(Naipaul a) writer of Indian origin has chosen to fulminate against Islam and the Indian Muslims ... Having explored an area of darkness and chronicled the histories of a wounded civilisation and a million little mutinies in India, he decided to fire his shots at the world of Islam. This was the beginning of a long-term laboured project. Long before Samuel Huntington earned his reputation for expounding the clash of civilisations theory, the Trinidad-born writer alerted his Western readers to the growing Islamic menace. Among the Believers, his Islamic journey to Iran, Pakistan,  Malaysia and Indonesia, led him to represent Islam as a hostile and aggressive force, and caricature Muslim societies as rigid authoritarian and uncreative. "Is-lam sancti-fied rage, rage about the faith, political rage: one could be like the other. And more than once on this journey I had met sensitive men who were ready to contemplate greater convulsions."

India: A Million Mutinies, published in 1990, conjured up the same images ... He referred to the 1857 revolt as the last flare- up of Muslim energy in India until the agitation, 80 years or so later, for a separate Muslim homeland. He found bazaars in Lucknow expressing the faith of the book and the mosque. Everything in the bazaar, he feit. served the faith (For all these years, I have searched in vain for such a bazaar in a city that I know better than Naipaul). Two years after this book was published, he came out in virtual defence of the demolition of the Babari Masjid ...

Today, Naipaul's worldview remains unchanged. Hindu militancy, he says in a recent interview to the Outlook magazine, is a necessary corrective to the past, -a creative force. To say that India has a secular character, he adds, is being historically unsound. This makes Naipaul a worthy chairman for the committee that is being readied for a major political rehearsal - the review of the Indian Constitution. He rejects the possibility of Islam working out reconciliation with other religions on the subcontinent. Islam is a religion of fixed laws. This, he points out, goes contrary to everything in modern India. This is, in just a few crispy sentences, the clash of civilisations theory applicable to the subcontinent.

There is a great deal of talk nowadays of re-writing our history. Naipaul has quite a few brilliant ideas for the newly appointed chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research. One of them is to give voice to the 'defeated people.' Mind you, not the poor or the downtrodden but the Hindus living in 'Hindu India.' To add poignancy to our historical narratives, Naipaul suggests that we concentrate on a more tragic and more illuminating theme. That theme is the 'grinding down of Hindu India.' So,  revive memories of temples being destroyed, Hindus being forcibly converted to Islam, and Sikh gurus being mercilessly executed by the Mughal emperors.

If one has to build a modern India by invoking the brutal past, the prescription is to rubbish the forces of assimilation and integration in Indian society. Finally, if the ICHR pays heed to Naipaul's advice, he would drop Gandhi from the history syllabus. That is because Naipaul regards the Mahatma as uneducated, and not a thinker. He has no message today ...

Naipaul's exposition is clumsy, naive and gibberish. He is as much ill-informed about India as Samuel Huntington is about the world outside the Western hemisphere. He talks of India's fractured past solely in terms of the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu- Buddhist culture of the past. He must know that celebrating the coming of the Turks or the vandalism of the Islamic zealots is nobody's favourite pastime. The historian's job is to come to terms with Turkish, Afghan and Mughal rule, study their polities objectively, and examine the consequences of their policies dispassionately. Fuming and fretting ... takes you nowhere. Anger, remorse and bitterness are not a substitute for serious study and analysis.

We have both inherited and self-created problems and difficulties. But we must have time and our own spaces to sort them out .. (Source: The Indian Express, 27 November, 1999)

(Naipaul a) writer of Indian origin has chosen to fulminate against Islam and the Indian Muslims ... Having explored an area of darkness and chronicled the histories of a wounded civilisation and a million little mutinies in India, he decided to fire his shots at the world of Islam. This was the beginning of a long-term laboured project. Long before Samuel Huntington earned his reputation for expounding the clash of civilisations theory, the Trinidad-born writer alerted his Western readers to the growing Islamic menace. Among the Believers, his Islamic journey to Iran, Pakistan,  Malaysia and Indonesia, led him to represent Islam as a hostile and aggressive force, and caricature Muslim societies as rigid authoritarian and uncreative. "Is-lam sancti-fied rage, rage about the faith, political rage: one could be like the other. And more than once on this journey I had met sensitive men who were ready to contemplate greater convulsions."

