excrete daisies at the perfume rising from the sewer

I have very mixed feelings about the writings of this author, counting “A House for Mr. Biswas” among my all-time favourite novels but intensely disliking just about everything else he has written, first and foremost “The Enigma of Arrival”. In this book Mr. Naipaul once again comes across as irascible, impatient, arrogant, intolerant, negative, self-absorbed and very, very pedantic.

He visits the country of his ancestors for the first time not with an open mind but with certain fixed ideas about it and seemingly almost determined to dislike the experience. He doesn’t travel extensively and has close contact with relatively few people but that doesn’t stop him from making sweeping statements about the country and Indian society. He is very perceptive and no doubt there is a lot of truth in the insights and opinions he forms, there are some brilliant descriptive passages, there is even humour but he sees mainly what he wants to see, i.e. squalor, poverty, stagnation and hopelessness.

Also, long chapters are less about India than about how he feels about it, reacts to it, what thoughts and emotions it awakens in him, etc. etc., in short for a travel book it's definitely too much about Mr. Naipaul.

Naipaul’s descriptions of his year in India during 1962 are of frustration and of a man being like a fish out of water. Naipaul frustration of the religious caste system and its rigid structure make him a grumpy man. The inability or unwillingness to do anything outside your job description is foreign to me.

His battle to get his two bottles of booze in Bombay have him filling out forms and going from one office to another. His amazement about defecation and uncleanliness of India is evident in his writings.

The travelogue is fascinating with descriptions of a Kashmir and the Hotel Liward on the Dal lake probably now gone. His continual battle of with Aziz at the hotel is both sad and amusing. The pilgrimage to Amaranath and the incident with the ghora wallah or pony man was funny especially when he asked Naipaul for bakshishi.

The racist Sikh, the invasion by China and the acceptance of the population of defeat. The Commissioner trying to get people to forget about tolerance and non violence and the failure of Gandhi to create an egalitarian society all add to the story Naipaul tells and the aptly right title ‘An Area of Darkness’.

The frustration Naipaul feels is reflected in the visit to his Grandfather’s village. The last sentence of that chapter perhaps reflects that visit to India ‘So it ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.’

Having read two more books of his travels to India by Naipaul I can say his frustration was still apparent but also more acceptance and tolerance.

Although Naipaul takes the reader by the hand and leads the way into a mysterious universe, he is not the tour guide, but a visitor himself. He is trying to navigate his way through uncharted territory and is trying to make sense of the situations he encounters on his journey. He is as surprised by what India offers him as anyone else would be. What makes the journey more special though for him than for the average visitor, is that Naipaul is of Indian descent. After reading this book, I was left with the impression that Naipaul's poignant account is an accurate reflection of the inner feelings he developed during his encounter with elements of his family background. It is telling that he labels the part of the world with which he is personally connected as 'an area of darkness'.

This is the first book by Naipaul that has helped me understand why people disliked him so much. It's an insufferably arrogant account of a traveler through India who does not speak the language and has no meaningful understanding of its history. He goes purely by gut and what he produces is an astoundingly negative portrait. He depicts India as a grotesque dystopia, doomed by its fatalism to eternal misery. We can see in retrospect that this judgement was a bit hasty.

I couldn't get over the fact that Naipaul repeatedly seems to lampoon Indians for their broken English, when he himself is the outsider who cannot understand the language of the land that he is visiting. He had truly internalized the idea of himself as a Britisher for whom mastery of English is the most important sign of humanity. His historical analysis of India is flailing and haphazard. He doesn't seem to evince any knowledge of the place other than what he may have picked up from a few other English writers. In this book, for once, Naipaul truly plays the role of the native informant reporting back to the colonizers about the terrible ways of their former subjects. The only redeeming thing he sees in India are its British remnants. Even this miserable sentiment is not articulated in any particularly poignant or convincing way.

