Sickeningly, disgustingly racist, and betrays a complete lack of understanding or empathy about a country and its people.

This book reeks of disillusion, but perhaps that is what sets it apart. It is not uncommon to find books overflowing with effusive praise about India. But being an India, a patriotic one at that, I do know sometimes the praise is hollow. India is a land of contrasts and complexities that one book cannot adequately describe. It will be like holding a drop of water and calling it the Ganges.

This book is representative, sure, but it fails to encompass the whole nature of India. There is a distinct self awareness in the bearing of India, a result of being a society in transition for centuries. But such is the fate of people with long histories.

Naipaul is unapologetic about his views on India, his alienation from the culture of his ancestors. It appears that he still harbours a sense of belonging to the land that is, by all means, foreign to him.

For me, the cynicism in the prose overshadows its lyrical, fluid quality. They disappointment of the author is apparent and it dominates the book.

So what is India? The question is not answered - not fully. But some observations about India struck me deeply.

Brilliantly written and observed this uncomfortable reflection on the joys and pains of India seems as relevant now as when it was written in the early 1960s. I first visited India in the late 1990s and many of Naipaul's observations resonate with what I saw and experienced. His narrative power is immense. I am looking forward to reading the next two volumes.

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.

Naipaul visited India, a homeland which he had never seen, passed down through the decayed myths of his immigrant family, when he was 30, having already earned a reputation as one of the most astute critics of the post-colonial world. He didn’t like it. He thought it was unhygienic and overcrowded, he detested the subcontinental tendencies towards prevarication and insincerity. He felt, in short, that the interplay between native Indian society and Western imperialism had let to an intellectually and morally sterile landscape. Naipaul didn’t like India, but in fairness he didn’t like Trinidad (or anywhere else in the West Indies), he didn’t like Iran or Indonesia, he was lukewarm, if memory serves, on the American south. Naipaul spent 70-odd years staring at the world and, to judge by his writing, came away with the impression that he had seen little of beauty or value. I like to think (or I would like to think that I like to think) that he is wrong. I suspect Naipaul is destined to be forgotten by future generations; he stands in too dramatic counterpoint to the received wisdom of our well-meaning, guilt-obsessed age. But on the opening day of 2023, I find I can’t condemn a man for looking out over our burning planet with some honest measure of disgust.

Observation was a key to Naipaul's oeuvre. To venture among a people, to talk to them, to find out everyday drama, to unearth "suppressed histories" (a term used by the Nobel committee), and to ultimately look... from a certain vantage point that kept changing over the years. In the recent Dhaka lit fest, he mentioned that the three books on India are not a journey into the development of a nation but into the development of a writer. He was being metaphorical. It is ultimately a way of looking. And it is a stern gaze, not given to sentiments or available narratives, always scrutinizing, and at times wicked (which may have caused outrage when this book came out).

He sees people defecating everywhere, and then in a club a posh lady tells him otherwise. He understands that she does't really look, or perhaps overlook. It helps that he has not matured in India, so that he can have a fresh approach to the country, and comes to uneasy conclusions about its people. In a train when a man meets him, "he asked me the Indian questions: where did I come from? what did I do?" People in Britain didn't bother. Trinidad was a different story altogether. In Kashmir, a journey is shared with a family of Brahmins in a bus. He sees how the patriarch observes the ruins and concludes "it is a cave used by pandavas." The family nodes and ambles around the ruins. They are not interested in the ruins, Naipaul observes. Food is served and cleanliness is questioned, in fact it is question everywhere. It is supposed to make us feel bad. But we are aware of it now. There are films being made on a need for proper toilets in villages, nearly fifty years after his remarks.

In a small hotel in Kashmir, a group of devotees accompanying a guru is described with biting wit, and it seems cruel, but not untrue. In Chennai, at the theosophical society a man is giving an important-sounding speech about occult and Annie Basant, and Naipaul tells us: two men in the audience were dozing. His curiosity about the Aurobindo Ashram takes him to Pondicherry. He learns that Mother rarely gives darshan and buys a booklet to learn more, and then he decides to share an information which is hilarious. In one of the question-answer sessions, Aurobindo explained to a devotee that Mother was not really angry at him, but was merely concentrating, which appeared as displeasure to the devotee. Naipaul reads "an occasional impatience" in Aurobindo's response. The idea of super-consciousness (or whatever the west is looking for in the east) is ridiculed. It can make us feel bad if we allow it to. It is a comedy at one level. Apart from his need for a clear gaze and prose, he is a caricaturist too.

