India: A Wounded Civilization

By: V. S. Naipaul

Narrated by: Sam Dastor

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 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.

©1976, 1977 V. S. Naipaul (P)2021 by Blackstone Publishing

India history

Not as in depth as others I have read.
Still, a good synopsis of the glory days if this often overlooked country and people.

If you like sitting in a dentist’s chair …

To V.S. Naipaul, “Get over it.”
I seem to remember Sam Dastor as someone knowing his trade. Listening to “Kim” gave me that impression. Maybe it’s not his fault this book was a grind, but Naipaul’s. Paul Theroux got his measure in, “Sir Vidia’s Shadow.”

Insightful & informative!

I found Naipaul's book very informative. I have been interested in Indian history and culture for decades, and this book fills a gap related to post-partition events and concerns. He does not explain the proximate causes of the Emergency; I assume that he figured that readers would already be familiar with those then-current events.

I learned more about living conditions and longstanding practices in India. The traditional old ways were bumping up against modern ways, and it reminds me of the European shift from Medieval to Industrial ages. It took centuries for Europeans to make that transition, though, while India and other places colonized by Western nations have had the same wrenching transition in a much shorter span of years. This book has given me much to reflect on.

Naipaul's writing is beautiful and evocative, with some humor amid the pathos. His evaluation of literature, the arts, and philosophy reminded me strongly of Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò's "Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously." Both authors focus on intellectuals and creatives within their ethnic /national heritage, and examine the impact of the choices made by their ethnic / cultural peers. They note harmful traditions and attitudes that preceded Western colonialism, many of which have endured beyond the end of colonialism. (Naipaul describes this as 'India swallowing things whole' and then returning to its roots. Thus, it seems an open question as to whether India or the West was more changed by the interaction.)

Naipaul and Táíwò each grapple with the complexity and nuance of flawed humanity, recognizing that all people are individual moral agents (even though there is no shortage of people who prefer to let themselves drift and bump through life like a leaf in a stream). I appreciate learning of additional scholars, creatives, and historical figures from these books,, because it helps flesh out my concepts of other geographical regions and how people interact with others.

The narrator was splendid, and I appreciate hearing correct pronunciation of foreign names and terms. It helps me pronounce names more correctly when I encounter South Asians in real life!

Wrong analysis of India’s problems

Naipaul correctly identifies some of the issues facing India in 1975 but his analysis is completely wrong. To many of the problems he finds the Indian culture and religion to be the root cause - this cannot be further from the truth. His understanding of Hinduism is very poor. His analysis and thoughts reek of deep rooted prejudice and racism towards Indians.