I've always credited Indians for their surprising willingness over the years to be lectured by Naipaul about their shortcomings. This despite the fact that he was essentially a perceptive tourist rather than an expert. I was somewhat surprised, then, to see that this book was actually banned in India for a long time due to its negative portrayals of the land and its peoples. No doubt the portrayals were negative, even to the point of being unfair and untrue. Nonetheless even unfair criticisms can have a certain utility. This was one of Naipaul's early books and he did improve over time. I usually enjoy his writing even when I disagree with him. As it seems, it took him a little while to develop his craft. He may have been too overwhelmed by what he saw on this trip to focus on articulating himself to his full ability. As such the writing was really unremarkable. The only reason I can imagine the book to have been popular at the time was for its political utility.

Naipaul takes us through his journey of India with a unique lens of a Trinidad Indian trying to explore a mysterious part of Indianness he inherited. The whole encounter is confusing, he is sometimes too Foreign to connect with Indians and too Indian to not to find pride in some Indian features. He is amazed, alienated, defeated, challenged, disgusted, confused by this 1960s journey of India.

As an Indian, reading this made me realise my own myopia in understanding India, how I have overlooked and ignored certain troubling aspect of our culture. This was an enjoyable read nonetheless.

Naipaul's arrogance drove me crazy. I was hoping for a portrait of India, instead I got a portrait of an arrogant, racist, insufferable man.

A very controversial book, why wouldn't it be, it's a Naipaul Book after all. The India that Naipaul witnesses and writes of is part conjectured and part real. The fact that the author is hasty and has weak anger-management skills coupled with the fact that his visit to India was at a not so favourable period, whilst India was grappling with a fresh post-colonial trauma, leads to such flawed yet so real description of India making this book an anomaly. Despite it's few flaws and characters largely stereotyped on the basis of gender, caste and religion(thanks to the author's presumptuous nature) a book like this was meant to be written and also to be read. After a lot of analysis I concluded that the characters were not at all stereotyped , they were there just as how the author had seen and experienced them (maybe a bit exaggerated and definitely not sugar-coated). I agree with the fact that the India that Naipaul writes of is limited and a few perceptions of him are unsound in nature and that there is more to the picture. But what irks me the most is that the India that Naipaul writes of is still there lurking in the shadows and is very real, the India that Naipaul writes of is brazenly neglected by us Indians, the India that Naipaul writes of is still to be accepted and to be worked upon by us as a society.

Malik, like Malhotra, was one of these. He too was a ‘new man’. He earned 1200 rupees a month. He lived in a well-appointed flats in one of the finer areas of Bombay. By the standards of London he was well off. By the standards of Bombay he was overprivileged. But he was miserable. […] He was an engineer that was good. That he was Scandinavia-returned was impressive. That he worked for an established firm with European connections made him more than promising (bridegroom). Then: ‘Do you own a car?’ Malik didn’t. The probing was abandoned. […] Adventure is possible. But a knowledge of degree is in the bones and no Indian is far from his origins. Malik and Malhotra are exceptional. They are not interested in the type of adventure the society can provide; their aspirations are alien and disruptive. Rejecting the badges of dress and food and function, rejecting degree, they find themselves rejected. Chapter 2 – Degree, pg. 56-60.

For the uninitiated, Naipaul was an Indo-Trinidadian British author whose grandparents migrated from Eastern Uttar Pradesh to Trinidad – a small British colony, off the coast of Venezuela – as indentured laborers in the 1880s. By the 1940s, the family had prospered and shed many (but not all) of their Indian roots and Naipaul went to Oxford in the 1950s where he found success as a budding author. This rupture – from India to Trinidad to England – is no doubt the cause of alienation and the sharp probity that an Area of Darkness offers to its readers in spades.

While at first read, one may jump to the incorrect conclusion that the Area of Darkness (a clear homage to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) would refer to Naipaul’s view that India is a dark and barbaric place, the title of the book actually refers to the author’s own lack of awareness of his ancestral roots and his attempt to discover India. While Naipaul was Indian by ancestry and cultural upbringing (he never fails to remind us of his Brahmin heritage), he is painfully aware that India is not his country. This alienation of a man from his society and his desire to understand constitutes the majority of this book. In that sense, this work is a tragedy. While there are a few moments in the book where he finds India comforting, the bulk of the book is Naipaul being horrified with the poverty and the indifference of the people to the poverty in front of them.

