V.S. Naipaul - India: A Million Mutinies Now

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 2011

Copyright 1990, 2011 by V. S. Naipaul

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in slightly different form in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd, London, in 1990, and subsequently published in hardcover, in the United States by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc., New York, in 1991.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932
India : a million mutinies now / V. S. Naipaul.1st Vintage International ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: London : Heinemann, 1990.
1. IndiaDescription and travel. I. Title.
DS414.2.N35 2011
915.40452dc22
2010038312

eISBN: 978-0-307-74278-0

www.vintagebooks.com

Cover art Achok Sinha / Getty Images

v3.1

Compassionate. Leaves the reader with a powerful sense of [a] peoples dedication, perseverance and passion.

The New York Times

Travel writing, history, novel, lyricNaipauls book partakes of the excellence of every category and fulfills itself in one of the oldest and rarest of formsprophecy. It bears witness, in unforgettable language, to the best of hopes in the worst of times.

The Christian Science Monitor

Naipaul has retired the familiar, infuriating, immobile face of India and painted a fresh one of human spirit and dramatic change.

Time

A shifting kaleidoscope of images of a country almost impossible to imagine, but made more comprehensible due to Naipauls formidable intelligence and prodigious narrative gifts.

Boston Sunday Herald

Naipaul creates his India slowly, through whole life-stories told in the characters own voices. The detail is wonderful, built up with impeccable care.

The Economist

[Naipaul] has invaluably revealed the brink on which India now stands, the sources of all that rage and all those little mutinies. There is a powerful feeling of change in this book.

Los Angeles Times

Compelling, almost hypnotic. A rich, multilayered portrait of a nation we know far too little about in the West. You will feel you have learned much about India, yet you will sense how much morehow very much moreremains to be learned.

The Seattle Times

Authentic. These narratives record, in human terms, the rich and disturbing diversity of contemporary India. Extraordinary.

Newsday

There is a great temptation to quote too much of Naipaul, for in reading the novelist, essayist and travel writer we realize the accuracy of those who consider him one of the finest writers in the language; a man with intense intellectual curiosity, as well as an inherited sympathy for inhabitants of the Third World.

The Oregonian

A superb raga of a book, a raga of morning curiosity and evening meditation. This may be [Naipauls] most generous work, and his best nonfiction.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

An absorbing journey through the mind of India. Mutinies will surprise those who have read and ranted at Naipauls earlier books on India.

St. Petersburg Times

Brilliant.

The Spectator (London)

In-depth. Beautifully written, this book gives a personal look at the societal and political forces pushing for change in the country.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Prescient. Naipauls intuitions and indefatigable on-the-spot research were well ahead of the academic reaction. [He is] a writer who will always be readand not just by academicsfor his intelligence and insight and for the clarity and elegance of his style.

The Times Higher Education Supplement

One of the most intelligent writers of our time. Naipauls word-pictures of India are lyrical, spare, precise and vivid. He succeedsbrilliantlyin integrating Indias individual truths with a larger picture of the country.

The Toronto Star

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published thirty books of fiction and nonfiction, including A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, A Turn in the South, and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.

ALSO BY V. S. NAIPAUL

Nonfiction

The Masque of Africa
A Writers People
Literary Occasions
The Writer and the World
Between Father and Son: Family Letters
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples
A Turn in the South
Finding the Center
Among the Believers
The Return of Eva Pern (with The Killings in Trinidad)
India: A Wounded Civilization
The Overcrowded Barracoon
The Loss of El Dorado
An Area of Darkness
The Middle Passage

Fiction

Collected Short Fiction
Magic Seeds
Half a Life
A Way in the World
The Enigma of Arrival
A Bend in the River
Guerrillas
In a Free State
A Flag on the Island
The Mimic Men
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion
A House for Mr. Biswas
Miguel Street
The Suffrage of Elvira
The Mystic Masseur

Published in an omnibus edition entitled Three Novels

Published in an omnibus edition entitled The Nightwatchmans Occurrence Book

India: a Million Mutinies Now is a long book, one of my longest. Long books (it has to be said) are harder to write than short books, and I have more than a certain regard for this one. Twenty years after the writing I still have a clear memory of the labour and the ambition.

I thought when I began to write that I would do fiction alone. To be a writer of the imagination seemed to me the noblest thing. But after a few books I saw that my materialthe matter in my head, the matter in the end given me by my backgroundwould not support that ambition.

The ambition itself had been given me by what I knew of the great nineteenth-century novels of Europe, or what I thought I knew of them. I put it in that cautious way because before I began to write I actually hadnt read a great deal. I saw nowsomething I suppose I had always sensed but never worked out as an ideathat those novels had come out of societies more compartmented, more intellectually ordered and full of conviction than the one I found myself in. To pretend that I came out of a society as complete and ordered would in some ways have made writing easier. The order I am talking about is, to put it at its simplest, the order, the fenced-in setting, that underpins the television situation comedy. The rules of the fenced-in world are few and easily understood; the messy outside world doesnt intrude to undo the magic. I could have tried to write like that. But I would not have got very far. I would have had to simplify too much, leave out a lot. It would have been to deny what I saw as my task as a writer.