India: A Wounded Civilization

Perhaps it was the setting, for I read this book in its entirety on an overnight flight to Delhi where I was about to immerse myself in northern India for about a month. But it's a fantastic book that seemed to me throughout my journeys to be as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1976. There's no way to really explain India to someone from the west who's not been there, but V.S. Naipaul's writings are a glimpse into the hope and hopelessness that is India.

Nobel prize winner V.S. Naipaul's masterpiece on India is a must-read for any Westerner seeking a deeper understanding of India. Naipaul tells the story of this incredibly complex country person by person, through in-depth interviews of his subjects not on politics, culture or religion but on their personal lives. Naipaul tells the stories of a wide range of characters--a secretary to a prominent businessman, members of the Bombay underworld, a Marxist rebel. He tells the story of Amir, the descendant of the Raja of Mahmudabad, now living in the palace his ancestors had gotten from the British, lost after Partition, and regained after he became a successful Muslim politician in a Hindu area. And the story of Kakusthan, a modern man who returned to tradition and the life of a pure Brahmin, in a ghetto surrounded by a Muslim neighborhood. And the story of Ashok, who rejected an arranged marriage, managed to break into marketing as a career, and now struggled with the decline of the genteel, Anglo business world he had grown up in. Naipaul's great talent is in ferreting out the details of everyday life--what his people ate, wore, above all where they lived--often in tiny 10' by 10' rooms with wife and children. One comes away with a great appreciation of the notion of caste, so embedded in the society and culture for religious and non-religious alike. One also begins to appreciate what a struggle life in India is for everyone, especially those who live in cities. This book is full of stories of struggle--against tradition, to preserve tradition, between castes, between Hindu and Muslim--and of more down to earth struggles--to find a job, to find housing, to choose a career. Unfortunately Naipaul wasn't able to interview women with the ease he interviewed men--not surprising in this traditional society--and women appear only as shadowy wives and mothers in the narrative. But a great book nevertheless.

This is a big book about India and its people. When you start to read this book you indubitably bring your own baggage of views and expectations, which color your subsequent grasp of the book and the picture it presents. I am an Indian expat and like many other expats, I am often called on to present my take on my homeland. Having grown up in India I could relate to my immediate experiences and my family. I like most Indians had no sense of history(other than the post independence interpretation found in most books on India), how they came to be and where my people are in relation to the world. India is fragmented into so many religions, classes & castes it is almost impossible for an ordinary Indian to grasp the whole.This book by Naipaul attempts to paint a picture of the whole and define the crux of what it means to be an Indian(a very modern concept). Naipaul is perfectly suited to this task, with his curious mind and very sharp observations. After having followed India over three decades, he does have a handle on the mentality of an Indian, at the same time he relates to the wider world and has a sense of perspective. This book presents a collage of people from different parts of India, different classes, castes, religion. He attempts to find out what drives them within the wider social context and how they see themselves, their values and their expectations and how they are standing up to the changing times. His portraits are clear, sympathetic and samples the wide spectrum of India. The people we meet are a varied group, a lower caste former Naxalite leader from the south, to a former Nawab of Lucknow, gangsters from Bombay, a disillusioned Sikh, a Bengali Boxwallah... An access into the minds of such a wide cast of people is definitely the best thing about the book. You could take from this selection what interests you; strange cultural practices, triumphs and tragedies of a slum dweller or a struggling Brahman. Fascinating details that an Indian might not spend a second thought on are illuminated by this author of Indian origin. In spite of so many people and interviews, the narrative is for the most part easy going and does not leave you stranded. This is because there is the underlying theme to the book I talked about earlier and Naipaul's skills a great travel writer.Naipaul's quest is not truly an Indian one, i.e. it is not a quest that an Indian would undertake, as he/she is ensconced in a rich cultural mythology that gives a sense to every ones place which most people accept in the normal course of life or are frustrated by its limitations, but learn to accept it as part of the `tension of living'. Naipaul's quest is an occidental mind's attempt to know India. That is not taking way from it any of its value, as from his unique perspective he sees things that others easily miss. At the same time in many parts of the book, he fails to grasp the underlying thoughts and world view of each of the Indians he meets. He is more in his e

