Analysis Of Naipaul's An Area Of Darkness

During the course of his physical journey of India, Naipaul also embarks upon a journey of self realisation- where he realises himself to be one with India and her people and is therefore deeply pained by her wounded past and troubled future:

“The turbulence in India this time hasn't come from foreign invasion or conquest; it has been generated from within. India cannot respond in her old way, by a further retreat into archaism. Her borrowed institutions have worked like borrowed institutions; but archaic India can provide no substitutes for press, parliament and courts. The crisis in India is not only political or economic. The larger crisis is of a wounded civilisation that has at last become aware of its inadequacies and is without

However, the brutal honesty of his writing and the sentiments his writing evokes in any self righteous Indian are incomparable to other writings by authors writing about the same cities and the same people. Through Naipaul’s description of India’s ruins in An Area of Darkness, one sees a deeply pessimistic tenor- where he describes India as a land of ruins and decadence, where destruction, annihilation, despair and dereliction was everywhere; but despite it all, very few can dissuade this Naipaulian area of darkness that India had become post the end of colonialism in the 1960s. What is most distinctive about his writing is that his sense of philosophy that adds a much required psychological take on all he sees. In India: A Million Mutinies Now this philosophical melancholy continues and provides the reader a deeper insight into Naipaul’s India. But with the progression of years we also see a progression of ideology, by the time Naipaul visits Calcutta nearly twenty six years later while writing India: A Million Mutinies Now, Naipaul himself tries to analyse the pessimistic lens he wore when he visited Calcutta in 1962. This revisiting of his past pessimism presents a fresh Indian take on India by the time the reader finishes reading the third