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Despite their ancient, surviving civilization, which every Indian takes pride in, 'Indians don't value their identity unless it is endorsed by foreigners', Nobel laureate V S Naipaul says in a newly published collection of his essays.
"Indians, the holy men included, have continually looked outside India for approval. Fragmentation and dependence are complete. Local judgement is valueless."
"It is as if without the foreign chit Indians can have no confirmation of their own reality," says the Carribean-born writer of Indian-origin, known for his candid and caustic style, in the essay collection The Writer and the World edited by Pankaj Mishra.
"Every discipline, skill and proclaimed ideal of the modern Indian State," he asserts, "is a copy of something which is known to exist in its true form somewhere else."
"The student of Cabinet government looks to Westminster, the journals of protest look, even for their typography, to the New Statesman," says the litterateur.
But, Naipaul says "imported ideas no longer answer the Indian's problems. The result is frenzy."
"Each Indian wishes to be the only one of his sort recognised abroad, like (former prime minister Jawaharlal) Nehru himself, who in the great days was described, most commonly, by visiting writers as the only Indian aristocrat presiding over his deficient but devoted peasantry," he says.
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