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 which he casts a more analytical eye over Indian attitudes. In this work, he recapitulates and further investigates the feelings that the vast, mysterious and agonised continent has previously aroused in him. What he sees and what he hears - evoked so superbly and vividly in this book - only reinforce in him his conviction that India, wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, has not yet found an ideology of regeneration.
`A devastating work` The Times
`Brilliant` Spectator