"The poverty of the land is reflected in the poverty of the mind" - more or less the summary of the second in Naipaul's India trilogy, written more than a decade after the first, and in the wake of the 1970s state of emergency declared by Indira Ghandi.

Unlike the first book, there is no pretence here of this being a travel book. instead it is a deeply political, angry, frustrated attempt to psychoanalyse a country which, to Naipaul's mind, has few of the characteristics of a true country: No real concept of the state, being entirely local in governance; no idea of a historical past, preferring myth (including the myth of Gandhi); no idea of shared racial identity, preferring castle division.

Take that Narinda Modi!

Of course, this was all written almost fifty years ago. Much has changed. Naipaul's assertions about India's lack of scientific and engineering capability - which he attributes to a kind of stubbornly unimaginative, traditionalist Indian mindset that's one of the few things he seems to identify as a true national trait - feel totally wrong today. (Albeit not that far off, when one remembers relatively recent frustrations with Indian call centres when seeking tech support, which seem only to have substantially improved in the last few years. If Naipaul can wildly generalise, so can I.)

This is, though, still fascinating as a snapshot of a perspective on India's transition from colony to one of the world's most important powers. The idea of a psychology of nations is, of course, one that riskyms leadibg to stereotyping and oversimplification as a single unifying narrative cause is sought among the complexities of millions of people and centuries of history and culture. With a psychoanalyst uninterested in maintaining professional detachment or avoiding passing judgement, like Naipaul, it could rapidly turn into xenophobic or racist polemic. At times, were Naipaul not of Indian heritage himself, this could seem that way. He certainly shows few signs of the affection for individuals here that he does in the first book - if anything, his whole attitude borders on contempt for everyone throughout.

But his anger comes from a place of deep frustration at the way the promise of Indian independence was being squandered and betrayed by politicians actively encouraging divisiveness in pursuit of power, all while creating and distorting myths about the past to justify themselves.

So while this was written half a century ago, it's very much relevant to the state of Modi's India today. This was written in the period when the seeds were sown. Understanding how they were chosen and cultivated and why they grew so strongly is something Naipaul was trying to get to the bottom of here - and that's exactly what I was looking for from this ahead of the 2024 Indian elections.

Among the three books Naipaul has written on India (Area Of Darkness, A Wounded Civilisation and third, A Million Mutinies Now), this one has to be the most scathing of them all. While the other two are travelogues in nature, A Wounded Civilisation is more of a critique - an analysis.
Since the book is so academic in nature, it's really difficult to absorb everything he says in one reading - this most certainly needs to be revisited to analyse clearly the various points the author raises.
As expected, it's the cynical, fierce side of Naipaul you get to see, exposing India for all that ails it. Predictably, he doesn’t give the country an inch.
The book was written post the Emergency (1975) and Naipaul makes a persuasive argument about how the country's political collapse is really the least of its concerns. He makes a case for how the Hindi way of life (with its customs, beliefs, myths, mysticism and orthodoxy) prevents the country from ever shedding the burden of its past and idea of the 'self'. This, he believes, has crippled Indians and their intellectual capacities, leading to them seeing everything from the prism of their own limited mental scape. The spirit of science and enquiry cannot exist amidst such primitivism, he says.

Interesting, Naipaul uses his favourite writer R K Narayan's works to delve into the deep-rooted psychological and attitudinal problems that India itself suffers from.

He's critical about some aspects about Gandhism and how its result was the deification of poverty itself. Naipaul is especially critical of avid Gandhian Vinoba Bhave, who he says, created a useless archaic model of Gandhi's legacy.

All in all, this book is a rather intriguing one on many fronts, and lends itself to a second read.

www.sandyi.blogspot.com

Naipaul’s reflections and occasional reporting -- I say occasional, because India: A Wounded Civilization, comprised of mostly his reflections interspersed with observations on recent, past, and more rarely, then current events during his travels with his guides, Indian acquaintances. and occasional minor dignitaries and reporters -- make a fascinating and idiosyncratic work. Naipaul wrote this book in just over one year, from 1975 to 1976, and while it is full of his quirky personal opinions about his ancestral homeland, one can almost get tricked into thinking it is objective. I would have actually preferred if he had added his own personal dimension to this, but he leaves his emotions, his own psychologically based reflections out of it. The result is a mixed bag. I still think it is a strong work. The insightful indications of Indian society to progress are, according to Naipaul, because of a nostalgic attachment to traditions and its insecurity regarding its historical and its inability to self-determine. It was colonized for too long by too many different culture. The ancient culture is long gone, and the Indian nation is, according to the title of the work, wounded (and not dead -- but one would wonder if it isn’t the latter, if you take a lot of what Naipaul says seriously).

