A novelist responds: ‘More interesting to map the sensibilities of diasporic (Indian) writers’

If you haven’t read the recent article entitled “Why almost every major Indian writer lives abroad and what it has done to Indian fiction” and you want to know what the overseas residence of these writers has done to Indian fiction, the answer as per the article is the one that people have been giving for the last few decades: It has left behind the authentic and given an overly explained version of India to western readers. There are several ways of responding to such an article, none of which I want to follow. But I do want to sketch a few of them in outline here.

Better questions

First, it can be pointed out that the great prominence of overseas writers could be counteracted, at least in India, by the Indian media giving prominence (and column space) to Indian writers living in India. Indian media appears to have largely signed off on Indian literary work. The website on which the said article appears is affiliated with a major English-language broadsheet that hasn’t reviewed a work of fiction in decades for obscure business-related reasons. Even those media outlets that do devote space to fiction spend large amounts of that space on the books that make it...

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