[Naipaul] has become a kind of inspired commando parachuting into the underdeveloped world and writing about the color and people and distress that United Nations statistical reports can never convey. His collected essays, The Overcrowded Barracoon, represent probably the most direct image of the Third World we're ever going to receive. These essays are superior, I think, because Naipaul never loses his novelist's command of experience and detail.

This is precisely what disappoints me about his … India: A Wounded Civilization, a book more about ideas than people…. Instead of uncovering new material … [Naipaul] has largely gutted [another earlier book, An Area of Darkness,] of its central ideas and tightened them into a grand despairing condemnation of his Hindu ancestry….

The Indian's idea of India, Naipaul believes, is a romantic retread of a glorious past which never really existed and has no magical power to solve the subcontinent's festering...