It is here where the other aspect of the book emerges. Naipaul, being an alien, is a fabulously shrewd social observer. While these observations are not completely original, what makes the book standout is the sociological commentary that accompanies these observations. Just as a skilled surgeon uses a scalpel to make precise cuts to a body, Naipaul dissects Indian society and provides piercing insights – not all of which are pleasant – into what makes Indian society tick. Being an alien to Indian society yet possessing the ability to understand Indian mores gives him the vantage to make observations that are equal part perspicacious and outrageous. One example of this is provided above. Naipaul deftly observes that just as how he finds India as an alien country, India is an alien country to most Indians as well. But while his alienness stems from his upbringing in Trinidad, the alienness for most Indians is self-imposed for the truth is too much to bear. Not all his observations hit the mark though. For instance, while he excoriates the educated elite for aspiring to be Englishmen (Boxwallah), he calls social writers as Premchand as fabulists and R.K. Narayan’s works to be aimless.

It is here that it should never be forgotten that Naipaul was as much a writer of fiction as non-fiction. And so there is no way to know what he is making up. Did the Sikh really slap the Tamil and call him a negro? Did the American girl who got married to the Muslim sitar player actually convert to Islam? As is with most commentary, there is no way to know where the truth ends and where fiction begins.

That said, Naipaul does hit the nail on the head most of the times. This is a work that while being most pertinent to the India of the 1960s continues to shed light on the India of the 2020s. While not all the writing is pleasant (and at times Naipaul comes across as churlish and disingenuous), this is a fine autobiographical piece interspersed with trenchant social commentary. If you can stomach the bile that Naipaul spews at his readers, it is a work well worth tackling.

Looking back from 2023, it is amusing that this book was once banned. Even so, if you look for reviews in literary or Hindu journals, you will see that it is still controversial. As someone who has visited India six times I found it very entertaining.

Naipaul was is a literary man and a novelist, and his perplexed, somewhat shocked experience of his first year on a visit to India, culminating in a visit to his father's village is related with a novelist's perspective, developing characters, relating anecdotes, staging scenarios. Some of the more negative reviews come from a clearly defensive posture, suggesting that Naipaul had no love for their country. As a young man, his grandfather left his home in India and moved to Trinidad for five years of indentured servitude, sending money back to his brahmin village in Uttar Pradesh. So although he was a born brahmin Indian, he was born in Trinidad. His visit to India holds outsider's perspective.

I quote:
"India is for me a difficult country.
It isn’t my home and cannot be my home;
and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it;
I cannot travel only for the sights.
I am at once too close and too far."

He admits this. And still,
"Afternoon now, and the train’s shadow racing beside us. Sunset, evening, night; station after dimly-lit station. It was an Indian railway journey, but everything that had before seemed pointless was now threatened and seemed worth cherishing; and as in the mild sunshine of a winter morning we drew near to green Bengal, which I had longed to see, my mood towards India and her people became soft. I had taken so much for granted. There, among the Bengali passengers who had come on, was a man who wore a long woollen scarf and a brown tweed jacket above his Bengali dhoti. The casual elegance of his dress was matched by his fine features and relaxed posture. Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink; the mere thought was painful."

He is clearly being changed by India, and is falling in love with his ancestral homeland.

Naipaul's astonishment at India's poverty and squalor is only natural. One can see it even today, some 70 years later. It is part of the dichotomy and splendor of India and cannot be denied.

I loved this book, but I would not want anyone to use it as a reason not to visit India. Most visitors are probably familiar with the experience of landing in India, and looking around thinking "I have made a horrible mistake, coming here." That was my experience, but I went back again and again, because I fell in love. To me, this book, even when it witnesses India's poverty and indignities, reads like a love letter.

