SOURCE: Idris, Farhad B. “The Native Returns: Conrad and Orientalism in V. S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness.” South Carolina Review 32, no. 2 (spring 2000): 43-53.

An Area of Darkness is the account of V. S. Naipaul's first visit to India. Born in a Trinidad Indian community, Naipaul went to England at the age of eighteen, in 1950, on a government scholarship to study at Oxford. After graduation and stints at a cement company and the BBC, he succeeded in realizing his old ambition—a writing career. By the time Naipaul got to India, in 1962 at the age of thirty, he had established himself as a writer and had to his credit six books, including the masterpiece A House for Mr. Biswas.¹ The last of these, Middle Passage, is a travel book about the Caribbean islands. In it, Naipaul discovered his true talent: writing about decolonized third-world countries. He honed a special vision for the task—an X-ray gaze into the ills of these newly emerging societies. Passage, the first in the genre, sets the general pattern Naipaul's travel writing was to follow. Indeed, readers familiar with Passage have a distinct premonition what to expect in Darkness. The two books are alike in many ways but also dissimilar in that Naipaul uses two different criteria in treating the two societies. In the West Indies, his standard is modernity and the way it manifests itself in the formation of the nation-state. In India, on the other hand, his vision is stereotypically orientalist: i.e., India is depicted as irremediably static and as quite incapable of modernity.²

Darkness presents India as a space the narrator traverses to define his own identity. Then the space for the orientalist's exploration is always a proving ground for the self. In this respect, Naipaul follows in the footsteps of such figures as Conrad's Marlow and Jim; Kipling's Kim and (in “The Man Who Would be King”) Peachy Carnehan and Daniel Dravot; and Paul Scott's Merrick. As Naipaul uses India to reconfirm orientalist stereotypes in Darkness, the text clamorously echoes Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a work Naipaul holds in singular esteem in his essay “Conrad's Darkness” (The Return of Eva Peron 205-28). Conrad's influence on Naipaul's African writing, apparent largely in this essay, has merited a deluge of critical attention, but this same influence on Naipaul's Indian writing, in particular, on An Area of Darkness, has received inadequate notice—though the title blatantly calls attention to Heart of Darkness.³

Glyne Griffith is one of the early critics to examine the orientalist dimension to Naipaul's travel writing. Griffith does draw a parallel between Heart of Darkness and An Area of Darkness and maintains that Naipaul's “emphasis on the scatological reveals an ontological crisis which is represented in the narrative by brutes defecating everywhere” (89). Thus Naipaul experiences “a horror similar to Kurtz's and Marlow's … [and] fears the loss of identity, an identity grounded in difference and deferral” (89). Like Griffith, Sara Suleri treats Naipaul's orientalism while examining the problematics of self and identity in An Area of Darkness. She reads the book as an orientalist text that undermines its own stereotyping because the narrator cannot deny his bodily identity as an Indian. This creates an ambiguity in the text, which is never truly resolved.⁴

Griffith and Suleri do treat orientalism and indicate the mediation of Heart of Darkness in An Area of Darkness, but their focus is primarily on the text's orientalist narrator's self. An Area of Darkness, however, shows a more profound affinity with orientalism and establishes a strong intertextual link with Heart of Darkness. Indeed Conrad's presence can be detected early in the opening pages of Naipaul's text. Like Marlow, the narrator in Naipaul's Darkness approaches India as a destination that exists more in myth than in reality. A clue to this India appears early in the text when Naipaul recounts his boyhood image of India. His childhood India was “an area of imagination”—a land of myth in other words. Thinking about the India of ancient glory, he became a “nationalist” and had even “committed to memory” the maps of India of yore (41). One is reminded of the “blank spaces” in Marlow's boyhood map that gradually “got filled … with rivers and lakes and names,” which “had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over” (61).⁵ Marlow sadly recalls that “it had become a place for darkness” (61). Similarly, Naipaul's interest in India declined upon its independence (41).⁶ Independence ushers India into the real world while colonial India can be more easily imagined as a mythic land. In modern times, no longer a land of myth, India becomes a land of “darkness” to Naipaul. If India is realized, it cannot be fantasized, and if it cannot be fantasized, it is not interesting. Marlow views Africa as a locus for adventure; Naipaul views India as a land of antiquated grandeur, whose eminence he vainly searches for in his visit. Familiarity does not breed contempt here because there is no familiarity to begin with. When the reality of modern India overwhelms him, he can only recoil in horror. In a separate piece written during the same trip, Naipaul says,

