An area of darkness

V. S. Naipul

V S Naipaul first visited India in 1962. The book emerging out of that visit, An Area of Darkness, remains a valuable record of an India in transition - an India losing, under a weak and exhausted Nehru, a war with China, and losing along with it its flush of post-independence idealism and innocence.  (Pankaj Mishra - http://dikigoros.150m.com/naipaulmishra.htm)