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India: A Wounded Civilization

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India: A Wounded Civilization

Written by: V. S. Naipaul
Narrated by: Sam Dastor
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About this listen

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.

Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his own encounters with ordinary Indians - from a supercilious prince to an engineer constructing housing for Bombay’s homeless - Naipaul captures a vast, mysterious, and agonized continent inaccessible to foreigners and barely visible to its own people. He sees both the burgeoning space program and the 5,000 volunteers chanting mantras to purify a defiled temple; the feudal village autocrat and the Naxalite revolutionaries who combined Maoist rhetoric with ritual murder. Relentless in its vision, thrilling in the keenness of its prose, India: A Wounded Civilization is a work of astonishing insight and candor.

©1976, 1977 V. S. Naipaul (P)2021 by Blackstone Publishing Asia Human Geography India Social Sciences South Asia
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Naipaul's treatment of the subject has all the tact of a battle hammer in a surgery. He has peppered the book with illuminating stories and incisive observations. However, not a lot of it is to be taken an face value - his writing betrays a colonial lens to India and a lot of his observations about India and the society are broad generalizations lacking nuance. In fact, this has aged poorly in the 45 years since the book has come out.

Nevertheless, there are still some gems within this book and I would still recommend people to pick up and read. Just take the writing with a handful of salt.

As for the narration, it was mostly very clear except for the places where the narrator has to voice a quote from an Indian - he adopts the annoying stereotypical 'Indian' accent popularized in the western caricatures of Indians. But that is a minor issue.

Sometimes illuminating but mostly lacking nuance

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Very dry. Big critic of india of the 1970s and Gandhian idea. Wonder what he would think about today's India

Dry so so book

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A mirror to our recent past. Worth your time. It’s never boring in the first place. Though the story base goes back it reflects various moods over a period of time. Some may connect some may not

Started rather hesitantly.

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Listen to it for good writing. You may or may not agree with the expressed views of the methodology by which they have been arrived at. If the latter, you may struggle to finish the book. That said, give it a chance and you may find that the views of the author, as unacceptable as they may appear and sound, could hold more than just a kernel of truth. Unappetising, but food for thought, just the same.

Unappetising, but food for thought, just the same.

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Naipaul brands Indian civilisation as one that is decaying and points out that the only solution is a complete decay of beliefs and notions that are still rooted in the past. The book picks up multiple aspects and as he talks about them he dissects and throws them all in a fervent hope that this may accelerate this decay enabling at the same time an emergence of a new and stronger India. These are fascinating accounts and many readers will feel that they know them all already... and yet it must leave them with wonder at their own inaction to pull away from their clutches.

This is a brilliant read though Sam Dastur, as the narrator, adopts a form of pronunciation that is incorrect in many places. Loved this book.

- Arvind Passey - Blog: www.passey.info

What Naipaul wrote decades back still holds true

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