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India Trilogy #1

An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India

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The Nobel Prize-winning author’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India.

“Whatever his literary form, Naipaul is a master.” — The New York Review of Books

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 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.

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

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About the author

V.S. Naipaul

140 books1,624 followers
Naipaul was born and raised in Trinidad, to which his grandfathers had emigrated from India as indentured servants. He is known for the wistfully comic early novels of Trinidad, the bleaker novels of a wider world remade by the passage of peoples, and the vigilant chronicles of his life and travels, all written in characteristic, widely admired, prose.

At 17, he won a Trinidad Government scholarship to study abroad. In the introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition of A House for Mr. Biswas, he reflected that the scholarship would have allowed him to study any subject at any institution of higher learning in the British Commonwealth, but that he chose to go to Oxford to do a simple degree in English. He went, he wrote, "in order at last to write...." In August 1950, Naipaul boarded a Pan Am flight to New York, continuing the next day by boat to London.

50 years later, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad "V. S." Naipaul was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 199 reviews
Profile Image for Murtaza .
680 reviews3,393 followers
May 8, 2019
This is the first book by Naipaul that has helped me understand why people disliked him so much. It's an insufferably arrogant account of a traveler through India who does not speak the language and has no meaningful understanding of its history. He goes purely by gut and what he produces is an astoundingly negative portrait. He depicts India as a grotesque dystopia, doomed by its fatalism to eternal misery. We can see in retrospect that this judgement was a bit hasty.

I couldn't get over the fact that Naipaul repeatedly seems to lampoon Indians for their broken English, when he himself is the outsider who cannot understand the language of the land that he is visiting. He had truly internalized the idea of himself as a Britisher for whom mastery of English is the most important sign of humanity. His historical analysis of India is flailing and haphazard. He doesn't seem to evince any knowledge of the place other than what he may have picked up from a few other English writers. In this book, for once, Naipaul truly plays the role of the native informant reporting back to the colonizers about the terrible ways of their former subjects. The only redeeming thing he sees in India are its British remnants. Even this miserable sentiment is not articulated in any particularly poignant or convincing way.

I've always credited Indians for their surprising willingness over the years to be lectured by Naipaul about their shortcomings. This despite the fact that he was essentially a perceptive tourist rather than an expert. I was somewhat surprised, then, to see that this book was actually banned in India for a long time due to its negative portrayals of the land and its peoples. No doubt the portrayals were negative, even to the point of being unfair and untrue. Nonetheless even unfair criticisms can have a certain utility. This was one of Naipaul's early books and he did improve over time. I usually enjoy his writing even when I disagree with him. As it seems, it took him a little while to develop his craft. He may have been too overwhelmed by what he saw on this trip to focus on articulating himself to his full ability. As such the writing was really unremarkable. The only reason I can imagine the book to have been popular at the time was for its political utility.
Profile Image for Paul Bryant.
2,280 reviews10.6k followers
August 25, 2013
O my God, did V S Naipaul get out of bed the wrong side every single day of his life? His Mr Grumpy routine gets so tiring you wish you could visit a poor woodworker in Delhi with him just so you could grab him and force his head into a vice and leave him there. ("Not letting you out till you cheer up old boy!"). The next time VS Naipaul rings me up and suggests a swift half of Tetley's at The Gladstone I'm going to tell him to call round at my house first. Then when he turns up I'm going to chloroform him, drag him into a white van, drive him to an abandoned warehouse (these things always take place in abandoned warehouses), bind him to a chair, and when he wakes up compel him to watch all seven series of Curb Your Enthusiasm back to back without a break, then truss him up like a turkey again, drive to the nearest motorway services, wait for an open-topped lorry with any kind of vegetables in it and shove him in there with just one foot exposed. The last bit would be my homage to Hitchcock's Frenzy, which is his last great film.

If that doesn't cheer him up, nothing will.
Profile Image for Bishan Samaddar.
8 reviews11 followers
June 2, 2011
If you are an Indian, this book is one of the most difficult things you can read. The difficulty arises from the undeniable truth in what Mr Naipaul writes. You resist that truth but are forced to acknowledge it as well. It is uncomfortable: that someone (an outsider?) can see that overwhelming reality of circadian Indian existence—and what lies beneath it—and articulate it so well is not easy to accept perhaps. But one is moved to accept it. Widely criticized for its negativity, this book actually shines in darkness. There is anger, there is resentment, stupefaction, disbelief, disgust, yet there is awe. It is not a hands-off review of a weird and hopeless nation but a concerned critique of a staggering civilization. Reading this book is a starting point of understanding India. It is highly recommended to those who are interested in India, and absolutely essential for those who love India.
Profile Image for Dmitri.
216 reviews190 followers
February 28, 2024
Written during the demoralizing conflict with China in 1962, this is the first volume of V S Naipaul's trilogy on India and his second major work of non-fiction. Interestingly, it was banned on the subcontinent for a 'negative portrayal of India and its people', earning the special distinction of a bad book review from a sovereign nation. In this travelogue Naipaul turns his gaze on a country he sees wallowing in squalor and split by caste divisions. He is unsparingly critical in his initial assessment.

Although it presents an unflattering portrait of his ancestral homeland, this may be the best of the three works. His approach to the genre seems to still be under development. The style differs from his later trips, which paint a vast panorama through extensive interviews. Instead this is a powerful series of personal narratives, culled from a year of travel. Naipaul is at the center of the story told in this book. There is a dark humor in his early voice, and a poetry that would later to be lost.

If you didn't know Naipaul was Indian (or even Trinidadian) you might mistake him for upper class British. He went to Oxford and lived in London, and he peers down upon the natives he meets in the former colonies. It's not always certain that the comical results are intentional. Knowing Naipaul from his other work, he is likely quite serious in his outlook. En route to Bombay he delivers scathing comments on Egypt, Arabia and Pakistan, setting an acerbic tone for encounters to come.

Once in India, Naipaul embarks on a wide ranging cultural journey. Memories of his youth in Trinidad mingle with vignettes about bureaucrats, anglophiles, noveau riche, avante garde, poseurs and expatriates. Naipaul finds fear and contempt in the urban degradation and rural poverty. He describes the professional beggars, the sidewalk sleepers, outdoor defecators, holy fakirs, work shirkers and crooked merchants. How these threads are tied together is a mystery only Naipaul can unravel.

Leaving Bombay, Naipaul visits Delhi. A stay with a wealthy housewife is the beginning of a short story. A sojourn on a Kashmir houseboat becomes a novella. A pilgrimage to the Himalayas begets a tale of adventure, a side trip to Simla bequeaths an essay on Kipling and Forster. Naipaul moves about a fabled countryside and revisits the literary landscape of his imaginary India. An awareness is awakened; he may never return to his lost homeland.

At the end of his travels, Naipaul visits the Brahmin village his grandfather left behind more than sixty years before. In their appearance he recognizes the faces of family from his childhood past. We are returned to the first chapter on his early life. In this book ordinary words and acts have been transformed into literary catharsis. Not content to examine the lives of others, his vision is turned within. One thing is certain, that Naipaul could write.
Profile Image for Sandhya.
131 reviews381 followers
July 22, 2008
V. S Naipaul has always been a controversial figure. Whether it is for his rude behaviour towards fellow writers at conferences or his show of support for India's Hindutva ring, Bharatiya Janata Party or his admission in his autobiography that his callousness killed his wife, this Trinidadian author has always been some sort of an enfant terrible of English literature. For all his genius, he also remains a vilified figure in India and not without reason. The Area of Darkness, when it was published in 1964, created an uproar among Indians and was intensely criticised for its unkind, deriding and supercilious view of India.

