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India: A Wounded Civilization

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India: A Wounded Civilization

By: V. S. Naipaul
Narrated by: Sam Dastor
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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 five thousand 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.

©1976 , 1977 by V. S. Naipaul (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing Asia Human Geography India Social Sciences South Asia Travel Writing & Commentary
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Critic reviews

“India: A Wounded Civilization is typical Naipaul—brilliantly lucid, terse, with something hardbitten yet resigned in the emotional background.”

(New York Times)
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an insightful snapshot into Indian society in 1975. the author is coming from an outsiders perspective and doesn't hold his punches. many lessons to be learned even in 2025. it's almost a historical book. excellent read.

A bleak snapshot of 1975 India with lessons for today

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The great V. S. Naipaul and the actor Sam Dastor, always a superb narrator, make a perfect Audible combination. Excellent editing and production values too.

Ideal team

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"The poverty of the land is reflected in the poverty of the mind" - more or less the summary of the second in Naipaul's India trilogy, written more than a decade after the first, and in the wake of the 1970s state of emergency declared by Indira Ghandi.

Unlike the first book, there is no pretence here of this being a travel book. instead it is a deeply political, angry, frustrated attempt to psychoanalyse a country which, to Naipaul's mind, has few of the characteristics of a true country: No real concept of the state, being entirely local in governance; no idea of a historical past, preferring myth (including the myth of Gandhi); no idea of shared racial identity, preferring castle division.

Take that Narinda Modi!

Of course, this was all written almost fifty years ago. Much has changed. Naipaul's assertions about India's lack of scientific and engineering capability - which he attributes to a kind of stubbornly unimaginative, traditionalist Indian mindset that's one of the few things he seems to identify as a true national trait - feel totally wrong today. (Albeit not that far off, when one remembers relatively recent frustrations with Indian call centres when seeking tech support, which seem only to have substantially improved in the last few years. If Naipaul can wildly generalise, so can I.)

This is, thought still fascinating as a snapshot of a perspective on India's transition from colony to one of the world's most important powers. The idea of a psychology of nations is, of course, one that riskyms leadibg to stereotyping and oversimplification as a single unifying narrative cause is sought among the complexities of millions of people and centuries of history and culture. With a psychoanalyst uninterested in maintaining professional detachment or avoiding passing judgement, like Naipaul, it could rapidly turn into xenophobic or racist polemic. At times, were Naipaul not of Indian heritage himself, this could seem that way.

But his anger comes from a place of deep frustration at the way the promise of Indian independence was being squandered and betrayed by politicians actively encouraging divisiveness in pursuit of power, all while creating and distorting myths about the past to justify themselves.

So while this was written half a century ago, it's very much relevant to the state of Modi's India today. This was written in the period when the seeds were sown. Understanding how they were chosen and cultivated and why they grew so strongly is something Naipaul was trying to get to the bottom of here - and that's exactly what I was looking for from this ahead of the 2024 Indian elections.

Brutal, dated, but fascinating

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An unbalanced account of India that relies heavily on the western obsession with the individual to level its criticism, rather than understanding India in its own terms. It is however, a valuable perspective nonetheless and the performance was golden.

Unbalanced

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V S Naipaul visited India in 1962 and again in the 1975 Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi. In a remarkably short book he provides a wonderful kaleidoscope of India. He discusses its culture, politics, industry, arts, architecture, its customs and practices, corruption, its strengths and weaknesses, Hinduism, the legacy of Gandhi and much, much, more. A lot of the book is based on Naipaul's anecdotes but his overview is the result of his learning, wisdom and, it has to be said, his innate pessimism faced with India's poverty and resistance to change.

This is the second of Naipaul's 3 books on India, the other 2 being An Area of Darkness (based on his 1962 visit) and India: A Million Mutinies and Now (1990).

Kaleidoscopic View of India 50 years Ago

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