The major criticism I have of the work is that Naipaul is often to florid and prolix. My writing is that way, too, and for that, I apologize.

VS Naipaul is a powerful writer. In simple words he creates a cathartic experience on the life of Indians four decades ago. The squalor, poverty and the sense of despondency of the country is as saddening as is distant today. He opines that Gandhi left the country without an ideology for moving forward and I tend to agree. He is as caustic on Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi as would have been possible without getting his book banned in 1976, the year in which he wrote the book.

A good perspective on post independent India and its search for its own identity. Worth a read.

good stuff, another banger from naipaul and the second book in his india series,
his eye for observation is as good as it can be, much better than even a billion indians now, he saw things very sharply and never shy-ied away from calling trash-trash and good-good, but the intention and tone of this book isn't evil but of pain and a desire that things were different, and that there wasn't this never ending struggle,

"To arrive at an intellectual comprehension of this equilibrium – as some scholars do, working in the main from Hindu texts – is one thing. To enter into it, when faced with the Indian reality, is another. The hippies of Western Europe and the United States appear to have done so; but they haven’t. Out of security and mental lassitude, an intellectual anorexia, they simply cultivate squalor. And their calm can easily turn to panic. When the price of oil rises and economies tremble at home, they clean up and bolt. Theirs is a shallow narcissism; they break just at that point where the Hindu begins: the knowledge of the abyss, the acceptance of distress as the condition of men."

a amazing book. loved it just like i love an area of darkness by him.

Take my rating with a grain of salt. It reflects my personal enjoyment while reading this, rather than the book's quality. I think you need way more cultural+historical context of India to enjoy it. My bad.

For anyone who enjoys the India of Discovery Channel and Lonely Planet guidebooks, who claims to see 'beauty' in her chaos and find 'meaning' in the apparent diversity and disorder, this is a deeply provocative and disturbing book. Naipaul's views are highly critical and negative but only a fool would dismiss them without a thought. This book sets a very high standard for a travelogue combined with cultural analysis. I have read this book three times, first time way back in 2007 and quite understandably, I remember nothing from that first reading for this is not a very easy book as travelogues go.

Naipaul returns to India during Indira Gandhi's Emergency for his second visit and straight away he launches into his devastating verdicts, " There was always a contradiction between archaism of national pride and the promise of the new; the contradiction has at last cracked the civilization open." From his reading of RK Narayan's novels, his tour of the ancient city of Vijayanagar, of Bundi in Rajasthan, he finds in India a civilization that has been left depleted by a thousand years of foreign invasion externally and whose religion, Hinduism, had reached a dead end, allowing it only to make itself archaic again, intellectually smaller and always vulnerable.

The claims of a glorious past, the ancient India and its thoughts, the Hindu ideals of non-attachment and non-violence, taken to its greatest height by Mahatma Gandhi - these are the ideas that can still win millions of votes today in India, but for Naipaul these are what has gone into the making of this civilization which is finding itself unable to move forward in modern times, after Independence, which has 'given men no idea of a contract with other men, no idea of the state.' In Bombay, Naipaul visits chawls where dwell the factory workers of the city, unwanted but necessary, with their allegiance to Shiva Sena and their committees. In them, Naipaul finds a people who have broken away from a past which holds no hope for them and who are making 'a new claim on the land'. This is perhaps where Naipaul is least pessimistic about India for everywhere else Naipaul finds people just barely surviving, without a want for more, in complete acceptance of their karma. This is ' the distress of India' , her 'holy poverty' romanticised by Gandhianism, which Naipaul finds impossible to accept.

Not just the substance, Naipaul's style is equally sharp and devastating ('Through generations of idle servitude they had grown to specialise only in style' he writes of Indian princes) There is hardly a superfluous sentence in the book. It is not very easy to accept all that he has to say about India, but his critical vision and views surely equip one with a better way understand a culture, be it foreign or one's own.

This is not a review but a short comment.

The title of the book is a big give away. If the first book of the trilogy, 'an area of darkness' is Naipaul's great disappointment at finally coming to terms with his 'imagined homeland', this book offers glimpses of the frustrations and anxieties of the 'great Indian middle class'; or in other words, the Caste Hindus. This is the very sentiment expressed by Kamala, the educated wife of a Delhi-based engineer, when she complaints: "all this democracy business has destroyed people like us."

In the process of 'imagining' a nation, the privileged lot who so enthusiastically supported Nehruvian values of secularism, role of the state and planned economy, began to doubt this process. The simplicity and reserve of the Gandhian worked well in conjunction with the economic policy of import-substitution; for without trade protection how could a nascent Tata or Bajaj compete with advanced capitalists like Rockefeller and Ford.

