ReadingWriting excerpt

From Reading & Writing: A Personal Account by V. S. Naipaul  India was the greater hurt. It was a subject country. It was also the place from whose very great poverty our grandfathers had to run away in the late nineteenth century. The two Indias were separate. The political India, of the freedom movement, had its great names. The other, more personal India was quite hidden; it vanished when memories faded. It wasn't an India we could read about. It wasn't Kipling's India, or E. M. Forster's, or Somerset Maugham's; and it was far from the somewhat stylish India of Nehru and Tagore. - - -     It was to this personal India, and not the India of independence and its great names, that I went when the time came. I was full of nerves. But nothing had prepared me for the dereliction I saw. No other country I knew had so many layers of wretchedness, and few countries were as populous. I felt I was in a continent where, separate from the rest of the world, a mysterious calamity had occurred. Yet what was so overwhelming to me, so much in the foreground, was not to be found in the modern-day writing I knew, Indian or English. In one Kipling story an Indian famine was a background to an English romance; but generally in both English and Indian writing the extraordinary distress of India, when acknowledged, was like something given, eternal, something to be read only as background. And there were, as always, those who thought they could find a special spiritual quality in the special Indian distress. It was only in Gandhi's autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, in the chapters dealing with his discovery in the 1890s of the wretchedness of the unprotected Indian laborers in South Africa, that I found - obliquely, and not for long - a rawness of hurt that was like my own in India. 

© V. S. Naipaul