India Quotes

“Indian poverty is more dehumanizing than any machine; and, more than in any machine civilization, men in India are units, locked up in the straitest obedience by their idea of their dharma. The scientist returning to India sheds the individuality he acquired during his time abroad; he regains the security of his caste identity, and the world is once more simplified. There are minute rules, as comforting as bandages; individual perception and judgement, which once called forth his creativity, are relinquished as burdens, and the man is once more a unit in his herd, his science reduced to a skill. The blight of caste is not only untouchability and the consequent deification in India of filth; the blight, in India that tries to grow, is also the over-all obedience it imposes, its ready-made satisfactions, the diminishing of adventurousness, the pushing away of men of individuality and the possibility of excellence.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“India is old, and India continues. But all the disciplines and skills that India now seeks to exercise are borrowed. Even the ideas Indians have of the achievements of their civilization are essentially the ideas given them by European scholars in the nineteenth century. India by itself could not have rediscovered or assessed its past. Its past was too much with it, was still being lived out in the ritual, the laws, the magic – the complex instinctive life that muffles response and buries even the idea of inquiry.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“Tolstoy, in the last year of his life, said of Gandhi, whose work he followed and with whom he exchanged letters: ‘His Hindu nationalism spoils everything.’ It was a fair comment. Gandhi had called his South African commune Tolstoy Farm; but Tolstoy saw more clearly than Gandhi’s English and Jewish associates in South Africa, fellow seekers after the truth. Gandhi really had little to offer these people. His experiments and discoveries and vows answered his own need as a Hindu, the need constantly to define and fortify the self in the midst of hostility; they were not of universal application.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“There was a time when Indians who had been abroad and picked up some simple degree or skill said that they had become displaced and were neither of the East nor West. In this they were absurd and self-dramatizing: they carried India with them, Indian ways of perceiving. Now, with the great migrant rush, little is hard of that displacement. Instead, Indians say that they have become too educated for India. The opposite is usually true: they are not educated enough; they only want to repeat their lessons. The imported skills are rooted in nothing; they are skills separate from principles ... To match technology to the needs of a poor country calls for the highest skills, the clearest vision. Old India, with all its encouragements to the instinctive, non-intellectual life, limits vision.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“Narayan’s novels did not prepare me for the distress of India. As a writer he had succeeded almost too well. His comedies were of the sort that requires a restricted social setting with well-defined rules; and he was so direct, his touch so light, that, though he wrote in English of Indian manners, he had succeeded in making those exotic manners quite ordinary. I did not lose my admiration for Narayan; but I felt that his comedy and irony were not quite what they had appeared to be, were part of a Hindu response to the world, a response I could no longer share. Narayan’s novels are less the purely social comedies I had once taken them to be than religious books, at times religious fables, and intensely Hindu.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“It was unclean to clean; it was unclean even to notice. It was the business of the sweepers to remove excrement, and until the sweepers came, people were content to live in the midst of their own excrement.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“Indians have made some contribution to science in this century; but - with a few notable exceptions - their work has been done abroad. And this is more than a matter of equipment and facilities. It is a cause of concern to the Indian scientific community - which feels itself vulnerable in India - that many of those men who are so daring and original abroad should, when they are lured back to India, collapse into ordinariness and yet remain content, become people who seem unaware of their former worth, and seem to have been brilliant by accident. They have been claimed by the lesser civilization, the lesser idea of dharma and self-fulfillment. In a civilization reduced to its forms, they no longer have to strive intellectually to gain spiritual merit in their own eyes; that same merit is now to be had by religious right behaviour, correctness.

