Volume 55, Number 9 · May 29, 2008
Looking for Naipaul
By Joseph Lelyveld
A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling
by V.S. Naipaul
Knopf, 189 pp., $24.95
Thirty-two years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to India for this paper to write about the collapse of its post-independence experiment in democracy. Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, had declared an emergency and suspended the constitution. Naipaul took this to be a major turning point, and possibly a salutary one, for a sick culture in need of shock therapy. One of his articles explored the notion that Indians experience the world in ways drastically different from those of most Westerners: that Indians were typically more self-absorbed, less observant, more instinctive; in other words, that they were ill-adapted, in their basic consciousness, to the modern world. 'India: A Defect of Vision' is what he called that essay.[1]
Review, 2964 words
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