India: A Wounded Civilization

‘A devastating work, but proof that a novelist of Naipaul’s stature can often define problems quicker and more effectively than a team of economists and other experts’ – The Times

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 agonized 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.

The second book in V. S. Naipaul's acclaimed Indian trilogy, India: A Wounded Civilization follows An Area of Darkness. The series concludes with India: A Million Mutinies Now.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.