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India Trilogy #1-3
India: An Area Of Darkness, A Wounded Civilization & A Million Mutinies Now
With an introduction from Paul Theroux
V.S. Naipaul first visited India in 1962 at twenty-nine. His most recent visit was in 2015 at eighty-two. The intervening years and visits sparked by an inquisitiveness about a country he had never seen but had been a dream of his since childhood have resulted in three books: India: An Area of Darkness, A Wounded Civilization and A Million Mutinies Now. India is the collection of all three, introduced by fellow traveller and writer Paul Theroux.
An Area of Darkness is V. S. Naipaul’s semi-autobiographical account – at once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered – of his first visit to India, the land of his forebears. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent. India was land of myths, an area of darkness closing up behind him as he travelled. What emerged was a masterful work of literature that provides a revelation both of India and of himself: a displaced person who paradoxically possesses a stronger sense of place than almost anyone.
India: A Wounded Civilization casts a more analytical eye than before over Indian attitudes, while recapitulating and further probing the feelings aroused in him by this vast, mysterious, and agonized country. A work of fierce candour and precision, it is also a generous description of one man’s complicated relationship with the country of his ancestors.
India: A Million Mutinies Now is the fascinating account of Naipaul's return journey to India and offers a kaleidoscopic, layered travelogue, encompassing a wide collage of religions, castes, and classes at a time when the percolating ideas of freedom threatened to shake loose the old ways. The brilliance of the book lies in Naipaul’s approach to a shifting, changing land from a variety of perspectives. India: A Million Mutinies Now is a truly perceptive work whose insights continue to inform travellers of all generations to India.
1103 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 1, 2017
69 people are currently reading
452 people want to read
About the author
V.S. Naipaul
118 books1,796 followersV. S. Naipaul was a British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent known for his sharp, often controversial explorations of postcolonial societies, identity, and displacement. His works, which include both fiction and nonfiction, often depict themes of exile, cultural alienation, and the lingering effects of colonialism.
He gained early recognition with A House for Mr Biswas, a novel inspired by his father’s struggles in Trinidad. His later works, such as The Mimic Men, In a Free State, and A Bend in the River, cemented his reputation as a masterful and incisive writer. Beyond fiction, his travelogues and essays, including Among the Believers and India: A Million Mutinies Now, reflected his critical perspective on societies in transition.
Naipaul received numerous accolades throughout his career, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for his ability to blend deep observation with literary artistry. While praised for his prose, his often unsparing portrayals of postcolonial nations and controversial statements sparked both admiration and criticism.
He gained early recognition with A House for Mr Biswas, a novel inspired by his father’s struggles in Trinidad. His later works, such as The Mimic Men, In a Free State, and A Bend in the River, cemented his reputation as a masterful and incisive writer. Beyond fiction, his travelogues and essays, including Among the Believers and India: A Million Mutinies Now, reflected his critical perspective on societies in transition.
Naipaul received numerous accolades throughout his career, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for his ability to blend deep observation with literary artistry. While praised for his prose, his often unsparing portrayals of postcolonial nations and controversial statements sparked both admiration and criticism.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 20, 2020
There is no way not to give this trilogy at least 4 stars.
Naipaul was indeed an excellent and sharp-witted observer who so skillfully describes scenery and characters, you feel you know them personally. Whatever one may think of his general stances, his Nobel price was very well deserved.
That being said, however, the first two parts of the trilogy were so excessively unforgiving and negative, it took me forever to get through them. Naipaul having grown up in the diaspora as a young man travels to India and starts writing on it. Every page screams of his anguish and disgust stemming from the disconnect he feels from what should be the country of his heritage. At the point of writing he doesn't understand that there is a good chunk of shared history and lived reality that he just doesn't share with other Indians, a fact that prevents him from really understanding and appreciating the condition he finds the country and the people in short after independence. Whatever is going badly in India at that time he sees rooted in an intrinsic defect of India and Indians. In short, he is very much regarding India through a colonial lens.
How much disgust seeps through the lines describing the numbness of the poor, the condition of the infrastructure, completely disregarding that he's in a country that has basically been bled out for its resources for the last few centuries.