Naipaul's literature, much like his personality demonstrates a certain extremism -where there are few or no grey areas. And that is most evident in The Area of Darkness. (His subsequent work, India; A Million Mutinies Now was a far more objective and detailed read -in many ways, this is his best book, apart from A House For Mr Biswas). The book is about how Naipaul built a 'mythical' image about India staying in Trinidad (Naipaul's grandfather was from India and they re-located to West Indies - in a small British colony called Trinidad) and how his one-year visit to India shattered his childhood image of the country. The entire experience is a deeply personal one -- and Naipaul himself behaves like a rather fussy, ungenerous foreign-returned guy(he was just about 30 years old) who criticises the loss of his 'imagined world' without bothering to delve into the reasons for it. This was a plundered country that was struggling to fight its colonial past and tackle some enormous problems at hand.

.....readers can read the rest on my blog, www.sandyi.blogspot.com
Profile Image for Sunil.
170 reviews65 followers
February 15, 2008
There was a time when I loathed Naipaul, wondering how someone never born and brought up in India can pass such judgements on her so unabatedly, but of course I was naive.
Am older and less of a spring-chicken now in such matters.Now, If there is someone whose judgement on India I give a true fuck about these days it has to be his ( Well, may be along with Upamanyu Chatterjees). The rest are mediocre scum floating in their vast post-modern mediocrity. As Vidia himself put-India does revel in its own unparalleled levels of mediocrity and any mediocre success that comes out of it is despite all mediocre efforts to prevent it or achieve it in the first place!
I am sure the book is hated in India and by Indian journalists/reviewers ; surely nothing could speak better for the book.
Profile Image for Daren.
1,391 reviews4,440 followers
January 7, 2015
A year spent in India in the early 60's, by Naipaul - born in Trinidad to parents of Indian heritage - his grandfather emigrated to Trinidad.
It is quite true Naipaul is incredibly negative, pessimistic and critical of India. It is difficult to expose anything he says as false however. Although negative, he has a wonderful writing style, and tells a good story, although some of his transitions leave me a bit bewildered, and there is a section of ranting I didn't grasp the point of in the middle there somewhere.
Profile Image for notgettingenough .
1,052 reviews1,264 followers
April 5, 2016
If one can imagine the difficulties Naipaul suffers now in a period in which the principle of 'free speech' is being eroded by nice white people to 'you can say what you like as long as we agree with it', it speaks buckets for this book that he experienced the 'censorship of the offended' the very moment it appeared. Banned in India and still banned over fifty years later.

This sits badly with me, not only because of the issue of free speech, but also because he didn't look at all at the side of India which is truly dark. He could so easily have talked of the violence and exploitation, but he left it unsaid. He spoke only of what he saw and how he felt. A travelogue filled with angst, not only towards the India which so upset him, but also towards himself. No doubt one learns a lot about one's own inadequacies in such a situation and Naipaul doesn't shrink from them one bit. I don't really understand why people who see this as only a personal critique of India, don't understand this. Neither writer nor subject come off well in this encounter. There are only losers, but why should it be any other way?

For the rest, please go here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...
Profile Image for Jayakrishnan.
504 reviews192 followers
May 19, 2022
Naipaul, with his tremendous will power wrote a book that still holds the most humbling and relevant truths about India. While it is not a pleasant read, it must have inspired many Indians to better themselves. Naipaul applied the stick. He felt Indians deserved no carrots.

For me the East had begun weeks before. Even in Greece I had felt Europe falling away. There was the East in the food, the emphasis on sweets, some of which I knew from my childhood; in the posters for Indian films with the actress Nargis, a favourite, I was told, of Greek audiences; in the instantaneous friendships, the invitations to meals and homes. Greece was a preparation for Egypt: Alexandria at sunset, a wide shining arc in the winter sea; beyond the breakwaters, a glimpse through fine rain of the ex-king’s white yacht; the ship’s engine cut off; then abruptly, as at a signal, a roar from the quay, shouting and quarrelling and jabbering from men in grubby jibbahs who in an instant overran the already crowded ship and kept on running through it. And it was clear that here, and not in Greece, the East began: in this chaos of uneconomical movement, the self-stimulated din, the sudden feeling of insecurity, the conviction that all men were not brothers and that luggage was in danger.

Nearly sixty years after this book was first published, India is still in a crisis situation. Naipaul's prediction that India is a disintegrating civilization might soon be fulfilled.
Profile Image for Jigar Brahmbhatt.
297 reviews144 followers
July 9, 2017
Observation was a key to Naipaul's oeuvre. To venture among a people, to talk to them, to find out everyday drama, to unearth "suppressed histories" (a term used by the Nobel committee), and to ultimately look... from a certain vantage point that kept changing over the years. In the recent Dhaka lit fest, he mentioned that the three books on India are not a journey into the development of a nation but into the development of a writer. He was being metaphorical. It is ultimately a way of looking. And it is a stern gaze, not given to sentiments or available narratives, always scrutinizing, and at times wicked (which may have caused outrage when this book came out).

He sees people defecating everywhere, and then in a club a posh lady tells him otherwise. He understands that she does't really look, or perhaps overlook. It helps that he has not matured in India, so that he can have a fresh approach to the country, and comes to uneasy conclusions about its people. In a train when a man meets him, "he asked me the Indian questions: where did I come from? what did I do?" People in Britain didn't bother. Trinidad was a different story altogether. In Kashmir, a journey is shared with a family of Brahmins in a bus. He sees how the patriarch observes the ruins and concludes "it is a cave used by pandavas." The family nodes and ambles around the ruins. They are not interested in the ruins, Naipaul observes. Food is served and cleanliness is questioned, in fact it is question everywhere. It is supposed to make us feel bad. But we are aware of it now. There are films being made on a need for proper toilets in villages, nearly fifty years after his remarks.

In a small hotel in Kashmir, a group of devotees accompanying a guru is described with biting wit, and it seems cruel, but not untrue. In Chennai, at the theosophical society a man is giving an important-sounding speech about occult and Annie Basant, and Naipaul tells us: two men in the audience were dozing. His curiosity about the Aurobindo Ashram takes him to Pondicherry. He learns that Mother rarely gives darshan and buys a booklet to learn more, and then he decides to share an information which is hilarious. In one of the question-answer sessions, Aurobindo explained to a devotee that Mother was not really angry at him, but was merely concentrating, which appeared as displeasure to the devotee. Naipaul reads "an occasional impatience" in Aurobindo's response. The idea of super-consciousness (or whatever the west is looking for in the east) is ridiculed. It can make us feel bad if we allow it to. It is a comedy at one level. Apart from his need for a clear gaze and prose, he is a caricaturist too.