Perhaps India is only a word, a mystical idea that embraces all those vast plains and rivers through which the train moves, all those anonymous figures asleep on railway platforms and footpaths of Bombay. … Perhaps it is this, this vastness which no one gets to know: India as an ache, for which one has great tenderness, but from which at length one always wishes to separate oneself.

(Barracoon 46)

It is significant that Naipaul's journey from Europe to India follows the old trade route and the India that he will describe is presaged through various little scenes of the journey. The voyage parallels Marlow's expedition in subtle ways. As the French steamer carries Marlow toward Congo, Africa imposes its formidable indistinctness on him. Unlike other coasts with their “smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage” outline, the African coast lacks contour (70-1). It is “featureless,” “still in the process of making,” and “with an aspect of monotonous grimness” (71). Indeed, Marlow's first impressions of Africa, “a God-forsaken wilderness” (71), form the staple of the account he is to render later. Thus he foregrounds early in the text the impression that Africa is a homogeneous entity, exists beyond time, inspires foreboding, and possesses no power to represent itself.

In Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French, Christopher Miller points out a curious fact about Heart of Darkness, that the huge blank is not named Africa by Marlow, that although the continent is named earlier among other ones, he refrains from ever mentioning it in the rest of the text (174-5).⁷ Examining Conrad's original handwritten manuscript, Miller indicates how certain place names were dropped later by Conrad—markers that would have given Africa a clear profile. In fact, removing all traces of an African identity and rendering the continent into an abstraction seemed to have been an intentional project of Conrad. Since Marlow's voyage occurs in a backward direction, all vestiges of civilization must be effaced because his is a devolutionary journey leading to the primal state of humanity.

Matching Marlow's gradual loss of civilizational values, Naipaul notices the steady erosion of the same early in An Area of Darkness. Eastern values are wholesome enough at first but begin to decay soon. Thus Greece begins with “the emphasis on sweets … in the posters for Indian films with the actress Nargis … in the instantaneous friendships, the invitations to meals and homes” (10). But true east is not Greece but Egypt, characterized by the “chaos of uneconomical movement, the self stimulated din, the sudden feeling of insecurity, the conviction that all men were not brothers and that luggage was in danger” (10). “[A] foreshadowing of the caste system” can be seen in “the faded hotel,” for the “old French waiter only served; he had his runners, sad-eyed Negroes … who fetched and cleared away” (11). An Egyptian sitting in the compartment of the train to Cairo “hawked twice, with an expert tongue rolled the phlegm into a ball, plucked the ball out of his thumb and forefinger, considered it, and then rubbed it away between his palms” (11-12), thus anticipating the casual and public defecation of Indians Naipaul will describe in the east of the east, India. A similar portent appears in the Pyramids that “function as a public latrine” (12). To Naipaul, all these point toward a new idea of man, recognizable in his otherness to the European:

From Athens to Bombay another idea of man had defined itself by degrees, a new type of authority and subservience. The physique of Europe had melted away first into that of Africa and then, through Semitic Arabia, into Aryan Asia. Men had been diminished and deformed; they begged and whined.

(13)

Overwhelmed by this degradation, Naipaul has “a new awareness of … [himself] as a whole human being and a determination, touched with fear, to remain what … [he] was” (13).

Several scholars have noted that An Area of Darkness is a dip into Naipaul's own self. (These scholars are not aware of the orientalist dimension of this self.)⁸ Like Marlow's resisting of primal instincts that Africa tempts him with, Naipaul struggles to suppress Indian ways of looking at things. But the resolve is “touched with fear,” because Naipaul, with his Indian roots, has his sensitivity to Indian culture. Hence, not giving in to “Indianness” is a constant battle for him. The struggle is worsened by the material reality of India and its teeming millions. Consequently, the Indians are rendered an abstraction, and Naipaul has to withstand its claim on him:

And for the first time in my life I was one of the crowd. … Now in Bombay I entered a shop or a restaurant and awaited a special quality of response. And there was nothing. It was like being denied part of my reality. Again and again I was caught. I was faceless. I might sink without a trace into that Indian crowd. I had been made by Trinidad and England; recognition of my difference was necessary to me. I felt the need to impose myself, and didn't know how.

