This book investigates what happens to the English language when it seeks to accommodate India and what happens to India when it is accommodated within the language of a far-off European country. It explores the work of writers from Kipling to Salman Rushdie, Ghandhi to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The author is concerned with writers who have set themselves an impossible task and try to carry it out with the wrong tools, writers who seek to enclose the unimaginable diversity of India within books of a few hundred pages written in a language that is scarely Indian at all. He shows that to write about India in Englsih is an excercise in futility, but an exercise that has produced some of the most exciting and moving literary work of this century.

This book investigates what happens to the English language when it seeks to accommodate India and what happens to India when it is accommodated within the language of a far-off European country. It explores the work of writers from Kipling to Salman Rushdie, Ghandhi to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The author is concerned with writers who have set themselves an impossible task and try to carry it out with the wrong tools, writers who seek to enclose the unimaginable diversity of India within books of a few hundred pages written in a language that is scarely Indian at all. He shows that to write about India in Englsih is an excercise in futility, but an exercise that has produced some of the most exciting and moving literary work of this century.