India: A Wounded Civilization  by V.S. Naipaul ( Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul FRAS TC ) 
About the Book:  First edition 
A seminal book challenging so many cliches that it is bound to raise some protest, but it is a work of love. Written with a creative sympathy which could only be found in a great novelist. 
 Notes from Flyleaf. “ India: A wounded Civilizations will gain and hold its place as a key book in the literature on India because V.S. Naipaul’s perception that any inquiry about India must go beyond the political and requires understanding of the civilization as a whole.
He describes how he himself first came upon ‘trapdoors into a bottomless past’ in his memoirs of an Indian childhood ( for so it partly was, although his family had been in Trinidad for a hundred years). Those ‘trapdoors’ he offers to his readers were discovered in his reading and in his travels, and are often surprising. They range from a comic afternoon at an institute of design where a student contriving lethal ‘reaping shoes’ in which the unfortunate peasant was supposed to caper through his cornfields, to the novels of R.K. Narayan, brilliantly interpreted; from a Bombay slum where a community of squatters valiantly attempts to do for it, to a village where ‘immemorial’ India goes calmly on in ways ignored by those who cherish the cliches of rural innocence. Easily, harmoniously, V.S. Naipaul moves from incident to incident, from person to person, as though he were doing no more than evoke particular events and characters for our interest and entertainment; but every portrait, every conversation, every  joke, every image of tragedy contributes to his analysis of India’s present condition in relation to her past.
The argument which emerges so surely is that when independence came to India it was not just a matter of the British leaving and the land being freed to grow out of its own past. That ‘Indian’ past had been erased by a long history of plundering and dominion by foreigners, ever since Moslem rule was established, and India has been left with spiritual and philosophical attitudes adapted to survival ain defeat rather than to progress and creation. Myth-making and consoling dreams of spiritual and intellectual activity, so that even such a recent figure as Gandhi was bounded to be absorbed into the dream. (Naipaul’s assessment of Gandhi and Gandhianism is especially illuminating)
 
Genre:  Modern First Editions, history
Edition: First Edition Published 1977
Published:  Andre Deutsch Limited, 105 Great Russell Street, London WC1
ISBN: 0233969365
Size: 22.5x 14.5cm
Pages:174pages
 
Contents
Foreword 
PART One A Wounded Civilization
1. An Old Equilibrium
2. The Shattering World
Part Two: A New Claim on the Land
3. The Skyscrapers and the Chawls
4 The House of Grain
Part Three: Not Ideas, but Obsessions
5. A Defect of Vision
6. Synthesis and Mimicry
7. Paradise Lost
8. Renaissance or Continuity 
 
CONDITION:
Dust Jacket: Faded marks on the whole dust jacket – see photographs - with  some minor scuffing to the edges, the spine is good no sun fade with same marks as covers.   
Covers: Green cloth covers are in good condition. Very minor wear to outer edges. 
Binding: Tight 
Spine: Good. The title on spine shows some minor bumping on edges
Pages.  All pages complete. Overall in good condition bright and clean. Slight foxing to extreme outer edges and final page.
Back Story and Biography.
“Born in Trinidad in 1932, the descendant of indentured labourers shipped from India, this dispossessed child of the Raj has come on a long and marvellous journey. His upbringing familiarised him with every sort of deprivation, material and cultural. A scholarship to Oxford brought him to this country. Nothing sustained him afterwards except the determination, often close to despair, to become a writer. Against all likelihood, a spirit of pure comedy flows through his early books. It is a saving grace.
Footloose, he began to travel for long periods in India and Africa. It was at a time of decolonisation, when so many people the whole world over had to reassess their identity. Naipaul saw for himself the resulting turmoil of emotions, that collision of self-serving myth and guilt which make up today’s bewildered world and prevents people from coming to terms with who they really are, and to know how to treat one another. On these travels he was exploring nothing less than the meaning of culture and history.” V. S. Naipaul – Biographical - NobelPrize.org
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