V.S. Naipaul's first trip to India -- he's appalled by the filth, poverty, etc. etc. -- quite funny in parts, like when he's trying not to overpay Kashmiri tour guides. In the years since he mellowed out, and also India's socio-economic situation changed considerably. But it's entertaining to catch him here in his younger days. He's self-aware enough to find the humor in his constant disgust/snobbery/irritation, and he's good at choosing just the right details to convey the sense of a place. You really can't go home.

In his native Trinidad Naipaul had always somehow been of India without being Indian. After 12 years in London, and possibly in an attempt to regain some sense of his own roots, he decided to take a sabbatical year in India in 1962. This book is the fruit of that year.
It begins inauspiciously enough with some amusing but not too jarring description of the endless troubles involved in bringing a bottle of liquor into India. We've all heard of India's elephantine bureaucracy, and Naipaul confirms to us that this is (was?) the case. Of much greater interest are the little fables he weaves to explain his view of how in India function is more important than action (i.e., ritual cleanliness is much more important than actual cleanliness) and gestures count more than reality (although this is common to many third world countries). Contrary to the impression a foreigner might have of chaos and aimlessness, India is in fact strictly regulated to a degree unknown in the West. Everyone has a place and a function, and such place and function are infinitely more significant to an Indian than what a Westerner's profession or skin colour might be to him. This provides a transition to another of Naipaul's interests, which is the nature of the relationship between the Indian Republic and the British Raj. According to Naipaul, the idea of Britishness is inextricably bound up with the Indian empire, and the British created themselves as an imperial people with a God-given mission, even as they created the Indians as a subordinate (inferior) race and state. Bound up with these deep meditations are the stories of his dealings with various landlords and hoteliers. Particularly amusing is his running relationship with the staff of a small hotel on Dal Lake, in Northern India, where he experiences the mutual dependency between masters and servants familiar to russian and ancient regime writers. He (the master) is often abused by the staff (the servants) and forced to perform meaningless or denigrating activities. The staff, however, treat him with an almost comical respect when confronted by third parties. Clearly the servants derive their respect from the respect shown to their master. The relationship is almost medieval.

And this is Naipaul's next point. India is not a modern country because there is no sense of the passage of time, but rather passive acceptance of everything, and an escape into the land of imagination to compensate for what otherwise would be a reality too painful to bear (but again, this is also a feature of other third world countries such as that of Colombia, and a source of Magical Realism a la Garcia Marquez).

The book's final part has a fascinating reflection on the nature of English writing on India and Indian writing. Naipaul disparages virtually all literary creation in the sub-continent (with a couple of minor exceptions including Narayan). He likes Kipling and has no clear opinion on Forster (he would eventually develop a strongly critical perspective on this author as well, deeply tinged by his antipathy to the writer's homosexuality). The ending is bleak, punctuated by his frightening falling in with a racist Sikh (who is a dead ringer for Europe's skinheads of a decade later) and a depressive visit to his grandfather's hometown, when he realizes that the distance between himself and India is unbridgeable. The backdrop is provided by the Chinese invasion and Indian defeat (this defeat is the last of endless defeats over the past millenium, and an emblem for them all).

The book, although picturesque in some points is extremely bleak and really justifies Naipaul's famed ability to stare at reality in the face, and not flinch. Whoever believes Naipaul has singled the Muslims for special abuse (in such works as "Among the Believers" and "The Suffrage of Elvira") only needs to read this disconsolate book (his first of a couple) on his own homeland to confirm that Naipaul does not believe in playing favourites, and will shine the passionately cold light of his wit on everything that catches his eye. The book is in parts obscure and disorganized, but very insightful. This reviewer shared Naipaul's sense of grossness and void, as he contemplates utter misery and hopelessness (this is a feeling many peoples might have today: former Zaireans, Sudanese, Palestinians, Colombians, Bhurmans, to name just a few). His refusal to compromise is not fuelled by self-hatred (as has been suggested by some commentators) but rather by a powerful self-awareness. It's no wonder many Indians hated the book. Not being Indian, and not therefore needing to be appeased, I liked it very much.

