3.3
Biographies
In 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 this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
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 five thousand 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.
© 2021 Blackstone Publishing (Audiobook): 9781665092289
Release date
Audiobook: 28 September 2021
3.3
Biographies
In 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 this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
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 five thousand 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.
© 2021 Blackstone Publishing (Audiobook): 9781665092289
Release date
Audiobook: 28 September 2021
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Sumedha
14 Mar 2022
A shameful, defeatist and Anglophilic sweeping study of India ranging from the Vijayanagar Empire to the Emergency years. Mr Naipaul's popularity in Western academia and readership simply confirms the kind of sycophantic literature about "oh so poor and backward" India that the West enjoys reading, after its years of colonial brutality done here that it now simply glosses over in public discussions! Distasteful and misleading literature especially when read in 2020s. Actor Sam Dastor's narration is alright, though most Indian place and people pronunciations are garbled, in the standard Western reader style.
English
India