India Trilogy Series by V.S. Naipaul

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India... moreA classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India.Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul’s strikingly original responses to India’s paralyzing caste system, its apparently serene acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. The result may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.From the Trade Paperback edition. less

Returning to India -- the subject of his acclaimed An Area of Darkness -- in 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi's Emergency, V. S. Naipaul 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... moreReturning to India -- the subject of his acclaimed An Area of Darkness -- in 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi's Emergency, V. S. Naipaul 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 to feudal village autocrats -- Naipaul captures India's manifold complexities. less

Naipaul, of Indian heritage, was born and raised in Trinidad, but he recognized that it was his ancestral culture that governed who he was and how he thought. In this passionate portrait of a culture, a society, and a country, he returns to India, a nation in turmoil.