Who are you writing for? Why do you do it? Who do you think you are?

— Margaret Atwood on writers and writing, in Negotiating with the Dead

Life is not an equal opportunity employer. Literature must often be an even more discriminating concern, for the press of dubious claimants at its gates is frenetic. This, mind you, is the meritocracy of the Word, a reservation from which Mandal remains providentially banished. Rights of Admission Deserved. Wannabe entrants should steel themselves to the fickle tyrants of this undemocratic realm — editor and agent, publisher and promoter, reader and critic. And you haven’t even exhausted that list yet — there’s the jury too, midwife of prize and prejudice.

Aravind Adiga is probably best able, at the moment, to convey the sensations of baptism into Bookworld — at once beatific and blistered. The Man Booker abroad, the pressure cooker at home, or his current chosen home, at any rate. His book — The White Tiger — has had such a lavish stewing at the hands of Indian reviewers you’d think the idea was to turn Adiga’s fiction to pulp.

Khushwant Singh’s column in The Telegraph found it the “darkest, one-sided picture of India”; author Manjula Padmanabhan savaged it in Outlook saying she found it a “tedious, unfunny slog”; historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam labelled it “another brick to the patronising edifice” in the London Review of Books; and US-based critic Amitava Kumar, who comes from Bihar, home to Adiga’s protagonist Balram Halwai, wrote in the Boston Review: “The novelist seems to know next to nothing about either the love or the despair of the people he writes about. I want to know if others, who might never have visited Bihar, read the passage above and recognise how wrong it is, how the appearance of verisimilitude belies the emotional truths of life in Bihar.” Verdict: Too dishonest, a corrupted ventriloquism.

A man arrived from far shores with the cheek to inhabit a voice from the depths of the Indian heartland; the deceit of it rings through. Mr Adiga, who do you think you are?

So did the Booker committee get it horribly wrong? No previous Booker winner with an India connection has been treated with such raging censure at home. On the contrary, they’ve been roundly feted and become, and in the odd case, celebrities. Why such trashing of Adiga?

Is it that Indians are bad at handling criticism? V.S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness remained disliked in India for decades; Satyajit Ray was often pilloried by his own for portraying too grey a picture of his country. “No,” argues a publishing editor who turned down The White Tiger but wouldn’t be named, “Our intellectual sensitivities have evolved and we are able to take criticism. Arundhati Roy or Salman Rushdie (both Booker winners) are pathological critics of things Indian in their own way. The issue is whether the criticism comes from a depth of understanding. In Adiga’s case, it rings positively shallow, it is probably smart, but it is flippant.”

Could there be an element of sudden fame-inspiring exaggerated envy in any of the criticism, or did Adiga’s work — now shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for 2008 — suffer congenital niggles spotted much earlier? It couldn’t have been for nothing that three leading Indian imprints — Penguin, Picador and Random House — had declined Adiga’s book before HarperCollins picked it up.

Penguin and Picador wouldn’t spell out their reasons for refusal. Random House was open and blunt. “The subject was amazing,” says chief editor Chiki Sarkar, “But I was not convinced about the voice, it was inauthentic to me.”

V.K. Karthika, chief editor of HarperCollins, Adiga’s Indian publisher, strongly disagrees. “The writing is gripping, the pace is relentless and the ideas he explores are contemporary and deeply relevant, especially for the middle-class reader… I think the book’s edginess and immediacy in terms of content and impact are what make it stand out.”

The middle class or the West, you might want to wonder, for Adiga’s book has been roundly lauded by critics abroad, toasted for the very voice, tone and content that brought on the savagery at home; it was the one book on the shortlist that, in the famous words of jury head Michael Portillo, “took my socks off.” Is this a view of India that the White Man — for various reasons including romance and ignorance — finds engrossing and Indians think calibrated to suit stereotypes that would appeal to the West?

For an editor who passed up The White Tiger, Sarkar isn’t terribly persuaded by the harsh tone of Indian reviews but she does agree the book contains a resonance to the West it lacks in India. “Nothing surprises me about the award despite the fact that there were more mature writers on that list and Amitav Ghosh is writing at the peak of his powers,” she says. “I know that editors in England and America, and these are editors that I hugely respect, fought bitterly for the book. I doubted its authenticity but editors and readers in the West must have found it very striking.”

The apportioning of various guilts to Adiga raises old and fundamental questions about India and fiction itself. Has he been too dark in his reportage? And if so, what about it? Is it possible to put darker hues on India? The greater guilt, one assumes, would be to paint India in lighter colours — the last man hanged for such crime was Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Then again, do Adiga’s Australian passport and TIME magazine tag — he was its India correspondent — deny him locus? Does literary quest require the licence to a constituency? Can fiction live nailed to specifics of time and dateline, must it be proscribed from liberating itself from facts in attempting truths?

Raj Kamal Jha, author of Fireproof, fights those limitations as a fiction writer, although he makes it clear his comment is general in nature because he has not read The White Tiger. “Paul Auster sits in Brooklyn and in his latest novel, a man recovering from a car accident sits in a living room in Vermont late into the night with his grieving granddaughter and they both watch Apur Sansar. They talk about that amazing hairpin scene the morning after Apu brings his wife home. You have watched the movie, you remember that scene, almost frame by frame, so there is a certain expectation from so gifted a writer. What will he do with it? How will he see it? Then all these questions melt away, it works brilliantly in the book because you believe in the characters he has created. I think that’s the key. Do you believe in the characters? Because if you do, the story seems real no matter which time or location it inhabits.”

The story with Adiga’s Balram Halwai might well be that he isn’t a believable character, something more than one Indian editor who saw the manuscript felt. He didn’t, as one of them put it, seem to come out of a “lived experience” of the author and, therefore, came across as “false, like a caricature being made to seem real.” But is there, to counter Amitava Kumar’s complaint, just one “emotional truth” of Bihar, or is it that Adiga has failed to explore any of them through Balram Halwai? The jury is perhaps out on that one.

There is an eccentric paradox embedded somewhere deep in the business of writing. All writing is a function of solitude, a private ramble between writer and doppelganger, at once alike and apart. Yet writing can seldom hope to achieve its definition unless it is able to evoke from its isolations the utterly universal. Aloofness and belonging are like atom and whole to the craft, one doesn’t quite make sense without the other. Adiga has failed to evoke that sense for critics at home; his Balram remains half-baked, or contrived to purposes of an alien audience.

We have no agreed answers on what makes writers out of people; perhaps the search for contexts is one of them. Had Adiga been guilty of being too hurried in his India experience? Who is to say? Where do we fit in, where does anything? Writing is only minimally the physicality of it, it’s never about a set of words strung into grammatically correct sentences, it’s about the ideas it confronts or is confronted by. Who are you writing for? Why do you write? Who do you think you are?

Adiga, as is often his wont, is logged off and isn’t answering. But does he really need to? The merciless thing about literary verdicts is that they can be just that: merciless. The merciful thing is none of that is binding.