An Artist’s Impression of Garden-Variety Politicians

Many Indians do not like VS Naipaul.
In a country where we are quick to embrace anyone successful with the slightest connection to India, this Nobel Prize winner of Indian descent is by and large ignored. Could be something to do with his field of endeavor- literature does not excite the popular imagination, his nature- acerbic and distant and the fact that he had written a book, An Area of Darkness, that was a brutal portrait of the India of the 70s (no matter that in the nineties he was among the first to catch the flowering of modern day India in his brilliant follow-up book on India – A Million Mutinies Now)
No matter whether you like him or dislike him, VS Naipaul is, I believe, among the two or three most prescient and powerful writers of his generation.
This week I have been reading his The Mimic Men, a novel first published in the mid-sixties. As an exposition and rumination of the psyche of those who grow up in small towns under a colonial yoke it is unmatched. As literature it is outstanding enough to get a special mention in his Nobel citation. Read it if you have the inclination and time for such things.
In this post however I want to offer you a passage from this book. The politician is a mystery to most ordinary people. The passage below, I think, offers the kind of insight on the subject that only great literature can provide. Enjoy.
(Note: The protagonist in first person is describing newly-minted politicians who have come to power in a small Caribbean island on the shoulders of the success of a political party started by his friend. The protagonist himself though a part of the movement is an intellectual and does not see himself as a politician)
“The others we could observe. We could see them in new suits even on the hottest days. We could see the foolish stern faces they prepared for the public to hide their pleasure at their new eminence. We could see them coming out of restaurants with their ‘secretaries”. We could see them shirtsleeved – their coats prominent on hangers- as they were driven in government cars marked with the letter M, on which they had insisted, to proclaim their status as Ministers. The car, the shirtsleeves, the coat on the hangar: the fashion spread rapidly down the motorized section of our civil service and might be considered the sartorial fashion of our revolution. At sports meetings they went to the very front row of the stands and over the months we could see the flesh swelling on the back of their necks, from the good living and the lack of exercise. And always about them, policemen in growing numbers.
They were easily frightened men, these colleagues of ours, they feared the countryside, they feared the dark, they grew to fear the very people on whose suffrage they depended. People who have achieved the trappings of power for no reason they can see are afraid of losing those trappings. They are insecure because they see too many like themselves….”
“…in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interests, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real which did not come from the outside…”
“.. They felt the awe of the ungifted who thought they had, simply through enduring, suddenly discovered, in this response of the ungifted among their people, the source of the power and regeneration they had waited for without hoping to find”
(Emphasis mine)

Unscrambled British Council, Scrambled Rushdie

The past week I went back to two abandoned favorites.
I let my British Council membership lapse years ago as its location in Bombay at Nariman Point became increasingly irrelevant to my life.
I remember having a conversation then with the Librarian about how the centre of gravity of Bombay including the mass of its reading public had shifted northwards to the suburbs.
A couple of months ago they surprised me. The library went the “Netflix” model. Browse the library on the website, queue up the books you want to borrow and they deliver them and pick them up (on request- no deadlines!) from your home (www.mylibrary.britishcouncil.org).
The British Council is back in my life and as I browse the library the presence of a selection of graphic novels assures me that the brand’s relevance-seeking new avatar is more than skin deep.
One of the first books I read through my new membership of the British Council is Salman Rushdie’s “The Enchantress of Florence”. Unlike the rest of Rushdie’s books, I had not bought this book when it came out a couple of years ago.
I was enchanted, like many of my generation, with Midnight’s Children but every subsequent book of his, to my mind, was a milestone on his fall from grace.
With “The Ground beneath Her Feet” I thought the addling of Mr. Rushdie’s talent was complete and thus restrained myself from investing time and money in “The Enchantress of Florence”.
With the resurrection of British Council in my life I thought of giving Mr. Rushdie a go to.
I am sorry to report that I think the addled state continues.
In “Midnight’s Children” Rushdie used the device of magic realism to illuminate reality and multiply relevance. “Midnight’s Children” has a totemic status with the post-independence generation because it managed to in their emotional landscape, light the dry tinder accumulated from recital of the history of the independence struggle and the trauma of partition.
However every subsequent Rushdie novel has moved further and further away from this magic of inciting and exciting emotional relevance. There are passages in “The Enchantress of Florence” of great beauty; there are phrases and metaphors that ignite admiration but alas!, the narrative structure instead of involvement engenders distance.
Mr. Rushdie himself perhaps does not care much for relevance. I am sure he will point out he is an artist of the first order and not a public utility like the British Council. Be that as it may be but I for one will dip into the next Rushdie book with great reluctance.