(42)

Thus Naipaul's attempt to keep his identity inviolate echoes Marlow's struggle not to respond to Africa's wild call, to “the thought of their [Africans'] humanity,” to “the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar” (113).

There is a crucial difference between Marlow and Naipaul here. In the Manichaean opposition between the European and the African, Marlow's identity is safer than that of Naipaul because no such opposition exists between Naipaul and the Indians in physical appearance. The kinship in this case is not too remote, for the race is the same (in fact, his blood kin, the Dubes, are there too), imbricating difference with sameness in an indelible conflation. Since physical sameness cannot be erased, Naipaul can assert only his mental difference, his cultural superiority, his espousal of enlightened values, in a land of benighted ignorance.

Just as Heart of Darkness makes use of two key nineteenth-century concepts—Spencer's sociological notion of primitive and advanced societies and Darwin's theory of evolution—⁹An Area of Darkness presents a contrast between India as a stagnating and primitive society and Europe as a dynamic and advanced one. Discussing the two cultures, Naipaul notes that “the British pillaged the country thoroughly; during their rule manufactures and crafts declined” and that “a biscuit factory is a poor exchange for gold embroidery (208). Still, to Naipaul, the principle Europe embodied during its colonial encounter with India was “positive” because it held enlightenment knowledge and hence ranked higher on the evolutionary scale of nations. As he says,

It was a clash between a positive principle and a negative; and nothing more negative can be imagined than the conjunction in the eighteenth century of a static Islam and a decadent Hinduism. In any clash between post-Renaissance Europe and India, India was bound to lose.

(208)

Long conquered by invasive forces, India lost its vitality, surviving on moribund imitative gestures. Its confrontation with Europe led to the inevitable consequence: defeat. While Europe, with its positive principle, inexorably progressed, India with its negative principle intractably regressed.

But it is not merely social Darwinism that prejudices Naipaul against India; echoes of evolutionary Darwin resonate in An Area of Darkness on many occasions. As soon as Naipaul arrives in India, he begins to notice the Indians and is shocked to see that the vast majority of them are deformed and devolved, people with arrested growth. The first Indian Naipaul meets upon arrival at the Bombay Port is Coelho, the Goan, sent by Naipaul's travel agency to facilitate his exit through the Indian Customs. Coelho is described as “tall and thin and shabby and nervous” (9) while his assistant is “stunted and bony” (10). The Indians Naipaul sees on the other vessels are “of small physique, betokening all the fearful things that had soon to be faced” (42-3).

Marlow positions Africans at an earlier point in the timeline of evolving civilizations. “These people,” in Miller's reading of Heart of Darkness, “are thus stuck in time, prior to time, and outside it, in a ‘perpetual childhood’” (179). Similarly, Indians, to Naipaul, are a sub species of humanity. However, unlike Marlow's depiction of Africans, Naipaul clearly describes them in terms of failed evolution:

I had seen the physique of the people of Andhra, which had suggested the possibility of an evolution downwards, wasted body to wasted body, Nature mocking herself, incapable of remission. Compassion and pity did not answer; they were refinements of hope. Fear was what I felt. Contempt was what I had to fight against; to give way to that was to abandon the self I had known.

(45)

Not surprisingly, in the ruins of Vijaynagar, the Indians “inside, the inheritors of this greatness: men and women and children, [appear] thin as crickets, like lizards among the stones” (204).¹⁰

Indians who are not in the category of devolved humanity do not fare all that well in An Area of Darkness. They are India's rising bourgeoisie, and they are the topic of Naipaul's severest censure for their “mimicry” of the departed British. Thus there are Bunty, the boxwallah, and Mrs Mahindra, the contractor's wife.¹¹ The “boxwallahs,” a class of men who hold sinecure executive positions in British businesses mostly in Calcutta, is the most despicable product of the East-West encounter because they still ape Raj manners. Mrs Mahindra, representing her class's crass imitation of the West, unabashedly professes her “Craze, just craze for foreign” and takes a great deal of pride in possessing things foreign (85).

