 Ever since the publication of Salman Rifti's Midnight's Children in 1981, our country has seen a remarkable explosion of literary activity in English. Several novels have achieved critical acclaim both in India and abroad, and many of them have also enjoyed commercial success. In spite of the wide public attention that it enjoys now, novel writing in English does not have a long history in our country. Though it may be considered to have begun in the 1930s, there is no continuous tradition. It was only in the 1930s that the Indian English novel became visible with the emergence of three major writers, Mulk Raj Anand, Arke Narayan and Raja Rao. Positioned between widely different cultural worlds, pre-independence Indian writers in English often drew the inspiration from India's narrative traditions, while at the same time were shaped by influences from abroad. I think all writers would like to belong to some tradition, even if they choose in the end to reject it. And I think for writers in English, living in India particularly, it is a difficult thing to say that you belong to a particular family, whether it's region, or language, or nationality. Being placed as we are, you know, somewhere between India and the West. But at the same time living here with all the other day-to-day Indian-ness of our existence, I would say that this is one of the handicaps of being an Indian writer in English, that you don't actually have a family, you feel like a foster child. The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one's own, the spirit that is one's own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word alien, yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual makeup, but not of our emotional makeup. In a multilingual environment, and all middle-class writers in India, let it be said, are bilingual. You know, even the smallest Mufassil, a person who wrote for publication, would write in a world where at least two languages were used. So in a bilingual or multilingual world, the main problem in front of an Indian writer is how do you render lives that occur in more than one language into one language? While pre-independence writers were concerned in different ways in recovering an identity fragmented and displaced under colonialism, several contemporary English novels like Shadow Line's question the idea of nationhood. All the generations of novelists believed like a lot of people in that generation that the real India was village India. People no longer believed that only village India is a true India. So there's also confidence in writing about what you know and a lack of guilt. I've never written any language I know. I read Urdu and Punjabi, but I write in English. I translate from those languages into English. It gives me a much wider audience and brings me much more money. Most of the money comes from the West. Vikram Seth was not paid all that much by Penguin India, but he was paid by his, a great deal of money by his British publishers. So maybe they are, I mean somewhere at the back of their mind, trying to cater to a western audience as well because that's where things really sell and that's where they make their money. Well they all belong I think to a fairly rich intellectual climate. It is bubbling at present and I've mentioned this earlier. You know if you've got your scientists and economists and so on, these are novelists and so on also reacting to the work that's being done in these fields over here. They're part of the debates that's going on in India. The publication in regional languages far outnumber the English ones. Our novels in English may give a totalizing image of India's literary world, while in fact it is just one lively expression of a profoundly plural and multilingual society.