- guardian.co.uk, Monday July 14 2008 00.04 BST
- The Guardian, Monday July 14 2008
I was at once dismayed and amused to read that Salman Rushdie believes I "take a swipe" at Midnight's Children "almost every day" ('Everybody needs to get thicker skins', G2, July 11, 2008). Amused because the description turns me into a fictional character from James Thurber, lonely and obsessed; dismayed because I actually like his novel very much. I may not be an unequivocal worshipper at the shrine; I've only reviewed him once, a mildly critical piece on Shalimar the Clown; but I do think Midnight's Children, with Haroun and the Sea of Stories, is his best book, and one of the most amazing novels to have emerged from India in the last 30 years. What I've been arguing against for some time is the conflation of that novel, in a certain kind of discourse, with an idea of Indian writing in English, or even Indian writing itself: a conflation that reduces, rather than enlarges, the field. I'm delighted, though, that it's received the Booker of Bookers. The only justification for having someone else win it this time would be to have the pleasurable possibility of a Booker of Booker of Bookers some time in the future.
Amit Chaudhuri
Kolkata, India
