Rajni George

'We don't want to get our morals from our holy books,' said Richard Dawkins at the annual Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) earlier this week. Some among his audience might have taken offence if they were listening, but they were too busy persecuting India's most simultaneously celebrated and vilified writer-in-exile, Salman Rushdie. When I spoke to festival director William Dalrymple two days before opening day, he anticipated some kind of a showdown between the 'liberals inside and the angry beards outside'. And so it came to pass, as the eternal clash between Indian 'liberals' and 'conservatives' played out on JLF’s stage.

In some ways, publishing in early post-independence India was like publishing in pre-sixties Canada: cautiously seeking native voices without much financial success. Take GV Desani’s All About H Hatterr (1948), the first Indian novel to ‘go beyond the Englishness of the English language’ as Salman Rushdie once said. It languished out of print for many years, despite critical acclaim. Anita Desai and VS Naipaul’s classics may sell well today, but when they started out in the sixties, their readership was select and modest. In the seventies and eighties, new writers like Manohar Malgaonkar and Aubrey Menon as well as the popular RK Narayan, came to prominence in journals like the seminal Illustrated Weekly of India.