This is an utterly devastating and honest look at India, and the Indian psyche/Weltanschauung, told through the narrative device of the writer, a Trinidad-Indian, returning to the country of his forefathers. What follows is a relentless sojourn of rapid disillusionment and bucketloads of bitterness-soaked critique.

This was my first introduction to Naipaul, and what an introduction it was. There are no holds barred right from the get-go ("Indians defecate everywhere"). There are plenty of astute analyses of the Indian way of life. For Naipaul, Indians are too fatalistic, they are irreedemably servile, the civilization as a whole seems to suffer from a crippling sense of complacency, and thus, Indians have no real sense of either history or beauty.

There is also an intriguing take on the caste system, with a spot-on observation that, while India may seem like an anarchic, unorganizble mess to the outside, it is actually almost fanatically regulated from within. This effortless organization from within is in part responsible for the decay from without, which is a counter-intuitive idea but which is at the heart of India, which Naipaul astutely picked up on.

As an Indian from a fellow colonial outpost, Naipaul is highly interested in the legacy of the British Raj. The author reckons that the British could have saved a civilization in decline, but they were too insular, too ensconced in the arrogant insecurity of an empire in its prime, too interested in creating an image of themselves as the 'stern Victorians', and lastly, too eager to get up and get out. In Naipaul's words "the migration failed, the project was aborted."

(As a side-note, he does not take too seriously the objection that the British plundered and looted the country. India's history, Naipaul notes, is precisely this history of being plundered and looted by invaders)

The first chapter of the 3rd section of the book opens with one of the most scathing critiques of Indian art and literature that I have ever read, and the author manages to make a point that I myself had been wondering about for some time now. Why exactly is it that India has not produced any literature worth a note? The answer? : Indians are simply incapable of any sort of sustained rebellion. The novel is the product of an Enlightenment-era mentality, and is thus inherently rebellious. This project does not conjoin with the Indian's eternal passivity. What Indians can and do offer in plenty are fables. This was such an obvious and stunning insight that I could not believe how valid it was, and how relevant it is even to the unmentionable output of our film industry.

I suppose here would be a good place to talk about Naipaul's writing itself. The man is a fantastic writer. Though I was aware that he is well-regarded, I was not prepared for the sheer quality of the writing displayed. Each paragraph is like a snapshot by an extremely well-trained yet highly idiosyncratic photojournalist, that leaves an ineradicable impression of bitterness, pathos, and hard-earned beauty. This is quality writing, and it stoked my appetite to complete his 'India trilogy', as well as his fiction.

So, is it all good? Well, no. Here are some of my complaints :

Firstly, where the hell was South India?

Secondly, Naipaul can be fairly characterized as extremely uncharitable. He has nary a good word to say about India, and he seems to insist (like his fellow writer, Khushwant Singh, once noted about him) on noting the filth and decadence about him instead of the good. Take his opinions with a grain of salt.

Thirdly, I wasn't really sure what to make of the author's extended sojourn in Kashmir and his treatment of the relationship between him and his hotel bearers. It seemed unnecessary, and overlong. What was Naipaul trying to do here? Was it intended as comic relief, or was there a subtle point being made about how easy it is to get sucked into India's natural tendency towards hierarchy/servility? I'm not sure.

And finally, be aware that this book is nearly half a century old, though I'm of the opinion that his fundamental critique of the Indian psyche remains spot-on. 50 years, after all, isn't any time at all when you're confronted with a civilization as ancient as India.

Very highly recommended for people trying to understand India, and for fans of great writing in general.

All that is to be said is already said about Naipaul's impressions of India in the book. The books comes as a shock to all who romanticize the India and the idea of India. But sadly enough the "dark" impressions of the author are shockingly true even after more than 50 years when the book was first written. Naipaul deconstructs India as only he can as he was connected to India not through real links but through a romantic nostalgia passed on by the ancestors. When he visits India what he discovers is diametrically opposite to the all the romantic notions which were held. All around there is poverty, inequality, misery, corruption, inaction, apathy - in essence a society in a terminal decay but has not completely decayed. Naipaul while analyzing symptoms is also trying to understand the causes of the current stay of decay. A very engaging read!