India grieved for the scientist Har Gobind Khorana, who, as an American citizen, won a Nobel Prize in medicine for the United States a few years ago. India invited him back and fêted him; but what was most important about him was ignored. 'We could do everything for Khorana,' one of India's best journalists said, 'except do him the honour of discussing his work.' The work, the labour, the assessment of labour: it was expected that somehow that would occur elsewhere, outside India.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“Mimicry within mimicry, imperfectly understood idea within imperfectly understood idea: the second-year girl student in the printing department, not understanding the typographical exercise she had been set, and playing with type like a child with a typewriter, avoiding, in the name of design, anything like symmetry, clarity, or logic; the third-year girl student showing a talentless drawing and saying, in an unacknowledged paraphrase of Klee, that she had described the 'the adventures of a line'; and that fourth-year man playing with tools for the peasants. There are times when the intellectual confusion of India seems complete and it seems impossible to get back to clarifying first principles. Which must have been one of the aims of an institute of design: to make people look afresh at the everyday.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“The National Institute of Design is the only one of its kind in India; it is fabulously equipped, competition to enter is fierce, and standards should be high. But it is an imported idea, an imported institution, and it has been imported whole, just like that. In India, it has been easily divorced from its animating principle, reduced to its equipment, and has ended - admittedly after a controversial period: a new administrator had just been sent in - as a finishing school for the unacademic young, a playpen, with artisans called in to do the heavy work, like those dispirited men I saw upstairs squatting on the floor and working on somebody's chairs: India's eternal division of labour, frustrating the proclaimed social purpose of the Institute.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“The human relationships. They’re so horrible because they are accepted by the victims.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“The poverty of the land is reflected in the poverty of the mind; it would be calamitous if it were otherwise.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“India will at the end be face to face with its own emptiness, the inadequacy of an old civilization which is cherished because it is all men have but which no longer answers their needs.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“The freedoms that came to independent India with the institutions it gave itself were alien freedoms, better suited to another civilization; in India they remained separate from the internal organization of the country, its beliefs and antique restrictions.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“It seems to be always there in India: magic, the past, the death of the intellect, spirituality annulling the civilization out of which it issues, India swallowing its own tail.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“Gandhi swept through India, but he has left it without an ideology. He awakened the holy land; his mahatmahood returned it to archaism; he made his worshippers vain.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“Archaic emotions’, ‘nostalgic memories’: when these were awakened by Gandhi, India became free. But the India created in this way had to stall. Gandhi took India out of one kind of Kal Yug, one kind of Black Age; his success inevitably pushed it back into another.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“No Indian can take himself to the stage where he might perceive that the faults lie within the civilization itself, that the failure and the cruelties of India might implicate all Indians.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“To match technology to the needs of a poor country calls for the highest skills, the clearest vision. Old India, with all its encouragements to the instinctive, non-intellectual life, limits vision.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“When men cannot observe, they don’t have ideas; they have obsessions. When people live instinctive lives, something like a collective amnesia steadily blurs the past.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“how, it might be asked, can Indians face reality without some filter of faith or magic? How often in India – at every level – rational conversation about the country’s problems trails away into talk of magic, of the successful prophecies of astrologers, of the wisdom of auspicious hours, of telepathic communications, and actions taken in response to some inner voice!”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“In the Indian set-up, as Kakar says, it is the Western-style ‘mature personality’, individualistic and assertive, that would be the misfit.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“The difference between the Indian and the Western ways of perceiving comes out most clearly in the sex act. Western man can describe the sex act; even at the moment of orgasm he can observe himself. Kakar says that his Indian patients, men and women, do not have this gift, cannot describe the sex act, are capable only of saying, ‘It happened.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“But the movement’s stated aims had stirred the best young men in India. The best left the universities and went far away, to fight for the landless and the oppressed and for justice. They went to a battle they knew little about. They knew the solutions better than they knew the problems, better than they knew the country. India remains so little known to Indians. People just don’t have the information. History and social inquiry, and the habits of analysis that go with these disciplines, are too far outside the Indian tradition. Naxalism was an intellectual tragedy, a tragedy of idealism, ignorance, and mimicry: middle-class India, after the Gandhian upheaval, incapable of generating ideas and institutions of its own, needing constantly in the modern world to be inducted into the art, science, and ideas of other civilizations, not always understanding the consequences, and this time borrowing something deadly, somebody else’s idea of revolution.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“From time to time in the Indian press there is still an item about the killing or capture of ‘Naxalites’. But social inquiry is outside the Indian tradition; journalism in India has always been considered a gracious form of clerkship; the Indian press – even before the Emergency and censorship – seldom investigated the speeches or communiqués or bald agency items it printed as news. And that word ‘Naxalite’, in an Indian newspaper, can now mean anything.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“the restaurateur, ambitious but shortsighted,”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“The many Indian religious attitudes without which the distress of India was - and is - almost insupportable.

Mr. Nehru had once observed that a danger in India was was that poverty might be deified. Gandhianism had had that effect. The Mahatma's simplicity had appeared to make poverty holy, the basis of all truth, and a unique Indian possession.

Indian blindess to India, with its roots in caste and religion.

In their attempts to go beyond the old sentimental abstractions about the poverty of India and to come to terms with the poor, Indians have to reach outside their civilization and they are at the mercy then of every kind of imported ideas.

Expense upon expense, the waste with which ignorance often burdens poverty.

India by itself could not have rediscovered or assessed its past. Its past was too much with it, was still being lived out in the ritual, the laws, the magic, the complex instinctive life that muffles response and buries even the idea of inquiry.

For too long, as a conquered people, Indians have been intellectual parasitic on other civilizations. To survive in subjection, they have preserved their sanctuary of the instinctive, uncreative life, converting that into a religious ideal. At a more worldly level, they have depended on others for the ideas and institutions that make a country work.

It seems to be always there in India: magic, the past, the death of the intellect, spirituality annulling the civilization out of which it issues, India swallowing its own tail.

The blight of caste is not only untouchability and the consequent deification in India of filth; the blight, in an India that tries to grow, is also the overall obedience it imposes, its ready-made satisfactions, the diminishing of adventurousness, the pushing away from men of individuality and the possibility of excellence.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“A passionate Marxist journalist - waiting for the revolution, rejecting all 'palliatives' - told me that the 'workers' of India had to be politicized; they had to be told that it was the 'system' that oppressed them. After nearly thirty years of power, the Congress has, understandably, become the system. But where does the system begin and end? Does it take in religion, the security of caste and clan, Indian ways of perceiving, karma, the antique serfdom? But no Indian cares to take political self-examination that far. No Indian can take himself to the stage where he might perceive that the faults lie within the civilization itself, that the failure and the cruelties of India might implicate all Indians. Even the Marxists, dreaming of a revolution occurring like magic on a particular day, of tyranny swept away, of 'the people' then engaging in the pleasures of 'folk' activities - the Marxist journalist's word: the folk miraculously whole after the millennia of oppression - even the Marxist's vision of the future is not of a country undone and remade but of an India essentially returned to itself, purified: a vision of Ramraj.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“To make democracy work, Jayaprakash Narayan suggests, to undo tyranny, it is only necessary for India to return truly to itself. The Ramraj that Gandhi offered is no longer simply Independence, India without the British; it is people's government, the reestablishment of the ancient Indian village republic, a turning away from the secretariats of Delhi and the state capitals. But this is saying nothing; this is to leave India where it is. What looks like a political programme is only clamour and religious excitation. People's government and the idea of the ancient village republic (which may be a fanciful idea, a nationalist myth surviving from the days of the Independence struggle) are not the same thing. Old India has its special cruelties; not all the people are people.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization