Surprise! Indian writers live in India

'For many years India's literary culture has been focused on London and New York. But things may be changing', reports Kathleen McCaul, writing for Guardian Unlimited. Absolutely, because that is where the market and money is. This is not dissimilar to the brain drain of scientists and professions to America, except they would be involved in more mundane chore.

The most famous of these NRIs is Salman Rushdie who rubbished all Indians who didn't write in English in his Introduction to the Vintage Book of Indian Writing, and whose essay in the TIME Magazine for India's 50th year of Independence conveniently forgot that India is closer to 5000 years old than 50. Excuse me, sir, Mr Rushdie, you may not have noticed that Valmiki, Vyasa, Kalidasa, Kabir and Tulsi Das - to name very very few - didn't write in English. And if you want more modern names in Indian vernacular writing how about Siva Sankaran Pillai, Vasudevan Nair, Anantha
Moorthy, Asokamitran … gosh I haven't even moved beyond south of India yet.

Anyway, I digress.

The report says that many NRIs are moving back to India to write. Altaf Tyrewalla spent years in America as a journalist and poet but returned home to work on his first novel. "I wouldn't have been able to work full time on a book in America because there's no question of living there without a job," he explains. "You need the health insurance."

"I don't know how, for instance, I could write from the perspective of an imaginary butcher in a chicken shop if I wasn't also suffering the humidity like him, suffering the noise of a ghetto like him, and yet trying, like him, to think amidst this discomfort, this cacophony ..." Talk about suffering for his art ...

More important is what are Indian (or any other non-European) writers allowed to write about. Pankaj Mishra's new book is about China and Rana Dasgupta's second novel is set in Bulgaria.

One writer says: "I have a lot of pressure from my publishers to write about India … it is a colonial hangover in publishing to think that writers in India, Africa and the Caribbean must write about their home cultures while writers from the West could write about anywhere. Mature literary cultures should feel like they can write about the world."

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2012008,00.html