europe Through Indian Eyes; English Pictures From an Indian Camera; and London and Paris Through Indian Spectacles. Burton argues that this was ‘not merely a rhetorical manoeuvre but had political ramifications’[xx]. It was an attempt to reverse the colonial gaze and confer ‘subject-hood’ on the Indian traveller, making him a ‘see-er’ rather than an ‘object of the colonial rule’[xxi]. The intended effect was a ‘provincialization’[xxii] of Britain itself, fashioning it as part of the Empire, not unlike India since 1877, and opening it to the ‘telescoping lens’[xxiii] of the Indian national gaze. It was not a coincidence that these writings emerged a year after the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885. The development was both historical and political.

It seems rather implausible that a writer with Naipaul’s training in Victorian literature could have been unaware of these accounts. Especially when they pertain so immediately to his great personal interest in travel writing. One could speculate if this was a case of honest oversight or wilful ignorance. Either way, the difficulty is only partially mitigated by the answer. The issue cuts deeper. For though Naipaul’s generalization may have been sweeping, the specific case of Gandhi remains peculiar. Naipaul is ready to concede that the Mahatma did come round, that he learned to see the country, and do so more clearly than anyone had until that point. The latter half of Gandhi’s life, as a leader and activist, was preceded by this transformation. What, then, had it entailed? What led him from the vantage of non-seeing to seeing?

The answer, it appears, lies with Naipaul himself. In an early essay titled “Jasmine”, he writes of an unease that prevented him from using in his fiction the names of the places in Trinidad where he grew up. Any attempt to write what he saw invariably resulted in a feeling of shame. It was part of a larger, deeper, colonial embarrassment—nurtured by the gulf in his lived reality and the one described by the books he read—that obscured his world from him, to the extent that he could not put together the name of the flower, ‘jasmine’, with the flower itself. It was only in his thirties, during a visit to British Guiana, when engaged in a conversation with an elderly lady, that he could learn of the word’s meaning.

The imperial obverse of the jasmine is the daffodil. Wordsworth’s daffodil. Naipaul had never seen the flower, but it had acquired in his mind a mythic quality, of a teeming golden wave that crowded the poet’s vision. While he was blind to the beauty of the flower before him, the jasmine, he was dazzled by that of a flower he had never seen. This ‘alien’[xxiv] vision ‘diminished’[xxv] his own and divested him of ‘the courage to a do a simple thing like mentioning the name of a Port of Spain street’[xxvi]. It seemed ‘impossible’[xxvii] to him that life in Trinidad—amorphous and shapeless—could ever be turned into a book. Like Gandhi’s, his writing succumbed to embarrassment.

Reading between the lines, one can see that the cause of this embarrassment is ultimately a separation—of the artist from his world. As Naipaul notes in the same essay, ‘no writer, however individual his vision, could be separated from [his] society’[xxviii]. Both his reluctance and Gandhi’s flatness stem from a similar lack—not a feel for the physical world, but a feel for history. In both cases, the shame is a result of historical dislocation—a writer feels discomfort when they are ahistorical. As late as 1893, when Gandhi was in South Africa, he was practically unread in history. In Naipaul’s words, this made him ‘unprepared’[xxix]. It was through a gradual investment in politics that he could ‘learn in the most brutal way about the political shape of the world’[xxx]. For Naipaul, too, the change, as annotated by the meeting with the elderly lady, was a training in history. It also included an act of writing-out—his early novels are all set in Trinidad, are motivated by the drive for a reacquaintance with his homeland, and entailed a rejection of ‘the familiar, meaningless word—daffodil—to put it no higher’ than the jasmine, and to allow his writing to develop ‘into the private language of [his] own particular society’[xxxi].