Then, the most powerful figure of mimicry emerging from the colonial encounter, absurd and outrageous, occurs in the master text in the genre, Heart of Darkness. This is the African fireman on Marlow's steamboat, the “improved specimen,” improved because he has been exposed to European machinery (114). Thus privileged (he has received a “few months of training) and “full of improving knowledge,” his appearance is “as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs” (114).

Even Indian nationalism, Naipaul claims, began as a mimicry of the British (211). Curiously enough, in Naipaul's estimate of Indian nationalists in Darkness, Gandhi is an admirable figure. Naipaul calls Gandhi “the least Indian of Indian leaders” (73) whereas “Nehru is more Indian [because] he has a romantic feeling for the country and its past …” (73). Gandhi, according to Naipaul, “saw India so clearly because he was in part a colonial” (73). The roles of these two nationalist leaders will be reversed in India: A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul's next book on India. But in Darkness, why is Naipaul so approving of Gandhi?

The reason relates to the text's orientalist vision of India. Certainly, it is much easier to conceive India through an orientalist lens, unchanging and beyond the reach of modernity, only if India remains a land of holy poverty as Gandhi wanted it to be after independence.¹² Indeed Gandhi's anti-modern vision of India is the rife ground for orientalist imaginings. To Naipaul, Nehru, on the other hand, “has a romantic feeling for the country and its past; he takes it to the heart, and the India he writes about cannot easily be recognized” (emphasis added) (73). Obviously, the modern India that Nehru is trying to create would cause India to lose its oriental charm. This is the reason that when Naipaul first arrives in Bombay, he is shocked to see how “The building [of Bombay] spoke of London and industrial England; and how, in spite of knowledge, this seemed ordinary and inappropriate” (43).

As in Heart of Darkness, a certain ambiguity pervades An Area of Darkness in the text's treatment of imperialism. Heart of Darkness, in Miller's words,

elicits such ambivalence among readers nowadays [because] it is neither colonialistic enough to be damnable nor ironic enough to be completely untainted by “colonialistic bias.” The net effect is a subversion of Africanist discourse from within.

(171)

A like tendency is seen in An Area of Darkness. Naipaul does not pronounce British rule in India either beneficial or harmful, though most of his comments on the issue suggest the latter. He declares that England in India was “an incongruous imposition” (189) and reacts against the English presence on more than one occasion: “The British had possessed the country so completely. Their withdrawal was so irrevocable” and “The British pillaged the country thoroughly; during their rule manufactures and crafts declined” (187, 208). Naipaul inspects the issue at length in an article published soon after Darkness and observes that “it was an encounter which ended in mutual recoil and futility” (Barracoon 59). Thus Naipaul's critique of British imperialism in India resembles Conrad's excoriation of Leopoldine Congo, although British imperialism is hardly a focus in Naipaul's Darkness as the Belgian is in Conrad's.

Like Conrad's Darkness, Naipaul's Darkness betrays a profound epistemological uncertainty about its subject. Naipaul often adopts the first person plural to describe Indians, and Peggy Nightingale praises him for assuming “a voice with which to condemn himself and all who follow him in expressions of anger and sensibility” (85-6). “This remarkably complex manipulation of point of view,” she asserts,

expresses brilliantly Naipaul's own inner turmoil—his sense of belonging and not belonging. Following as it does his declaration of his need to feel different, to be recognized as distinctive, not just one of Indian mass, it is especially telling.

(86)

What is proposed in this statement certainly grants Naipaul a remarkable power, for his is a consciousness that feels Indianness and all its denial and bad attitudes and yet can distance itself from those and critique them on a Western platform. It is a consciousness that can penetrate its object of study though it itself is a part of the same object. Thus it intimates its right to a complete epistemological grip on its object.

