I have read in a daily newspaper report that India's "red tape" has been described as "one of the most frustrating experiences for any Indian, let alone a foreign investor." The reference is taken from a Hong Kong-based consultancy group known as the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (HYPERLINK "http://www.asiarisk.com/" www.asiarisk.com/) and emerged from a survey of 1,300 business executives in 12 Asian countries. The executives' responses led the consultancy to rank India's bureaucracy on a scale from one to 10, with 10 being the worst, at 9.41. I had previously been made aware of this perception some time ago. Trinidad and Tobago Nobel laureate VS Naipaul had long before dramatised, with cringing sarcasm, the Byzantine ways of the sub-continent's officialdom and its decision-making processes. In An Area of Darkness (New York: Vintage, 1964) Naipaul recreates the events on his arrival in Bombay and his being met at the port by "Coelho, the Goan." The latter had been "sent by the travel agency to help me through the customs."
What follows is a biting scrutiny of the mind-boggling ways of customs at Bombay over the bringing in by the protagonist of two bottles of alcohol. Naipaul is sent from pillar to post trying to complete the requisite forms to allow him to reclaim his confiscated alcohol, then disallowed entry into Bombay except to tourists and only under severe restrictions. Naipaul has to make several trips dealing with different officials in varied locations across the city before identifying the correct bureaucrat with whom he has to treat and only then is he told that he needs, what is described as a "transport permit" to ferret his prized possessions. "'You must have a transport permit.' I was exhausted, sweating, and when I opened my mouth to speak I found I was on the verge of tears. 'But they told me.'...I thrust all the papers I had at him: my liquor permit, my customs receipt, my passport, my receipt for wharfage charges, my Tourist Introduction Card..." (An Area of Darkness, 20)
RIGHT: VS Naipaul
Nearing exasperation Naipaul volleys: "'I am going to write to the papers about this.'" The official in quick time responds: "'I wish you would. I keep telling them they must tell people about this transport permit...'" (An Area of Darkness, 21) Even when he arrives to complete the supposed form, he is met by uncertainty by officials themselves who query the need for such permit. "'Transport permit?' said a third and, walking away to a fourth asked, 'Transport permit. Ever hear of transport permit?' He had. 'They've been writing us about it.' A transport permit was required to transport liquor from the customs to a hotel or house." (An Area of Darkness, 21) One cannot but help smile at the officials' lassitude in the face of stultifying inefficiency.
Finally, after it was determined that the document was required, Naipaul the writer is required to pen a letter requesting his bottles and the author confesses that for once his mental exasperation was such that words eluded him: "I was finding it hard to spell and to frame simple sentences. I crumpled up the sheet of paper." (An Area of Darkness, 23) His surroundings, as much as the asphyxiating approach of the bureaucrats he encounters, would have contributed to his utterly disjointed frame of mind: "It was a long low room at ground level, hidden from the scorching sun and as dark as a London basement but warm and dusty with the smell of old paper, which was everywhere, on shelves rising to the grey ceiling, on desks, on chairs, in the hands of clerks, in the hands of khaki-clad messengers." (An Area of Darkness, 22) A typical public service office, one would think.
At this point in time a companion accompanying the author faints but is left by the office staff, ignored on the floor, until Naipaul himself has to scream "Water!" The descendant of Indian indentured immigrants, born half-way around the world, had forgotten that in India "A clerk was a clerk; a messenger was a messenger" and that the head clerk, whose "eyes distastefully acknowledged my impatience" was unprepared, as it was presumably not in his job specifications, to assist a distressed inferior lying unconscious on the office floor. Later the author discloses: "We went to get a transport permit" he relates to a third party at a dinner "and she fainted." Naipaul almost apologetically suggests the heat to be the cause, only to receive the retort from his Indian dinner guest "It isn't the heat at all. Always the heat or the water with you people from outside. There's nothing wrong with her. You make up your minds before coming to the country.
You've been reading the wrong books." In this way, Naipaul underscores the contrast in the world view of those residents of the largest democracy in the world and those who live elsewhere. The ways of doing business and the customs, mores and all that has to do with the Indian civilisation are portrayed by the author as incomprehensible, perhaps bizarre, to the outsider but utterly coherent and impeccably intuitive to the Indian persona. The area of darkness is precisely just that to Naipaul whose understanding of his ancestral homeland was as just a vacuous, dimly lit space inhabited by memories of his Hindu clan life.
He reminisces: "as a child, the India that had produced me was featureless, and I thought of the time when the transference was made as a period of darkness, darkness which also extended to the land...though time has widened, though space has contracted and I have travelled lucidly over that area which was to me the area of darkness, something of darkness remains.