V.S. Naipaul and Indonesia

V.S. Naipaul and Indonesia

The following passages are quoted from V.S. Naipaul's Among
the Believers from 1979 and Beyond Belief published in 1995. The
extracts concern the author's observations of Indonesia.

In his first book, Naipaul writes: "The Borobudur offered cut-
price deals for local people... a recognized way of spending
holidays... simple pleasures; but they were feeding resentment.

"Resentment of Chinese; of foreigners; of people with skills
Indonesia didn't have... he was full of rage against the
Chinese... the successful, the ignorant men... rage seemingly
political... and racial rage.

Most of the PhD are Chinese. They are like cancer cells, ever
growing and powerful. These people are actually like electric
currents with 220 volts. However the existing wiring of the
society is capable only for 110 volts... thus you need a
transformer... supposed to be the government sector and young
intellectuals. One day... will come to Jakarta and burn down
this nice hotel. "

In Beyond Belief, he writes: "In Jakarta the new wealth could
at times feel oppressive... rich people, rich Chinese looked to
get away for rest, cleanliness, cool air, order to the new five
star hotels... now the city's weekend sanctuaries... and on
Sunday mornings, in the Borobudur hotel, the rich folk, Chinese
and others from the Bethany successful families, one of the new
American evangelical faiths, met and sang hymns and clapped
hands... praying for the luck to last. It felt like luck, this
wealth that could bless even the uneducated, because the
technologies and the factories that produced it had been imported
whole. For that reason too, it felt like plunder, something that
had to end.

"In the authoritarian state, where luck and licenses came only
to the obedient, every idea of development -- including
technology -- went with that idea of plunder. Even the rich could
be made anxious. So on Sunday mornings they met in the sanctuary
of the hotel and sang hymns and clapped hands with sabbath
abandon; on the rear window of their cars there were stickers,
Bethany Successful Families, like a fixed prayer to ward off the
evil eye. I often felt in Jakarta that it was a version, less
elegant perhaps, of what Iran might have been like before the
revolution: so grand and overwhelming that it seemed wrong to see
the sham or to imagine the great city collapsed or decayed.

"There are stretches and stretches of gutted ghetto like
sweatshops-shop-houses where once three generations would cram in
to work and to live and yet there are parties -- wedding parties
-- not solemnization ceremonies and birthday parties -- in those
five-star hotels in total amnesia of the recent past,
oblivious of the surrounding, ignorant of presence and
indifferent to the future; wherefore rich Chinese would become
the idea that all Chinese are rich and guilty."

Following are lines from Naipaul's A Bend in the River: "It is
not that there is no right and wrong here. There is no right...
There may be some parts of the world where men can cherish the
past and think of passing furniture and chinaware to their
heirs... perhaps in Sweden or Canada... It is not easy to turn
your back on the past... It is something you have to arm
yourself for, or grief will ambush and destroy you. The thought
of two generations going to wastes -- it was very painful. The
thought of losing that house built by my grandfather, the thought
of risks he and my father had taken to build up a business from
nothing, the bravery, the sleepless nights... very painful. In
another country such effort... talent, would have made us
millionaires, aristocrats... there all going into smoke... the
rage was also with my community and our civilization, which gave
us energy but... left us at the mercy of others but I had not
understood to what extent our civilization had also been our
prison... either to what extent we had been made by the place
where we had grown up... and how incapable we had become of
understanding the outside world... The world is what it is; men
who are nothing, and who allow themselves to become nothing, have
no place in it."

SIA KA MOU

Jakarta