In Vidia's India: A Million Mutinies Now there is little landscape and hardly any weather. There is no smell, no heat or dust, no sweating men, no lisping saris, no honking traffic, nothing except the sound of yakking Indians.
Paul Theroux in Sir Vidia's Shadow
In the summer of 1998, India—and then Pakistan—suddenly exploded on the front pages of the newspapers around the world. The nuclear bomb tests were a culmination of a heady season of self-assertion, a year during which the 50th anniversary of Indian and Pakistani independence came to life in a flurry of literary acclaim. By December, it was clear that the South Asian demonstration of literary force in the West rivalled the power of the other Third World product of the year, El Nino. Breathless, magazines like the New Republic almost begged for mercy: Macaulay, who had said that "a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India", has been pelted with masterpieces for this ignorant denigration of Indian literature. His punishment has taken a form which he could not have imagined, the vivid prosperity of an Indian literature, and a Pakistani literature, written in Macaulay's own language.
In the ice-cream parlours of New Delhi, a lot of Indians were happy to receive so much notice in the pages of the New Republic and The New Yorker. I was happy that Granta magazine sent a reporter to my own hometown, Patna. He found Conrad's Mistah Kurtz there in the figure of our Chief Minister, Laloo Prasad Yadav. In the story, Yadav was called by his first name, just like Saddam. But the reporter must have made an impression on the Patna leader. Yadav took him for a walk through his vegetable garden and offered friendly dietary information: "This is satthu," he said. "Very good for wind." Such characters also made their appearance in the fiction by Indian writers, published in the same magazines around this time.