India. A Wounded Civilization

From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes a masterpiece of astonishing insight and candor about a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past."Extraordinarily forceful.... Naipaul is an elegantly precise and exacting writer." -NewsweekIn 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi's "Emergency, " V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years earlier.
Out of that journey he produced a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of India.  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.