Notwithstanding that tremendous claim, being both within and without India (much in the fashion of Kipling's Kim), ambiguity surrounds the nature of experience Naipaul narrates, creating a sense of indeterminacy in it. On the one hand, Naipaul claims full control over his subject; on the other, he disavows the finding it yields. At the end of Darkness, he says,

It was a journey that ought not to have been made; it had broken my life into two. “Write me as soon as you get to Europe,” an Indian friend had said. “I want your freshest impressions.” I forget now what I wrote. It was violent and incoherent; but, like everything I wrote about India, it exorcised nothing.

(265)

This apparent contradiction, knowing India and not knowing it, corresponds to the duality inherent in the discourse of Indology. Ronald Inden, in “Orientalist Constructions of India,” explains that two seemingly opposing groups of thinkers have governed oriental studies about India from its start: the romantic/idealist and the utilitarian/positivist.¹³ The former, called the “Orientalists,” from whom the discourse gains its name, were pioneered by Sir William Jones while the latter, known as “Anglicists,” were headed by James Mill (416-7).¹⁴ The idealist view emphasizes India's differences from Western culture and is fascinated by them whereas the positivist denigrates them, recommending their speedy replacement with Western values. Both views, according to Inden, conform to the episteme of Indology: that India is Europe's other.

Naipaul's India in Darkness veers between the two. The India of his childhood, the land of myth and fantasy, conforms to the romantic India created by Jones and those loyal to him whereas Naipaul's felt experience of India and his commentary on it comply more with the view advanced by Mill and the positivists. The tension from the two pressures creates the epistemological uncertainty in An Area of Darkness.

Inden informs us that early Indological accounts usually had two components: descriptive and commentative. There is another, explanatory or interpretive, but this last is a later phenomenon (410-1). All three can be seen in Naipaul's writings about India; in Darkness, however, Naipaul mostly describes and sometimes comments. His description—as all Indological descriptions are—is placed in what Inden would call “a framing commentary” (411). Treating a similar issue in Darkness, Ashish Roy shows that description and narration—or the “failure of narrative [which] yields a successful narrative, a narrative of success”—go on to the making of self in the text (243). Analyzing an anecdote in which the narrator of Darkness has just alighted from an airconditioned train compartment into the blistering heat of Delhi—where beggars whine, overburdened porters stagger under loads of trunks, and a hotel agent waves his “grubby folder” from time to time—Roy remarks,

[H]ere with one leap of the imagination, the bounder recollects his true self of which he was about to be stripped, annihilates the enemy, composes himself in the midst of all activity that is nonactivity, reaches out, slowly concentrates, reads. Writes! Authorizes the scene of writing.

(243)

With all its inactivity and ahistory, the Indian civilization perfectly answers to the descriptive mode of representation, however tedious the task may be. Description, moreover, is the appropriate mode to represent what is timeless and lacking the power of representing itself. For these reasons, description, according to Roy, is considered the damned genre in Western writing: “Description has always, in Western rhetorical theory, been regarded as a second-order, menial labor, a necessary evil in the heroic gesture of making narratives” (257).

What Inden calls “commentative” accounts in Indology resemble the kind of narration Roy has in mind. Commentary requires an application of the self that still remains detached from its object. The self can penetrate the distance and invade the descriptive space of the object only by employing the narrative mode. Descriptive material, mute and inert for the most part, finds expression and animation when linked with the narrator's narration. One is reminded of Edward Said's comment: “in discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence; yet we must not forget that the Orientalist's presence is enabled by the Orient's effective absence” (208). This strategy of orientalist discourse is manifest in Heart of Darkness. The Africans do not possess “any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginning of time—had no inherited experience to teach them, as it were …” (121). Quoting the above, Miller indicates the “perpetual childhood” Africans are condemned to live in by Marlow (179). “There is nothing anterior to their present moment,” Miller notes, “nothing to inherit from; time begins with the arrival of the whites and, as we shall see, with the arrival of their genre, the novel” (179).

That Naipaul succumbs to similar stereotyping in his Darkness is evident in his comment on the state of literature in India. He declares novel-writing to be an inappropriate vocation for Indians: “Indian attempts at the novel further reveal the Indian confusion. The novel is of the West. It is part of that Western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now” (214). Naipaul ridicules Indian novelists who mimic Western writers, but his sample is too scanty to be representative. He describes only those who write in English. Certainly, the following does not apply to many who write in Indian languages.

