An Area of Darkness Quotes

“Out of its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink [out of my memory]; the mere thought was painful.”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India

“It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad. And it is well that they have no sense of history, for how then would they be able to continue to squat amid their ruins, and which Indian would be able to read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger and pain? It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism, to trust to the stars in which the fortunes of all are written”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

“The medieval mind, which saw only continuity, seemed so unassailable. It existed in a world which, with all its ups and downs, remained harmoniously ordered and could be taken for granted. It had not developed a sense of history, which is a sense of loss; it had developed no true sense of beauty, which is a gift of assessment. While it was enclosed, this made it secure. Exposed, its world became a fairyland, exceedingly fragile. It was one step from the Kashmiri devotional songs to the commercial jingles of Radio Ceylon; it was one step from the roses of Kashmir to a potful of plasticdaisies.”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness

“Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink; the mere thought was painful.”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India

“We talk of despair, but true despair lies too deep for formulation.”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

“To step out of the third-class air-conditioned coach on to the smooth hot platform was to feel one’s shirt instantly heated, to lose interest, to wonder with a dying flicker of intellectual curiosity why anyone in India bothered, why anyone had bothered with India.”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

“Well, India is a country of nonsense. M. K. Gandhi”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

“The sweetness and sadness which can be found in Indian writing and Indian films are a turning away from a too overwhelming reality; they reduce the horror to a warm, virtuous emotion. Indian sentimentality is the opposite of concern.”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

“possession of a holy man induced arrogance.”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

“Divorce of the intellect from body-labour has made of us the shortest-lived, most resourceless and most exploited nation on earth.”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

“I began to do the porter’s job. He smiled but offered no help. I lost my temper. His face acquired that Indian expressionlessness which indicates that communication has ceased and that the Indian has withdrawn from a situation he cannot understand. Labour is a degradation; only a foreigner would see otherwise:”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

“ladies at the Lucknow Club, after denying that Indians defecate in public, will remind you, their faces creased with distaste, of the habits of Europe – the right hand used for love-making, toilet paper and food, the weekly bath in a tub of water contaminated by the body of the bather, the washing in a washbasin that has been spat and gargled into – proving by such emotive illustrations not the dirtiness of Europe but the security of India. It is an Indian method of argument, an Indian way of seeing: it is so that squatters and wayside filth begin to disappear.”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

“These squatting figures – to the visitor, after a time, as eternal and emblematic as Rodin’s Thinker – are never spoken of; they are never written about; they are not mentioned in novels or stories; they do not appear in feature films or documentaries. This might be regarded as part of a permissible prettifying intention. But the truth is that Indians do not see these squatters and might even, with complete sincerity, deny that they exist: a collective blindness arising out of the Indian fear of pollution and the resulting conviction that Indians are the cleanest people in the world.”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

“Escape was always possible; in every Indian town there was a corner of comparative order and cleanliness in which one could recover and cherish one's self-respect. In India the easiest and most necessary thing to ignore was the most obvious.

The colonial mimicry is a special mimicry of an old country without a native aristocracy for a thousand years who has learned to make room for outsiders, but only at the top. The mimicry changes, the inner world remains constant: this is the secret of survival. Yesterday the mimicry was Mogul; tomorrow it might be Russian or American; today it is English.

The Indian lavatory and the Indian kitchen are the visitor's nightmare.

The attitude of the foreigner who does not understand the function of the beggar in India and is judging India by the standards of Europe.

Physical effort is to be avoided as a degradation.

Every man is an island; each man to his function, his private contract with God. This is the realization of the Gita's selfless action.

An eastern conception of dignity and function, reposing on symbolic action: this is the dangerous, decayed pragmatism of caste. Symbolic dress, symbolic food, symbolic worship. India deals in symbols, inaction. Inaction arising out of proclaimed function, function out of caste.

India, it was said, brought our concealed elements of the personality.

It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad. And it is well that they have no sense of history, for how then would they be able to continue to squat amid their ruins and which Indian would be able to read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger and pain? It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism, to trust to the stars in which the fortunes of all are written.

Respect for the past is new in Europe and it was Europe that revealed India's past to India and made its veneration part of Indian nationalism. It is still through European eyes that India looks at her ruins and her art.

The virtues of R.K. Narayan are Indian failing magically transmuted.

Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life, yet it permitted a unique human development to so many.”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India