09-14-2005, 12:11 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Bengal gets taste of Naipaul acid</b>
AMIT ROY
www.telegraphindia.com/10...227245.asp
London, Sept. 11: Intellectual life in Calcutta has been smothered by the communists, just as independent thinking in much of the Arab world has been destroyed by uneducated mullahs, Nobel Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul has argued in a hard-hitting article in the British magazine Tatler.
What is clear is that Naipaul has as much contempt for the communists of Calcutta as he does for those who run the madarsas in Pakistan and elsewhere.
<b>âCommunist Calcutta rots and rots in the most shameful way; but the talking people there hold fast to their ancient Marxist half-truths,â rages Naipaul.</b>
His savaging of supposedly ignorant mullahs is not so different. <b>âMore fearfully, for our interdependent world, the poorer clients of Arab faith in various countries have been made to believe that the substitute for education is the faith itself: more and more of it when things go wrong until, in the end, in the barren religious schools where the only book is the holy book, to be learnt by heart, boys can be trained by semi-literate men with beards, with a half-view of the world, to be foot soldiers of the faith, to fight religious wars everywhere, to be killing machines and human bombs: the final short cut to achievement, avoiding the pain and labour and shame of a world too hard to master.â</b>
when Naipaul writes about the need to understand Indian history, he seems to be referring to be something much deeper. Without that, he fears that India, for all its impressive economic achievements, could eventually be lost.
Indian writers and scientists flourish abroad, he says, but not the pursuit of historical truth. That has to happen at home. <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>âHistory is more than an academic subject here. You might say it is too important to be left to historians. India vitally needs to arrive at an understanding of its own history. Every other great country has an understanding of itself. India doesnât, and this lack makes it incomplete and vulnerable.â </span>
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AMIT ROY
www.telegraphindia.com/10...227245.asp
London, Sept. 11: Intellectual life in Calcutta has been smothered by the communists, just as independent thinking in much of the Arab world has been destroyed by uneducated mullahs, Nobel Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul has argued in a hard-hitting article in the British magazine Tatler.
What is clear is that Naipaul has as much contempt for the communists of Calcutta as he does for those who run the madarsas in Pakistan and elsewhere.
<b>âCommunist Calcutta rots and rots in the most shameful way; but the talking people there hold fast to their ancient Marxist half-truths,â rages Naipaul.</b>
His savaging of supposedly ignorant mullahs is not so different. <b>âMore fearfully, for our interdependent world, the poorer clients of Arab faith in various countries have been made to believe that the substitute for education is the faith itself: more and more of it when things go wrong until, in the end, in the barren religious schools where the only book is the holy book, to be learnt by heart, boys can be trained by semi-literate men with beards, with a half-view of the world, to be foot soldiers of the faith, to fight religious wars everywhere, to be killing machines and human bombs: the final short cut to achievement, avoiding the pain and labour and shame of a world too hard to master.â</b>
when Naipaul writes about the need to understand Indian history, he seems to be referring to be something much deeper. Without that, he fears that India, for all its impressive economic achievements, could eventually be lost.
Indian writers and scientists flourish abroad, he says, but not the pursuit of historical truth. That has to happen at home. <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>âHistory is more than an academic subject here. You might say it is too important to be left to historians. India vitally needs to arrive at an understanding of its own history. Every other great country has an understanding of itself. India doesnât, and this lack makes it incomplete and vulnerable.â </span>
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