Although V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, his family originally came from India, and in the early '60s, the author made his first journey to the subcontinent. An Area of Darkness chronicles this year of travel, which took him to Bombay, Delhi, Kashmir, and eventually to the small village that his grandfather left as an indentured laborer more than 60 years before.

As Naipaul travels, the finely wrought sentences and observations about caste and the Raj can give his account an aura of reason and even detachment. But this is deceptive. The level of hostility toward almost everything observed, the ugly disparagement of the country and its inhabitants, the simmering anger always ready to burst forth—all make it clear that for Naipaul this is a deeply emotional journey.

Naipaul is understandably appalled by the poverty, the dirt, the subservience that he observes. "The beggars, the gutters, the starved bodies, the weeping swollen-bellied child black with flies in the filth and cowdung and human excrement of a bazaar lane, the dogs, ribby, mangy, cowed and cowardly, reserving their anger, like the human beings around them, for others of their kind."

All around he sees a "static, decayed society" that keeps people down. He writes astutely about the negative impact of the Raj and of the caste system, which, he says, reduces people to functionality. People defecate openly because there will be sweepers whose function it is to clean up after them. There is no bravery, he writes, not because of cowardice but because "bravery, the willingness to risk one's life, is the function of the soldier and no one else."

But the negative is almost all that he sees, and he expresses his revulsion in contemptuous language. A man is "rat-faced." The roads are "infested with peasants." ("Infested!") The railways "reveal India as futility and limitless pain." India's famous bureaucracy, "the rows of young men sitting at long tables, buried among sheaves of paper"—an image that might evoke a bit of humor—is for Naipaul, he says, "more than I could bear." His contempt extends to the Indians' use of the English language: he seems unable to consider that what he perceives as "incorrect" usage might be Indian usage, that the Indians have made the language their own.

Reading all of this, I felt compelled to ask: Why the savage disparagement? Why the intense disdain?

Repugnant though it is, the text reveals Naipaul to be a vulnerable narrator. My sense is that in India, he confronts an identity thrust upon him, an identity he neither feels nor wants any part of. Yes, his heritage is Indian. But "In Trinidad," he writes, "to be an Indian was to be distinctive…To be an Indian in England was distinctive." In India, however, "for the first time in my life," he says, "I was one of the crowd." He can't simply observe the poverty or the bureaucracy with detachment—he sees himself through the eyes of others as part of this inferior, inadequate, filthy society and feels deeply ashamed. Only when he finds some "privacy and protection,"— "Only then was I released from the delirium of seeing certain aspects of myself magnified out of recognition."

Naipaul's failed visit to his grandfather's village—a trip that ends in "futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight"—seems to me to exemplify his shame and inability to accept his Indian heritage. The whole journey, he writes, "ought not to have been made; it had broken my life in two." Newly arrived back in Europe, asked by an Indian friend to write him with "his freshest impressions" of India, Naipaul says, "I forget now what I wrote. It was violent and incoherent; but, like everything I wrote about India, it exorcized nothing." India remains for him "an area of darkness."

Ultimately, this is a painful journey for the author, and he doesn't hide the pain. Indeed, he would be a sympathetic figure, if he were not so arrogant, so bigoted, and so lacking in sympathy--and empathy--himself.

There was a time when I loathed Naipaul, wondering how someone never born and brought up in India can pass such judgements on her so unabatedly, but of course I was naive.
Am older and less of a spring-chicken now in such matters.Now, If there is someone whose judgement on India I give a true fuck about these days it has to be his ( Well, may be along with Upamanyu Chatterjees). The rest are mediocre scum floating in their vast post-modern mediocrity. As Vidia himself put-India does revel in its own unparalleled levels of mediocrity and any mediocre success that comes out of it is despite all mediocre efforts to prevent it or achieve it in the first place!
I am sure the book is hated in India and by Indian journalists/reviewers ; surely nothing could speak better for the book.

Naipaul is witty, poetic and overflows with self confidence in his critique of Indians. Never at once does he self-doubts himself- maybe that's the sign of a good writer. The book can be both damaging and insightful for us. He does talk metaphysically about caste, duty, honor etc. which can a building force in the Ambedkarite movement. Passages such as these makes a strong impact in an ex-leftist's mind.

