India From the Perspective of Biruni and V.S. Naipaul

Abstract

This study is based on a comparison of two works on India, one by Biruni, who lived and wrote about India nearly a thousand years ago, and one by V.S. Naipaul, who lived in the twenty-first century. The first work, Kitâb’ut-Tahkîk ma li’l-Hind, written by Biruni, was written in Arabic in the first quarter of the eleventh century to help Muslims living among Hindus in different regions such as Sindh, Punjab, Kabul and Ghazni. The work was edited by Edward Sachau in the early 1880s and translated into German (1883-1884) and English (1887-1888) under the title Al-Beruni’s India; both the Arabic edition and the translations were published in the West in those years. An Arabic edition of the book, based on the copy in the Paris National Library, was published in Hyderabad in 1958 with the help of the Indian Ministry of Education. On September 30, 1932, Kıvameddin Burslan translated the work into Turkish, but due to various reasons, it was published only in 2015. 
 Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul, on the other hand, has written three travel books on India and in these works, which are based on his travels to the country in 1964, 1977 and 1990, he refers to India as a dark, wounded and rebellious civilization respectively. With the publication of his books, Naipaul, himself of Hindu descent, was severely criticized for his views on India, Indians and non-Western societies and cultures, which went far beyond criticism, and caused intense debates.
 The most obvious conclusion that emerges from the comparative analysis of the works of both authors is that Biruni, despite being a Muslim, is extremely tolerant and objective in his approach to India, Hindu culture, traditions, and belief system, while Naipaul's approach, on the contrary, is far from tolerance and extremely biased.