Doubtless, this criticism was unjustified. But the noteworthy point is that Nirad Chaudhuri did not comment on why, with some notable exceptions, the Muslim characters did not figure creatively in Bengali literary writings (outside the circle of Muslim writers) for well overa century. Equally, it is not clear why he, the self-styled defender of Victorian (rather than Indian) values, was flustered by the presence of an Aziz in A Passage to India. One will have to turn to his other writings to explain his own antipathy towards Islam and the Muslims.

Yet another writer of Indian origin has chosen to fulminate against Islam and the Indian Muslims. He is no other than Sir Vidiadhar Naipaul, whose ancestors left India in the early-1880s, as indentured labourers for the sugar estates of Guyana and Trinidad. Having explored an area of darkness and chronicled the histories of a wounded civilisation and a million little mutinies in India, he decided to fire his shots at the world of Islam. This was the beginning of a long-term laboured project. Long before Samuel Huntington earned his reputation for expounding the clash of civilisations theory, the Trinidad-born writer alerted his Western readers to the growing Islamic menace. Among the Believers, his Islamic journey to Iran, Pakistan,Malaysia and Indonesia, led him to represent Islam as a hostile and aggressive force, and caricature Muslim societies as rigid, authoritarian and uncreative. ``Is-lam sanctified rage, rage about the faith, political rage: one could be like the other. And more than once on this journey I had met sensitive men who were ready to contemplate greater convulsions.''

India: A Million Mutinies, published in 1990, conjured up the same images, though he was much more restrained in his overall reflections on the country as a whole. He referred to the 1857 revolt as the last flare-up of Muslim energy in India until the agitation, 80 years or so later, for a separate Muslim homeland. He found bazaars in Lucknow expressing the faith of the book and the mosque. Everything in the bazaar, he felt, served the faith (For all these years, I have searched in vain for such a bazaar in a city that I know better than Naipaul). Two years after this book was published, he came out in virtual defence of the demolition of the BabriMasjid.

Naipaul would have also derived satisfaction from the fact that, for once, he and his compatriot in Oxford, Nirad Chaudhuri, was on the same wavelength.Today, Naipaul's worldview remains unchanged. Hindu militancy, he says in a recent interview to the Outlook magazine, is a necessary corrective to the past, a creative force. To say that India has a secular character, he adds, is being historically unsound. This makes Naipaul a worthy chairman for the committee that is being readied for a major political rehearsal -- the review of the Indian Constitution. He rejects the possibility of Islam working out reconciliation with other religions on the subcontinent. Islam is a religion of fixed laws. This, he points out, goes contrary to everything in modern India. This is, in just a few crispy sentences, the clash of civilisations theory applicable to the subcontinent.

There is a great deal of talk nowadays of re-writing our history. Naipaul has quite a few brilliant ideas for the newly appointedchairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research. One of them is to give voice to the `defeated people.' Mind you, not the poor or the downtrodden but the Hindus living in `Hindu India.' To add poignancy to our historical narratives, Naipaul suggests that we concentrate on a more tragic and more illuminating theme. That theme is the `grinding down of Hindu India.' So, revive memories of temples being destroyed, Hindus being forcibly converted to Islam, and Sikh gurus being mercilessly executed by the Mughal emperors.

If one has to build a modern India by invoking the brutal past, the prescription is to rubbish the forces of assimilation and integration in Indian society. Finally, if the ICHR chairperson pays heed to Naipaul's advice, he would drop Gandhi from the history syllabus. That is because Naipaul regards the Mahatma as uneducated, and not a thinker. He has no message today, even though Indians have used the very idea of Gandhi to turn dirt and backwardness into much-loved deities. The HindSwaraj is so nonsensical that it would curl the hair of even the most devoted admirer.

Mercifully, Jawaharlal Nehru is spared for being a democrat and a humane person who did not abuse his power.

Naipaul's exposition is clumsy, naive and gibberish. He is as much ill-informed about India as Samuel Huntington is about the world outside the Western hemisphere. He talks of India's fractured past solely in terms of the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of the past. He mu-st know that celebrating the coming of the Turks or the vandalism of the Islamic zealots is nobody's favourite pastime. The historian's job is to come to terms with Turkish, Afghan and Mughal rule, study their polities objectively, and examine the consequences of their policies dispassionately. Fuming and fretting, which is what Naipaul does in this interview, takes you nowhere. Anger, remorse and bitterness are not a substitute for serious study and analysis.

We have both inherited and self-createdproblems and difficulties. But we must have time and our own spaces to sort them out. Most of us would therefore prefer not to be told, by people living in Mayfair Gardens or Manhattan, how to move into the next millennium with our heads held high. Believe me, some friends living overseas can be our worst enemies.