'Four sweepers are in daily attendance, and it is not enough in India that the sweepers attend. They are not required to clean. That is a subsidiary part of their function, which is to be sweepers, degraded beings, to go through the motions of degradation. They must stoop when they sweep; cleaning the floor of the smart Delhi café, they will squat and move like crabs between the feet of the customers, careful to touch no on, never looking up, never rising. In Jammu you will see them collecting filth from the streets with their bare hands. This is the degradation the society requires of them, and to this they willingly submit. They are dirt; they wish to appear as dirt.'

One cannot but think, on where does Naipaul stand ideologically. Has he transcended all that left-right discourse and operates through a humanist lens- trying to capture poverty objectively or is his commentary just a modern/ newer version of the 19th century imperial-oriental discourse. I don't know and it bothers me. I like to sing this passage- repeat it a thousand times in my mind for it is so well written but I'm cautious about ingraining it in myself. What would a sweeper think about this passage- maybe that is a more important question. Is his 'willingness to submit' actually voluntary- resulting from his nature or is it the result of his social and material position- that there is no choice except to submit. Whichever one you believe in will directly affect on how you interact with a sweeper (and example of how ideology reflects in you). Colonialism is cruel and so is caste but it does give Naipaul a lot of think and write about. His critique of Gandhi is the most fascinating passage in the book.

it takes a special genius to damn a country for it's climate ALSO. and the world never tires of telling what a special genius naipaul is. this turn of phrase here. that most appropriate word there. lots of perfectly formed sentences in between.all of which are on display in this book that to me seems to be more about naipaul than about india.
with great subtlety he says that there is no subtlety to be found here. someone with a salary of 600 rupees is a "600 rupees a month man." another is a "1200 rupees a month man." irony and satire are impossible in india. poor indians shit everywhere. rich ones are busy miming the english before which they were busy miming the moguls. anonymous places (the railway station, harbour, etc.) repel him. when he does get involved with people, as in a srinagar hotel, he has a certain charm but it is only momentary. after a point the book is a drag. what is in it hasn't been my experience of india. and reading it i fear that my own feelings will lose their legitimacy if i take sir vidia too seriously.

i felt like I was trully travelling in india in the early 1970s...some of Naipauls encounters draw similarities with mine! he explains the modern Indian psyche very well!

I do not recall how I came to own An Area of Darkness by V.S. Naipaul. It's not a genre I normally read, but I did own it, and having it I decided to give it a try. It was worth it.


At first I was put off by the lack of emotion in the narrator's voice. He spoke of his family, his upbringing on the island of Trinidad, his family's Indian heritage, all as though he were an alien who was making observations and taking notes to report back to his home planet ("species seem to believe in many gods.....caste system...certain cultural values differ from fellow inhabitants of the island...").


As his journey progressed, for it was a journey on several levels, he became, if not more emotionally involved, at least interested.


And interesting. I have never traveled to India, although I did live in the Caribbean not far from Trinidad. My landlady and her family in Grenada were Indian and also from Trinidad. If I had not lived there I would not have known what a significant percentage of the population on the East Indian islands are descendants from India.


So I started reading the book with some understanding as to where the author was coming from. Naipual wrote this book in 1962-64 and I think some of his experience was different than the many Indians I interacted with on Grenada.


For one, he speaks of feeling something of a foreigner even though he grew up there. I lived on Grenada in the nineties and the Indians I met had absorbed the culture. They were Christians, regular church goers and interacted easily with other racial groups (mostly of African descent but also European). Naipaul's grandparents immigrated to Trinidad so he was closer in spirit to the home country. Or so he thought.


An Area of Darkness is Naipaul's record of his travels to India and his experiences there. He learned quickly that he was as foreign as any European. There were many cultural conflicts.


He quickly tired of the class system. He describes another Indian/European's frustration when he tried to get work done but was not getting his letters mailed quickly enough. He called in the clerk who took down his dictation to solve the problem.


"The secretary has many letters to write and she is backed up, so sorry."


"What do you mean? You take the dictation. Write out these letters for me so I can send them out. They are urgent."


"That is not my job. That is the secretary's job."


