India Quotes

“To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

“Independence was worked for by people more or less at the top; the freedom it brought has worked its way down. People everywhere have ideas now of who they are and what they owe themselves. The process quickened with the economic development that came after independence; what was hidden in 1962, or not easy to see, what perhaps was only in a state of becoming, has become clearer. The liberation of spirit that has come to India could not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to come as disturbance. It had to come as rage and revolt. India was now a country of a million little mutinies.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

“If you get too attached to your roots in the old sense, you might actually become unrooted, fossilized. At least in form, at least in style, you must get into the new stream, get the new roots. More of India is doing that. Style becomes substance in one generation. Things that one starts to do because other people are doing it – like wearing long pants, in my father’s case – become natural for the next generation.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

“In 1962, in spite of five-year plans and universal suffrage, and talk of socialism and the common man, I found that for most Indians Indian poverty was still a poetic concept, a prompting to piety and sweet melancholy, part of the country’s uniqueness, its Gandhian non-materialism.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

“Actually, we owe a great deal to those British officers and men and scholars who went deep into our literature, to translate the texts which the brahmins didn't want known outside their own coterie.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

“Le Corbusier’s unrendered concrete towers, after 27 years of Punjab sun and monsoon and sub-Himalayan winter, looked stained and diseased, and showed now as quite plain structures, with an applied flashiness: megalomaniac architecture: people reduced to units, individuality reserved only to the architect, imposing his ideas of colour in an inflated Miróesque mural on one building, and imposing an iconography of his own with a giant hand set in a vast flat area of concrete paving, which would have been unbearable in winter and summer and the monsoon. India had encouraged yet another outsider to build a monument to himself.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

“Their primary idea was the old Bengali idea of the Motherland, the idea that Bengal had given to the rest of India, Debu said: the idea that India had to be a country one could be proud of. The idea had decayed in Bengal since independence, Debu said. ‘In my class the idea is still there, but it is a remnant of the past – considered an anachronism – and in the class above, the industrialists and businessmen, the idea exists more or less as a negative quantity.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

“What Raja Ram Mohun Roy began as a reform movment early in the 19th century Devendranath Tagore made into a religion. It transformed the Bengali middle class. Rabindranath Tagore expanded that religion into a culture. And that culture became Nehru’s politics.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

“It had been hard enough to drive past the area. It was harder to imagine what it was like living there. Yet people lived with the stench and the terrible air, and had careers there. Even lawyers lived there, I was told. Was the smell of excrement only on the periphery, from the iridescent black lake? No; that stench went right through Dharavi. Even more astonishing was to read in a Bombay magazine an article about Papu's suburb of Sion, in which the slum of Dharavi was written about almost as a bohemian feature of the place, something that added spice to humdrum middle-class life. Bombay clearly innoculated its residents in some way.

I had another glimpse of Dharavi some time later, when I was going in a taxi to the domestic airport at Santa Cruz. The taxi-driver - a Muslim from Hyderabad, full of self-respect, nervous about living in Bombay, fearful of sinking, planning to go back home soon, and in the meantime nervously particular about his car and his clothes - the taxi-driver showed the apartment blocks on one side of the airport road where hutment dwellers had been rehoused. In the other direction he showed the marsh on which Dharavi had grown and, away in the distance, the low black line of the famous slum.

Seen from here, Dharavi looked artificial, unnecessary even in Bombay: allowed to exist because, as people said, it was a vote-bank, and hate-bank, something to be drawn upon by many people. All the conflicting currents of Bombay flowed there as well; all the new particularities were heightened there. And yet people lived there, subject to this extra exploitation, because in Bombay, once you had a place to stay, you could make money.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

“Cruelty, yes: it was in the nature of Indian family life. The clan that gave protection and identity, and saved people from the void, was itself a little state, and it could be a hard place, full of politics, full of hatreds and changing alliances and moral denunciations. It was the kind of family life I had known for much of my childhood:...”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

“He was unrelenting in his cause, though his own need for religious faith involved him in contradictions and compromises; though the caste structures in his own family remained in place; and though, in the garbage of Madras, the broken roads, the absence of municipal regulation, the factionalism and plunder of the DMK administration and its successor administrations, something close to chaos could be seen.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

“Far from extending people’s ideas of beauty and grandeur and human possibility – uplifting ideas which very poor people may need more than rich people – much of the architecture of free India has become part of the ugliness and crowd and increasing physical oppression of India. Bad architecture in a poor tropical city is more than an aesthetic matter. It spoils people’s day-to-day lives; it wears down their nerves; it generates rages that can flow into many different channels.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

“She said, on another day, "I do think about the individuals involved, all of them and I sometimes wonder what they really felt at certain moments, I think all of them were very courageous people. Each of them displayed some kind of courage in making the changes that they did make.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now