But it is with his Indian love affair that we are most concerned. Naipaul, the grandson of an Indian exile, is a sensitive soul who grappled with the idea of India long before he visited it and then kept grappling with himself and his many ideas of India again and again. We worry, we admire, we get angry, we get delighted, but we are never bored with the strange mirror he holds up to us as he gives us RIs (my newly coined term for Resident Indians) a guided tour of our own country. The mirror is alternately ironic, irritating, condemnatory and occasionally even laced with a little bit of praise. The India of the ’60s that he first visited was not just a disappointment but a malignant blister inflicted on his soul. He found nothing to admire, everything to reinforce a morbid pessimism. Had he actually stumbled on a place that was more hopeless, pointless and deadening than Trinidad? And given the size of India, this utterly negative setting where thin-legged dwarfs inhabited a continent without hope was actually a monumental disaster that could not be ignored just as an afterthought as one might a small Caribbean island.

While An Area of Darkness had the hallmark Naipaul style of bleak description that is almost an end in itself, in India: A Wounded Civilization one discovers a great deal more of analysis. I can never forget the incident at Hampi where Naipaul meets college students who have no knowledge at all of the history of that once-glorious, now-ruined city. Simultaneously, Naipaul seems to understand, condemn and even sympathise with these contemporary ignoramuses. Bereft of an interest in their own history, condemned to live in dirt and squalor without even being aware of it (elsewhere Naipaul has mentioned that an Indian who has not travelled abroad cannot and does not know what civic cleanliness means and hence does not mind its absence; Gandhi was intensely aware of it precisely because he had lived outside India for so long), their conversations resembling the pathetic characters of an ill-staged absurd drama, these inheritors of a wounded civilisation were not only living in a dark country but were actually blind so that they could recognise neither darkness nor light.

... contd.