
In 1964 V.S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness, his semi-autobiographical account of a year in India. Two visits later, prompted by the Emergency of 1975, he came to write India: A Wounded Civilization, in which he casts a more analytical eye over Indian attitudes. In this work, he recapitulates & further investigates the feelings that the vast, mysterious & agonised continent has previously aroused in him. What he sees & what he hears
- evoked so superbly & vividly in this book
- only reinforce in him his conviction that India, wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, has not yet found an ideology of regeneration.