I don’t think R K Narayan exalted his material or that Mulk Raj Anand, writing in the Thirties and later, did. I think it’s occurred with the latest crop of writers, who have been encouraged by all kinds of foolish people to do these family sagas, and it’s so bad for India, the encouragement of this rubbish. Because writing isn’t that. It shouldn’t be about cracking yourself up so that people on the outside say, ‘We knew Indians were grand people after all. Kipling didn’t say so, and others didn’t say so, but here we have the evidence.’
You know and I know there’s no such thing as Indian grandeur. Here these boys are doing it, all in a great rush since the Nineties, and it’s as bogus as hell. It really implies that they have never looked outside their little tawdry family circle.o Fa
~VS Naipaul talking to Farrukh Dondi
