India: A Wounded Civilization

The description fails to make clear that this is a collection of essays, arranged by subject matter. Most were published originally in the New York Review of Books. Read together they result in a book choppy, turgid, and a bit repetitive in its concerns. Read individually, as originally intended, they are fine. So if you buy the book, read one at a time then put it down for a few days.These essays are forty years old now. For the most part their topics -- the nature of Indian civilization and the Indian mindset, M. Gandhi's attitudes and development, and his effect on Indian society -- remain timely. But the frequent references to the Emergency no longer have any real relevance, especially since the event is unexplained (because the NYRB's readers at the time were aware of it).

In 1975, India was not finished, it was wounded. It would recover and go on, as it had gone on for thousands of years. This sentence, India will go on, must have impressed Naipaul. In fact he opens not one but two chapters with this quote from a novel by R.K. Narayan.This is typical of Naipaul's prose. Starting with someone else's words, he superimposes his own voice on theirs and creates what, to my mind, must be the finest contemporary English prose around. Through it, we experience not one person after another, but a whole cast of characters all in layers. Naipaul interviews an engineer who takes him to a village where he is introduced to a money lending landlord and his tenants. In one paragraph we are exposed to many relationships. Naipaul's and the engineer's, then the engineer's relationship with the powerful landlord who could forbid his tenants to talk to the him thus making him unable to carry out his land improvement projects. There's the relationship between the tenants and the landlord, between Naipaul and the tenants, and so on. It is almost like an opera which, unlike theater, remains coherent even if everyone is talking all at once.Economy is a mark of great art. The title makes this point too. India was wounded, not dead. But during Indira Ghandi's Emergency, it was in critical condition. And the point is made in four words.India has a long history of art and culture but their natural development was largely interrupted during the British Raj. The forms have remained but the conscious sense of continuity was lost. What remains is the here and the now. The people no longer remember their past but at any moment they feel its presence around them.I've never been to India so cannot say if Naipaul's picture of it is true or faithful. I suspect it is, but that is immaterial. It is certainly an accurate presentation of what he himself thought and felt as a foreign-born Indian returning to the land of his ancestors, and that is how we ought to measure an artist's achievement, by his ability to make us feel precisely what he wishes us to feel.Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

I picked this book because I liked Naipaul's Beyond Belief and also because I like his prose.The work does not do justice to the tremendous task that Naipaul has set for himself, if that task is to make sense of India's present from its historical path of where it comes from. Naipaul seems to impute that the religious beliefs of Hinduism are responsible for indians' easy acceptance of foreign rule, defeat and subjugation, if i got his point right through this well-written narrative of post-independent India's predilictions. Hindus, in Naipaul's view are only too willing to 'spiritualise' the experience of abject poverty. This analysis of Naipaul is of course very different from the usual diagnosis of difficulties of running world's largest democracy in which more than half the people were illiterate for most of existence as a independent nation.The aspect of Hinduism that is debilitating in author's view is a certian obsession with the self and withdrawal from outer social world. This made Indians complicit in easy acceptance of foreign rulers and accept defeatspiritually.Naipaul sees this debilitating Hindu thought in none other than Gandhi and his adherents - gandhi being presented as a self-obsessed man who is ever conscious of his inner workings and impulses while missing to observe or narrate a lot what happens around him. Naipaul is relentless in critically examining India's father of nation.Also a certian lack of historic sense among Indians, and pride yielding long years of subjugation means Indians interpret themselves through ideas of their colonial masters rather than through their own illustrious past. Naipaul has a point here, no doubt.What Naipaul's penetrating observation misses is much more than what it catches - for instance, to say Hinduism is self-centered is a jaundiced view. Any society that has a notion of good and evil has some concept of society and social norms and obligations, and concept of Dharma is just that. Likewise, this land was not always poor and in fact pursuit of wealth, so called Artha among four purusharthas, is one of the goals of Hindu life - wise men as alms-seeking mendicants seeking elightenment through suffering is a perhaps much later addition to Hindu thpught, may be more buddhist than hindu in origin. Likewise, while Naipaul bemoans India's loss of a part of cultural heritage in areas such as painting, architecture he has ignored the successful continuation of dance and music.All in all, a laboured and contrived explanation to explain a complex civilisation through a single simplistic idea. Lastly, it needs to be mentioned though Naipaul's prose is as good as I have found it in his other non-fictionworks. That to many of his fans makes anything he writes worth reading, even if that writing is only dimly illuminating

The important thing to know if you are considering this book is that many of its insights are obsolete as the book was written in the 1970's and references many specific conditions and controversies specific to that time. Naipaul criticizes Indian traditionalism which continues to be a live issue. He believes that glorying in the past, a common Indian preoccupation, is counterproductive to India's progress into the future. He certainly agrees that Hindu nationalism is unlikely to help actualize the potential of India, which is more relevant today than when Naipaul wrote his book. To that extent, we can consider Naipaul to have been prophetic.What I enjoyed most were passages describing visits that Naipaul made as a semi-outsider to the home of a village Brahmin, and to a suburban Mumbai squatters settlement. Social description was my desire in obtaining this book, but it disappointed me in that there was not more of it.

Boring and useless. So called "Hindu" who don't want to be associated with Hindustan but won't mind exploiting its legacy by writing down their understanding of it. Unfortunately these people are quoted by "historians" and west elite to describe Hindustan. Don't expect any positivity coming out of it.

Brilliant (if somewhat jaded and sad) insights into the world's oldest and once-greatest civilization. India's recent (but now faltering) economic upsurge might have seemed to make Naipaul's analysis somewhat out of date, but the underlying "wounds" are still taking their toll

Sublime. Great timing, quality, wrapping, object arrived as clean & timely as a ruby. Kudos. Keep up the good work.

This book reveals why he is such a great mind and author. The sheer depth of his perception and his exquisite expression of thoughts and feelings makes this book a must read, perhaps more than once because you are sure to discover great thoughts in 2nd or 3rd reading that you missed out in previous ones, for every patriotic Indian who desires India to achieve its potential.

Still relevant. Addresses the cause of current politics in India .Rise and fall of kejriwal , the continuing attraction of modi. How cities are the hope for modern india and the villages a blot on human existence.