Other writers quickly fatigued me with their assertions that poverty was sad, that death was sad. I read of poor fishermen, poor peasants, poor rickshaw-men; innumerable pretty young girls either simply or suddenly died, or shared the landlord's bed, paid the family's medical bills and then committed suicide; and many of the “modern” short stories were only refurbished folk tales.

(215)

Even if Indian novels pursued mostly such trite stories, Naipaul does not grant them their own aesthetic criteria. In this “description” of Indian novels, a “framing” or “interpretive” “commentary” is not late in coming.

The sweetness and sadness which can be found in Indian writing and Indian films are a turning away from a too overwhelming reality; they reduce the horror to a warm, virtuous emotion. Indian sentimentality is the opposite of concern.

(215)

When Said notes that orientalist studies is characterized by “[t]he defeat of narrative by vision” (239), he is surely talking about description. According to Said, there exists a “conflict between a holistic view of the Orient (description, monumental record) and a narrative of events in the Orient” (239). This conflict occurs because “[t]he Orientalist surveys the Orient from above, with the aim of getting hold of the whole sprawling panorama before him—culture, religion, mind, history, society” (239). Said argues that “[a]gainst this static system of ‘synchronic essentialism,’” which views the orient “panoptically,” there is the diachronic pressure of narrative, not of the orientalist but of the orient itself (240). The orientalist suppresses this energy by imposing his “monumental form of encyclopedic or lexicographical vision” on the orient (240). Narrative, Said rightly insists, has the power to usurp the inflicted vision, which is why the orientalist denies the orient the strength of narrative. In Said's words,

Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake “classical civilization”. …

(240)

Said recognizes the inherently subversive power of narrative here. Curiously, so does Naipaul. In the foreword to Middle Passage, he writes, “The novelist works towards conclusions of which he is often unaware; and it is better that he should.” The unexpected conclusions in the novel, Bakhtin would say, testify to the genre's irreducible potential for dialogism. This is why Naipaul refuses to treat India imaginatively because such a mode might overthrow the preconceived notions he has about India—the monologic seal he wants to silence it with.¹⁵ True not only of Darkness but most of Naipaul's early non-fiction, the strategy is a product of deliberate effort. In an interview given years later, Naipaul says that his fiction and non-fiction “come out of two entirely different segments of the brain,” that “fiction begins on the typewriter” while the “other has to be done very carefully, so it's done by hand, because it's very planned …” (Jussawallah 82). Thus fiction is spontaneous while non-fiction is studied. A major difficulty in the latter is the struggle the author endures to suppress elements undermining his set impressions. Naipaul states in the same interview that the travel writer has “got to be alert to the various pressures, all the temptations to draw social lessons” (82).

Naipaul denies Indians a role in the account of India he offers in Darkness, and India becomes a construct of his orientalist fantasy in the text. Indians who appear in the text remain passive participants in his narrative, which, in the last analysis, is a study of Naipaul's own self. That self fights a hard battle to efface its own Indianness and to shield its identity from being Indianized. The discourse of orientalism comes very handy to Naipaul to overcome the threat of his disintegrating self, for it is preserved by creating a dialectic of the self and the other and adhering to their defined parameters. Naipaul's interest in his self, ironically, resembles an attempt at narcissism, the same narcissism he critiques in the culture that the Raj transplanted onto India (187-99). Reviewing Darkness, V. S. Pritchett observes that “Narcissism is an inevitable aspect of imperialism”—that is, the phenomenon is not accidental as Naipaul seems to think (362). Threatened by dissolution, the narrative self in orientalist representations exhibits a strong tendency toward narcissism, which, indeed, is an inevitable aspect also of orientalism.

Notes

1. This biographical information is taken from Jussawallah (xix).

2. For an explanation of “orientalist” representation, see Edward Said's Orientalism. In it, Said maintains that western culture views the orient in stereotypical terms, producing “the discourse of orientalism” that treats the orient as the west's other—feminine in essence, exotic in appeal, and unchanging for centuries.