How little appreciation he sees in any effort put forth by the locals to cater to him and please him. A moment that stuck most in my mind is how he talks down on a young Shiv Sena activist who hosts him in their meeting office. Big effort is being taken to serve him a Coke (a Western drink, back then certainly only served to important guests). The Soda is too artificial tasting for him and warm on top. He proceeds to tell about the young activists life. How the young man from a village managed to come to Mumbai and after several other occupations attained a job in the AC area of the airport. A remarkable and unlikely achievement for a relatively uneducated villager at the time. Naipaul can only think to bemoan how little motivation Indians have to achieve more in life, baffled that the young man is proud and content with his occupation, and completely blind to the fact that the young man most likely has risen farther than he could ever have dreamed of.
In the first two parts of the trilogy Naipaul is very much the guest at a humble wedding who complains about how the wedding spread is not varied enough, how the flowers are not expensive enough, how the table cloths are not white enough and how there is no live band but only a stereo system. All while the humble couple low on money is doing their level to entertain their honored guest.
Naipaul himself, btw. admits to his early harshness in the third part of the trilogy. Visiting India in the 90s he is astonished at the leaps the country made technologically, in infrastructure and in science. And towards the end he does reflect a lot on his inner struggles as part of the diaspora having affected his early impressions and judgements of India significantly. He realizes that the damage of hundreds of years of colonialism couldn't be undone just in a few decades. India needed time to recover, and still does, but it's on its way.
For anybody with a serious interest in India and Indian modern history this trilogy is a must-read. The first two parts, however, are both to be taken with a large grain of salt. While literary excellent, they do reflect more of Naipaul's diaspora psychology, rather than fairly evaluating the situation of the country and its people. In the last part of the trilogy, with Naipaul being a lot more matured as a person and as a writer, and more reflective of himself, he finally finds a more leveled-headed view of the country.
Naipaul was indeed an excellent and sharp-witted observer who so skillfully describes scenery and characters, you feel you know them personally. Whatever one may think of his general stances, his Nobel price was very well deserved.
That being said, however, the first two parts of the trilogy were so excessively unforgiving and negative, it took me forever to get through them. Naipaul having grown up in the diaspora as a young man travels to India and starts writing on it. Every page screams of his anguish and disgust stemming from the disconnect he feels from what should be the country of his heritage. At the point of writing he doesn't understand that there is a good chunk of shared history and lived reality that he just doesn't share with other Indians, a fact that prevents him from really understanding and appreciating the condition he finds the country and the people in short after independence. Whatever is going badly in India at that time he sees rooted in an intrinsic defect of India and Indians. In short, he is very much regarding India through a colonial lens.
How much disgust seeps through the lines describing the numbness of the poor, the condition of the infrastructure, completely disregarding that he's in a country that has basically been bled out for its resources for the last few centuries.
How little appreciation he sees in any effort put forth by the locals to cater to him and please him. A moment that stuck most in my mind is how he talks down on a young Shiv Sena activist who hosts him in their meeting office. Big effort is being taken to serve him a Coke (a Western drink, back then certainly only served to important guests). The Soda is too artificial tasting for him and warm on top. He proceeds to tell about the young activists life. How the young man from a village managed to come to Mumbai and after several other occupations attained a job in the AC area of the airport. A remarkable and unlikely achievement for a relatively uneducated villager at the time. Naipaul can only think to bemoan how little motivation Indians have to achieve more in life, baffled that the young man is proud and content with his occupation, and completely blind to the fact that the young man most likely has risen farther than he could ever have dreamed of.
In the first two parts of the trilogy Naipaul is very much the guest at a humble wedding who complains about how the wedding spread is not varied enough, how the flowers are not expensive enough, how the table cloths are not white enough and how there is no live band but only a stereo system. All while the humble couple low on money is doing their level to entertain their honored guest.
Naipaul himself, btw. admits to his early harshness in the third part of the trilogy. Visiting India in the 90s he is astonished at the leaps the country made technologically, in infrastructure and in science. And towards the end he does reflect a lot on his inner struggles as part of the diaspora having affected his early impressions and judgements of India significantly. He realizes that the damage of hundreds of years of colonialism couldn't be undone just in a few decades. India needed time to recover, and still does, but it's on its way.
For anybody with a serious interest in India and Indian modern history this trilogy is a must-read. The first two parts, however, are both to be taken with a large grain of salt. While literary excellent, they do reflect more of Naipaul's diaspora psychology, rather than fairly evaluating the situation of the country and its people. In the last part of the trilogy, with Naipaul being a lot more matured as a person and as a writer, and more reflective of himself, he finally finds a more leveled-headed view of the country.
