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.
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