India: A Wounded Civilization

India: A Wounded Civilization PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307370623
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
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 before. Out of that journey he 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. Drawing on novels, news reports, and political memoirs -- but most of all on his conversations with ordinary Indians, from princes to engineers and feudal village autocrats -- Naipaul captures India’s manifold complexities.

India: A Wounded Civilization

India: A Wounded Civilization PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307370623
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
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 before. Out of that journey he 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. Drawing on novels, news reports, and political memoirs -- but most of all on his conversations with ordinary Indians, from princes to engineers and feudal village autocrats -- Naipaul captures India’s manifold complexities.

India

India PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9781509832125
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An area of darkness: Semi-autobiographical account of the author's first visit to India, the land of his forebears. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent

The Indian Trilogy

The Indian Trilogy PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1509852387
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 1169

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Book Description
AN AREA OF DARKNESS 'Brilliant ... tender, lyrical, explosive' Observer V.S. Naipaul was twenty-nine when he first visited India. This is his semi-autobiographical account-at once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered-a revelation both of the country and of himself. INDIA: A WOUNDED CIVILIZATION 'A devastating work, but proof that a novelist of Naipaul's stature can often define problems quicker and more effectively than a team of economists and other experts' The Times Prompted by the Emergency of 1975, Naipaul casts a more analytical eye, convinced that India, wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, has not yet found an ideology of regeneration. INDIA: A MILLION MUTINIES NOW 'Indispensable for anyone who wants seriously to come to grips with the experience of India' New York Times Book Review It is twenty-six years since Naipaul's first trip to India. Taking an anti-clockwise journey around the metropolises-including Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Delhi-he focuses on the country's development since Independence. The author recedes, allowing Indians to tell the stories, and a dynamic oral history of the country emerges.

An Area of Darkness

An Area of Darkness PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330529307
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The first book in V. S. Naipaul’s acclaimed Indian trilogy – with a preface by the author. An Area of Darkness is V. S. Naipaul’s semi-autobiographical account – at once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered – of his first visit to India, the land of his forebears. He was twenty-nine years old; he stayed for a year. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival in Prohibition-dry Bombay, bearing whisky and cheap brandy, he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent. It became for him a land of myths, an area of darkness closing up behind him as he travelled . . . The experience was not a pleasant one, but the pain the author suffered was creative rather than numbing, and engendered a masterful work of literature that provides a revelation both of India and of himself: a displaced person who paradoxically possesses a stronger sense of place than almost anyone. ‘His narrative skill is spectacular. One returns with pleasure to the slow hand-in-hand revelations of both India and himself’ – The Times

Malevolent Republic

Malevolent Republic PDF Author: K. S. Komireddi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 178738005X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
After decades of imperfect secularism, presided over by an often corrupt Congress establishment, Nehru's diverse republic has yielded to Hindu nationalism. India is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Since 2014, the ruling BJP has unleashed forces that are irreversibly transforming the country. Indian democracy, honed over decades, is now the chief enabler of Hindu extremism. Bigotry has been ennobled as a healthy form of self-assertion, and anti-Muslim vitriol has deluged the mainstream, with religious minorities living in terror of a vengeful majority. Congress now mimics Modi; other parties pray for a miracle. In this blistering critique of India from Indira Gandhi to the present, Komireddi lays bare the cowardly concessions to the Hindu right, convenient distortions of India's past and demeaning bribes to minorities that led to Modi's decisive electoral victory. If secularists fail to reclaim the republic from Hindu nationalists, Komireddi argues, India will become Pakistan by another name.

Among the Believers

Among the Believers PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307789306
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 595

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Book Description
The Nobel Prize-winning author gives us – on the basis of his own intensive seventeen month journey across the Asian continent – an unprecedented revelation of the Islamic world. • “A brilliant report…. A book of scathing inquiry and judgment, whose tragic power is being continually reinforced by current events” (Newsweek). With all the narrative power and intellectual authority that have distinguished his earlier books and won him international acclaim (“There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him” – Irving Howe, The New York Times Book Review), Naipaul explores the life, the culture, the ferment inside the nations of Islam – in a book that combines the fascinations of the great works of travel literature with the insights of a uniquely sharp, original, and idiosyncratic political mind. He takes us into four countries in the throes of “Islamization” – countries that, in their ardor to build new societies based entirely on the fundamental laws of Islam, have violently rejected the “materialism” of the technologically advanced nations that have long supported them. He brings us close to the people of Islam – how they live and work, the role of faith in their lives, how they see their place in the modern world.

The Enigma of Arrival

The Enigma of Arrival PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307744035
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The Nobel Prize-winning author distills his wide experience of countries and peoples into a moving account of the rites of passage endured by all people and all communities undergoing change or decay. • "Naipaul's finest work." —Chicago Tribune "A subtly incisive self-reckoning." —The Washington Post Book World The story of a writer’s singular journey – from one place to another, and from one state of mind to another. At the midpoint of the century, the narrator leaves the British colony of Trinidad and comes to the ancient countryside of England. And from within the story of this journey – of departure and arrival, alienation and familiarity, home and homelessness – the writer reveals how, cut off from his “first” life in Trinidad, he enters a “second childhood of seeing and learning.” Clearly autobiographical, yet woven through with remarkable invention, The Enigma of Arrival is as rich and complex as any novel we have had from this exceptional writer. "The conclusion is both heart-breaking and bracing: the only antidote to destruction—of dreams, of reality—is remembering. As eloquently as anyone now writing, Naipaul remembers." —Time "Far and away the most curious novel I've read in a long time, and maybe the most hypnotic book I've ever read." —St. Petersburg Times

A Writer's People

A Writer's People PDF Author: V.S. Naipaul
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330470531
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Part meditation, part remembrance, A Writer’s People by V. S. Naipaul is a privileged insight, full of gentleness, humour and feeling, into the mind of one of our greatest writers. For the ‘serious traveller’, one who is fully engaged with the world, there can be no single view. Our author’s purpose, then, ‘is not literary criticism or biography’, but only to set out the writing and ways of seeing to which he was exposed. So here is colonial Trinidad (the early Derek Walcott and Naipaul’s own father); the culture of school (Flaubert and the classical world); England, where with the help of friends the writer seeks to make his way; and, inevitably for a colonial Indian, there is India, to be approached through the residue of Indian culture and the scattered memories of nineteenth-century immigrants, leading to a special understanding of Mahatma Gandhi.

A Way in the World

A Way in the World PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307789292
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
The Nobel Prize-winning author—and "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angeles Times)—spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian … a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work."—The New York Times “Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.” So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum—that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp—which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in The Enigma of Arrival, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention. It is the story of a writer’s lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance — language, character, family history — and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: “things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.” What he writes — and what his release of memory enables us to see — is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh’s final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda’s disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator’s own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates to England, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling.

A Bend in the River

A Bend in the River PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0735277141
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
In the "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man — an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.