A Paper Presentation on

V.S.NAIPAUL’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS

INDIA

By

Jayashree B.K
Dept of English
GFGC, Rajajinagar,
Bangalore – 560010.
V.S.NAIPAU
L
 An Area of Darkness
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.
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.
“Even now, though time has widened, though space has
contracted and I have traveled lucidly over that area which
was to me area of darkness, sometimes of darkness
remains, in these attitudes, those ways of thinking and
seeing, which are no longer mine”.
MIGRATION TO THE NEW
WORLD

“Customs are to be maintained

because they are felt to be
accident.”
“One day she noticed a tumbler of what look like
coconut milk she tasted, she drank to the end,
and fell ill; and in distress made a confusion… she
had drunk tumbler of Blanco fluid,”
The image of colonial and Gandhi
in Naipaul’s view:

“(Gandhi) looked at India as no Indian

was able to; his vision was direct and
his directness was and is,
revolutionary, he sees exactly what
the visitors sees; he does not ignore
the obvious…. The beggars and the
shameless filth…. The atrocious
sanitary habit…. He sees Indian
callousness the Indian refusal to
see..”
 India: A Wounded Civilization
A penetrating survey of this tormented continent by one of the
literary heavyweights of our age. In 1964 V.S. Naipaul published
An Area of Darkness, his semi-autobiographical account of a
year in India. Two visits later, prompted by the Emergency of
1975, he came to write India: A Wounded Civilisation, in which
he casts a more analytical eye over Indian attitudes. In this
work, he recapitulates and further investigates the feelings that
the vast, mysterious and agonised continent has previously
aroused in him. What he sees and what he hears - evoked so
superbly and vividly in this book - only reinforce in him his
conviction that India, wounded by a thousand years of foreign
“India for me a difficult country. It is not my and cannot be
my home: and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it. I
cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and
too far….
Every open space we saw was a latrine; and in such
space we came suddenly upon a hellish vision.
 LITERATURE
“He examines… Gandhi and R.K.Narayan as
more or less representing the old morality
and Vijaya Tendulkar and Anantha Murthy as
reflecting the incipient new morality.”
“Anantha Murthy has portrayed a barbaric civilization,
where the books, the laws are buttressed by magic…
and the civilization they have inherited has long gone
sour… crippled by rules they make up a society without
a head.”
“The world’s most populous country which now has little
to offer the world expect its Gandian concept of holy
poverty.”
“The right way which all men must follow according
to their natures. As its noblest it combines self-
fulfillment and truth to the self with the ideas of
action as duty, action as its own spiritual reward… it
touches the high ideas of other civilization. But
dharma can also be used to reconcile men to
servitude and make them find in paralysing
obedience and the highest spiritual good.
 India: A Million Mutinies Now
In this book, V.S. Naipaul returns to the country which continues to
intrigue and inspire him and about which he wrote "An Area of
Darkness" in 1964, a semi-autobiographical account of a year
spent in India. Now, twenty-five years later, he goes back to that
country, returning to the places he visited years ago and talking to
people of all types and at all levels of society.
“Travel writing is new to me, and I did not see how I
could find a narrative for a book about India… I had
kept no journal, made few connected notes. But
money had been spent and a book had to be written…
calling up events day after day found a narrative.”
“In the political of alignment and realignment there were
no principles or programs. There were only enemies or
allies: penguin politics. What was true of this state,
Karnataka, was true of other states as well.”
“Homespun clothes, once the clothes of the
poor, now no longer worn by the poor, worn
only by the men to whom the poor had given
power.”
“Periyar preached a crude kind of socialism.”
Periyar had touched in these people something deeper
than logic and a regard for historical correctness: that
also had to be taken into account..
In twenty seven years I had succeeded in making
a kind of return journey, shedding my Indian
nerves, abolishing the darkness that separated
me from my ancestral past.”
V.S.NAIPAU
L