How the area of darkness became a wounded civilisation where, eventually, were found a million mutinies
After nearly a year of travel and enquiry in India for the book, Vidia returned to London and wrote a letter to Moni Malhoutra, an IAS officer with whom he had stayed in the district of Faizabad, UP:
"The point that one feels inescapable is the fact of India's poverty; and how deep is one's contempt for those Indians who, finding no difficulty in accepting one standard in India and another outside it, fail to realise this, and are failing to work night and day for the removal of this dreadful insult and humiliation.... The lavatories at Palam (airport) were literally covered with shit and the aerodrome officer could only speak of the shortage of staff (i.e. sweepers). I wonder, wonder if the shitting habits of Indians are not the key to all their attitudes.... So goodbye to shit and sweepers; goodbye to people who tolerate everything; goodbye to all the refusal to act; goodbye to the absence of dignity; goodbye to the poverty; goodbye to caste and that curious pettiness which permeates that vast country; goodbye to people who, though consulting astrologers, have no sense of their destiny as men.... Not only must caste go, but all those sloppy Indian garments; all those saris and lungis; all that squatting on the floor to eat, to write, to serve in a shop, to piss.... Probably I am mad. But it seems to me that everything conspires to keep India down."
These ideas would mature in An Area of Darkness. India remained for V.S. Naipaul "the land of my childhood, an area of darkness.... I had learned my separateness from India, and was content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors". This was a premature and inaccurate conclusion: he was not content to be a colonial, and he would continue to seek an ancestral past, far from the Caribbean of his childhood. Vidia was a product of the Indian diaspora who wanted to link himself to the civilisation of his forebears.
India was then at the beginning of a social, political and economic upheaval that would lead to the nation's rise at the end of the century, a million mutinies leading to a new phase of creativity and economic progress. "Independence had come to India like a kind of revolution; now there were many revolutions within that revolution," Vidia wrote. He sensed that something important was taking place in a country where others still saw only a continuation of old patterns. India: A Million Mutinies Now would be longtoo longbut exceptional in its narrative perception. To the surprise of readers of his earlier books, Vidia saw beyond the corruption and the violence to an original and redemptive vision. It was a personal homecoming, as he continued to seek an ancestral past, trying to link himself to a nation that was, in his own imagination, his source.