India: A Wounded Civilization

by V. S. Naipaul

Overview

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 before. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece of journalism and cultural analysis, a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by repeated foreign invasions and immured in a mythic vision of its past. Drawing on novels, news reports, and political memoirs -- but most of all on his conversations with ordinary Indians, from princes to engineers and feudal village autocrats -- Naipaul captures India's manifold complexities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307789341
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/06/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

V.S. NAIPAUL was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession.
 
His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.
 
In 1990, V.S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He died in 2018.

Hometown:

Wiltshire, England

Date of Birth:

August 17, 1932

Place of Birth:

Chaguanas, Trinidad

Education:

Queen's Royal College, Trinidad, 1943-48; B.A., University College, Oxford, 1953

Editorial Reviews

The Loss of El Dorado (1969) chronicles how the belief that the mythical land of plenty lay off the coast of Trinidad-Naipal's birthplace-placed that country into the world's vision, making it an object of desire for Spain and Britain as well as a haven for adventurers, slavers, and other undesirables. Naipaul's ancestors hailed from India, and in India: A Wounded Civilization (1975), the author returned to his roots to discover how the country's tumultuous past was still impacting its present and shaping its future. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

....This is an indispensable book for anyone who wants seriously to come to grips with the experience of that tortured land. -- The New York Times Books of the Century

Charles McGrath

Extraordinarily forceful. . . . Naipaul is an elegantly precise and exacting writer.” –Newsweek

“A deep pleasure to read. . . . Adventurous, inquiring, observant, penetrating, intelligent.” –The Washington Post Book World

“Typical Naipaul–brilliantly lucid, terse, with something hardbitten yet resigned in the emotional background.” –The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher