Bookmarked Musings: V.S. Naipaul’s India – A Wounded Civilization by Dr. Ramlal Agarwal
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Dr. Ramlal Agarwal writes about V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization highlighting how it never attracted any reprisals. In this piece, he probes the how and why of this exception.
V.S. Naipaul had a curious relationship with India. It was a country of his ancestors who settled in Trinidad as indentured labourers. He had grown up in Trinidad among a sizeable community of Indians who practised Hindu ways of life. Later, when he moved to London and took to Western ways of life, he developed an aversion to Hindi beliefs and philosophy. Yet he was drawn to India and came to visit it not once or twice but three times, and each time came out with a book of his stay here. These books are: An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1976), and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). These books are non-fiction books and a penetrating inquiry into the Indian philosophy and beliefs that are ingrained into the Indian psyche and are the causes of India’s subjection to foreign rule and its acceptance of defeat and humiliation.
