BOOKS

By Edward W. Desmond/New Delhi

INDIA: A MILLION MUTINIES NOW

by V.S. Naipaul

Viking; 521 pages; $24.95

At the end of his last book on India, V.S. Naipaul wrote that the country's survival depended on seeing the past as dead "or the past will kill." In that volume, India: A Wounded Civilization, as well as in his earlier work on the subcontinent, An Area of Darkness, the Trinidad-born writer of Indian descent scorched the landscape of subcontinent society, indicting the rigidities of a country that preserved the evils of the Hindu caste system and endured a suffocating bureaucracy. Now Naipaul has returned to India more than 10 years later to discover that the past is being left behind, and far more quickly than he imagined it would be.

India: A Million Mutinies Now is Naipaul's appreciation of how real, individual freedom, first sighted in the distance with India's independence in 1947, has begun to take hold in daily life, to break down the "layer upon layer of distress and cruelty." The result is messy, since those liberties give rise to a "million little mutinies," the colliding trajectories of countrymen shaking off the old mind-sets of caste and class. To Naipaul's solidly liberal sensibilities, that turmoil is what marks the road to progress.

He sees the "many revolutions within that revolution" everywhere. Mr. Ghate, a rough-edged slum dweller and organizer for Shiv Sena, a violent Hindu chauvinist group, displays an inspired streak of social activism and complains in earnest, and in English, about the "absence of civic sense" in his neighborhood. Subramaniam is a Brahman and scientist whose grandfather was a Hindu priest, once the flamekeepers of reactionary Hindu society. But the next generation of Brahmans, like Subramaniam's father, led India's political- reform movements, and now Subramaniam's own generation, the most accomplished and Westernized to date, is the ironic, not entirely unhappy victim of those reforms. Brahmans are losing out in India's equivalent of affirmative action, while other castes, including the lowest of the low, are at least partial winners. As testament to that transformation, Namdeo Dhasal, a militant dalit (untouchable) leader and poet, tells Naipaul, "There was a time when we were treated like animals. Now we live like human beings."

Naipaul has retired the familiar, infuriating, immobile face of India and painted a fresh one of human spirit and dramatic change that should become the new starting point for thinking about the country. What Naipaul does not grapple with is the question of whether India can survive burning so hotly. Hindu-Muslim conflicts are on the rise; violent secessionist movements have paralyzed three states; caste warfare threatens to erupt around the country. Naipaul barely touches on that drift to anarchy, but he helps us understand it.