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. 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.

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