India: A Wounded Civilization

by V. S. Naipaul Narrated by Sam Dastor

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 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.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

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.

Charles McGrath

....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

From the Publisher

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

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176377200
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	09/28/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos