In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency,” V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.

Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his own encounters with ordinary Indians–from a supercilious prince to an engineer constructing housing for Bombay’s homeless–Naipaul captures a vast, mysterious, and agonized continent inaccessible to foreigners and barely visible to its own people. He sees both the burgeoning space program and the 5,000 volunteers chanting mantras to purify a defiled temple; the feudal village autocrat and the Naxalite revolutionaries who combined Maoist rhetoric with ritual murder. Relentless in its vision, thrilling in the keenness of its prose, India: A Wounded Civilization is a work of astonishing insight and candor.

奈保爾爵士（1932- ），2001年諾貝爾文學奬得主。1932年齣生於特裏尼達島上的一個印度移民傢庭。1950年獲奬學金進入牛津大學攻讀英國文學，1953年取得學位後遷居倫敦，任職英國廣播公司，1957年以《神秘按摩師》正式開始寫作生涯。 奈保爾的作品以小說和遊記為主，兩者均獲高度評價。代錶作有：《比斯瓦斯先生的房子》、《河灣》、《印度三部麯》等。 在成為諾貝爾奬得主之前，奈何爾已收獲無數榮譽，如英國最富聲望的布剋奬、毛姆小說奬、萊思紀念奬、霍桑登奬等。1993年，獲頒第一屆大衛・柯恩英國文學奬，該奬旨在錶揚“尚在人世的英國作傢一生的成就”。 1990年，奈保爾被英國女王封為爵士。