Washington: The ancient, surviving civilisation which every Indian takes pride in is in fact "making them its own victims by telling that their identity is incomplete without the foreign chit," says Nobel Laureate V S Naipaul 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 judgment is valueless. It is even as if, without the foreign chit, Indians can have no confirmation of their own reality," said the Caribbean-born writer of Indian-origins known for his candid and caustic style.

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, as to the answers at the back of the book. The journals of protest look, even for their typography, to the New Statesman," says the litterateur in the essay collection "The Writer and the World- V S Naipaul" edited by Pankaj Mishra.

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 Nehru himself, who in the great days was described, most commonly, by visiting writers as the only Indian aristocrat - his own unexplained word and presiding over his deficient but devoted peasantry."

PTI