"It is now your job. Write out these letters and send them out."


Stubborn silence and noncompliance. Reporting his clerk to the job bureau accomplished nothing. So he called in his clerk again.


"I need to write another letter. Please scribe. "You're fired." Deliver that to the secretary and put it on the top of her pile as priority."


The clerk, realizing that if he gave such a letter to the secretary he would be humiliated, ran off and wrote out all the letters for the man. That is how things operated in India.


Another time he was in a train and had the bottom bunk. This is a coveted bunk because climbing up and down to the upper bunk was considered too much effort and beneath the dignity of the class of Indians who could afford to have a bunk while traveling on a train. The man assigned to the bunk above him was put out.


Naipaul who considered the lower bunk an inconvenience offered to change places with him. The man gladly agreed.


But the man remained seated on the upper bunk. By this time the train had already moved off and the porters had left the train, which meant the passengers would have to move their own belongings until the next stop when the porters would again be available. One of his class did not move his own things. That was the porter's job. Exasperated, Naipaul moved both his and the man's belongings.


Naipaul describes India as a country of form but not substance. What he means by this is that form is followed strictly to the letter but there is no substance to it. The untouchables come to a building. One flings dirty water out across the floor, another one swishes a dirty rag around and a third sweeps the water back into the bucket. The floor is as filthy as ever but no one notices because the form has being carried out to the letter.


Indians comment on the unhygienic practice of Westerners only using toilet paper while Indians also used water to clean themselves after using the bathroom. Meanwhile the city and countryside all over India is used as an open latrine. But nobody sees it; they only see what they believe is true. The form of their culture and religious practices.


Brahmin cows stagger around starving to death because they are holy. People starve to death or live off garbage because that is their Karma.


I could insert here my own observations as to how ideologues exist in every country. Worldwide people who cling to beliefs and social systems even when they have been proven not to work but that is a discussion for another time, I suppose.


Naipaul calls Ghandi one of the greatest failures of India. He brought in ideas of an egalitarian society and human rights that were never put into practice. The Indians did what they always did. They made Ghandi into a Holy Man to be revered and enshrined while ignoring his teaching. Form is worshiped even though it is devoid of substance.


But the author does more than philosophize on the failings of Indian society. He carefully describes the people he comes into contact with and the places he visits. He goes on a pilgrimage, lives in a houseboat for a while, figures out how to get licenses for this and for that because apparently everything one does in India needs the permission of the government. He works and lives with Hindus and Muslims.


While Naipaul describes India and its people in rich colors, I think it would have helped if he had felt any kind of compassion or feeling of any kind because the book, while a vicarious traveler's treat, left me unmotivated to visit. I now long to read a book from a different perspective.

We Indians have grown up referring to Indians in the third person, somehow feeling untouched by whatever terrible slur we're about to finish the sentence with. Then when I read Naipaul's incessant use of 'the Indians' followed by terrible slurs, one would think I would have been outraged or chastened into mending my ways. Instead it gave me the sign of approval needed for me to write my own book complete with terrible slurs about 'the Indians'. Cynics will point out that Naipaul never ever lived in India, while I never ever lived outside it apart from 2 years that I will trumpet everywhere as if containing the essence of my personal development and release of the soul, and increasingly inflate in number of years with every retelling to every person not directly cognizant of my resume. But cynics gonna cynic. Somewhere, some insightful critic will point out the poignant similarity between my writing and Naipaul, ignore the shameful hypocrisy and thinly veiled but obviously deflected self-loathing, and instead concentrate on the cutting insight delivered with unflinching precision and wit. That critic will be me. If one wants something done right, one must do it oneself, mustn't one? Because this untrustworthy world is full of cynics. and Indians. Mostly they are one and the same.

Clippings

there could be no pride in power, and that to give way to anger and contempt was to know a later self-disgust.

‘It’s only his company.’ It was strange that this simple view of the relationships of the simple could hold so much force and be so moving.

I had been made by Trinidad and England; recognition of my difference was necessary to me. I felt the need to impose myself, and didn’t know how.

Poverty not as an urge to anger or improving action, but poverty as an inexhaustible source of tears, an exercise of the purest sensibility.