Most Indians don't seem to like Mr.Naipaul from what I hear about his very acrimonious literary workshops and press conferences in India. He has a reputation preceding him as 'not a very nice man' but a great writer. I had all this in mind when I opened to read this book(such a sharp title).The book is written by some one who is intellectually a westerner(written from an unabashedly western stand point),and wants to understand and digest the Indian social & cultural scene to satisfy his probing mind. Naipaul does not accept convenient lies and soft answers in this quest.The result is a remarkable book about India and about the attitudes and expectations of average Indians(one generation away from the closed social life of an extended family, caste, religion, region).Naipaul dissects the Indian psyche and pinpoints the muddy thinking and mythologising that is widely prevalent in the intellectual life of India. This book could be seen as a critique of the blindness of Indians to the 'real' world, who prefer to live and judge themselves and others through the myopic glass of perceived high culture of 'centuries of rich civilization'. Unlike any previous rendition of India, Naipaul has a familiar access to people and places and the perspective of an outside observer that is closed to Indians. He straddles this unique viewpoint successfully, making this a very revealing book on India. This book is never dry or trite but has a rich humanity to it, a cast of real people seen through the curious and sympathetic eye of Naipaul.The book, to an Indian expat like me, was riveting.This book would have been an uncomfortable read for me in India. I would have failed to see the western ideals that Naipaul is grounded on and would have criticized him for trying to pull down an intellectual edifice under which I grew up and shared with everyone around me(with nothing else to take its place).The book is one of the better studies on India and gives you a flavor of the Indian mind. And what's more, it is a short book.

India, A Million Mutinies Now is like going to India with a friend who knows everybody, and takes you to meet everybody: holy men, politicians, authors, princes, revolutionaries, gangsters, women's magazine publishers... At first, the prospect of so many interviews and anecdotes seemed daunting, but as I read on I found that somehow Naipaul was able to drop one after a few pages and go on to the next almost seamlessly, just as a skilled conversationalist moves from one group to another at a party. It's a testament to Naipaul's considerable ability as a traveler and writer. Although the interviews and mini-biographies are all about his subjects and their lives, there is ever a sense of his presence, at once gentle and piercing, the antithesis of the loud, gauche Western tourist. He is critical without being crass, intellectual without being dreary. When he's finished, a portrait of considerable depth and color has emerged.I got exactly what I wanted from it: a lot of perspective and innumerable fascinating details. Like the U.S., India is a pluralistic nation limited by its bigotry. Like Israel, it is sitting on a powder keg of ethnic aspirations. Like China, it has way too many people.How they cope (or do not cope) with that last problem is a recurrent topic. A family of ten can live together in a 10'X10' room by working and sleeping in shifts. A talented young professional must turn down a good job because it requires nine hours of daily commuting through Calcutta. People are loath to walk outside because their clothing and skin gets begrimed with dust and soot in a matter of minutes. Washing is difficult because the supply of water is intermittent, as is the supply of electricity. Naipaul presents basic facts like these, which any journalist could provide, but then builds upon this framework vignettes and tableaux that are often surprising or ironic or astonishing. India has perhaps the largest collection of slums in the world. Yet, for legal reasons, their film industry (also the largest in the world) must build their own slum if they want to depict a slum in a film. The most cursory reading of Indian history will tell you that the priestly class of the Hindus (brahmins) must keep away from the latrine cleaning class (sweepers). But did you know that a brahmin could be "polluted" by a menstruating woman at a distance of up to fifteen feet? Or that brahmins should only drink water that comes directly from the earth (not from a pipe)? Or that some poorer brahmins, with the rising wages of sweepers, have been reduced to cleaning their own latrines? There is much affection and empathy in Naipaul's account, as in the description of a family of five riding together on a motorcycle: "father on the main saddle, one child between his arms, another behind him holding on to his waist, mother on the carrier at the back, sitting sideways, with the baby." One sees in a glance the flirting with catastrophe that is nece