...Writers At Work | Pankaj Mishra
I think it started with my life as a reader. If you think of India in the 1980s there weren’t many writers in English around. The ones that were there,Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth, were living abroad or publishing from abroad. Indian writing in English by then had also become linked to robust expressions of intellectual confidence and linguistic inventiveness, and I wasn’t part of any metropolitan network—St Stephen’s, Ivy League, or Oxbridge—it seemed to emerge from. So the idea that someone could be a writer in English, without leaving India or being educated abroad, seemed way ahead in the future. Only in the 1990s did that become a possibility, after Arundhati Roy’s novel (The God of Small Things). Now of course the ambition to write is not only widely available, it is quite quickly realized.
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