India: The Wounded Civilization

Author: V.S. Naipaul
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: In 1975, shortly before and after the imposition of the "Emergency" by Indira Gandhi, Naipaul revisited his ambiguous ancestral homeland, India. Unlike the shock, anger, shame, and contempt he felt in A House for Mr. Biswas (The Darker Nations), this time he felt his journey "could not be just about seeing the sights." Beneath the wounded reality, he saw India as a product shaped by its colonial history, millennia of religious and cultural traditions, the caste system, and Gandhiism. As a conquered nation, India's "intellectual civilization had become parasitic," and thus, after independence, India appeared lacking creativity, intellectually exhausted, unable to defend itself, and already a defeated country. On this visit, Naipaul invested India and Indian culture with a more complex rationality and emotion. Sharp satire gave way to melancholic and even tragic analysis and description. The challenges of the ancient civilization were revealed one by one, yet the modern nation had not found a point of renewal. Naipaul's predicament is India's predicament, and also ours. This book is quite stirring, but it also proves that a novelist like Naipaul can point out problems more quickly and effectively than a World Bank economist team and various experts.