A Writer's People by V. S. Naipaul Page A

rescued many years later by some kind of political-academic interest, concerned here as in other Caribbean colonies with promoting local culture and pride.
The Light of Life
, rescued in this way, had been translated into Dutch. This Dutch text, translated into English by some Surinam-Dutch academics and given the sensational title of
The Autobiography of an Indian Indentured Labourer
, had been published by a small Indian publisher and had made its way to the serious review pages of
The Hindu
newspaper in India. Many accidents had lengthened the life of Rahman’s little book.
    It is a primitive piece of book-making. It begins with a plea for forgiveness for writing an autobiography: he is only, after all, “an insignificant soul.” There follows, as an introduction to his story, a history of India in fifty-five short paragraphs, each paragraph reading like a school note that Rahman might have taken down from a teacher at his school in India sixty years before or—his memory is prodigious—remembered from a basic history text book of that time: a British text book, it may be, Indian history in these notes being, principally, a list of Muslim emperors, and then a list of British governors. British rule in India is regarded as something settled. Rahman is a complete colonial, loyal always to the ruler.
The Light of Life
ends with a poem in Hindi in praise of the Dutch queen,Wilhelmina, “Maharani Queen Wilhelmina Sahab Bahadur”; if Rahman had stayed in British India something as loyal to the British sovereign, and as fulsome, might have come from his pen.
    The autobiography proper, less than two hundred pages long, comes between the fifty-five paragraphs of the history of India and a polemical fifty-page account of a childish religious dispute with a Brahmin in Surinam. It would seem, from these “fillers,” that Rahman didn’t feel his autobiographical material was enough for a book. And, indeed, he doesn’t have a great deal to say about India outside school and family. He tells us about his family connections, his family’s rich patrons, his schools; and he talks at length and very precisely about his examinations, still important to him after fifty years (this no doubt explains his lasting memory of his history lessons). He has much more to say than my grandmother’s mattress-maker, but as a narrator he has something of the mattress-maker’s incompleteness. He has no feeling for the physical world about him. It is quite startling to see a photograph of his school in India (provided by the book’s editors); nothing in Rahman’s words suggests a fine decorated brick building, as this is or was; without the photograph we would have been free to create anything we wanted. He has no sense of the passing of time, or cannot communicate it. Once he allows himself to be recruited by the Surinam agents he is moved from depot to depot; he gives no description of these depots, judging each only according to the quality of the food given out.
    But his narrative tools are suited to his vision. His world is full of religious rituals, of vows made and then carried out. Hedeals in wonders: men who fight tigers, men who suffer from dreadful maladies and are then cured by wise healers, both the details of the maladies and the extraordinary cures clearly remembered fifty or sixty years later. For one cure a big tortoise had to be brought to Rahman’s father’s house. It was easy enough for a fisherman to catch a tortoise. But then the tortoise had to be made to urinate; and then the urine had to be collected and mixed with the powder of a baked earthworm. Rahman’s father didn’t know how to get the tortoise to urinate. But the wise and famous old hakim, who had prescribed the cure, laughed and told Rahman to bring a stove, a pan, and some firewood from his mother. Rahman did as he was told. The firewood was lighted, the pan was put upside down on the stove, and