By V. S. Naipaul

Returning to India--the subject of his acclaimed "An Area of Darkness"--in 1975, Naipaul produced this concise masterpiece of journalism and cultural analysis, a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by repeated foreign invasions and immured in a mythic vision of its past. 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 a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of India. 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 5,000 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.

NY. Vintage. 1976. 161p.