Rating: 
Summary: Dated book, true to its times but lost to modern India
Review: Naipaul's book is a critical look at India of 1969 where he looks at all of India from the North to the South. It is true to its times and gives an accurate picture of Nehruvian India with all of its bureucracy, casteism and problems. It is written very well and there is no error of fact in Naipaul. Any person who is young from India must read this book to get an idea of how things where so that they do not eat up the drivel that they are fed by the politicians. However, having said this, I went to India after a long time and saw that the modern India has changed substantially from what is depicted in this book. It is like reading a book about the Civil war and slavery and assuming that it is the view of the present day US. While Naipaul was accurate in depicting the India that was then, he was not good at predicting the future. All the cities in the modern India give a completely different picture. Travel through Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, and so on and you will see an India that has both positives and negatives. It has all the poverty but great development too, with the younger generation immune to the problems of the past. I am not sure how much of it is positive, but I can grant you that it is different from the bleak picture portrayed in this book. Give this book another 20 years and it will look even more out of place. No one can question Naipaul's writing style, but I always felt that he was a person who felt that all the countries who were under the British were best when under them and progressively got worse after becoming independent. Compared to authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his writing does not have the same appeal.
Rating: 
Summary: An unflinching, well written look at India
Review: This book details the experiences of author V.S. Naipaul in India between February 1962 and February 1964, of his travails there with the locals, his discoveries about the people of India, and his coming to terms of what is India and what it means to be Indian. I found him an excellent writer, many of his personal stories reading like fiction, and have since found that Naipaul has a loyal following of readers. I may indeed try to find more of his works in the future. Naipaul is of Indian heritage, but was not born there but rather on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. Some of the first part of the book detailed his growing up there, of his internal resolution as a child between his Indian household and the often very non-Indian islanders, a very diverse group that included a great many of African descent. Much of the rest of the book at least to me seemed to be the author trying to learn more about the country he ultimately hailed from, about what India is really like. Naipaul provided several stories and anecdotes about his time in India. He opened the book with a little exploration of the often Byzantine if not Sisyphean paperwork and bureaucracy of India, describing his trials and tribulations of simply trying to import a bit of alcohol to the dry port of Bombay. A lengthy section details his time spent on a hotel on a lake in Kashmir, of his involvement in the day to day lives of those who lived in and ran the hotel, even accompanying them on a pilgrimage to a Hindu shrine in the Himalayas. Another story relates his time he was befriended by a Sikh while traveling by train in southern India, a friendship that was apparently founded in misunderstanding and did not end well. The main point of the book though was a rather unflinching and unromantic look at India, or at least India in the early 1960s. He shows the India a traveler, an outsider, would actually see, an India that many Indians he writes simply do not see or refuse to see. Caste he finds still dominates life in India, serving to imprison "a man in his function," rendering "millions faceless." A businessman's function is to make money by whatever means he can; he does not have a duty though to produce good quality items. It is not an issue of dishonesty or of short-sightedness, as service is not an Indian concept. He described groups of sweepers who cleaned a set of stairs; after they worked with twig brooms, rags, and buckets of dirty water, the stairs and wall are not only not cleaner but dirtier than ever. However they fulfilled their function, which was to sweep, or rather to be sweepers. Actual cleanliness was not the issue. Indians have been known to be picnicking on the banks of a river while someone drowned, not lifting a finger to help. He writes that the Indians do not lack courage or an admiration for it, but rather see courage and the choice to risk one's life to save another the function only of soldiers. Attempts to save government jobs for untouchables is not lauded, as this merely in many Indian's eyes simply puts responsibility into the hands of those unqualified - by their caste - to perform that function. Those who buck the caste system, or are outside of it, such those Indians who were born overseas, are not accepted by the system and often frustrated. Naipaul wrote of the many squatters he saw in India (which I am certain didn't win him many friends with those who would promote Indian tourism); Indians he writes, "defecate everywhere." He saw people squatting and defecating beside railway tracks, along river banks, on the streets, never looking for cover, rarely with any sense of embarrassment. Even when presented with public lavatories were as likely to use the floor as anything else. Indians he says do not see these squatters, and certainly do not see the problem. Interests in sanitation are the concern of latrine-cleaners - not the concerns of the other castes - and to clean up after oneself would be unseemly, that unnecessary labor outside the required actions of one's caste was degrading. Though obviously not something Naipaul saw personally he did spend time discussing Gandhi, relating to it the issues of public sanitation and caste. Gandhi, having spent twenty years in South Africa, saw India through an outsider's eyes. He saw sanitation linked to caste and that caste was linked to a disregard for others as well as inefficiency and a needlessly and hopelessly divided country, all of which lead to weakness and the rule of India by foreigners. Gandhi tried repeatedly to attack the psychology of caste, to show that there was dignity and a need for cleaning the excrement and filth of the nation. Naipaul believed that this was Gandhi's most important work, not his message of non-violent resistance of the British, work that he ultimately failed in, as his efforts were eventually reduced to mere symbolism, that latrine cleaning became among many simply an occasional, virtuous, highly symbolic action rather than an effort to really improve things. I found his thoughts on the numerous ruins of India quite interesting. They are not revered as they might be in Europe, as respect for the past is a European, not an Indian, tradition. Not only are ruins everywhere and considered commonplace, but they do not speak of any development of the country's spirit and definition of nationalism or are revered as such. Rather - as with Mogul architecture - instead they tell of "personal plunder" and a nation with "an infinite capacity for being plundered." They are wasteful and without function; though the Taj Mahal is lovely, it is a despot's monument to one woman, nothing more. An interesting book, I would like to know how the author's thoughts on India changed in his later writings, if they did.