To write, then, is to be in possession of a history. Though he was writing in 1925, Gandhi was faithful to the experiences of that ‘untutored, country boy’[xxxii]—one without history— who first set out from home. He simply had not been ready. On the other hand, Nirad Chaudhuri was ‘formidably well read’[xxxiii]. So confirmed was he in the ‘habit of thinking historically’[xxxiv] that he thought ‘nothing was either complete or intelligible at one particular point of time without a reference to its past, that is to say, its duration or history’[xxxv]. If custom, ritual, and myth serve to codify the past, history is a stirring of the present. It animates the sterile. The so-called medievalism wasn’t an attribute of an unseeing people, but an index of their ahistoricity. The correcting lens, in Chaudhuri word, was ‘archaeological’[xxxvi].

Consider then, for instance, the assured voice of another of the Victorian flaneurs, writer T. N. Mukharji, describing the sea between Bombay and Aden:

We were always in the midst of a vast circular expanse of deep blue water, at the circumference of which the azure sky bends and touches the whole heavens, looking like a huge convex basin inverted upon the sea. No living creature meets your eye, except occasionally a white seagull, which sits easily on the water and slides up and down as the waves rise and fall.[xxxvii]

He wrote these words at the end of a long, distinguished career in civil service, including a stint as the assistant curator of the Indian Museum in Calcutta. When he says that ‘Modern civilisation has developed destructiveness at the expense of horror’[xxxviii], he is armed with parallels from Greek and Indian mythologies. There is no hint of discomfort or shame—the voice is so assured as to be critical when it excoriates the British as ‘civilized savages’[xxxix], a sentiment later echoed in Gandhi’s writings. Surely his words, and not of the young Gandhi, offer a better context for the Indian vision.

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Endnotes

[i] V.S. Naipaul, "Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way," in A Writer's People (New York: Vintage, 2009).

[ii] ibid.

[iii] ibid.

[iv] V.S. Naipaul, “Indian Autobiographies,” in Literary Occasions (London: Picador, 2003).

[v] ibid.

[vi] ibid.

[vii] ibid.

[viii] Nirad C. Chaudhuri, "My Birthplace," in Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, 42nd ed. (Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House, 2023).

[ix] ibid.

[x] V.S. Naipaul, "A Defect of Vision," in The Indian Trilogy (London: Picador, 1995).

[xi] Naipaul, "Indian Autobiographies."

[xii] ibid.

[xiii] ibid.

[xiv] ibid

[xv] ibid.

[xvi] ibid

[xvii] Codell, Julie F. “Reversing the Grand Tour: Guest Discourse in Indian Travel Narratives.” Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2007): 173–89. https://doi.org/10.1525/hlq.2007.70.1.173.

[xviii] Pandian, TB. "Public Buildings and Institutions of London." In England to an Indian Eye (London: Elliot Stock, 1897).

[xix] ibid.

[xx] Burton, Antoinette. "Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travellers in Fin-de-Siècle London." History Workshop Journal 42, no. 1 (1996): 126-146. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/1996.42.127.

[xxi] ibid.

[xxii] ibid.

[xxiii] ibid.

[xxiv] V.S. Naipaul, "Jasmine," in Literary Occasions (London: Picador, 2003)

[xxv] ibid.

[xxvi] ibid.

[xxvii] ibid.

[xxviii] ibid.

[xxix] Naipaul, "Looking and Not Seeing."

[xxx] ibid.

[xxxi] Naipaul, “Jasmine”

[xxxii] Naipaul, "Looking and Not Seeing."

[xxxiii] V.S. Naipaul, “The Mahatma and After," in A Writer's People (New York: Vintage, 2009).

[xxxiv] Nirad C. Chaudhuri, “Initiation into Scholarship,” in Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, 42nd reprint (Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House, 2023).

[xxxv] ibid.

[xxxvi] Chaudhuri, “My Birthplace.”

[xxxvii] Mukharji, TN. "On the Way,” In A Visit to Europe (Calcutta: W. Newman and Co., 1889).

[xxxviii] Mukharji, TN. “Notes and Observations,” In A Visit to Europe (Calcutta: W. Newman and Co., 1889).

[xxxix] ibid.

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Utkarsh Adhrit is a writer from Patna, India. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gordon Square Review, HAD, and The Metaworker Literary Magazine.

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