3. Adewale Maja-Pearce studies Conrad's influence in A Bend in the River. Not focusing on any particular text, Selwyn Cudjoe explores the Conradian stamp on Naipaul's sensibility (160-66). Conrad receives considerable attention in Dennis Walder's study, and Walder shows how In a Free State draws on Heart of Darkness and recasts it as a postcolonial text. Rob Nixon identifies Heart of Darkness as a seminal work affecting all subsequent representation of Africa, including Naipaul's as well as Chinua Achebe's: “Heart of Darkness has exerted a centripetal pull over Western representation of Africa unequaled in this century by the sway of any other text over the portrayal of any single continent” (90). Though Nixon observes that “[m]ore subtly, India, too, becomes a semi-Conradian Area of Darkness,” he does not quite explain how it is so (88). Similarly, Fawzia Mustafa, in a recent study of Naipaul, notes that “textual echoing of Heart of Darkness … resonates beyond the title's allusion” in Naipaul's Darkness. Her reading of the text does not pursue this reverberation either.

4. What is remarkable in Suleri's reading of Naipaul is the link she seeks to establish between his The Enigma of Arrival and Heart of Darkness. She argues that Naipaul's

   The Enigma of Arrival startlingly repeats the structural principle of the previous text [A Bend in the River] by revising Heart of Darkness into a comic tale. Naipaul as narrator is both Marlow and the Harlequin; Kurtz is inverted into the powerless landlord; the wilderness is recast as England at the end of empire, whose entropic impulse Naipaul maps with a quiet but exquisite pleasure.

   (170)

5. As Christopher Miller has explained, Marlow renders Africa into “the property of boy's adventure”; with his “passion for maps and the “blank spaces on the earth,” he relives the boyhood self of his author (173).

6. Naipaul talks about the “two Indias” he grew up with in many other writings as well. The notions of the India of imagination and the India of reality also appear in India: A Million Mutinies Now (7-8).

7. Miller also mentions the source of his own title, which is derived from the “blank spaces” the boy Marlow sees in the map.

8. Two early reviewers of Darkness note that the work is more about Naipaul than the country he visits. D. J. Enright comments,

   [A] travel book by an author of little personality is likely to be plain dull; a travel book by an author with a pronounced personality (like Mr. Naipaul) is likely to tell us more about the author than about the country. Heads, the country loses; tails, the author wins.

   (59-60)

   V. S. Pritchett makes the same observation:

   this most compelling and vivid book on India in a long time owes its success to “Mr Naipaul's eye and ear as a novelist and as much to the fact that he was one of those disturbed egotistical travellers who hit upon their necessary enemy.

   (361)

9. Two New Historicist studies examine Darwinism and related issues in Heart of Darkness. See Shaffer and Kershner.

10. Compare Marlow's “A lot of people [Africans], mostly black and naked, moved about like ants” (74).

11. Naipaul explains the origin of the term “boxwallah” in “Jamshed into Jimmy,” an article that first appeared in New Statesman in 1963 and was subsequently reprinted in The Overcrowded Barracoon. He thinks it derives from “the Anglo-Indian office-box of which Kipling speaks so feelingly in Something of Myself” (52).

12. For a discussion on Gandhi's insistence that India remain traditional after independence, see Partha Chatterjee (85-130).

13. Inspired by Edward Said, Inden's article examines “Indology,” a prominent branch of orientalist studies. His work is similar to Miller's Blank Darkness, which probes “Africanist” representations of Africa.

14. Sir William Jones's failure to produce a master text of India, Inden observes, caused him and his followers to lose the battle to Anglicists who “argued that Western knowledge in English should displace the Eastern” (417). Mill's History of India, on the other hand, purported to be just that. It claimed to explain away all facets of Indian life and became in the nineteenth century the “hegemonic textbook of Indian history,” shaping the policies of the East Indian Company (417-18).

15. Naipaul has never written a novel that is set in India. Only a short story of his, “One Out of Many” in In a Free State, is partly set in Bombay. He, however, offers more than one fictional account of Africa: “In a Free State” and A Bend in the River.

Works Cited

Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Conrad, Joseph. Youth, Heart of Darkness, Typhoon. New York: The Modern Library, 1993.

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