[Eric]

Jayaprakash, I see your point about Dickens, but nowadays, if you have enough money to survive, you can spread things around the world by the internet to either blacken the image of your country, or praise it. You can't really be stopped. But whether anyone will read you is another matter.

I find it a little odd that the Indian writing community is quarreling about the image India has abroad, when virtually none of the books written by people perhaps closer to the reality of poverty and injustice, i.e. writers writing in their various vernaculars, ever reach the outside world so that we people in, for instance, Europe, can get a more balanced view of Indian fiction.

As for privilege, I don't mind a few privileged middle-class Indians writing books, but I'd like to hear from privileged people writing originally in the indigenous languages.