Some instances, like the Sikh ranting about Dravidians, seem too good a find for Naipaul to be true. He is in the South, wants to explore the Dravidian/Aryan notions, and conveniently finds a man who helps create a bit of drama, provides fodder sort of. Even if it is inventive it gets the job done. He mentions how when a certain Chou En-lai had promised the city of Culcutta as a present to the Chinese people, the Tamil folks, "despite their objection to Hindi, were already learning Chinese". He has a knack for finding old documents, going against popular history, and coming up with a view all his own. He provides funny anecdotes about how soldiers who grew up on nonviolance had to be aroused to fight the Chinese.

Sometimes he behaves like a whining Sahib: the trees were "disfigured by the Indian dust", or other complains that would seem irrelevant to an unassuming, seasoned Indian. At the ghats of Banaras near the pyres, "above occasional blazes... family groups smiled and chattered." Well, what else do you expect? The dead are dead. This book does not describe India as it is, but India as it looks, to him. He hits some notes and misses some, and that too is subjective. The hotel sequence in Kashmir is easily my favorite, especially the character of a caretaker named Aziz. It can work as a comic novella in itself.

Why is the country called an Area of Darkness? It is a personal metaphor more than anything else, and the disillusionment, unlike the now-famous story, may not have been the result of his first visit to India. It seemed to have begun years back.

At the end of the book I was left with a nagging doubt, too serious to leave out in this write-up: is semicolon important? Naipaul's elegant use of it in this book seems at war with Kurt Vonnegut's hatred for the "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing". I had learned to phrase such that a semicolon would never be required; here, I just used it and the paragraph still looks okay. But I am not sure. I feel stranded in an in-between zone - my own area of darkness.
Profile Image for John.
1,284 reviews107 followers
September 26, 2021
Naipaul’s descriptions of his year in India during 1962 are of frustration and of a man being like a fish out of water. Naipaul frustration of the religious caste system and its rigid structure make him a grumpy man. The inability or unwillingness to do anything outside your job description is foreign to me.

His battle to get his two bottles of booze in Bombay have him filling out forms and going from one office to another. His amazement about defecation and uncleanliness of India is evident in his writings.

The travelogue is fascinating with descriptions of a Kashmir and the Hotel Liward on the Dal lake probably now gone. His continual battle of with Aziz at the hotel is both sad and amusing. The pilgrimage to Amaranath and the incident with the ghora wallah or pony man was funny especially when he asked Naipaul for bakshishi.

The racist Sikh, the invasion by China and the acceptance of the population of defeat. The Commissioner trying to get people to forget about tolerance and non violence and the failure of Gandhi to create an egalitarian society all add to the story Naipaul tells and the aptly right title ‘An Area of Darkness’.

The frustration Naipaul feels is reflected in the visit to his Grandfather’s village. The last sentence of that chapter perhaps reflects that visit to India ‘So it ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.’

Having read two more books of his travels to India by Naipaul I can say his frustration was still apparent but also more acceptance and tolerance.
Profile Image for John.
2,059 reviews196 followers
August 15, 2021
A travel narrative that just never really made it onto my radar until Audible released a new edition via Audible Plus recently, read by veteran narrator Simon Vance.

Can't put my finger on it, but I was so willing for the book to just end that I sped up the narration to 1.25x (I rarely tinker with those settings). To some extent it was Vance's narration, which is excellent for novels, but perhaps a bit "dramatic" here? However, I'm going to assign most of the issue to the underlying text, too much fault-finding I suppose. There were scenes that should've been funny, but just weren't. If you're familiar with Paul Theroux, it's similar to him at his crankiest.

Individually, the stories are well-written. I've been interested in the issue of "foreign" Desi identity for a while. Years ago I asked a friend raised there, and his dad who never left, whether they considered Asians from colonial-era diaspora families (Trinidad, etc) "the same"? Father "Yes, of course" and son "No!" I've never heard Naipaul speak, assuming it was what is now called RP. This is where I admit that listening to Vance, I had to consciously remind myself that the author was not white. So, while probably inaccurate, it may have been better to have had the book read in an Indian accent?

I would recommend this one, though with breaks between each chapter or two.
455 reviews13 followers
July 12, 2013
In his native Trinidad Naipaul had always somehow been of India without being Indian. After 12 years in London, and possibly in an attempt to regain some sense of his own roots, he decided to take a sabbatical year in India in 1962. This book is the fruit of that year.
It begins inauspiciously enough with some amusing but not too jarring description of the endless troubles involved in bringing a bottle of liquor into India. We've all heard of India's elephantine bureaucracy, and Naipaul confirms to us that this is (was?) the case. Of much greater interest are the little fables he weaves to explain his view of how in India function is more important than action (i.e., ritual cleanliness is much more important than actual cleanliness) and gestures count more than reality (although this is common to many third world countries). Contrary to the impression a foreigner might have of chaos and aimlessness, India is in fact strictly regulated to a degree unknown in the West. Everyone has a place and a function, and such place and function are infinitely more significant to an Indian than what a Westerner's profession or skin colour might be to him. This provides a transition to another of Naipaul's interests, which is the nature of the relationship between the Indian Republic and the British Raj. According to Naipaul, the idea of Britishness is inextricably bound up with the Indian empire, and the British created themselves as an imperial people with a God-given mission, even as they created the Indians as a subordinate (inferior) race and state. Bound up with these deep meditations are the stories of his dealings with various landlords and hoteliers. Particularly amusing is his running relationship with the staff of a small hotel on Dal Lake, in Northern India, where he experiences the mutual dependency between masters and servants familiar to russian and ancient regime writers. He (the master) is often abused by the staff (the servants) and forced to perform meaningless or denigrating activities. The staff, however, treat him with an almost comical respect when confronted by third parties. Clearly the servants derive their respect from the respect shown to their master. The relationship is almost medieval.

And this is Naipaul's next point. India is not a modern country because there is no sense of the passage of time, but rather passive acceptance of everything, and an escape into the land of imagination to compensate for what otherwise would be a reality too painful to bear (but again, this is also a feature of other third world countries such as that of Colombia, and a source of Magical Realism a la Garcia Marquez).

The book's final part has a fascinating reflection on the nature of English writing on India and Indian writing. Naipaul disparages virtually all literary creation in the sub-continent (with a couple of minor exceptions including Narayan). He likes Kipling and has no clear opinion on Forster (he would eventually develop a strongly critical perspective on this author as well, deeply tinged by his antipathy to the writer's homosexuality). The ending is bleak, punctuated by his frightening falling in with a racist Sikh (who is a dead ringer for Europe's skinheads of a decade later) and a depressive visit to his grandfather's hometown, when he realizes that the distance between himself and India is unbridgeable. The backdrop is provided by the Chinese invasion and Indian defeat (this defeat is the last of endless defeats over the past millenium, and an emblem for them all).

