India: A Million Mutinies Now

V. S. Naipaul

Pan Macmillan, Mar 22, 2012 - Biography & Autobiography - 624 pages

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

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User Review  - danoomistmatiste - LibraryThing

This book is surprisingly more objective and less visceral than "A wounded civilization". Several things must have happened, - Someone must have given him a piece of their mind and made him see reason ...

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User Review  - Larou - LibraryThing

The third book of V.S. Naipaul on India, written 26 years after the first one in 1962 and 13 after the second in 1975, again shifts its writing premises and tackles its subject with a distinctly ...

About the author

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession.

His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.

In 1990, V. S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lived with his wife Nadira and cat Augustus in Wiltshire, and died in 2018.

Bibliographic information

• Title: India: A Million Mutinies Now
• Author: V. S. Naipaul
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan, 2012
• ISBN: 1447209389, 9781447209386
• Length: 624 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / Asian & Asian American; Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures; Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs; History / Asia / India & South Asia; History / Social History; Travel / Asia / India & South Asia; Travel / Essays & Travelogues