An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India

Naipaul relates his experiences traveling to India with beautiful, trenchant prose. Every page is a delight. Such brilliance.

The best line 'Indians defecate everywhere'. This trivial (not to Indians though) observation should have alone earned Naipaul a Noble. This is probably because of the Hindu caste system (no, I am not a Muslim). Just go to any Hindu temple, you will see spider webs, dust and filth. Of course, lower castes who are supposed to do the dirty work aren't allowed in temples. But Mosques and Sikh temples are reasonable clean. Any Hindu place is guaranteed to be filthy. Ganges is practically a sewer. All this talk about India rising (or BJP slogan 'India Shining' ha!) is a cruel joke on India's 400 mil poor who live on less than a dollar a day. If you don't believe me, take flight to India. As soon as you step out the place, stench is there to welcome you. If you take a train to Bombay, do not look out when you are getting near Bombay. Just outside the airport, smell of urine, excrement and careful not to step on spit (this is an Indian spit, all together a different variety) or something else. I know I grew up in India. Nothing ever changes

I read this book in preparation for recent trip to India. While it may be a bit dated, Naipaul writes beautifully. He describes India's people and places as he found them in the early 60's (pre Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and even, apparently, before Nehru shirts were known as such)givin and interesting perspective and historical context to the India I experienced on my recent trip.

I first read this book when I was 12 years old (23 years ago) and it amazed me on how an author who is a x generation Indian like myself feels when he returns to the land of his forefathers.I vividly remember the first chapters regarding VS Naipaul's attempt to recuperate a bottle of liquor (Metaxas) amidst one of the worst things that India inherited from the British: -i.e their bureaucracy. His description of Kashmir, wow ...transports you there and reminds us of a place bereft of the strife which we know of today especially thanks to those fundamentalists.Brilliant Book...the first author who got me interested in reading serious stuff

I picked this up out of curiosity and was astonished at the vividness of writing and perceptions. Normally, a travel book this old is simply too dated to be of relevance. Instead, in this book we are treated to a deep meditation on the country with Naipal's novelist's eye and his persepctive as one of the first great writers from the Third World. Indeed, if you know India, this is a travel book that predates touristic India, and so is an entry into history. But there are so many images that stick in the mind, flashes of humor and melancholy. I will always remember the pilgrimage he went on to see the "miracle" of an ice formation that appeared every year in the shape of a hindu god, though not in that year; the troubled American girl, Larene, who married a local musician in a moment of passion and was now attempting to ditch him; and the retreat in Cashmere, where Naipal got an incompetent cook fired in a fit of rage that he later regretted. Get it. One of the best travel books I ever read.