The book, although picturesque in some points is extremely bleak and really justifies Naipaul's famed ability to stare at reality in the face, and not flinch. Whoever believes Naipaul has singled the Muslims for special abuse (in such works as "Among the Believers" and "The Suffrage of Elvira") only needs to read this disconsolate book (his first of a couple) on his own homeland to confirm that Naipaul does not believe in playing favourites, and will shine the passionately cold light of his wit on everything that catches his eye. The book is in parts obscure and disorganized, but very insightful. This reviewer shared Naipaul's sense of grossness and void, as he contemplates utter misery and hopelessness (this is a feeling many peoples might have today: former Zaireans, Sudanese, Palestinians, Colombians, Bhurmans, to name just a few). His refusal to compromise is not fuelled by self-hatred (as has been suggested by some commentators) but rather by a powerful self-awareness. It's no wonder many Indians hated the book. Not being Indian, and not therefore needing to be appeased, I liked it very much.
Profile Image for Alejandro Teruel.
1,199 reviews231 followers
June 2, 2013
V.S. Naipaul caustically spins out, at arm´s distance, in silky, spidery prose, his accumulated frustrations, bitterness and resentments. Born in Trinidad, the grandson of a brahmin immigrant, he exemplifies the constant, dull, poignant unease of flimsy, shallow postcolonial roots triply severed from a childhood in Trinidad, a garbled, crumbling heritage from India foisted on a child that knew no better and a half-hearted yearning for an England that never was:
To me as a child the India that had produced so many of the persons and things around me was featureless, and I thought of the time when the transference was made as a period of darkness
[...]
And even now, though time has widened, though space has contracted and I have travelled lucidly over that area which was to me the area of darkness, something of that darkness remains, in those attitudes, those ways of thinking and seeing, which are no longer mine [...]
I came to London. It had become the centre of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. London was not the centre of my world
[...]
But we did not take a houseboat. Their relics were still too movingly personal. Their romance was not mine, and it was impossible to separate them from their romance. I would have felt an intruder [...] I was not English or Indian; I was denied the victory of both.
One feels Naipaul´s grim, tight-lipped incantation "I shall go to India, I shall not like it, I will expose and destroy whatever childhood fantasies about India still lurk in the dark recesses of my makeshift patchwork identity". So the nameless, phantom-accompanied, narrator spends a year in India; after a few cautious, desultory sniffs around New Delhi, he flees into glorious, poisonous seclusion at a lakeside hotel in Kashmir -that seems to be the main extent of his exploration of India. To escape the invasion of the hotel by a rich brahmin family in the clutches of a worldly holy man, he goes on a himalayan pilgrimage to Amarnath Cave to see a "massive ice phallus", but in a typical twist of the novel, at the mouth of the cavern:
Individual advance or retreat was impossible; a woman was sobbing with terror. I climbed up and held on to the iron railing: I could see only crowd and a low rock vault blackened by damp or incense. I climbed back down again [...] No sight of the god, then, for me: I would sit it out.
Suddenly, Naipaul sets everything aside and inserts a prolonged, fascinating and twisted literary reflection on Fantasy and ruins trying to pin down exacty what British Empire meant for England, for Trinidad and for India:
With one part of myself I felt the coming together of England and India as a violation; with the other I saw it as ridiculous, resulting in a comic mixture of costumes and the widespread use of an imperfectly understood language.
In a whirlwind of endeavour, the narrator ushers in Kipling, undermines him with an observation by Ada Leverson and a dismissive, cutting remark by Somerset Maugham, trips us up on E. M Forster, bedazzles us with a brief aside on British travel-writing in the nineteenth century, berates G. M. Trevelelyan for setting aside a mere page and a half to how the possession of an empire influenced British attitudes in the nineteenth century in his work on English Social History, "regarded, I believe," stage-whispers Naipaul with heavy irony "as a classic.":
So, at the height of their power, the British gave the impression of a people at play, a people playing at being English, playing at being English of a certain class. The reality conceals the play; the play conceals the reality.
Now Naipaul is getting into his stride, and his alter ego lashes out at what he considers are feeble, "stupefied" Indian attempts to adopt alien art forms:
...perhaps the British are responsable for this Indian artistic failure, which is part of of the general Indian bewilderment, in the way the Spaniards were responsible for the stupefaction of the Mexicans and the Peruvians.
He dismisses Indian novels in one fell sweep:
Indian attempts at the novel further reveal the Indian confusion. The novel is of the West. It is part of that Western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now. In India thoughtful men have preferred to turn their backs on the here and now and to satisfy what President Rahhakrishnan calls ´the basic human hunger for the unseen´. It is not a good qualification for the writing or reading of novels.
saving only R. K. Narayan:
Indian failings magically transmuted [...] forever rescued by his honesty, his sense of humour and above all by his attitude of total acceptance
and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala ("And she is European", he adds sardonically).

His resentment propels him into becoming a coy sidekick to a hate-filled, racially intolerant, increasingly violent Sikh, from which he finally, reluctantly and relievedly separates. Finally, after his lengthy procastrination, he crosses India to half-heartedly visit his grandfather´s home village in Uttar Pradesh and even before setting his foot in the town he is bidding it good riddance:
One journey remained, and for this I had lost taste. India had not worked its magic on me [...] it was closing up again, as fast as I withdrew from it [...] In a year I had not learned acceptance. I had learned my separateness from India, and was content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors.
So he buffers himself with IAS officials and in a week long visit to the area, reduces his visit to his ancestors´village, where he still has distant family, to a mere day and a half. So ends his trip to India, as, in my opinion, it started:
...in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight[...]It was a journey that ought not to have been made
Only in Arthur Koestler´s The Lotus and the Robot does one find such a violent reaction against India, and Koestler is reacting against what he perceived to be sham spirituality, against nonsense and filth dressed up as religious sentiment; in Naipaul, his narrator twin seems to be in complete, preemptive denial of anything that could tie him to India.

In short, be forewarned, to read this book is to be reeled into a brilliant dew-dropped web in the centre of which lurks a quivering, poisonous, alienated spider.
Profile Image for Sharon Barrow Wilfong.
1,119 reviews3,954 followers
February 2, 2017
I do not recall how I came to own An Area of Darkness by V.S. Naipaul. It's not a genre I normally read, but I did own it, and having it I decided to give it a try. It was worth it.


At first I was put off by the lack of emotion in the narrator's voice. He spoke of his family, his upbringing on the island of Trinidad, his family's Indian heritage, all as though he were an alien who was making observations and taking notes to report back to his home planet ("species seem to believe in many gods.....caste system...certain cultural values differ from fellow inhabitants of the island...").


As his journey progressed, for it was a journey on several levels, he became, if not more emotionally involved, at least interested.


And interesting. I have never traveled to India, although I did live in the Caribbean not far from Trinidad. My landlady and her family in Grenada were Indian and also from Trinidad. If I had not lived there I would not have known what a significant percentage of the population on the East Indian islands are descendants from India.


So I started reading the book with some understanding as to where the author was coming from. Naipual wrote this book in 1962-64 and I think some of his experience was different than the many Indians I interacted with on Grenada.


For one, he speaks of feeling something of a foreigner even though he grew up there. I lived on Grenada in the nineties and the Indians I met had absorbed the culture. They were Christians, regular church goers and interacted easily with other racial groups (mostly of African descent but also European). Naipaul's grandparents immigrated to Trinidad so he was closer in spirit to the home country. Or so he thought.


An Area of Darkness is Naipaul's record of his travels to India and his experiences there. He learned quickly that he was as foreign as any European. There were many cultural conflicts.


He quickly tired of the class system. He describes another Indian/European's frustration when he tried to get work done but was not getting his letters mailed quickly enough. He called in the clerk who took down his dictation to solve the problem.


"The secretary has many letters to write and she is backed up, so sorry."


"What do you mean? You take the dictation. Write out these letters for me so I can send them out. They are urgent."


