India, A Wounded Civilization

Returning to India -- the subject of his acclaimed An Area of Darkness -- in 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi's Emergency, V. S. Naipaul produced this concise masterpiece of journalism and cultural analysis, a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by repeated foreign invasions and immured in a mythic vision of its past. Drawing on novels, news reports, and political memoirs -- but most of all on his conversations with ordinary Indians, from princes to engineers to feudal village autocrats -- Naipaul captures India's manifold complexities.