India: A Million Mutinies Now
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Publisher Description
The third book in V. S. Naipaul's acclaimed Indian trilogy, with a preface by the author. India: A Million Mutinies Now is a truly perceptive work whose insights continue to inform travellers of all generations to India.
Much has changed since V. S. Naipaul’s first trip to India and this fascinating account of his return journey focuses on India’s development since independence.
Taking an anti-clockwise journey around the metropolises of India – including Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, and Delhi – Naipaul offers a kaleidoscopic, layered travelogue, encompassing a wide collage of religions, castes, and classes at a time when the percolating ideas of freedom threatened to shake loose the old ways. The brilliance of the book lies in Naipaul’s decision to approach this shifting, changing land from a variety of perspectives: the author humbly recedes, allowing the Indians to tell the stories of their own lives, and a dynamic oral history of India emerges before our eyes.
‘With this book he may well have written his own enduring monument, in prose at once stirring and intensely personal, distinguished both by style and critical acumen’ – Financial Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Trinidadian journalist-novelist Naipaul stresses that much has changed since his 1962 trip to India, which yielded his darkly pessimistic book India: A Wounded Civilization. In this kaleidoscopic, layered travelogue, he portrays ``a country of a million little mutinies,'' reeling with ``rage and revolt,'' as percolating ideas of freedom shake loose the old moral ethos rooted in caste and class. Despite what he terms regional, religious and sectarian excesses, Naipaul sees possibilities for regeneration in the new freedoms, yet this skewed essay is fraught with bewilderment and sorrow as he reels off a familiar litany of problems--terrible poverty, shoddy manufactured goods, ugly neo-modern architecture, etc.--and comes to terms with his own past: his ancestors were indentured servants of Indian descent. Most interesting here are the dozens of first-person stories by Indians themselves, ranging from a wealthy young stockbroker to anti-religionists to a publisher of women's magazines. 50,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour.