"That is not my job. That is the secretary's job."


"It is now your job. Write out these letters and send them out."


Stubborn silence and noncompliance. Reporting his clerk to the job bureau accomplished nothing. So he called in his clerk again.


"I need to write another letter. Please scribe. "You're fired." Deliver that to the secretary and put it on the top of her pile as priority."


The clerk, realizing that if he gave such a letter to the secretary he would be humiliated, ran off and wrote out all the letters for the man. That is how things operated in India.


Another time he was in a train and had the bottom bunk. This is a coveted bunk because climbing up and down to the upper bunk was considered too much effort and beneath the dignity of the class of Indians who could afford to have a bunk while traveling on a train. The man assigned to the bunk above him was put out.


Naipaul who considered the lower bunk an inconvenience offered to change places with him. The man gladly agreed.


But the man remained seated on the upper bunk. By this time the train had already moved off and the porters had left the train, which meant the passengers would have to move their own belongings until the next stop when the porters would again be available. One of his class did not move his own things. That was the porter's job. Exasperated, Naipaul moved both his and the man's belongings.


Naipaul describes India as a country of form but not substance. What he means by this is that form is followed strictly to the letter but there is no substance to it. The untouchables come to a building. One flings dirty water out across the floor, another one swishes a dirty rag around and a third sweeps the water back into the bucket. The floor is as filthy as ever but no one notices because the form has being carried out to the letter.


Indians comment on the unhygienic practice of Westerners only using toilet paper while Indians also used water to clean themselves after using the bathroom. Meanwhile the city and countryside all over India is used as an open latrine. But nobody sees it; they only see what they believe is true. The form of their culture and religious practices.


Brahmin cows stagger around starving to death because they are holy. People starve to death or live off garbage because that is their Karma.


I could insert here my own observations as to how ideologues exist in every country. Worldwide people who cling to beliefs and social systems even when they have been proven not to work but that is a discussion for another time, I suppose.


Naipaul calls Ghandi one of the greatest failures of India. He brought in ideas of an egalitarian society and human rights that were never put into practice. The Indians did what they always did. They made Ghandi into a Holy Man to be revered and enshrined while ignoring his teaching. Form is worshiped even though it is devoid of substance.


But the author does more than philosophize on the failings of Indian society. He carefully describes the people he comes into contact with and the places he visits. He goes on a pilgrimage, lives in a houseboat for a while, figures out how to get licenses for this and for that because apparently everything one does in India needs the permission of the government. He works and lives with Hindus and Muslims.


While Naipaul describes India and its people in rich colors, I think it would have helped if he had felt any kind of compassion or feeling of any kind because the book, while a vicarious traveler's treat, left me unmotivated to visit. I now long to read a book from a different perspective.





Profile Image for Tarun Rattan.
191 reviews5 followers
November 22, 2018
I’d read Naipaul's India Trilogy when I was in my late teens and at that young age, it did fill me up with profound hatred for the writer who in my opinion was spewing venom against my beloved country. Naipaul and Nirad Chaudhary were the two literary villains I grew up with, though my impression of Nirad Chaudhary being utterly devoid of depth, remained the same but as I grew older, I started to admire the faculty of observation Naipaul was gifted with and also by his fearlessness to write exactly what he observed. When I heard the news of Naipaul’s demise, I decided to reread his India Trilogy as a tribute to the great writer. Naipaul died in late summer this year and I bought these books on the day of his demise but I could not start the trilogy till November, but finally have been able to complete it now.

The first book of trilogy evoked strong sentiments in my youth and generated a lot of hatred for the author who was hellbent on telling me the obvious truth and reality of Indian life. Nobody has ever written so courageously and truthfully about India and his portrait of Indian psyche lays bare the banality and stupidity with which Indian mind has been riddled with since last millennium. But he was sympathetic of the reasons and correctly nailed down the deprivation of Indian thought on the Islamic invasion which terrorised Indian spirit. The first book of the trilogy was also a personal discovery for the author and its fascinating to walk with the author on his solo journey and to read first hand, his impressions of his native land, eccentricities of people he encountered and his bewilderment at the strange rituals and customs of the land that he was exploring. Naipaul was critical of Indian weather, Indian landscape, Indian arts, Indian science, Indian religion, almost everything that India had to offer but I beleive, not because these were deficient in any way but rather because he expected more or perhaps was expecting something different. India is a strange land and one either loves it or hate it and Naipaul ended up hating it in his first attempt to understand it. But I don’t blame him, India is so different and Naipaul who had till then only seen simple societies of Caribbean & Europe was not ready to fathom the intricacies of a complex social construct of an ancient land. It would take much more time for any outsider like Naipaul to understand the diversity and spirituality of India. It's not possible to understand India with western lenses that Naipaul kept on during his first sojourn to India and ended up labelling it, wrongly in my opinion, as an area of darkness.

When Naipaul visited India again during emergency few years later and wrote the second book of this trilogy, he saw the country in a different light but still could not understand the conflicted society where everybody was out fighting the system whether these were Naxal revolutionaries or Hindu fundamentalists or Muslim gang lords. The second visit invoked the feeling in Naipaul that India has been wounded first in his mind by Islamic invasions and then by an onslaught of modernity over an archaic society with hypocrisy of the political class not helping in any way. India was going though a perfect storm at the time of Naipaul’s second visit with emergency being declared and country going through the turmoil with desperate attempts by political class to rescue democratic norms from clutches of dictatorship which thankfully it finally succeeded in saving. On this second trip, Naipaul encountered first hand the hostility & pain of an angry society and that’s what he ended up depicting as a wounded civilisation.

Naipaul's third and final sojourn was most sympathetic to India, he understood the challenges the country was grappling with and he made an attempt to unravel these. In the last book of this trilogy, Naipaul wrestled with the aftermath of the terrible partition of India leading to the creation of Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan and also made an attempt to understand Dravidian and Sikh conflicts. Naipaul also did something unique and decided to traverse the path taken roughly a century earlier by war correspondent for Times, William Russell during Indian mutiny of 1857. Naipaul had read Russell’s India diaries earlier but could not comprehend it fully so now that Naipaul was at India, he picked up the book again and moved along the trodden path by Russell and compared the landscape and society of that era with the present. Naipaul ended up concluding that Indian mutiny in some form was still going on, the Sikh insurgency or Dravidian revolt or Naxal class struggle, in author’s judgement were just progression of that century old mutiny as witnessed by Russell. I think what Naipaul observed as million mutinies during his third visit to India were nothing more than the birth pangs of a new nation which was undergoing metamorphosis from an ancient civilisation into a modern state. Now more or less that transition phase is over and India is now rightly marching forward to the league of strong and cultured nations. Naipaul never got an opportunity to write another book about new modern India but I’m sure he would have admired the progress and stability that India achieved in the last few decades.

This trilogy is important to understand India and Naipaul’s excellent rendering makes it without any doubt a pleasure to read. The world lost a courageous soul and a superlative writer but he has left us with his writings that I’m sure will keep us informed and entertained for long long time to come.

