A Writer's People by V.S. Naipaul

Author:V.S. Naipaul [Naipaul, V. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-26948-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-01T16:00:00+00:00

THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS met in Kanpur in 1925. Gandhi would have been deep in his autobiography at this time; and by an extraordinary chance we have a literary witness of the Congress occasion. Aldous Huxley was thirty-one, and full of energy (he had promised his publishers two books a year). In 1925 he was for a while in India, doing a round-the-world journal for Jesting Pilate, published in 1926. He was a London intellectual—belonging, in his own words, “to that impecunious but dignified section of the upper middle class which is in the habit of putting on dress-clothes to eat”—and he was travelling fast, travelling and writing, doing the famous sights, and, more or less successfully, working up new ideas about them, never taking the name of Kipling. Still, it is unexpected finding him here in awful Kanpur, at this Congress meeting, some years before the Indian freedom movement and the mahatma became well known internationally. Perhaps Forster’s A Passage to India, published the previous year, though an entirely different kind of book, had put ideas in his head.

There were about eight thousand people at the Kanpur Congress. They were in a tent about a hundred yards long and sixty yards wide, with a light roof of brown canvas, and they were all seated on matting on the ground. Whereas earlier in the century (according to Nehru) there would have been delegates in morning coat and striped trousers, now they were all in Indian dress and many were wearing the boat-shaped white cotton cap which was already known as the Gandhi cap. The meeting went on for three days, six hours the first day, seven hours the second, and finally nine hours, speeches all the time, and no food.

Huxley, though very young, was treated with great regard. Some people might have thought he was Professor Huxley; this had happened before in India. He was given a place on the platform, which would have been raised in some way so that speakers could be seen. But even on the platform people sat on the floor; and at the end of the last, nine-hour day Huxley (immensely tall, to add to his troubles) was all but dead of fatigue. But he had had a very clear view of Gandhi, one of the main speakers; and his brisk but sharp pen portrait of the mahatma (still little known abroad) was one that would be followed by later writers: the small emaciated man, with a shawl over his naked shoulders, the shaved head, the big ears, the “rather foxy” features, the easy laugh.

He was talking about the position of Indians in South Africa, but to Huxley’s surprise there had been no great welcoming applause for him and no respectful hush while he spoke. People talked and fidgeted all the time; some called for water; some got up and went outside and came back again. Huxley, as a traveller too concerned with interpreting the externals of things, had not thought to provide himself with a translator (which would have been easy), and so we have no account from him of what Gandhi said.

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