India: A Million Mutinies Now
Naipaul's third book on India, built from the testimony of people describing their own lives and grievances.
Naipaul’s third book about India, published in 1990, and the one that broke with the disgust of the earlier two. Instead of judging, he listens: to a Shiv Sena organiser in Bombay, a Dalit writer, a Sikh militant’s family, a Brahmin scientist, a Naxalite turned businessman. The million mutinies of the title are the assertions of caste, region, faith and class that were tearing at the Indian state, and which Naipaul came to read as evidence of a country waking into its own multiplicity rather than falling apart.
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Pankaj Mishra
The book that comes closest to having the narrative energy of a work of fiction on my list is India: A Million Mutinies Now by V S Naipaul, which is why I chose it, in part. There’s this idea of the ‘Great American Novel’, which is deeply flawed because we know there isn’t one America. There are many, many Americas and no novel can hope to capture them all. This difficulty is even more pronounced in India.
Interview · March 2011
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