India; a wounded civilization - Tapa dura

With the publication of Guerrillas (which the New York Times Book Review hailed as "probably the best novel of 1975"), V. S. Naipaul achieved the recognition in America that has long been granted him elsewhere as on of the foremost writers in the English language. Born in Trinidad, he now returns to the land of his family's past and, in a series of fascinating personal encounters, reveals with extraordinary brilliance the India of Indira Gandhi, the "wounded civilization" that is at last facing its own inadequacies, its lack of coherent political ideals, the blankness of its decayed civilization, the pressures of its crumbling democracy, the possibility of a new India emerging in the modern world. He brings us to the shattering India of huge, overpopulated cities (1,500 more people crowding into Bombay each day, over 100,000 sleeping on the streets), into the conversations of intellectuals, of confused, frightened middle-class people ("For people who live like us, it's all over"), of journalists (forfeiting freedoms while enlarging their responsibilities, finally presenting the realities of India to the Indian people), of theorists, bureaucrats, the engineers and other enthusiastic doers trying to import from the larger, restless world the crucial tools of survival. He makes us perceive the delicate problems of intermediate technology: irrigation as not just a matter of land-leveling but of remaking men so that they can appreciate the simplest advances, of bringing them back from the self-wounding that comes with established destitution, with a society where rituals totally regulate the will, where caste and clan totally define an individual, inducing a collective amnesia, blurring the past to the people. He makes evident the pervasive influence of Hinduism, which has exposed Indians to a thousand years of stagnation and defeat, teaching them to relish distress as religious theater, as the arena of karma.