Breaking free

The parallel draws a hum of approval from the crowd, and is happily accepted by McCall Smith, who recently delivered a lecture paying homage to Narayan.

Step away from this well-lit and well-heeled corner of India, however, and walk out of the air-conditioned mall and into the sweaty, chaotic streets where saris mix with jeans and T-shirts, and rickshaw drivers have mobile phones, and Narayan's bucolic novels seem out of place.

Contemporary India has moved on significantly from the 1930s, when Narayan needed the patronage of Graeme Greene in order to be published and popularised in the West. As the country becomes ever more prosperous and literate (650 million readers and growing at the last count), the days when Indian writers like Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai needed to leave to find an audience have passed.

For many, the watershed came in 2004. Chetan Bhagat, a young graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, published his debut novel, Five Point Someone. The comic tale of three mechanical engineers struggling through Bhagat's alma mater sold millions in India. It remained on the bestseller lists until 2007. In the West, however, it barely caused a ripple.

"It proved you could be a literary writer in India without having to sell in the West," says Rimi B Chatterjee, one of Kolkata's few English-language authors. The Belfast-born writer is part of a self-confident Indian generation writing in English that no longer feels the need to tip its hat towards its former colonial masters. "The previous generation hadn't the option of making it big in India. People like Anita Desai and Narayan had to go to the West because that is where the publishers, agents and awards were. There was nothing here. That is no longer the case."

Book publishing is booming in India. An increasingly educated and aspirational population sees reading as a symbol of social mobility. In the five years from 2003 to 2008, spending on books, magazines and newspapers more than doubled.

Both Chatterjee's novels reference contemporary and historical India but refuse to unpack it for a Western audience. Her 2005 debut, Signal Red, melds science fiction and political comment in a style similar to Margaret Atwood. The follow-up, City Of Love, is a historical novel about India's spice trade, pirates, gold, plus a generous dose of mysticism.

"Writers are becoming more confident that we can get an audience in India who can understand what I am saying, and I don't need to explain the most obvious Indian stuff," says Chatterjee. "Instead I can look at more interesting questions of hybridity, change, and cultural difference in a way that I find more interesting as an Indian. We no longer say: I am presenting India in all its exotic glory for the West."

In the coffee shops around Kolkata's College Street, an area colonised by booksellers for 200 years, the air is thick with the sound of what Bengalis call "adda". It is the locals airing opinions, verbal pugilism, mixed with a healthy dose of devil's advocacy.

Aravind Adiga's Booker prize-winning The White Tiger - currently India's number two bestseller - points an adda-fuelled finger at his native land, holding it to account for overlooking the poor amidst its headlong rush to inherit the world from the West.

But where Adiga's adda is of a Dickensian bent, the kind that sells well internationally, the third-best-selling book in India last week displays a style of political adda more akin to Hunter S Thompson. The Story Of My Assassins is by Tarun J Tejpal, a journalist making his name writing angry novels based on semi-fictionalised accounts of his encounters with politicians.

It is one that gleefully proclaims its desire to "slash through the subcontinent's dubious spiritual serenity to lay bare every crippling divide of language, wealth and class". Like Dostoevsky and Dickens, the new Indian writers are sending their own notes from the underground, postcards from the edge.

Anjum Hasan's Lunatic In My Head typifies the new writing from India's margins. Set in the northeast hill station of Shillong, Hasan's tale tells of a wannabe civil servant convinced that Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters is communicating with him psychically. The town is suspicious of outsiders and riven with divisions between Christians, Animists and Muslims. Hasan was longlisted for last year's Man Asian Literary Prize for her follow up novel, Neti, Neti, before it was even published.

Caste is an increasingly prominent topic. Chatterjee teaches several "untouchable" or Dalit poets at Jadavpur University. "There is an upcoming generation who centralise caste," she says. "They grew up facing discrimination, so they write about it."

One leading light is Namdeo Dhasal, a casteless writer from Mumbai. In 1972 he founded the Dalit Panthers, inspired by America's Black Panthers. He began publishing poetry a year later, and is one of the few casteless writers translated into English.

A CCORDING to Chatterjee, more Dalits' writing will appear in the coming years, challenging what remains a blot on India's claim to be the world's largest democracy. Another is its attitude towards women. During the first week of the Kolkata book fair, images flashed around India of a group of women being physically beaten out of a pub. The justification? "It is not acceptable for women to go into bars in India," according to Pramod Mutalik, head of the group Ram Sena (Army of Lord Ram), who was arrested during the attack.

Mutalik and his ilk are raging against the dying of the patriarchal light. Chick-lit is booming in India. And it does not just import the clichés of arranged marriages and parental pressures seen in British Asian equivalents, by the likes of Mira Sayal.Homosexuality is another taboo subject increasingly being aired. Amruta Patil's Kari, for example, uses the graphic novel format to tell the story of a young lesbian working in a Delhi call centre.

Bolstered by India's growing self-confidence, this April's London Book Fair's theme will be "India Through Fresh Eyes". Nearly 40 authors, including Tarun J Tejpal, will come from India to take part. It could prove to be a shock. These new writers are gunning for the India now sold internationally, the India of malls rising from shanty towns, of slumdogs winning millions, of a place where spiritual enlightenment is still possible, of a democracy ready for superpower status. The gloves are off.