India Told and Exposed: A Reading of the Indian Booker Heavyweights

Abstract

It’s always very dicey to speak anything about a multifarious country like India for sure. And from literature one must never expect a Kodak-camera realism. In little over a decade, three Indian writers bagged the prestigious Booker-prize, a tradition that the fiction giant Rushdie started in 1981. Here I intentionally drop V.S. Naipaul as he is of Indian ancestry and not of Indian origin. The works of all the four Indian Booker- prize winners depict a picture of the country that annoys many of the intellectuals and laymen as well. These novels have been received with considerable antagonism in India. In place of telling India, these novelists have been charged of selling India, keeping the western audience in their minds. They have been charged of tarnishing the image of the country.