By this time, Indians must have become happily used to the idea of winning international literary prizes, so much so that even when an Indian writer wins the Booker, the response back home is rather muted — or maybe, more mature. Could it also be that Indians have started believing that there is a book in each one of us, and that it is only a matter of time before we also get there? Aravind Adiga’s Booker would no doubt give heart to those who find comfort in such a belief.

Michael Portillo, the chair this year, compared The White Tiger (Adiga’s first novel) to Macbeth, and praised it for being “extremely readable”. The first point is true, insofar as there is a surface parallel between Macbeth and Adiga’s protagonist, Balram Halwai. Both of them are self-serving individuals who do not hesitate to kill their patrons for self-advancement. Beyond this there is nothing remotely Shakespearean about The White Tiger. As for its readability, Adiga tries to do a clever first-person voice, spoken by Balram, in a choppy, Indianized English; but his effort, alas, is a huge flop. Instead of the desired effect — of the subaltern speaking in another tongue — it seems as if the author himself is trying to ape what he thinks should be the suitable equivalent of such a voice.

Since Adiga’s protagonist is writing a series of letters to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, he is able to explain every detail of his rags-to-riches life. So his story turns out to be the ideal rough guide to Dark India: a series of extensive footnotes for the benefit of Western readers. After Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, perhaps the best novel by an Indian in recent times, italicization has suddenly become passé. Chandra had seamlessly woven street-slang into his English and created a truly bilingual idiom. But Adiga has played it safe, just as the other Indian contender for the Booker this year, Amitav Ghosh, did not. Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the first part of a trilogy, is a richly audacious work, set in the heyday of colonial Bengal, and delves into a veritable melting pot of languages — Lascar dialects, Anglo-Indian, Hindustani and Bengali. But Ghosh does not provide a readymade glossary, nor does he struggle to enhance his novel’s readability.

As Adiga shows, the best bet for all those closeted novelists lurking in this country of a billion, is to write about the Darkness, the rural hinterland that lies stashed far away from the dazzling India of the big cities. In the West, the sufferings of the Indian urban elite have always been taken with less seriousness than those of the small-townie. In India, one need not try too hard to leap into the heart of darkness and Adiga, too, does it with disarming effortlessness. He picks out an obscure village near Dhanbad, describes his hero’s early miseries in vivid detail, with his eye probably set on a future screenplay for a Hollywood version of his book. Only, all this had been done far better by R.K. Narayan or Mulk Raj Anand, and nearer time, by Upamanyu Chatterjee, and of course, by the Great Gatsby of Indian writers in English: Salman Rushdie. If Balram Halwai comes out of the Dark India, where did Saleem Sinai emerge from?

The West has at last given Indian writers a formula to get to the big prizes. And bad imitators of Naipaul and Rushdie are most welcome.