India: A Wounded Civilization

De: V. S. Naipaul

Narrado por: Sam Dastor

Duración: 6 h y 41 m

Resumen del Editor

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.

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.

©1976, 1977 V. S. Naipaul (P)2021 by Blackstone Publishing

India history

Not as in depth as others I have read.
Still, a good synopsis of the glory days if this often overlooked country and people.

If you like sitting in a dentist’s chair …

To V.S. Naipaul, “Get over it.”
I seem to remember Sam Dastor as someone knowing his trade. Listening to “Kim” gave me that impression. Maybe it’s not his fault this book was a grind, but Naipaul’s. Paul Theroux got his measure in, “Sir Vidia’s Shadow.”

Wrong analysis of India’s problems

Naipaul correctly identifies some of the issues facing India in 1975 but his analysis is completely wrong. To many of the problems he finds the Indian culture and religion to be the root cause - this cannot be further from the truth. His understanding of Hinduism is very poor. His analysis and thoughts reek of deep rooted prejudice and racism towards Indians.