India: A Wounded Civilization

 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 agonised 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, had 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.