Compassion and pity did not answer; they were refinements of hope.

an old country which has been without a native aristocracy for a thousand years and has learned to make room for outsiders, but only at the top.

aspire with despair, and, despairing, seek to ridicule.

The black buffalo, on the other hand, creature of darkness, is always fat and sleek and well looked after. It is not holy; it is only more expensive.

“Sheikh Abdullah, we have no rice and we are starving. Give us rice.” And you know what he said to them? He said, “Eat potatoes.” ’ Humour was not intended, and the advice was sound.

The medieval mind, which saw only continuity, seemed so unassailable. It existed in a world which, with all its ups and downs, remained harmoniously ordered and could be taken for granted. It had not developed a sense of history, which is a sense of loss; it had developed no true sense of beauty, which is a gift of assessment. While it was enclosed, this made it secure. Exposed, its world became a fairyland, exceedingly fragile.

the Indian ability to retreat, the ability genuinely not to see what was obvious: with others a foundation of neurosis, but with Indians only part of a greater philosophy of despair, leading to passivity, detachment, acceptance.

the Raj was an expression of the English involvement with themselves rather than with the country they ruled. It is not, properly, an imperialist attitude.

Europe has its monuments of sun-kings, its Louvres and Versailles. But they are part of the development of a country’s spirit; they express the refining of a nation’s sensibility; they add to the common, growing stock. In India these endless mosques and rhetorical mausolea, these great palaces speak only of a personal plunder and a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered.

The Taj Mahal is exquisite. Transported slab by slab to the United States and re-erected, it might be wholly admirable. But in India it is a building wastefully without a function; it is only a despot’s monument to a woman, not of India, who bore a child every year for fifteen years.

It is still through European eyes that India looks at her ruins and her art. Nearly every Indian who writes on Indian art feels bound to quote from the writings of European admirers.

It is like seeing Indians on a dance floor: they are attempting attitudes which do not become them.

Englishness, unlike the faith of other conquerors, required no converts; and for the Bengali, who was most susceptible to Englishness, the English in India reserved a special scorn.

Hindi, it is said, gives the North an advantage; it is better for North and South to remain illiterate and inefficient, but equal, in English. It is an Indian argument: India will never cease to require the arbitration of a conqueror.

At times it seems that to our folly and indecisiveness, and to our dishonesty, there can be no limit. Our relationship ought to have ended at the end of that journey.

He wrote it in 60s but everything he wrote we are discussing even today, he spotted stuff long before we did. He is extremely critical of us but it's not due to hatred like naxals but due to his hopelessness, he deeply wanted India fixed. He sees things, as skilled as a master photographer, his perspective of India from an outsider (or a homeless as he felt by his end of the tour) who has a fantasy of India but which lead to a culture shock instead, his deep sadness at state of India, the gloom, gloom not for just the wretchedness but Indians negation of it, is evident in this narration. It's a must read for we frog in the well type people.

It's Naipaul, I was carried along by the narrative like a leaf on a stream. The book is a semi-autobiographical account of his first visit to his homeland for the first time as a 29-year old. He grew up in Trinidad, surrounded by carefully preserved Indian artefacts and customs - both sometimes cracked and broken, but patched together to make do because of their connection to ancestry. However, the India he visits is not the India of his grandparents and parents' (and thereby his) memories. It is a harsh encounter that divests him of his romanticised images and replaces them with in-your-face ugliness and nerve-jangling ineptitude. He hates the place, the people, the experiences. The writing is disillusioned and deeply pessimistic. I could see why the book was immediately banned in India for its "negative portrayal of India and its people." On reading it again after all these years I wondered if the darkness was not inside him. After all, our travels are nothing but a mirror, revealing to us a perfect image of what is inside us at that moment in time.

This book (first published in 1964) has become somewhat notorious for its narrator’s rather negative attitude towards the country he is writing about. In the preface to the edition I read (from 2010) he lets his readers know that his bad mood during at least the first part of the book was due to a creative crisis he was going through at the time – this might be true, or it might be not; but in any case, it reminds us that, even though An Area of Darkness is a book of non-fiction, its narrator might still be somewhat less than completely reliable.