October 8, 2022
I was recommended this book when listening to a discussion on Indian culture throughout the ages, and how the Indian psyche was changed due to one conquest after another by different cultures.
I will try to review all the three books in one write up, but it’s such an monumental task, because the varied experiences which Naipaul had when travelling through the length and breadth of the country are rich, and Naipaul manages to give us all these experiences in such rich language that you can identify with everything which he says to us.
He travels from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and gives us the aspirations and feelings of common people on the ground, by giving us the characters he meets throughout his journey. He meets lot of people in these states and manages to capture the crux feeling across this state about the identity of India and its culture and how different experiences makes a country as a whole.
The trilogy starts pretty negatively when Naipaul first visits India, and his fantasy completely broken by the fact which he experiences on ground as to the license raj which was rampant in the country during that time.
The next time he visits is when the green revolution has succeeded in the country and we have started the march to some self reliance, but make no mistake he does not sugarcoat anything, but sometimes goes overboard for criticising some ideas which he finds as repugnant.
My favourite book was the last book which he visited the country in 2010 and saw a changing India which was trying to balance its glorious past to the present scientific situations going on throughout the world.
My only complaint was the author didn’t travel to north east and gives us some experience there, but overall I was awed by this trilogy.
This is a must read book for anyone who wants to understand India as a whole, but be prepared for some harsh words.
I give this book 5 stars.
I will try to review all the three books in one write up, but it’s such an monumental task, because the varied experiences which Naipaul had when travelling through the length and breadth of the country are rich, and Naipaul manages to give us all these experiences in such rich language that you can identify with everything which he says to us.
He travels from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and gives us the aspirations and feelings of common people on the ground, by giving us the characters he meets throughout his journey. He meets lot of people in these states and manages to capture the crux feeling across this state about the identity of India and its culture and how different experiences makes a country as a whole.
The trilogy starts pretty negatively when Naipaul first visits India, and his fantasy completely broken by the fact which he experiences on ground as to the license raj which was rampant in the country during that time.
The next time he visits is when the green revolution has succeeded in the country and we have started the march to some self reliance, but make no mistake he does not sugarcoat anything, but sometimes goes overboard for criticising some ideas which he finds as repugnant.
My favourite book was the last book which he visited the country in 2010 and saw a changing India which was trying to balance its glorious past to the present scientific situations going on throughout the world.
My only complaint was the author didn’t travel to north east and gives us some experience there, but overall I was awed by this trilogy.
This is a must read book for anyone who wants to understand India as a whole, but be prepared for some harsh words.
I give this book 5 stars.
Read
September 1, 2015The third book of V.S. Naipaul on India, written 26 years after the first one in 1962 and 13 after the second in 1975, again shifts its writing premises and tackles its subject with a distinctly different approach from the other two books: While those had held up India to some kind of standard and measured it against that (the reality usually falling spectacularly short), India: A Milltion Mutinies Now attempts to take India entirely on its own terms, to not present it as viewed from the distance of an observer or analyst but to let it speak for itself, in its own words. And quite literally so: Most of this book consists of interviews Naipaul led with a large variety of people he met while travelling. There still are passages of anecdotes and descriptions like in
An Area of Darkness
or of analysis like in
India: A Wounded Civilization. V.S. Naipaul
, but the bulk of of India: A Milltion Mutinies Now simply consists of people talking to Naipaul.
And of course it is not as simple as that: Immediacy is something hard to achieve and Naipaul, being the perceptive and scrupulous writer that he is, knows that very well, never forgetting to remind us that most of the interviews he presents us with have been filtered through translation. He constantly mentions and name-drops his translators until one gets the feeling that he is surrounded by them like a shark by pilot fish. Or maybe rather a turtle than a shark, for as has been often remarked, India: A Million Mutinies Now is not as biting in its criticism as the earlier books, seems even mellow in comparison. Personally, though, I think that first appearances are a bit deceptive here – a lot of this seeming mellowness is owed to the basic decision of presenting India and its people in their own words, and Naipaul hence chosing to let his interview partners destroy themselves rather than taking them apart by his commentary. He frequently shows that he can be as trenchant and incisive (not to mention nasty) as ever; and one cannot help but wonder whether the hopeful view of India’s future is really his or that of the people he interviews. Naipaul certainly perceives India in 1988 as a country in unrest and motion (the “million mutinies” of the title), seething with conflict and potentialities, but for my part I would be hesitant to say just how optimistic he really is about where this may lead for India’s future.