Rest in peace, Naipaul.
Profile Image for Andrew.
2,077 reviews781 followers
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October 29, 2023
So this is my first time reading Naipaul’s nonfiction, and the influence on his greatest frenemy, Paul Theroux, is obvious. Naipaul is just as grumpy as ordinary Paul, and much less forgiving of human foibles on the whole. While there are moments of humanity, V.S. winds up carrying water for the worst sort of postwar racists who have transmuted their contempt for the supposed failures of bloodline to the supposed failures of culture. Sorry we can’t all live up to a certain digestive biscuits and PG Tips standard of what constitutes propriety.
Profile Image for Daniel Polansky.
Author 29 books1,196 followers
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January 1, 2023
Naipaul visited India, a homeland which he had never seen, passed down through the decayed myths of his immigrant family, when he was 30, having already earned a reputation as one of the most astute critics of the post-colonial world. He didn’t like it. He thought it was unhygienic and overcrowded, he detested the subcontinental tendencies towards prevarication and insincerity. He felt, in short, that the interplay between native Indian society and Western imperialism had let to an intellectually and morally sterile landscape. Naipaul didn’t like India, but in fairness he didn’t like Trinidad (or anywhere else in the West Indies), he didn’t like Iran or Indonesia, he was lukewarm, if memory serves, on the American south. Naipaul spent 70-odd years staring at the world and, to judge by his writing, came away with the impression that he had seen little of beauty or value. I like to think (or I would like to think that I like to think) that he is wrong. I suspect Naipaul is destined to be forgotten by future generations; he stands in too dramatic counterpoint to the received wisdom of our well-meaning, guilt-obsessed age. But on the opening day of 2023, I find I can’t condemn a man for looking out over our burning planet with some honest measure of disgust.
Profile Image for Arjun Ravichandran.
225 reviews143 followers
November 1, 2015
This is an utterly devastating and honest look at India, and the Indian psyche/Weltanschauung, told through the narrative device of the writer, a Trinidad-Indian, returning to the country of his forefathers. What follows is a relentless sojourn of rapid disillusionment and bucketloads of bitterness-soaked critique.

This was my first introduction to Naipaul, and what an introduction it was. There are no holds barred right from the get-go ("Indians defecate everywhere"). There are plenty of astute analyses of the Indian way of life. For Naipaul, Indians are too fatalistic, they are irreedemably servile, the civilization as a whole seems to suffer from a crippling sense of complacency, and thus, Indians have no real sense of either history or beauty.

There is also an intriguing take on the caste system, with a spot-on observation that, while India may seem like an anarchic, unorganizble mess to the outside, it is actually almost fanatically regulated from within. This effortless organization from within is in part responsible for the decay from without, which is a counter-intuitive idea but which is at the heart of India, which Naipaul astutely picked up on.

As an Indian from a fellow colonial outpost, Naipaul is highly interested in the legacy of the British Raj. The author reckons that the British could have saved a civilization in decline, but they were too insular, too ensconced in the arrogant insecurity of an empire in its prime, too interested in creating an image of themselves as the 'stern Victorians', and lastly, too eager to get up and get out. In Naipaul's words "the migration failed, the project was aborted."

(As a side-note, he does not take too seriously the objection that the British plundered and looted the country. India's history, Naipaul notes, is precisely this history of being plundered and looted by invaders)

The first chapter of the 3rd section of the book opens with one of the most scathing critiques of Indian art and literature that I have ever read, and the author manages to make a point that I myself had been wondering about for some time now. Why exactly is it that India has not produced any literature worth a note? The answer? : Indians are simply incapable of any sort of sustained rebellion. The novel is the product of an Enlightenment-era mentality, and is thus inherently rebellious. This project does not conjoin with the Indian's eternal passivity. What Indians can and do offer in plenty are fables. This was such an obvious and stunning insight that I could not believe how valid it was, and how relevant it is even to the unmentionable output of our film industry.

I suppose here would be a good place to talk about Naipaul's writing itself. The man is a fantastic writer. Though I was aware that he is well-regarded, I was not prepared for the sheer quality of the writing displayed. Each paragraph is like a snapshot by an extremely well-trained yet highly idiosyncratic photojournalist, that leaves an ineradicable impression of bitterness, pathos, and hard-earned beauty. This is quality writing, and it stoked my appetite to complete his 'India trilogy', as well as his fiction.

So, is it all good? Well, no. Here are some of my complaints :

Firstly, where the hell was South India?

Secondly, Naipaul can be fairly characterized as extremely uncharitable. He has nary a good word to say about India, and he seems to insist (like his fellow writer, Khushwant Singh, once noted about him) on noting the filth and decadence about him instead of the good. Take his opinions with a grain of salt.

Thirdly, I wasn't really sure what to make of the author's extended sojourn in Kashmir and his treatment of the relationship between him and his hotel bearers. It seemed unnecessary, and overlong. What was Naipaul trying to do here? Was it intended as comic relief, or was there a subtle point being made about how easy it is to get sucked into India's natural tendency towards hierarchy/servility? I'm not sure.

And finally, be aware that this book is nearly half a century old, though I'm of the opinion that his fundamental critique of the Indian psyche remains spot-on. 50 years, after all, isn't any time at all when you're confronted with a civilization as ancient as India.

Very highly recommended for people trying to understand India, and for fans of great writing in general.
Profile Image for Osama Siddique.
Author 7 books297 followers
January 25, 2020
I approach Naipaul with trepidation. A combination of misanthropy; sweeping observations about an entire people based on limited and selective exposure and negligible background study; a warped complexity and narrow-mindedness; unadulterated Islamophobia; and, a propensity at times to dully describe dull things in long, dull passages have to my mind characterized non-fiction produced in the later stages of his career. And yet we also have masses of anglophone Pakistanis and Indians who rave about his work, especially his earlier work. To the shock of many I was underwhelmed and even irritated by A Bend in the River which on which I have shared my two cents elsewhere https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5.... His politics in his advanced age as well as his, from several accounts, deeply unpleasant personality, also made me wary and disinclined. Much as it is proclaimed that the writer is to be separated from his writing, I often find the mark of unpleasant people to be indelible when it comes to judging their work.

An Area of Darkness is the first part of what is now regarded as a trilogy of Naipaul travelogues of India. It is really three books

Book 1 in turn has broadly three facets as Naipaul examines various manifestations of class and caste as he meets a wide variety of people. In many ways, his descriptions are brutally honest (something he is often given credit for but which is also converted into a defensive shield to deflect valid criticism of what he then contrives to say based on these honest observations) without any sheen of romanticization, as he dwells on debilitating and degrading poverty, unsanitary living conditions and poor hygiene standards, the rigid classification of society according to class and caste, and also the veneer of westernization which he feels covers essentially orthodox and obsolete attitudes and beliefs - 'mimicry' as he calls it of western attitudes and approaches; mere mimicry.

At the same time, it appears that poverty, squalor, decrepitness and discrimination to his eye are particularly and quintessentially Indian phenomenon. And that to be Indian is to be embracing and accepting of these. Much as it may be true that many locals develop an immunity in any milieu to getting shocked as compared to visitors, Naipaul's simplistic generalization ignores local diversity of attitudes to these phenomenon and their pushback against the same. He appears to be seduced by and descend into another kind of orientalism - one where the romantic and the exotic are replaced by the miserable and the wretched. Both varieties are of course equally misleading and intellectually debilitating. Finally, there is a also certain smugness, a palpable self-righteousness, and a sneering disdain that never appear to leave him even when he tries to come across as a neutral, unsentimental observer. Two of his mains preoccupations in the first part - in addition to his boundless amusement at how locals speak English (he barely speaks any Hindi) - are Indian hygiene (or lack thereof, as well as interminable descriptions of public defecation; and Gandhi's perpetually ignored exhortations on the same) and the Borgesian complexity and interminability of the Indian bureaucracy.

