India: A Wounded Civilization

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years before. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece of journalism and cultural analysis, a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by repeated foreign invasions and immured in a mythic vision of its past. Drawing on novels, news reports, and political memoirs — but most of all on his conversations with ordinary Indians, from princes to engineers and feudal village autocrats — Naipaul captures India’s manifold complexities.

Reports on a recent trip to India, revealing the underlying problems of that troubled and frightening country.

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency,” V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.

Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his own encounters with ordinary Indians–from a supercilious prince to an engineer constructing housing for Bombay’s homeless–Naipaul captures a vast, mysterious, and agonized continent inaccessible to foreigners and barely visible to its own people. He sees both the burgeoning space program and the 5,000 volunteers chanting mantras to purify a defiled temple; the feudal village autocrat and the Naxalite revolutionaries who combined Maoist rhetoric with ritual murder. Relentless in its vision, thrilling in the keenness of its prose, India: A Wounded Civilization is a work of astonishing insight and candor.

Library Journal

The Loss of El Dorado (1969) chronicles how the belief that the mythical land of plenty lay off the coast of Trinidad-Naipal's birthplace-placed that country into the world's vision, making it an object of desire for Spain and Britain as well as a haven for adventurers, slavers, and other undesirables. Naipaul's ancestors hailed from India, and in India: A Wounded Civilization (1975), the author returned to his roots to discover how the country's tumultuous past was still impacting its present and shaping its future. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

In awarding V. S. Naipaul the Nobel prize for literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy called him a "literary circumnavigator" and a "modern philosophe." Both tags seem spot-on, given Naipaul's gift for describing -- in both his fictional and nonfictional studies of India, Africa, and beyond -- the humor and pathos of cultural collisions.