In a significant collusion between culture and economy, the new India that the Indian English writing of recent years has set out to portray and celebrate is the radiant and sanguine face of a post-liberalisation nation and polity. One novel is usually singled out as the instigator of this changed writing scenario in the subcontinent. This is, of course, Midnight's Children, published in the United Kingdom in 1981 by the Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie. Although the book preceded the onset of economic reforms in the country, it could inspire a revolution in Indian writing in English precisely because, inspired by the postmodernist muse – incidentally another muse in thrall to Mammon (Eagleton 1996) – it dared to be experimental and innovative with language and style and with the presentation of the narrative. The decade of writing about India that followed became fittingly known as the postmodern phase of the Indian English novel (Kirpal 1996). Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things which won the Booker Prize in 1997, becoming in the process the first Booker to be won by a bona fide Indian, fitted into the postmodernist ethos despite its exposure of the patriarchal and hierarchical Indian society. The tragic tale of love and loss (by caste-sponsored and state-enforced ‘love laws’) notwithstanding, the novel was hailed more for its technical virtuosity and for its being a stylistic tour de force.

The triumphalist way of portraying a new India continued in the fiction that came in the decade following the new millennium. The Indian diaspora took centre stage this time around. Without taking anything away from The Inheritance of Loss, the other big book by a bona fide Indian – Kiran Desai – to have won the Booker Prize in 2006, it has to be said that this is a novel caught between a nostalgia for the Raj and a yearning for the American dream which is a modern-day version of the Raj. This leaves only one novel of the decade, on the face of it at least, to call a halt to this fictional desire to look away from a contemporary India and its discontents and to write India anew in a different way. This is Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008).