Book 2 presents a fairly different Naipaul - a Naipaul less cantankerous, judgmental, petty and mean-spirited. Seemingly designed and destined to be a curmudgeon, he is frequently swept off his feet by his picturesque surroundings in Kashmir - indeed this part is full of beautiful descriptive passages as he dwells on Srinagar's surrounding country and its many sights. Quite clearly his mood improves if he finds himself feted and fawned upon and an excessive portion of this part is dedicated to him describing and commenting upon a bunch of people whom economic necessity made dependent on his custom and largesse (most prominently Aziz the comical servant). He looks upon Srinagar itself as a medieval city, describing in painstaking details its squalor as well as its charms.

Tellingly it is also in this part of the book that we find a Naipaul constantly bemoaning his own tenuous links with India and its unknowability as well as feeling overwhelmed by its scale and complexity after having only observed emigrant Indian life in small town or rural Trinidad. Not that it prevents him from passing categorical statements on all things Indian (it would be justifiable if these were just personal impressions but his tone and conviction leave no doubt at least in his mind that they ought to be exalted as perceptive and definitive assessments). Tellingly also the tiny heart briefly melts as after roundly scorning all demonstrations of dogma, caste privilege and a pre-modern approach to life, he gets emotional and feels closest to a Brahmin family punctiliously dining while following age-old customs and caste rules that ordain strict segregation to prevent those of lower castes or the casteless from tainting the meal. All of a sudden the orthodoxy, ritual, superstition and stubborn changelessness appear charming and overawing to him - quite paradoxically V. S finds similar tradition-bound attitudes appear devoid of historical knowledge, ignorant and laughable in any other community.

Further, he minces no words in categorizing more recent faith systems as presumptuous and more or less phony; patinas over the older faith systems of the area - which to him by the way are strictly Aryan and very Brahmanic (any history earlier than that he conveniently glosses over and ignores). His descriptions of the Muslims of the valley portrays them as simpletons who know no history or contemporary politics and blindly cling on to symbols and rituals of their faith - the much admired Brahmin family he shared pooris, potatoes and chatni with of course did not. This attitude will of course fester and worsen by the time he writes Among the Believers and Beyond Belief and more openly announces his allegiance to Hindutva prejudices.

Book 3 puts forward new treasures of contradictions, paradoxes and ill-humor that to me define V.S. Elegant prose; evocative and faithful descriptions of poverty, discrimination, ugliness and squalor; these close and astute observations somehow leading to grand theorizing that reduces entire people, movements and civilizations to some simplistic, unnuanced and demeaning castigations; frequent self-contradictions; a palpable sense of low esteem as well as occasions of marked mean-mindedness, conceit, ego-mania and lack of charitableness; self-entitlement as well as a deep insecurity; and a talent for demonstrating great empathy while divulging an absence of it.

What was also particularly interesting in this section once again was his scorn for caste and yet a definitive sense of satisfaction in his Brahmanic roots; a clear disdain for Islamic civilization; a near-absent appreciation of post-colonialism and the role played by colonialism in creating it; and, a propensity to look upon Indians - barring few exceptions - as a lesser people civilizationally, temperamentally, socially, culturally, aesthetically and physically. There is much blaming of the victims as well. In one of the chapters he is more or less at ease and almost in awe of a rather uncharacteristically morose and openly racist Sikh; another focuses on what he finds a lame reaction to the Chinese invasion of 1962; yet another remarkably finds Indian ruins to be an embarrassment; and in yet another while he appears to be reluctantly touched by generosity on part of many he returns the favor by essentially recreating multiple Indian caricatures. He is singularly ungenerous while visiting his ancestral village.

What is amazing - or perhaps not so -is that this 29 year old was commissioned and then encouraged to comment like a novice on matters beyond his experience and comprehension and then published and extolled. It is not political correctness that I speak of or seek here but the fact that so much that he deduces and states by way of generalizations and sweeping statements is inaccurate and offensive - I speak here not of his direct observations but his ludicrous and banal theorizing and conclusions. There is much word play, closeness of observation and elegance of phrase and some beautifully wrought passages but one is still left wondering by so much that comes after that.

At one level it is hard to disagree with another reviewer on goodreads who concluded "In short, be forewarned, to read this book is to be reeled into a brilliant dew-dropped web in the centre of which lurks a quivering, poisonous, alienated spider."
Profile Image for Roxanne.
Author 1 book56 followers
March 8, 2008
This is a book that heartily annoyed me as I read it, but the last 60 pages changed my tune. I would never want to read this book again, nor would I recommend it to others unless they knew what they were getting into--but the endless historical essays on caste and English colonialization did eventually end, and did lead into a really interesting place for Naipaul. One of my chief complaints with the book as I read was that Naipaul kept himself aloof, that so much of the book was abstract historical essay instead of real stories of his travels. There was a chunk in the middle of the book where Naipaul stayed at a particular hotel and got to know the people there, which was really intriguing, but otherwise I was dead bored. The last 60 pages, however, were almost entirely of Naipaul's experience and dealt with the real people he met and the terrible misunderstandings he had. All of the earlier material on caste and colonization had been building up to this point: the point when he visits his grandfather's village and, though charmed at first, ultimately cannot connect with his relations there for the same reasons that he can't connect with the rest of India. Overall the ending was very moving and very powerful.
Profile Image for Amar Pai.
960 reviews101 followers
November 12, 2008
V.S. Naipaul's first trip to India -- he's appalled by the filth, poverty, etc. etc. -- quite funny in parts, like when he's trying not to overpay Kashmiri tour guides. In the years since he mellowed out, and also India's socio-economic situation changed considerably. But it's entertaining to catch him here in his younger days. He's self-aware enough to find the humor in his constant disgust/snobbery/irritation, and he's good at choosing just the right details to convey the sense of a place. You really can't go home.
375 reviews185 followers
March 27, 2020
Phew. He was a genius, wasn't he? I wanted to run through the whole trilogy at once, but the depth of what is in here makes me want to reach for something lighter now. I look forward to reading the next two books.
Profile Image for Larou.
330 reviews52 followers
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May 6, 2015
This book (first published in 1964) has become somewhat notorious for its narrator’s rather negative attitude towards the country he is writing about. In the preface to the edition I read (from 2010) he lets his readers know that his bad mood during at least the first part of the book was due to a creative crisis he was going through at the time – this might be true, or it might be not; but in any case, it reminds us that, even though An Area of Darkness is a book of non-fiction, its narrator might still be somewhat less than completely reliable.

Also, the Grumpy Traveller is a figure with a long tradition in British travel literature, going back to at least Tobias Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy , famously poked fun at as “Smelfungus” by Lawrence Sterne in his A Sentimental Journey – indeed, I’d go so far as to say that the Cranky and the Enthusiastic Traveller are the basic archetypes of British travel writing (maybe even of all travel writing). What they both have in common, however, is that for both modes the person of the traveller is at least as important as the countries through which he travels; and this takes us back to Naipaul and his An Area of Darkness – His Discovery of India (do take note of the subtitle here).