Some instances, like the Sikh ranting about Dravidians, seem too good a find for Naipaul to be true. He is in the South, wants to explore the Dravidian/Aryan notions, and conveniently finds a man who helps create a bit of drama, provides fodder sort of. Even if it is inventive it gets the job done. He mentions how when a certain Chou En-lai had promised the city of Culcutta as a present to the Chinese people, the Tamil folks, "despite their objection to Hindi, were already learning Chinese". He has a knack for finding old documents, going against popular history, and coming up with a view all his own. He provides funny anecdotes about how soldiers who grew up on nonviolance had to be aroused to fight the Chinese.

Sometimes he behaves like a whining Sahib: the trees were "disfigured by the Indian dust", or other complains that would seem irrelevant to an unassuming, seasoned Indian. At the ghats of Banaras near the pyres, "above occasional blazes... family groups smiled and chattered." Well, what else do you expect? The dead are dead. This book does not describe India as it is, but India as it looks, to him. He hits some notes and misses some, and that too is subjective. The hotel sequence in Kashmir is easily my favorite, especially the character of a caretaker named Aziz. It can work as a comic novella in itself.

Why is the country called an Area of Darkness? It is a personal metaphor more than anything else, and the disillusionment, unlike the now-famous story, may not have been the result of his first visit to India. It seemed to have begun years back.

At the end of the book I was left with a nagging doubt, too serious to leave out in this write-up: is semicolon important? Naipaul's elegant use of it in this book seems at war with Kurt Vonnegut's hatred for the "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing". I had learned to phrase such that a semicolon would never be required; here, I just used it and the paragraph still looks okay. But I am not sure. I feel stranded in an in-between zone - my own area of darkness.

This book details the experiences of author V.S. Naipaul in India between February 1962 and February 1964, of his travails there with the locals, his discoveries about the people of India, and his coming to terms of what is India and what it means to be Indian. I found him an excellent writer, many of his personal stories reading like fiction, and have since found that Naipaul has a loyal following of readers. I may indeed try to find more of his works in the future.

Naipaul is of Indian heritage, but was not born there but rather on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. Some of the first part of the book detailed his growing up there, of his internal resolution as a child between his Indian household and the often very non-Indian islanders, a very diverse group that included a great many of African descent. Much of the rest of the book at least to me seemed to be the author trying to learn more about the country he ultimately hailed from, about what India is really like.

Naipaul provided several stories and anecdotes about his time in India. He opened the book with a little exploration of the often Byzantine if not Sisyphean paperwork and bureaucracy of India, describing his trials and tribulations of simply trying to import a bit of alcohol to the dry port of Bombay. A lengthy section details his time spent on a hotel on a lake in Kashmir, of his involvement in the day to day lives of those who lived in and ran the hotel, even accompanying them on a pilgrimage to a Hindu shrine in the Himalayas. Another story relates his time he was befriended by a Sikh while traveling by train in southern India, a friendship that was apparently founded in misunderstanding and did not end well.

The main point of the book though was a rather unflinching and unromantic look at India, or at least India in the early 1960s. He shows the India a traveler, an outsider, would actually see, an India that many Indians he writes simply do not see or refuse to see.

Caste he finds still dominates life in India, serving to imprison "a man in his function," rendering "millions faceless." A businessman's function is to make money by whatever means he can; he does not have a duty though to produce good quality items. It is not an issue of dishonesty or of short-sightedness, as service is not an Indian concept. He described groups of sweepers who cleaned a set of stairs; after they worked with twig brooms, rags, and buckets of dirty water, the stairs and wall are not only not cleaner but dirtier than ever. However they fulfilled their function, which was to sweep, or rather to be sweepers. Actual cleanliness was not the issue. Indians have been known to be picnicking on the banks of a river while someone drowned, not lifting a finger to help. He writes that the Indians do not lack courage or an admiration for it, but rather see courage and the choice to risk one's life to save another the function only of soldiers. Attempts to save government jobs for untouchables is not lauded, as this merely in many Indian's eyes simply puts responsibility into the hands of those unqualified - by their caste - to perform that function. Those who buck the caste system, or are outside of it, such those Indians who were born overseas, are not accepted by the system and often frustrated.

