Indian War Drums: Rushdie, Naipaul, and the Subcontinent's challenge.

Like most British writers, I willingly contributed to the fund to defend Salman Rushdie when Ayatollah Khomeini issued his notorious fatwa against him. But as I read The Satanic Verses, its so-called "magic realism" struck me as a cop-out from the writer's primary task of getting at the truth of life as it is. Rushdie, I understood, is another spoiled British leftie, determined to attack the privileges he enjoys. It was disappointing that even with the round-the-clock protection provided by Mrs. Thatcher he did not have the courage to tell the Muslim fundamentalists to go to hell, but instead made a point of abasing himself with public assurances that he was a good Muslim. The principle, however, stood firm-that though one might have disagreed with him, one had to defend to the limit his right to say what he had to say.

On September 11, a previously submerged campaign of Muslim terrorism against the West-and by extension free thinking everywhere-came out into the open. The campaign will have profound and long-lasting ramifications in many countries of the world, bedeviling relations between Muslims and their neighbors. India is especially vulnerable, as it has some 140 million Muslims, about the same as the entire population of Pakistan. Pakistan-backed terrorists last December attacked the Indian parliament, killing security guards and almost setting off a full-scale war. As it is, a million men are mobilized along the India-Pakistan border, with nuclear weapons in reserve. There seems no obvious way to stand these armies down. The immediate hope is to ward off war and communal massacres of a type frequently experienced since the British left India.

But in this fraught context, in an op-ed piece for the Washington Post about the current tensions in India, Rushdie claims that Hindu fundamentalism is out to destroy that country's secular democracy. He goes on to say that the writer V. S. Naipaul, "speaking in India just a week before the violence erupted, denounced India's Muslims en masse and praised the nationalist movement." Thus, in Rushdie's eyes, "Naipaul makes himself a fellow traveler of fascism and disgraces the Nobel award."

Literary London is a small city. It so happens that recently I sat next to a publisher who had invited Rushdie to lunch last October. On the very morning of that lunch, the news broke that the Nobel prize had been awarded to Naipaul. A dejected and angry Rushdie, the publisher told me, spent the meal railing against Naipaul, and bemoaning that he himself would now not be receiving the Nobel for ten more years. It further happens that in the month of February Naipaul and I were together in India for an international conference on the subject of contemporary Indian writing. As the recent Nobel winner, Naipaul was the star of the occasion. It may add to Rushdie's sour grapes to learn that there was no mention of him or his work at the conference. I was surprised by this, and said so-to be told that Rushdie was not considered of much interest.

For almost three weeks I was in the uninterrupted daily company of Naipaul. After the conference in Delhi, we did a tour together, to famous sites both Muslim and Hindu. The conference received an unimaginable amount of publicity. With hype at the Hollywood level, Naipaul was obliged everywhere and all the time to sign copies of his books, to autograph any available sheet of paper, and to run the gauntlet of photographers. On one day, at Neemrana, a couple of hours outside Delhi, over a hundred journalists turned up to hear him. His least doings and sayings filled the columns of the newspapers. Had he ever denounced India's Muslims "en masse" or associated himself with Hindu fundamentalism, it would have been very big news.

A novelist through and through, Naipaul is interested in stories rather than politics. For him, narrative is the key to behavior. But narrative is a tricky business. People think that they have an identity or a past, and will explain sincerely who they think they are. But for all sorts of reasons having to do with culture or the lack of it, most people accept the simple narrative about themselves that they have picked up from those around them, and often it is too simple to be true. Look for the story behind the story, Naipaul kept repeating, and then you'll understand India.

The story that most Indians believe about themselves is that one fine day British imperialists occupied the country, exploited it, and bled it dry. The nationalist movement then threw them out and restored national integrity and pride. At Neemrana, a grand Indian lady with impeccable nationalist credentials was putting forth this view to the assembled conference, when Naipaul cut her off in mid-sentence. This story, he told her summarily, had lost whatever purpose or authenticity it might have had. Look at India, its democracy, its rule of law, the supremacy of the English language, the way the whole shaky subcontinent survives against all the odds-and you will understand that the British did Indians the favor of bringing them into the modern world on equal terms. India's great achievements, then, are at least in part Britain's. So much for Hindu fundamentalism. Needless to say, Naipaul's opinion sparked a storm of press comment, some of it warm, some of it hostile. One editorialist compared him to P. G. Wodehouse.

Behind the nationalist anti-British story is quite another story, which Naipaul has been carefully elaborating in his books about India and the Muslim world. The British were able to conquer and rule India so easily only because the country and its Hindu religion and culture had been so thoroughly destroyed by the historic Muslim invaders. The architecture and stone carving of the ancient Hindu temples at Khajuraho are evidence of the high civilization lost. The astonishing Taj Mahal, and Fatehpur Sikri and other mosques, are built on the sites of Hindu temples deliberately pulled down to make way for these monuments of Islamic triumphalism. These works are great too, but the money to pay for them was wrung out of the Hindu peasantry, who have remained poverty-stricken ever since. That was true colonialism, which first the British and then Hindu Indians have had to remedy. To say so is not to denounce India's Muslims en masse, or to be a fascist fellow-traveler, but to provide the narrative and make the historical point.

The closing moments of the literary conference were shattered by the reports of an atrocity. At a small town called Godhra in the state of Gujurat, Muslim extremists had stopped a train carrying Hindus wishing to rebuild a temple on a contested site, and they locked and then burnt out the train's carriages, to leave 58 dead. Carefully planned and executed, the attack may well have had the purpose of setting the whole country ablaze. Retaliation was swift, and the police response slow. Hindus burnt out Muslim houses and shops, to leave about 700 dead in Gujurat and the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh. Given the timing and the provocation, it could have been much worse.

A dozen Hindu-nationalist leaders requested a meeting in our hotel with Naipaul. Among them were members of parliament, professors, several journalists, all polite and quiet-spoken men. They saw themselves, they declared, as a post-independence generation. They said they were able to enter five-star hotels without embarrassment. They wanted to assert their Hindu identity and resented the way that secular opinion-makers patronized them and deprecated Hindu culture.

When Naipaul questioned the meaning of "assertion," they denied that it had anything to do with aggression, presenting themselves as men of peace according to Hindu principles. I may have spoken more than Naipaul did, for instance twice asking what role these men envisaged for Muslims in India. They answered with unsatisfactorily vague generalities. In a separate interview with one member of this delegation, the editor Seshadri Chari, I was no more successful, unable to stop him from trying to make me understand some essential concept of dharma-which, as far as I could gather, is a conglomeration of values that holds everything together. There are Hindu fanatics, of course, and perhaps behind our backs these leaders secretly pick up the telephone to activate them, but there is no way of telling. The delegation went away with nothing from Naipaul except a stack of signed books and plenty of posed photographs.

Anti-American animus from the Cold War survives in some diehard circles in India, accustomed down the years to Soviet patronage. A columnist in the Times of India, for instance, can still write, "America loves war, so long as other people are the victims." But September 11 has brought about the much broader public perception that the United States has a coincidence of interest with India when it comes to waging the campaign against Islamic terrorism. Look at the story behind Rushdie's story: His talk of fascism in this context is absurd, and all it does is help the sort of Muslim extremists who once condemned him to death. That's magic realism for you.