Born and brought up in an Indian colony of Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul always thought India to be the country from which his grandfather came, a country never physically described and therefore never real, a country out in the void beyond the dot of Trinidad… a country suspended in time… So in 1962 he set out to discover this country of his imagination. But during his journey, as the physique of Europe melted away and he found himself into the Aryan Asia, his feelings are described as “Hysteria had been my first reaction, and a brutality dictated by a new awareness of myself as a whole human being and a determination, touched with fear, to remain what I was.” His first journey to India was of “Superficial impressions, intemperate reactions”.