In any case, this is also is the by far longest of the three books, and at the same the most tightly structured: Each of its parts has its emphasis an a particular group or juxtaposition of groups (Sena, brahmin / anti-brahmin, scientists, boxwallah / Maoists, Sikh) each of which is located in a particular region centered around a city (Bombay, Goa, Bangalore, Madras, Calcutta, Chandigarh). And the latter is not just contingent, but touches an essential of those groups and the people that speak for them in this book – India: A Million Mutinies Now is as much a book about space as it is about people. About real as well as symbolical space and particularly the ways in which they intersect, as in the case of the high Sena official who prefers living in a small worker’s tenement because it puts him in contact with other people while a bourgeois apartment leaves him isolated. Again and again Naipaul emphasises the way architecture and spatial environment shape and influence social space, the people who live in an area, and again and again Naipaul returns to the cramped living conditions, many people sharing a small space, something that can be both a blessing and a curse: “He would show both places to me later from the roof terrace: the drama of small spaces and short distances, the settings themselves always accessible afterwards, never really out of sight, and perhaps for this reason cleansed (like stage sets) of the emotions they had once held.” The Indian people are defined by the spaces they grew up and live in, whether they confine themselves within them, try to break free of them or attempt to change them.
All of this fits together so very neatly that it immediately raises suspicion, and I believe is intended to: Paradoxically, this most experience-saturated and immediate of Naipaul’s books on India is also the most literary; and just by the way he has arranged his material, the author never lets us forget that this is not a simple reporting of facts but has been filtered and transformed into a work of art – the formal equivalent to the cloud of translators surrounding Naipaul on his forages into Indian life, both indicating a distance between Naipaul (and the reader) and his material, Entfremdung as well as Verfremdung, alienation both as being a stranger in a strange land as well as literary distancing technique.
In the final chapter of the book, Naipaul becomes his own tourist attraction when he returns to the hotel in Kashmir where he stayed for several months in 1962 and which he wrote about extensively in An Area of Darkness. His second visit is both nostalgic and merciless, the sepia colouring of memory never quite glossing over the continued disparagement of the people he encounters, nor the keen awareness of his own ridiculousness in these surroundings, among those people If this was a novel, it would be a metafictional twist, but with this being a travel book one has to wonder if there might be such a thing as meta-non-fiction and whether Naipaul may not have invented it. Whatever you want to call it, it marks the brilliant conclusion to a brilliant trilogy of travel books which deserve to be read as such even if one has no interest for their subject matter.
And of course it is not as simple as that: Immediacy is something hard to achieve and Naipaul, being the perceptive and scrupulous writer that he is, knows that very well, never forgetting to remind us that most of the interviews he presents us with have been filtered through translation. He constantly mentions and name-drops his translators until one gets the feeling that he is surrounded by them like a shark by pilot fish. Or maybe rather a turtle than a shark, for as has been often remarked, India: A Million Mutinies Now is not as biting in its criticism as the earlier books, seems even mellow in comparison. Personally, though, I think that first appearances are a bit deceptive here – a lot of this seeming mellowness is owed to the basic decision of presenting India and its people in their own words, and Naipaul hence chosing to let his interview partners destroy themselves rather than taking them apart by his commentary. He frequently shows that he can be as trenchant and incisive (not to mention nasty) as ever; and one cannot help but wonder whether the hopeful view of India’s future is really his or that of the people he interviews. Naipaul certainly perceives India in 1988 as a country in unrest and motion (the “million mutinies” of the title), seething with conflict and potentialities, but for my part I would be hesitant to say just how optimistic he really is about where this may lead for India’s future.