Also, the Grumpy Traveller is a figure with a long tradition in British travel literature, going back to at least Tobias Smollett’s n  Travels Through France and Italyn, famously poked fun at as “Smelfungus” by Lawrence Sterne in his n  A Sentimental Journeyn – indeed, I’d go so far as to say that the Cranky and the Enthusiastic Traveller are the basic archetypes of British travel writing (maybe even of all travel writing). What they both have in common, however, is that for both modes the person of the traveller is at least as important as the countries through which he travels; and this takes us back to Naipaul and his An Area of Darkness – His Discovery of India (do take note of the subtitle here).

I doubt anyone would disagree that Naipaul is very firmly on the grumpy side of things – he does not like India much at all, complains about its shabbiness, the dirt, the lack of manners in its inhabitants, and is particularly offended by the public defecation he seem to encounter everywhere (to a degree that one can’t help but wonder whether there is not some obsession at work there). All in all, there seems to be more than enough reason for the often fierce dislike this book and its author have inspired in many readers. And yet – while I tend to agree that Mr. Naipaul is probably a deeply unlikable person, a closer look at An Area of Darkness shows that there is more going on than just a cranky author venting his petty spleen. A lot more, in fact.

First of all, the reason why Naipaul in An Area of Darkness is an unreliable narrator is paradoxically his scrupulous honesty. He has a very fine and well-tuned sensitivity not just for his surroundings but also for himself, and follows the smallest nuances of his prejudices and motivations. And like no man is a hero to his valet, no narrator remains likeable who is seen from this close – there is no attempt at all from Naipaul to make himself appear more heroic, to smooth his crankiness or to gloss over his petty meanness. Naipaul holds nothing back and throughout remains committed to absolute honesty, reminiscent of Rousseau in his Confessions (but, one assumes, staying somewhat closer to actual facts); which in turn makes it possible for the reader to see just how much this account of India is coloured by the person narrating it.

Second, there is a reason why Naipaul’s attitude towards India is so fraught with tension, and he gives it to the reader at the start of the book (well,a after the prologue, anyway) – even before the narrator sets foot on Indian soil, Naipaul tells us over thirty pages of his childhood in Trinidad where his grandfather had moved from India. Like many emigrants, Naipaul’s family held on to as many things from their homeland as they could, and young Naipaul grew up among a clutter of half or not at all comprehended memorabilia and rituals from which he pieced together his own fantasy of India. And it is this fantasy which at some – intellectually denigrated, but none the less deeply felt – emotional level Naipaul is looking for in the real India only to be deeply disappointed when – rather unsurprisingly – he fails to find it. This is where things begin to move beyond the sphere of mere individual experience, as it’s quite obvious to see how Naipaul’s indeed is just a slightly displaced version of what most Europeans – and that, of course, means mainly British – relate towards India, carrying a pre-conceived image of the country when visiting it. Few, however, are as ruthlessly honest in their reactions when India fails to conform to their fantasy.

And this brings us to a third thread running through An Area of Darkness – namely that Naipaul may have been objectively justified in his reaction, for the simple reason that India in 1963 was in a deplorable state. Among the anecdotes and the descriptions, large parts of the book are given to analysis of India’s past, present and future as well as on a host of related subjects, from how Hinduism has become a repository for symbols that have lost their religious significance, over how India seems to construct its self-image by way of mimicry to other cultures, to novels about and from India – all of those subjects treated with equal intellectual brilliance and a certain cool detachment, made possible precisely thanks to Naipaul’s continuous self-scrutiny that enables him to purge his subjectivity from the more strictly analytic parts of this books.

At the same time, Naipaul never lets the reader forget that everything he writes about is ultimately grounded in personal experience – the long, analytic passages are always counterbalanced by a wealth of anecdotes – often quite funny ones, and more than once the joke is actually on Naipaul, more proof that he is after verity rather than self-aggrandizement – or descriptions. And the descriptions alone, whether of scenery, architecture or the people he encounters, would make reading An Area of Darkness worthwhile because – something I think even his most determined detractors have never denied – Naipaul writes beautifully, capturing sensual impressions in a measured, rhythmic prose, along whose shining surface images move and glitter like sunlight on the moving ocean.