Naipaul wrote of the many squatters he saw in India (which I am certain didn't win him many friends with those who would promote Indian tourism); Indians he writes, "defecate everywhere." He saw people squatting and defecating beside railway tracks, along river banks, on the streets, never looking for cover, rarely with any sense of embarrassment. Even when presented with public lavatories were as likely to use the floor as anything else. Indians he says do not see these squatters, and certainly do not see the problem. Interests in sanitation are the concern of latrine-cleaners - not the concerns of the other castes - and to clean up after oneself would be unseemly, that unnecessary labor outside the required actions of one's caste was degrading.

Though obviously not something Naipaul saw personally he did spend time discussing Gandhi, relating to it the issues of public sanitation and caste. Gandhi, having spent twenty years in South Africa, saw India through an outsider's eyes. He saw sanitation linked to caste and that caste was linked to a disregard for others as well as inefficiency and a needlessly and hopelessly divided country, all of which lead to weakness and the rule of India by foreigners. Gandhi tried repeatedly to attack the psychology of caste, to show that there was dignity and a need for cleaning the excrement and filth of the nation. Naipaul believed that this was Gandhi's most important work, not his message of non-violent resistance of the British, work that he ultimately failed in, as his efforts were eventually reduced to mere symbolism, that latrine cleaning became among many simply an occasional, virtuous, highly symbolic action rather than an effort to really improve things.

I found his thoughts on the numerous ruins of India quite interesting. They are not revered as they might be in Europe, as respect for the past is a European, not an Indian, tradition. Not only are ruins everywhere and considered commonplace, but they do not speak of any development of the country's spirit and definition of nationalism or are revered as such. Rather - as with Mogul architecture - instead they tell of "personal plunder" and a nation with "an infinite capacity for being plundered." They are wasteful and without function; though the Taj Mahal is lovely, it is a despot's monument to one woman, nothing more.

An interesting book, I would like to know how the author's thoughts on India changed in his later writings, if they did.

This book has two faces. One which I thought was amazing, the other not so much. To start with the positive: Naipaul uses language in a beautiful way. I find his writing to be enchanting, for example when he describes lotuses as "an explosion of dying pink."
This also brings me to my second point, Naipaul's negativity. This book is really depressing. India is a beautiful country with a rich history and culture, yet Naipaul can't say anything positive about it. He describes old ruins as "ruins being continually rebuild, so that no progress is made overall" (this is a paraphrase, not his exact words). I'm no expert on India's history, but even a quick Wikipedia search reveals that India certainly has progressed over time.

If for the language alone, I would have given this book four stars, but sadly I have to take into account what was being written as well.

Beautiful, eloquent writing with passages that are equal parts hilarious and arresting. I had told my bookclub that at 30, V.S. Naipaul's narrator strikes as somebody more jaded with the developing world than I had expected. I felt like I saw a bit of myself in his takes of the more nonsensical parts of India at the time (the bureaucracy, the open defecation) but that was after I spent two years living in a village in Rwanda with the Peace Corps. I did not pay as much attention during the chapters that can only be described as literary criticism, mostly because I am not as erudite as him to understand the references. But I think this is an essential (and very quick and engrossing) read.

So this is my first time reading Naipaul’s nonfiction, and the influence on his greatest frenemy, Paul Theroux, is obvious. Naipaul is just as grumpy as ordinary Paul, and much less forgiving of human foibles on the whole. While there are moments of humanity, V.S. winds up carrying water for the worst sort of postwar racists who have transmuted their contempt for the supposed failures of bloodline to the supposed failures of culture. Sorry we can’t all live up to a certain digestive biscuits and PG Tips standard of what constitutes propriety.

Naipaul offers a unique perspective of worlds beyond worlds. As an Indian raised in Trinidad and educated in the UK, he planned a tour of his "homeland" that gives us the impressions of an outsider often invisible as an outsider to the people among whom he moves. Of course the India of over a half century ago is different from today's, but in these pages we learn a lot about what it means to be human and about what we take for granted as "human" that is more cultural. The episode at the end, when he visits his forebears' village, is hauntingly moving and, like the rest of the book, not quite what we expect!

Memoir of one of my favorite authors, a little dry at some points but a fantastic mix between a travel guide and personal memoir.