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V.S. Naipaul had a well-known talent for writing damning criticisms of developing societies and their inhabitants. This book, for all its raw criticisms of India, was actually his most positive take on the country. It is the final book of a trilogy about the country, written over the course of three decades. Naipaul traveled the width and breadth of India during the period in the early 1990s, meeting ordinary people and taking notes on what he saw. At the time, the first stirrings of India's economic and political awakening were underway. Naipaul was a well-known critic of the alleged fatalism of the peoples of Asia and Africa. In India he finally saw that fatalism starting to erode. Hundreds of millions of people had begun to reenter history. Improving material conditions allowed them to think about their lives and pasts different, beyond the moment. With their new wealth and learning, people started to develop a new idea of what they owed themselves. This included an awakening to historical grievances and crises of identity. This has now begun to manifest in political movements such as Narendra Modi's BJJP and others. Such is the story of modern India, but also many other emerging countries around the world.

As usual, Naipaul's writing is vivid. The book really feels like taking a trip to India a few decades back in time. He spends a lot of time collecting the small stories of people from different streams of Indian society. There are working-class Shiv Sena members, struggling filmmakers, residents of a Muslim ghetto in Mumbai, demobilized Sikh militants, Bengali intellectuals, Dalit activists and more. There are moving vignettes about ascetic Brahmins who have tried to hold onto their traditions within the maelstrom of the modern world. Two chapters stood out to me in particular. The first was about the Tamil philosopher Periyar Ramasamy, who led a movement of revolt against the Brahmins and their social order on behalf of the lower castes. The second was about the city of Lucknow, which was once a seat of royalty and high Indian Muslim culture. Since its defeat by the British, Lucknow has undergone a slow and melancholy decline. This decline mirrored the fortunes of India's Muslims as whole. Due to my own background, I found this to be a particularly poignant section. Before the partition of the Subcontinent much of my own family came from Lucknow. I could recognize them clearly in Naipaul's writing.

Naipaul lets his subjects talk for themselves, and at length. As a result this at times feels like a book of interviews. When Naipaul does editorialize, it is usually to give his own perspective on Indian history. His viewpoint is very much that of the Brahmin elite. He is subtly and sometimes not-so-subtly contemptuous of the perspective of his Sikh, Muslim and Dalit subjects. The Islamic period of India's history is depicted as not just an age of decline but as somehow a kind of interruption of India's true self. He cannot comprehend that after 1,400 years Islam might be the indigenous religion of many South Asians. Such a view reflects the Hindu nationalist perspective on history, of which Naipaul was a sympathizer.

Despite this, I think that depictions of Naipaul's bigotry are overstated. His genius was his ability to sympathetically express the perspective of almost all his subjects. You can imagine yourself in their shoes. At times it gives you a visceral sense of how these people see themselves in history. The only person I can recall him condemning was the Sikh militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Even that condemnation was based on secondary accounts of those who knew him during the Golden Temple siege. For all his dismissiveness towards Indian Muslims and suspicion of Dalits, he has written some of the most beautiful odes to their community that I've ever read. The beauty of his writing overcomes the fact that his histories are often heavily blinkered or even incorrect, charges that were leveled at him on various subjects throughout his career.

Despite running far too long in pages (a privilege granted to famous writers later in their career), I have to say that this is a brilliant travelogue. For those who wan to understand how modern India emerged, for both better and worse, this book is an important guide. As usual Naipaul's beautiful prose makes the narrative flow very easily. From any other writer, I'd assume this book was a condemnation of India. When you understand it in the context of Naipaul's career, you can see that he's actually praising it.