I doubt anyone would disagree that Naipaul is very firmly on the grumpy side of things – he does not like India much at all, complains about its shabbiness, the dirt, the lack of manners in its inhabitants, and is particularly offended by the public defecation he seem to encounter everywhere (to a degree that one can’t help but wonder whether there is not some obsession at work there). All in all, there seems to be more than enough reason for the often fierce dislike this book and its author have inspired in many readers. And yet – while I tend to agree that Mr. Naipaul is probably a deeply unlikable person, a closer look at An Area of Darkness shows that there is more going on than just a cranky author venting his petty spleen. A lot more, in fact.

First of all, the reason why Naipaul in An Area of Darkness is an unreliable narrator is paradoxically his scrupulous honesty. He has a very fine and well-tuned sensitivity not just for his surroundings but also for himself, and follows the smallest nuances of his prejudices and motivations. And like no man is a hero to his valet, no narrator remains likeable who is seen from this close – there is no attempt at all from Naipaul to make himself appear more heroic, to smooth his crankiness or to gloss over his petty meanness. Naipaul holds nothing back and throughout remains committed to absolute honesty, reminiscent of Rousseau in his Confessions (but, one assumes, staying somewhat closer to actual facts); which in turn makes it possible for the reader to see just how much this account of India is coloured by the person narrating it.

Second, there is a reason why Naipaul’s attitude towards India is so fraught with tension, and he gives it to the reader at the start of the book (well,a after the prologue, anyway) – even before the narrator sets foot on Indian soil, Naipaul tells us over thirty pages of his childhood in Trinidad where his grandfather had moved from India. Like many emigrants, Naipaul’s family held on to as many things from their homeland as they could, and young Naipaul grew up among a clutter of half or not at all comprehended memorabilia and rituals from which he pieced together his own fantasy of India. And it is this fantasy which at some – intellectually denigrated, but none the less deeply felt – emotional level Naipaul is looking for in the real India only to be deeply disappointed when – rather unsurprisingly – he fails to find it. This is where things begin to move beyond the sphere of mere individual experience, as it’s quite obvious to see how Naipaul’s indeed is just a slightly displaced version of what most Europeans – and that, of course, means mainly British – relate towards India, carrying a pre-conceived image of the country when visiting it. Few, however, are as ruthlessly honest in their reactions when India fails to conform to their fantasy.

And this brings us to a third thread running through An Area of Darkness – namely that Naipaul may have been objectively justified in his reaction, for the simple reason that India in 1963 was in a deplorable state. Among the anecdotes and the descriptions, large parts of the book are given to analysis of India’s past, present and future as well as on a host of related subjects, from how Hinduism has become a repository for symbols that have lost their religious significance, over how India seems to construct its self-image by way of mimicry to other cultures, to novels about and from India – all of those subjects treated with equal intellectual brilliance and a certain cool detachment, made possible precisely thanks to Naipaul’s continuous self-scrutiny that enables him to purge his subjectivity from the more strictly analytic parts of this books.

At the same time, Naipaul never lets the reader forget that everything he writes about is ultimately grounded in personal experience – the long, analytic passages are always counterbalanced by a wealth of anecdotes – often quite funny ones, and more than once the joke is actually on Naipaul, more proof that he is after verity rather than self-aggrandizement – or descriptions. And the descriptions alone, whether of scenery, architecture or the people he encounters, would make reading An Area of Darkness worthwhile because – something I think even his most determined detractors have never denied – Naipaul writes beautifully, capturing sensual impressions in a measured, rhythmic prose, along whose shining surface images move and glitter like sunlight on the moving ocean.
Profile Image for russell barnes.
464 reviews20 followers
March 22, 2020
Second time round, and good 10 years after I first read it An Area of Darkness surprised me more than I expected. Okay, so Naipaul is at best an arch miserablist, but I had forgotten just how negative and mean he is about Indians and the whole Indian experience.

However the middle section dealing with his time in Kashmir is wonderfully arch, with the previously-forgotten Aziz an amazingly Falstaffian character, simultaneously protecting the tourists, whilst fleecing them at every opportunity.

Also, I presume had I bothered reading this whilst I was actually doing my Post-Colonial Literature coursework, I might have done slightly better than a Desmond because there's plenty of theoretical meat concerning the Indian reaction and absorbtion to the English (and vice versa) to get your teeth into.
348 reviews25 followers
May 15, 2015
After reading so much of his later stuff, it's a relief to turn to his earlier work, when he was funnier, more enthusiastic and more expansive. The writing and the thinking aren't as tightly controlled, which risks melodrama. I was surprised when Naipaul visited his ancestral village and found out they were indeed Brahmin, as I had been sure that his grandparents had switched caste somewhere on their way to Trinidad.

There's a hysteria at the edges of this book, a barely-contained shock at the squalor, the hypocrisy, and the blank idiocy he encounters, but this is still (he was only thirty when he wrote this) somewhat balanced by his Mr. Biswas style affection for the little canoe-paddlers of the world.

"The stupefaction of peoples is one of our mysteries" writes Naipaul, and that's the phrase and the question that sticks with you after the book is done.
Profile Image for Jeanne Thornton.
Author 11 books185 followers
October 23, 2015
This book is beautiful but also makes me really personally sad for VS Naipaul? His scatological horror conception of India, though it's pretty arresting and incisive re: postcolonial trauma and personal self-loathing and horror, also made this a difficult book to get through, though I think worth it in the end. I kept wanting to get outside of VSN's head, to have some kind of relief, objectivity, that was never really forthcoming, that maybe by the nature of a book like this can't be forthcoming?

Makes me want to read all of VSN's other, less maybe immediate/reactive/virulent books on India; makes me want to reread Mr. Biswas for the manyth time. But I'm not sure I'd recommend this to anyone as like--a great entry into What Is Good About VSN.

Hits: "A Garland on my Pillow," "The Village of the Dubes," "Degree," and the suffocating opening.
Profile Image for Sarah.
501 reviews23 followers
September 19, 2016
Naipaul's arrogance drove me crazy. I was hoping for a portrait of India, instead I got a portrait of an arrogant, racist, insufferable man.
Profile Image for Shobhit Shubhankar.
Author 1 book37 followers
July 7, 2018
This is an extraordinary dissection of India, and Indian society. Naipaul laments throughout as to how the Indians as a people are incapable of truly looking at themselves and society, as it exists in the here and now. And that is exactly what he masterfully succeeds at doing. He seems to possess an uncanny ability to dive deep into the collective impulses of a complex society, and emerge with insights that speak directly, forcefully.

Reading the book also made me realize exactly how little has changed over the past five decades since Naipaul first journeyed in India. Almost every modern refrain seems to have been, as it were, carried down unaltered from an earlier age. Even in the early 1960s, Naipaul talks about the growing irrelevance of Gandhi, the creation of a distance from the masses through his deification. Ordinary corruption is commonplace, as is a general disdain for public hygiene.

It is tragic that when the book was published, it was seen to portray India in an unsavory light, and therefore quickly banned. We, who could not learn to look at ourselves, flinched when we were shown a mirror.
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