Rating: 
Summary: Naipaul's earliest and most emotional travel book
Review: V.S. Naipaul is a man of strong opinions, and they are often politically incorrect. He is the man who once, infamously, called the Third World the "turd world." This book is about one of his early forays into the turd world. I imagine that it did not please the Indian Tourism Board to read that India is "the world's largest slum" or that Indians are "a withered race of men." Not surprisingly, the young Naipaul - just barely into his thirties when he wrote this book - got labeled as a reactionary and a lapdog of the former colonial power in India. Naipaul's bluntness produced a scandal and much misunderstanding. At closer inspection, however, his unflinching look at unpleasant realities (beyond his politically incorrect asides) reveals a man who is deeply troubled by what he sees. When he writes he transforms his anger into lucid, detailed observations. It is a stylistic attribute that also defines his later travel writing about India ("India: A Wounded Civilization," 1977; "India: A Million Mutinies Now," 1991) and about the predominantly Muslim countries of Asia ("Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey", 1981; "Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among The Converted Peoples", 1998).
In this early book published in 1964, his working method is revealed in more detail than in the later books. Naipaul decided to write about the flagrantly visible things whose existence is being denied, and about those personal experiences that are fresh and not worn out by having been described by other authors of travelogues. The themes of the first four chapters can be summarized in the words poverty, caste, defecation, and failure. But Naipaul being Naipaul manages to transform the squalor of the world he observes into clean, cold and lucid prose. His language is, for the most part, that of a surgeon who feels neither contempt nor pity when he dissects. Naipaul writes that the "sweetness and sadness which can be found in Indian writing and Indian films are a turning away from a too overwhelming reality; they reduce the horror to a warm, virtuous emotion. Indian sentimentality is the opposite of concern." This explains why Naipaul's apparent detachment is so misleading: for Naipaul unsentimental description is - quite unexpectedly for the reader - a way of showing concern. Naipaul is most effective when he is sarcastic. His book sparkles with rhetoric fervor when he quotes Gandhi on the squalor and shortcomings of India and points out that Gandhi's observations are still valid today. Chapter 3, "The Colonial," depicts the colonial's view of India. Incidentally, the colonial happens to be Mahatma Gandhi, and Naipaul quotes extensively from Gandhi's early writing. It starts with a quote just below the Chapter heading: "Well, India is a country of nonsense." Naipaul effectively turns one of the founding fathers against his successors who, in Naipaul's opinion, let the country rot in its stagnancy. Naipaul feels that India undid Gandhi: "He became a mahatma. He was to be reverenced for what he was; his message was irrelevant"; and that "his failure is there, in his writings: he is still the best guide to India. It is as if, in England, Florence Nightingale had become a saint, honoured by statues, everywhere, her name on every lip; and the hospitals had remained as she had described them." When Naipaul writes about Gandhi, he also characterizes his own way of seeing and writing: "He looked at India as no Indian was able to; his vision was direct and the directness was, and is, revolutionary. He sees exactly what the visitor sees; he does not ignore the obvious. He sees the beggars and the shameless pundits and the filth of Banares; he sees the atrocious sanitary habits of doctors, lawyers and journalists. He sees the Indian callousness, the Indian refusal to see. No Indian attitude escapes him, no Indian problem; he looks down to the roots of the static, decayed society. And the picture of India which comes out of his writings and exhortations over more than thirty years still holds: this is the measure of his failure." Bottom-line: opinionated and brilliant as most of Naipaul's writing, surely not a balanced portrait of India in the early 1960s, but definitely a must-read for anyone trying to understand Naipaul, and a good case-study how easy it is to misunderstand the intentions of a writer or how easy it is to use quotations out of context to malign someone.
Rating:
Summary: A truthful picture on as-it-is basis
Review: VS Naipaul flair for travel writing is at its best. With the senstivity that we all possess but seldom express, he views India absolutely objectively and present an engrossing tale of his journey. Mixed with his internal turmoil and feelings that all those who have travelled through India feel but fail to notice. He makes no bones about the the sqatters alongside reilway tracks, withered and poor Indian physique, or the dishonesty prevalent everywhere. But like most Naipauls works this one too is very critical with little praise for the good. Or is it that he saw no good at all, or that its not worth mentioning ? Read and find out.
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