India: A Wounded Civilization

A penetrating survey of this tormented continent by one of the literary heavyweights of our age

THE SECOND BOOK IN V.S. NAIPAUL’S ACCLAIMED INDIAN TRILOGY

In 1964 V.S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness, his semi-autobiographical account of a year in India. Two visits later, prompted by the Emergency of 1975, he came to write India: A Wounded Civilization. In this work he casts a more analytical eye than before over Indian attitudes, while recapitulating and further probing the feelings aroused in him by this vast, mysterious, and agonized country. What he saw and heard – evoked so superbly and vividly in these pages – reinforced in him a conviction that India, wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, has not yet found an ideology of regeneration.

A work of fierce candour and precision, it is also a generous description of one man’s complicated relationship with the country of his ancestors.

‘A devastating work, but proof that a novelist of Naipaul’s stature can often define problems quicker and more effectively than a team of economists and other experts’ The Times

‘It is a long and angry stare at the obvious; it is humbling . . . because it seems chasteningly right’ New Statesman

‘Brilliant’ Spectator