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'Most of our writing is abysmal. It is unreadable'

First of all, what is the hurry? Secondly, what does it mean -- that we have arrived? I am not denying that fine books have been written by regional authors but, when it comes to our writing in English, it is barely 100 years old. Do we have a body of work? Why are we in a hurry to pat our backs?

We have so much distance to cover. I do not think we are incapable of doing this, but only if we are willing to emulate, imbibe and appropriate the kind of rigour you see in the Bhakti poets or in Shakespeare. For us, the sun rises and sets in the West. And that is strange because, in other areas, the sun has begun to rise in our own territories. In IT, for instance. But in literature, for some reason, that hang-up still exists and I can't understand it.

Someone very well-read once told me that Cuckold was a fine book that reminded him of (M M Kaye's) The Far Pavilions. What does one do with a comment like that? We don't even know that (Gabriel Garcia) Marquez and (John) Grisham are not in the same league! I am not running down Grisham, but they are just different.

That is a perfect analogy -- Garcia compared to Grisham is like your work being compared to M M Kaye's.

It is. And I say this despite the fact that I am always trying to eliminate the boundaries between genres. I want my books to read like the wind, like thrillers. I like thrillers, and I think it is nonsense that we have decided that they are pulp, or that comedies can't get Academy Awards. Where have we got this from? Comedy is one of the most difficult things to do.

We don't even know our registers. If Dostoevsky and Marquez are up there, then the rest of us have to come a little lower. Greats occur very rarely. So, if we had our registers right, would we say something as nonsensical as 'We have arrived'? It was in 1997, 50 years after independence, that Rushdie and others began talking about the golden age of Indian literature. And we bought into that whole thing.

Are we out of our minds? I don't think we have arrived by a long shot. Most of our writing is abysmal. It is unreadable.

Which brings us back to the need for a tradition of criticism.

If we aren't going about developing critical standards of our own, and continue depending on the West, we are in for trouble.

Anything I write is Indian. I cannot avoid the fact that my English is Indian. I am not writing Victorian English, nor can I write the way authors like Ian McEwan do today. But I am not in the least bit interested in writing an Indian novel.

The only thing I would like to do -- or hope to attempt -- is to write a good novel. And not by the double standards that exist in the West -- with one for the Third world, and one for them. They can take their patronising attitude and shove it.

There are some new writers who are genuinely working with new forms though. Like Altaf Tyrewala, for instance, or Rana Dasgupta. Do you follow these developments at all?

I think Altaf Tyrewala is one of the few people playing with form in a very fine way. I want his book to be taken seriously. It gives me hope. In between, I was so put off by what was being published that I stopped reading for a long time. As for Rana Dasgupta, I have yet to read his work.

With Altaf, or any of these writers, I am going to say that I enjoyed the book, but now is the toughest part. Let's see what they come up with next. The same thing hold for me -- you are only as good as your next book, not your previous one.