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The proposed chapter aims to look at the dialogic potential in self (individual/collective identity), culture, and history through an examination of V.S. Naipaul's India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). Naipaul here shifts the focus of historical attention from the macro to the micro level, that is, toward the gradual evolution of individual lives in comparison to his earlier travelogues on India. Here the personal and the public history merge together. He sees a million mutinies breaking out in the margins: mutinies of castes, of class, and of gender. Through the multiple voices of people from different corners of India from its offices, kitchens, galleries, and chawls; in Dalit and women movements one can precisely perceive the working of Bakhtinian dialogics. Significantly, there is a change in author's viewpoint between An Area of Darkness, and India: A Wounded Civilization to A Million Mutinies Now as myriad viewpoints articulated by many different characters emerge independently. The characters are not only objects of the author's word, but also subjects of their own directly significant word. In context to Bakhtinian reading, Bakhtin saw this quality as a kind of dynamic and liberating influence which conceptualizes reality, giving freedom to the individual character, thus subverting the "monologic" discourse. This particular non-fictional work is inherently dialogic, as it incorporates a broad range of human voices; some associated with the characters, others with the author, and still others apparently unconnected and free-floating. Included within this medley are the voices of authority (such as the author's), but they are consistently undermined, contradicted, and enriched by the voices of subversion. All these voices interact and collide to create heteroglossia, in which there is no "last word," only a continuing dialogue. Here Naipaul almost becomes de-voiced in comparison to his earlier work. In this book, he has been able to come to terms with the plurality and paradox of India. He observes the individuals, records their opinions, and places them against those of an earlier generation. Million voices speak of a million mutinies. Each narrator discloses a special struggle that had led to a special development. In this book, Naipaul has overcome his obsession with his response to India and looks at the country through the eyes of its people. But through the study of various personal histories, he delineates the contradictions in the public posturing and private lives of most of these characters. It is this internal, vertical split in the lives of the people that reflects, at the macro level, in the form of insurgency/rebellion/mutiny.

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-6313-8_13

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