 The English language came to India in a curious way, not through a gradual process of cultural osmosis like Urdu, Persian or Arabic, but writing piggyback on the British Empire. In 1937, the well-known writer Raja Rao asked the basic question at the root of all Indian writing in English. How does one convey in a language that is not one's own, the spirit that is one's own? It is a question successive generations of Indian writers have conclusively laid to rest. With great mastery and conviction, they have taken an alien language of conquest and made it their own. Over the last 20 years, a slew of writers have been wooed and fated by their former colonists as master users of English, once a language not their own. On October the 14th, 1997, when Arundhati Roy stood up in the Guild Hall in London to accept the Booker Prize, she became the first resident Indian to win Britain's most coveted literary award. V. S. Naipur, best known for his masterpiece A House for Mr. Biswas, was the first writer to make the great leap to prove that neither poverty nor his obscure beginnings as the descendant of indentured labour and far-off Trinidad could stop him from becoming one of the greatest masters of the English language. Back home in India, the genre found its pillars in writers like Arke Narayan and Mulkraj Anand. Unlike Naipur, these writers wrote only on Indian themes, but their styles were strictly British. Of course, they used English excellently, but it was still a borrowed tongue, and they did not presume to play with it. How were Indian writers to infuse English expression with the temple and cadence of Indian life? At the same time, there were a few fine writers between the 60s and 80s who in a sense kept tending the Indian English flower beds, preparing them for the flowering that was to come in the late 80s. Prominent among them were Anita Desai, Naintara Seigel and Kushwant Singh. It was high time Indian writing in English grew out of the shadow of the Raj and created a distinctive voice of its own. The answer came in 1981 in a far more dramatic fashion than anyone could have anticipated, courtesy an anonymous part-time copywriter living in London. Salman Rushdie's magnum opus Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and electrified the English-speaking world. The Rushdie effect was spectacular. Within years, dozens of highly accomplished Indian writers sprang up, earning international kudos. The first of these was Amitav Ghosh. Critics excitedly compared his first novel, The Circle of Reason, with the great classic Kikeresks, Tom Jones and Don Quixote. Another Indian writer who had the western world bowing to his sheer talent in the 1980s was Vikram Sate. In a display of amazing virtuosity, Sate wrote a 307-page novel in perfectly crafted Elizabethan sonnets. Set in San Francisco, the Golden Gate received immense critical acclaim and became an instant international bestseller. Completely different in style but equally accomplished, Sate's second novel, A Suitable Boy, placed him firmly as a front-runner in the recognized canon. But the last two decades have seen several Indian writers sip from the cup of instant success. Shashi Tharoos, the great Indian novel, Rukun Advani is Beethoven among the cows, the old Keshavans looking through glass, Rohinton Mysteries, Such a Long Journey, Amit Chaguri's Afternoon Raga, Kiran Nagarkar's Cuckold, Firdaus Kanga's Trying to Grow, and Upamanyu Chatterjee's English August, hit that list. Though talented in versatile, Indian writers in English often face criticism at home for being too cosmopolitan and unrooted, for living abroad and writing in nostalgic ways about Indian realities. The 50th anniversary celebrations of India's independence saw major Western literary journals like The New Yorker and Grantor carry special issues on Indian writers in English. As the 1990s wind to a close and the millennium approaches, the empire is writing back and beyond in strident and confident tones. Thank you.