India: A Million Mutinies, published in 1990, conjured up the same images ... He referred to the 1857 revolt as the last flare- up of Muslim energy in India until the agitation, 80 years or so later, for a separate Muslim homeland. He found bazaars in Lucknow expressing the faith of the book and the mosque. Everything in the bazaar, he feit. served the faith (For all these years, I have searched in vain for such a bazaar in a city that I know better than Naipaul). Two years after this book was published, he came out in virtual defence of the demolition of the Babari Masjid ...

Today, Naipaul's worldview remains unchanged. Hindu militancy, he says in a recent interview to the Outlook magazine, is a necessary corrective to the past, -a creative force. To say that India has a secular character, he adds, is being historically unsound. This makes Naipaul a worthy chairman for the committee that is being readied for a major political rehearsal - the review of the Indian Constitution. He rejects the possibility of Islam working out reconciliation with other religions on the subcontinent. Islam is a religion of fixed laws. This, he points out, goes contrary to everything in modern India. This is, in just a few crispy sentences, the clash of civilisations theory applicable to the subcontinent.

There is a great deal of talk nowadays of re-writing our history. Naipaul has quite a few brilliant ideas for the newly appointed chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research. One of them is to give voice to the 'defeated people.' Mind you, not the poor or the downtrodden but the Hindus living in 'Hindu India.' To add poignancy to our historical narratives, Naipaul suggests that we concentrate on a more tragic and more illuminating theme. That theme is the 'grinding down of Hindu India.' So,  revive memories of temples being destroyed, Hindus being forcibly converted to Islam, and Sikh gurus being mercilessly executed by the Mughal emperors.

If one has to build a modern India by invoking the brutal past, the prescription is to rubbish the forces of assimilation and integration in Indian society. Finally, if the ICHR pays heed to Naipaul's advice, he would drop Gandhi from the history syllabus. That is because Naipaul regards the Mahatma as uneducated, and not a thinker. He has no message today ...

Naipaul's exposition is clumsy, naive and gibberish. He is as much ill-informed about India as Samuel Huntington is about the world outside the Western hemisphere. He talks of India's fractured past solely in terms of the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu- Buddhist culture of the past. He must know that celebrating the coming of the Turks or the vandalism of the Islamic zealots is nobody's favourite pastime. The historian's job is to come to terms with Turkish, Afghan and Mughal rule, study their polities objectively, and examine the consequences of their policies dispassionately. Fuming and fretting ... takes you nowhere. Anger, remorse and bitterness are not a substitute for serious study and analysis.

We have both inherited and self-created problems and difficulties. But we must have time and our own spaces to sort them out .. (Source: The Indian Express, 27 November, 1999)

 S.V. Naipaul On Islam's Impact on India

'Fractured past' is too polite a way to describe India's calamitous millennium. The millennium began with Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of the North. This is such a big and bad event that people still have to find polite, destiny-defying ways of speaking about it. In art books and history books, people write of the Muslims 'arriving' in India, as though the Muslims came on a tourist bus and went away again.

The Muslim view of their conquest of India is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of idols and temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves, so cheap and numerous that they were being sold for a few rupees. The architectural evidence -the absence of Hindu monuments in the North is convincing enough. This conquest was unlike any other that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of the period. Defeated people never write their history. The victor writes the history. The victors were Muslims. For people on the other side it is a period of darkness.

The terrible Akbar ravages Orissa in the east. This means that while a country like England is preparing for greatness under its great queen, old India, in its sixth century of retreat, is still being reduced to non-entity. To say that India has a secular character is being historically unsound. Dangerous or not, Hindu militancy is a corrective to the history I have been talking about. It is a creative force and will be so. Islam can't reconcile with it. 

V.S. Naipaul's Interview with Onlooker