But since Gandhi's death, his already outdated political ideas were taken to laughable lengths of rogue mimicry and piety by the likes of Vinobha Bhave; evinced by the titular character in RK Narayan's The Guide who turns out to be a fraud after all. The next generation of this great Indian middle class possessed no such Gandhian virtues. They were restless after fattening on two decades of import-substitution and state subsidies. They were spoiling for a fight as evinced in the character of Mali in RK Narayan's novel The Vendor of Sweets. Despite the individual sense of evil attributed to the period of Emergency, the political frustration of this Indian middle class was churning as recorded by Naipaul.

Curiously the initial response of Indira Gandhi to this churning only further reinforces this fact, but, in the reverse. Her programme of nationalisation of public assets, poverty reduction, the addition of the terms 'secular and socialist' to the preamble of the constitution, her tolerance of the Left parties, abolishing privy purses and such should be seen as her attempt to mobilise political legitimacy against this great Indian middle class frustrations and its real or perceived 'loss of privilege' (because of all this politicking and too much democracy). That the experiment became a different monster, not least, thanks to the mental Sanjay Gandhi is another matter.

Naipaul doesn't delve much into the conservative political response to this development. But soon, in 1980, the BJP would make this great Indian middle class its 'vote bank' post a disastrous experiment of the Jana Sangh after it merger within the JP's united opposition to Indira. If Naxalbari is the violent expression of disillusionment of the poorest of the poor with 20 years of independence without any substantial redistribution of the cake (read resources like land and so on) in their favour, the rise of the BJP through the 80s is the organised violent expression of the frustrations of this great Indian middle class with 30 years of Independence and, more importantly, anxiety because of what Christope Jaffrelot calls, the 'rise of the plebeian'; as more and more people, especially from the hitherto non-caste Hindus, got to partake in discussions on how the cake is distributed by staking claim to offices of power and representation. The great 'entitled' Indian middle class were mortified to lose this rapidly shrinking public space which they hitherto took for granted before we gave ourselves the Constitution.

Hence, their support for a conservative party which promises to restore those glory days of entitlement in the name of safeguarding Indian tradition and culture. Like Dr. Faustus, the temptation of restoring Ramrajya, where people know their station in life and cannot have access to democracy, was too much for the great Indian middle class to resist. And the rest of the country is paying the price of these 'wounds' with the blood of the innocent minorities.

“It seems to always be there in India: magic, the past, the death of the intellect, spirituality annulling the civilization out of which it issues, India swallowing its own tail.”

Naipaul’s “India A Wounded Civilisation” is the second of a trilogy of non-fiction books on India. It is an angry book, written as a reflection on the 1975 State of Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi. The anger is spat out in all directions: at the Indian political leadership (or lack thereof), at the crisis of the Indian intellectual tradition, at the ordinary people who accept the status quo, at the Westerners who fail to think deeply enough about the issues at stake.

But Naipaul stays dispassionate enough to delve into murky territory. Much has of course changed in the last thirty years, but there are some truths that still stand. There is a devastating and painstaking deconstruction of the role that Gandhi has played in forming the Indian psyche where he exposes the truth of the underlying cruelty at play even today in Indian society. Naipaul writes:

“Gandhi had given India a new idea of itself, and also given the world a new idea of India. In those eleven years [1919-30] nonviolence had been made to appear an ancient, many-sided Indian truth, an eternal source of Indian action. Now [in 1975] of Gandhianism there remained only the emblems and the energy; and the energy had turned malignant. India needed a new code, but it had none. There were no longer any rules; and India – so often invaded, conquered, plundered, with a quarter of its population always in the serfdom of untouchability, people without a country, only with masters – was discovering again that it was cruel and horribly violent.”

There are parts that are dated, but not many. Naipaul’s special skill (as a novelist and a writer of non-fiction) is to find the universal in the particular. The book is full of incisive and contrarian thinking, and it is this – along with the beautiful prose – that makes the book so exciting and stimulating to read.

Highly recommended.

I’d read Naipaul's India Trilogy when I was in my late teens and at that young age, it did fill me up with profound hatred for the writer who in my opinion was spewing venom against my beloved country. Naipaul and Nirad Chaudhary were the two literary villains I grew up with, though my impression of Nirad Chaudhary being utterly devoid of depth, remained the same but as I grew older, I started to admire the faculty of observation Naipaul was gifted with and also by his fearlessness to write exactly what he observed. When I heard the news of Naipaul’s demise, I decided to reread his India Trilogy as a tribute to the great writer. Naipaul died in late summer this year and I bought these books on the day of his demise but I could not start the trilogy till November, but finally have been able to complete it now.

