V.S. Naipaul alternatives essay writing and autobiography in a narrative which is to become the most intimate, critical and funny account of his journey to India. Beats Kerouac at his own game: on the road novel.

Naipaul, with his tremendous will power wrote a book that still holds the most humbling and relevant truths about India. While it is not a pleasant read, it must have inspired many Indians to better themselves. Naipaul applied the stick. He felt Indians deserved no carrots.

For me the East had begun weeks before. Even in Greece I had felt Europe falling away. There was the East in the food, the emphasis on sweets, some of which I knew from my childhood; in the posters for Indian films with the actress Nargis, a favourite, I was told, of Greek audiences; in the instantaneous friendships, the invitations to meals and homes. Greece was a preparation for Egypt: Alexandria at sunset, a wide shining arc in the winter sea; beyond the breakwaters, a glimpse through fine rain of the ex-king’s white yacht; the ship’s engine cut off; then abruptly, as at a signal, a roar from the quay, shouting and quarrelling and jabbering from men in grubby jibbahs who in an instant overran the already crowded ship and kept on running through it. And it was clear that here, and not in Greece, the East began: in this chaos of uneconomical movement, the self-stimulated din, the sudden feeling of insecurity, the conviction that all men were not brothers and that luggage was in danger.

Nearly sixty years after this book was first published, India is still in a crisis situation. Naipaul's prediction that India is a disintegrating civilization might soon be fulfilled.

AN AREA OF DARKNESS (Part-1: V.S. Naipaul’s The Indian Trilogy)
A litany of the ‘inexhaustible’ India…..A land of symbols, inaction and speeches
Writer’s block and ennui beguiled Naipaul to visit India in 1962 for a year; like a beast of prey in pursuit of its quarry, Naipaul pens a savage diatribe on India who had failed to live up to its billing. The travelogue reads like a severe scrutiny and critique of India as a fading and decaying mythical land, a land that still romances and ‘rhapsodizes’ the glories of its ancient past.
Like a cantankerous old relative he grumpily lands in Bombay where he performs a herculean task of getting a liquor transfer permit (read: prohibition-dry Bombay) from the paper-work obsessed offices. His short stay in Kashmir and Amarnath Yatra further enhances the acerbity of his narrative on India.
‘Eid- for the Kashmiri, the year’s solitary day of cleanliness, a penitential debauch of soap and water and itching new cloth.’
Naipaul views the cultural hybridization of India and England of the Raj as ‘a violation’, a hilarious mixture of costumes and the flawed use of the misunderstood English language. This land of ruins is further tagged as a colonial country that was mainly harvesting politicians and speeches. Unlike E.M Forster’s and Kipling’s India, viewed with a more forgiving lens, Naipaul’s India remained the land of his childhood, an area of darkness which he was unable to ‘penetrate’.
Naipaul, an impatient traveler, raises his word-whip on India-a behemoth of squalor and human decay. (I am obsessed with non-fiction reads on India and fancy the kaleidoscopic field of vision on India. Naipaul is a master of his craft and his take-down on India can be viewed in a more constructive fashion than taking a staunch jingoistic defense of denial of his remarks. )

This book made me feel a tad uncomfortable. The author's experience in the newly independent India and how many of its citizens were still stuck in almost the middle ages, makes me realize how bad the situation was. But it also gives me hope when I see how far we have come as a nation. It would have been interesting to hear Naipauls own comparison of the India he visited in the 1960s and the India today.

It felt like eating a beautifully prepared dish you despise.I had to pick up another book immediately after finishing the last page just to erase it from my mind.

One of the funniest characters that Naipaul encounters during his first visit to India is a Sikh traveller who has spent some time in London and thus feels qualified to scorn everything in his own country. At one point he even declares himself "colour prejudiced". Yet the man is also a chauvinist and believes every other Indian race inferior. The reader, like Naipaul, finds the man's pronouncements funny, but is horrified to learn that no humour was intended.

Naipaul is brilliant at unravelling the contradictions of the places he visits. In India, he finds that the legacy of British rule is preserved not in the form of British institutions, but of colonial British institutions, with all their hierarchies. These in a way resonate with India's own hierarchies of caste and class. And the civil service and military become carriers of these bygone traditions which even within Britain's self-conception represented a rupture.

As always, there is too much attention to the grotesque. After speaking at length about Gandhi's obsession with India's filth, the book is replete with superfluous mentions of public defecation. There are also needless descriptions of people eating in ways that Naipaul finds distasteful. But as far as studying character and culture goes, Naipaul remains an unparalleled observer. His writings endure because the purity of his prose is matched by the lucidity of his vision. I don't care much fo Naipaul the man or his politics and prejudices. But as a writer, he stands in a league of his own.

A travelogue that displays some handsomely written passages that shows the author's self-assuredness in his craft, but is ultimately let down by long stretches of the author's muddled thoughts about India and his connection with the place.

As a 2nd generation son of immigrants, I related very strongly to Naipaul’s descriptions. His experience is like mine, he grew up in a house filled with detritus from India. Then, as a young man he goes to India for the first time where he observes the servant culture and remnants of the British influence. He also goes on a Himalayan pilgrimage, rides the trains, and eventually visits his ancestral home.

Naipaul is brutally honest and insightful, conveying in terse sentences what many struggle to put across in voluminous books. Even though he seems to have offended several people by the depiction of India in this book, one should keep in mind that he describes India of the 1960s, which persisted even as I was growing up in the 1980s. His passages transported me to my childhood, to dimly lit railway stations, people packed in third class carriages, weak limbed people sprawled on platforms, and the Kafkaesque government offices that Indians fear to this day.

Naipaul's interaction with the Sikh man and the latter's racism might come across as shocking to some, but many high caste Sikhs still have the disregard for dark complexioned South Indians whom they perceive to be weak and unfit. Naipaul notes how the Sikh gentleman turns away rice in contempt, or how the ghoda-wallah shamelessly asks for bakshish despite failing to turn up at the promised hour, and how the IAS officer talks about the 'brahmin village' in reverence. His is an honest account, which does not tiptoe around. He does not try to rationalise what enabled a civilisation to be so brutally plundered for over thousand years (although he does say that Indians are incapable of rebellion, which he borrows from Camus), nor does he try to lay the blame of the poverty and squalor on centuries of foreign rule. What he writes in this book are unfiltered emotions, and instead of being offended by them, one finds succour in the fact that we have come a long way since then.

This very well written book was banned in India. Truth hurts. The book touches on the frustration of people of Indian descent arriving in India. Banning the book doesn't change the truth, only hides it from its people.

I enjoyed the writer's in depth experiential record which defies categorisation. In particular his descriptions of the people he comes across are a delight. Verging on caricature, they do not quite tip over - there is usually some genuine warmth in Naipaul's response, even if it is frustration.

While he is often aghast at the India (1963/4) Naipaul encounters which is so unlike the Indian experience of his homeland, Trinidad, by the end of the account he has achieved an equilibrium.

For this reader the travelogue's strength, with its many, acutely perceptive insights, hinged on how much emotionally was at stake for Naipaul. This could not be a better introduction to indescribable India.

“愤怒、怜悯和轻蔑，本质上是相同的一种情感；它并没有价值，因为它不能持久。你若想了解印度，就必须先接受它。”