ISBN INDIA

INDIA

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.


About author(s)
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He is the author of more than 20 books of fiction and nonfiction and is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Man Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990. He lives in Wiltshire, England. His latest book, The Masque of Africa, was published in 2010.