In any case, this is also is the by far longest of the three books, and at the same the most tightly structured: Each of its parts has its emphasis an a particular group or juxtaposition of groups (Sena, brahmin / anti-brahmin, scientists, boxwallah / Maoists, Sikh) each of which is located in a particular region centered around a city (Bombay, Goa, Bangalore, Madras, Calcutta, Chandigarh). And the latter is not just contingent, but touches an essential of those groups and the people that speak for them in this book – India: A Million Mutinies Now is as much a book about space as it is about people. About real as well as symbolical space and particularly the ways in which they intersect, as in the case of the high Sena official who prefers living in a small worker’s tenement because it puts him in contact with other people while a bourgeois apartment leaves him isolated. Again and again Naipaul emphasises the way architecture and spatial environment shape and influence social space, the people who live in an area, and again and again Naipaul returns to the cramped living conditions, many people sharing a small space, something that can be both a blessing and a curse: “He would show both places to me later from the roof terrace: the drama of small spaces and short distances, the settings themselves always accessible afterwards, never really out of sight, and perhaps for this reason cleansed (like stage sets) of the emotions they had once held.” The Indian people are defined by the spaces they grew up and live in, whether they confine themselves within them, try to break free of them or attempt to change them.
All of this fits together so very neatly that it immediately raises suspicion, and I believe is intended to: Paradoxically, this most experience-saturated and immediate of Naipaul’s books on India is also the most literary; and just by the way he has arranged his material, the author never lets us forget that this is not a simple reporting of facts but has been filtered and transformed into a work of art – the formal equivalent to the cloud of translators surrounding Naipaul on his forages into Indian life, both indicating a distance between Naipaul (and the reader) and his material, Entfremdung as well as Verfremdung, alienation both as being a stranger in a strange land as well as literary distancing technique.
In the final chapter of the book, Naipaul becomes his own tourist attraction when he returns to the hotel in Kashmir where he stayed for several months in 1962 and which he wrote about extensively in An Area of Darkness. His second visit is both nostalgic and merciless, the sepia colouring of memory never quite glossing over the continued disparagement of the people he encounters, nor the keen awareness of his own ridiculousness in these surroundings, among those people If this was a novel, it would be a metafictional twist, but with this being a travel book one has to wonder if there might be such a thing as meta-non-fiction and whether Naipaul may not have invented it. Whatever you want to call it, it marks the brilliant conclusion to a brilliant trilogy of travel books which deserve to be read as such even if one has no interest for their subject matter.
June 7, 2024
Beautiful, intriguing, insightful, resonates with my foreign eye on this country with the most intricate peoples and habits
May 2, 2025
Best Book
An eye opening book, everyone should read. It was written in 60s but rwlevent evwn toady in india. Ideological subversion should be studied.
An eye opening book, everyone should read. It was written in 60s but rwlevent evwn toady in india. Ideological subversion should be studied.
December 17, 2018
Naipaul is as high as his critics say and as stratospheric as his awards claim he is. I am so impressed by reading his long sentences with multiple uses of various punctuation; I find his descriptions of the numerous people and places that he encounters enriched by this combination.
Every chapter and sub-section of a chapter contains an examination of these people and places; and at this point, readers of this little screed might say, "Ho Hum-been there and read that." But the beauty of Naipaul's descriptions of the country he left but never left because of his life in Trinidad as an Indian migrant is so enriching for the reader.
This book's brilliance lies in this fact: he can describe a particular traveler's impressions of something passed over in a sentence or perhaps not even mentioned by other writers while Naipaul will devote a page, or more or a chapter's sub-section to its substance.
This book and the others in his Indian Trilogy are not to be passed over.
Every chapter and sub-section of a chapter contains an examination of these people and places; and at this point, readers of this little screed might say, "Ho Hum-been there and read that." But the beauty of Naipaul's descriptions of the country he left but never left because of his life in Trinidad as an Indian migrant is so enriching for the reader.
This book's brilliance lies in this fact: he can describe a particular traveler's impressions of something passed over in a sentence or perhaps not even mentioned by other writers while Naipaul will devote a page, or more or a chapter's sub-section to its substance.
This book and the others in his Indian Trilogy are not to be passed over.
January 24, 2024
Naipul writing cuts to the bone
Naipaul could well be considered the most perceptive and no-nonsense journalist of all time. These books are mandatory read for anybody to begin to understand India.
Naipaul could well be considered the most perceptive and no-nonsense journalist of all time. These books are mandatory read for anybody to begin to understand India.
December 23, 2023
See my review of "India: A Million Mutinies Now"
August 21, 2025
Wow, such a despairing look at India but with some great insight.
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