India: A Wounded Civilization
About this audiobook
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 earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his own encounters with ordinary Indians—from a supercilious prince to an engineer constructing housing for Bombay’s homeless—Naipaul captures a vast, mysterious, and agonized continent inaccessible to foreigners and barely visible to its own people. He sees both the burgeoning space program and the five thousand volunteers chanting mantras to purify a defiled temple; the feudal village autocrat and the Naxalite revolutionaries who combined Maoist rhetoric with ritual murder. Relentless in its vision, thrilling in the keenness of its prose, India: A Wounded Civilization is a work of astonishing insight and candor.
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About the author
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) was the author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction. His honors include the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Booker Prize, the Trinity Cross, and a knighthood for services to literature. He was named a finalist for the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for achievement in fiction. He was born in Trinidad in 1932 and went to Oxford on a scholarship in 1950.
Sam Dastor studied English at Cambridge and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His early theatrical experience includes a spell at the National Theatre under Sir Laurence Olivier and time spent acting in the West End. For the Royal Shakespeare Company, he has been seen in Timon of Athens, Tales from Ovid, and a world tour of A Servant to Two Masters. His many television appearances include I, Claudius; Yes, Minister; Mountbatten; Julius Caesar; and Fortunes of War. He has also appeared in the films Made, Jinnah, and Such a Long Journey, recorded over a thousand broadcasts for the BBC, and narrated numerous audio books.
