In 1964 V. S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness, his semi-autobiographical account of a year in India. Two visits later, prompted by the Emergency of 1975, he came to write India: A Wounded Civilization. In this work, he 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. What he saw and heard evoked so superbly and vividly in these pages reinforced in him a conviction that India, wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, had not yet found an ideology of regeneration. A work of fierce candour and precision, it is also a generous description of one mans complicated relationship with the country of his ancestors. The second book in V. S. Naipaul’s acclaimed Indian trilogy, India: A Wounded Civilization follows An Area of Darkness. The series concludes with India: A Million Mutinies Now. Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
