Siddhartha Deb on Indian Literature

Siddhartha Deb on the effect of empire on Indian literature.

But there is another kind of collaboration, one harder to categorise, and that is with publishers in the west. Writers working in English find that being read in India is still an after-effect of being published in Britain or America, in spite of the growing body of literature in English that is being published initially, or even exclusively, in India. Publication in the west has always been crucial, right from Graham Greene’s intervention on behalf of RK Narayan around the time the Progressive Writers’ Association was being formed, but it became a noticeable phenomenon only when the presence of Indian writers in the west began to coincide with other global trends: the increasing interest of the west in India as a market and the desire of a rising Indian elite to flaunt its affluence on a global scale.