The Die is Caste; the Subcontinent Is Dying : INDIA: A Million Mutinies Now <i> By V. S. Naipaul (Viking: $22.95; 521 pp.) </i>

It’s almost 30 years since Vidiadhar Naipaul first visited India, the land of his ancestors. The book he wrote about his experiences then, “An Area of Darkness,” read like one of his novels, especially in its balance between narrative and dialogue. It was the work of a fastidious and rather lofty man who did not find the subcontinent edifying.

Indians do not like being patronized by people from the West, even if they are distinguished natives of Trinidad, and they thought little of Naipaul’s tone and criticisms. They were not much more enamored of his second attempt to resolve his ancestral neurosis, “India: A Wounded Civilization.” And now here he goes again, picking away at the country his people left just over a century ago, for a life of indentured labor in the West Indian cane fields.

In severing themselves from their roots, those 19th-Century agricultural workers developed in Trinidad a sense of Indian community which, as Naipaul realized back in 1962, they could never have enjoyed in South Asia. The modern India is, in fact, nothing less than a score or so of different countries with almost as many major languages, federalized into one nation. There are greater cultural differences between Kashmir in the north and Tamil Nadu in the south than there are, for example, between Scotland and Spain; that is part of India’s fascination to the rest of us. The more fundamental division, however, goes back to ancient Vedic times and is caused by the rigid exclusions of caste. How can a lowly Pulayan feel a sense of community with a Nambudiri Brahmin, whom he must not defile with his shadow, on pain of a beating or even worse?

The scope of Naipaul’s inquiries on his latest exploration of India is impressively wide. Not many middle-aged writers have either the energy or the patience to spend months quartering the subcontinent from top to bottom, even when they are able to withdraw each night to the pampered security of a luxury hotel. With the dogged persistence of a sociologist, Naipaul goes forth from these fortifying comforts to appointments that sometimes involve hours of interrogation.

In Bombay, he questions a Jain businessman who is fearful of revolution (“It cannot last, the inequalities of income. I shudder when I think of that”). A member of the fundamentalist Shiv Sena, convinced that there is “a plot to wipe Hinduism off the face of the earth,” totally rejects Mahatma Gandhi’s faith in nonviolence. At the other end of the politico/religious spectrum, a Naxalite in Calcutta informs Naipaul that “Indians are basically a very violent people,” and tells the visitor that, when his wife ventured to Europe a number of years ago, she understood for the first time in her life “that a woman was not merely or at all the appendage of some man.”

The colonial history of the subcontinent is not overlooked. But Naipaul believes that “the British peace after the 1857 Mutiny can be seen as a kind of luck,” being a time of intellectual advance that resulted in the appetite for true liberty--not only from the foreigners but also from native despots of one sort and another.

Another appetite had been stimulated even earlier by William Jones and the other Orientalists of the old East India Company, who “gave to Indians the first ideas they had of the antiquity and value of their civilization.” Jawaharlal Nehru never failed to acknowledge that debt, even after he’d been imprisoned by the British for campaigning to end their rule.

Naipaul eventually came to the conclusion that the last 90 years of British rule and the first 40 years of independence “begin increasingly to appear as part of the same historical period--the idea of freedom has gone everywhere in India . . . (but) the liberation of spirit that has come to India could not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to come as disturbance. It had to come as rage and revolt. India was now a country of a million little mutinies.”

There is a powerful feeling of change in this book; that everything Indian--from the state of foot paths to the texture of society--is “half-way to being or ceasing to be.” Naipaul himself seems to have changed from the self-conscious writer who peered haughtily at the subcontinent in 1962 and 1976. He is still disconcerted by grime and grit (the ancestral phobia about impurity still clinging to this sophisticated man) and the other nuisances of Indian life. But in Kashmir, meeting again an acquaintance after 30 years, he wonders why on their last encounter he had never asked the man much about himself--”perhaps from the idea of a writer that I had inherited: the idea of the writer as a man with an internal life, a man drawing it all out of his own entrails, magically reading the externals of things.”

This time, Naipaul draws little from himself and offers only glimpses of the stylish novelist. He has gone to India not so much to use her as a backdrop to his own perceptions but rather to understand. As a result, long stretches of his book do read more like a sociologist’s survey than prize-winning literature.

But in this fashion he has invaluably revealed the brink on which India now stands, the sources of all that rage and all those little mutinies. Up in the Punjab, there is the terrifying animosity between two religions. Down in Kerala, there is the cynical politics that sees parliamentary votes cast on behalf of whoever will cough up the equivalent of $8,000. And repeatedly, Naipaul is told that the greatest responsibility for India’s ills rests with the high priests of Hinduism. “If you see a Brahmin and a snake,” according to an old Hindi saying, “kill the Brahmin first.” The first thing Naipaul encounters on this journey is a procession of Dalits, who converted to Buddhism to escape the strictures of caste.

“What form do you think the revolution will take?” the author asked that fearful Jain businessman.

“It won’t be anything ,” he replied. “It will be totally chaos.”

And so it will, if India abandons the secular democracy which, with all its manifest imperfections, has for 43 years shone like a beacon across an otherwise miserably benighted Third World.