The first book of trilogy evoked strong sentiments in my youth and generated a lot of hatred for the author who was hellbent on telling me the obvious truth and reality of Indian life. Nobody has ever written so courageously and truthfully about India and his portrait of Indian psyche lays bare the banality and stupidity with which Indian mind has been riddled with since last millennium. But he was sympathetic of the reasons and correctly nailed down the deprivation of Indian thought on the Islamic invasion which terrorised Indian spirit. The first book of the trilogy was also a personal discovery for the author and its fascinating to walk with the author on his solo journey and to read first hand, his impressions of his native land, eccentricities of people he encountered and his bewilderment at the strange rituals and customs of the land that he was exploring. Naipaul was critical of Indian weather, Indian landscape, Indian arts, Indian science, Indian religion, almost everything that India had to offer but I beleive, not because these were deficient in any way but rather because he expected more or perhaps was expecting something different. India is a strange land and one either loves it or hate it and Naipaul ended up hating it in his first attempt to understand it. But I don’t blame him, India is so different and Naipaul who had till then only seen simple societies of Caribbean & Europe was not ready to fathom the intricacies of a complex social construct of an ancient land. It would take much more time for any outsider like Naipaul to understand the diversity and spirituality of India. It's not possible to understand India with western lenses that Naipaul kept on during his first sojourn to India and ended up labelling it, wrongly in my opinion, as an area of darkness.

When Naipaul visited India again during emergency few years later and wrote the second book of this trilogy, he saw the country in a different light but still could not understand the conflicted society where everybody was out fighting the system whether these were Naxal revolutionaries or Hindu fundamentalists or Muslim gang lords. The second visit invoked the feeling in Naipaul that India has been wounded first in his mind by Islamic invasions and then by an onslaught of modernity over an archaic society with hypocrisy of the political class not helping in any way. India was going though a perfect storm at the time of Naipaul’s second visit with emergency being declared and country going through the turmoil with desperate attempts by political class to rescue democratic norms from clutches of dictatorship which thankfully it finally succeeded in saving. On this second trip, Naipaul encountered first hand the hostility & pain of an angry society and that’s what he ended up depicting as a wounded civilisation.

Naipaul's third and final sojourn was most sympathetic to India, he understood the challenges the country was grappling with and he made an attempt to unravel these. In the last book of this trilogy, Naipaul wrestled with the aftermath of the terrible partition of India leading to the creation of Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan and also made an attempt to understand Dravidian and Sikh conflicts. Naipaul also did something unique and decided to traverse the path taken roughly a century earlier by war correspondent for Times, William Russell during Indian mutiny of 1857. Naipaul had read Russell’s India diaries earlier but could not comprehend it fully so now that Naipaul was at India, he picked up the book again and moved along the trodden path by Russell and compared the landscape and society of that era with the present. Naipaul ended up concluding that Indian mutiny in some form was still going on, the Sikh insurgency or Dravidian revolt or Naxal class struggle, in author’s judgement were just progression of that century old mutiny as witnessed by Russell. I think what Naipaul observed as million mutinies during his third visit to India were nothing more than the birth pangs of a new nation which was undergoing metamorphosis from an ancient civilisation into a modern state. Now more or less that transition phase is over and India is now rightly marching forward to the league of strong and cultured nations. Naipaul never got an opportunity to write another book about new modern India but I’m sure he would have admired the progress and stability that India achieved in the last few decades.

This trilogy is important to understand India and Naipaul’s excellent rendering makes it without any doubt a pleasure to read. The world lost a courageous soul and a superlative writer but he has left us with his writings that I’m sure will keep us informed and entertained for long long time to come.

Rest in peace, Naipaul.

l'unico scrittore-nobel che non mi abbia mai deluso. Duro e ferrigno, non distoglie mai gli occhi dalla realtà perchè non sembra esserne capace. Quindi nessuna consolazione, neanche dai buoni sentimenti.
Le sue molteplici 'India', raccontate con una una lingua ricca e asciutta (è possibile?) si scolpiscono nella mente per sempre. Questo sopra a tutti. Più che una lettura un'esperienza

I've been trying to write reviews instead of just giving ratings, but this one is problematic. On the one hand, I feel like I am lacking the knowledge to properly evaluate the book. I don't know enough of the history or politics to put it into context properly. On the other hand, if someone who had not identified as being of Indian descent had written this book, I would call them racist. (It's almost as if Naipaul had internalized a British imperialist viewpoint.) So two stars and a lot of confusion.