The occasion was the launch of Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace at the Maurya Sheraton in New Delhi. The 551-page hardcover version of the book, published by HarperCollins (£16.99), is already on the shelves, but this was more than just a launch. It was a forum for critic Mukul Kesavan to hold Ghosh in conversation before an enthralled audience, which included the likes of artist Anjolie Ela Menon, actresses Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das, former CBI director Joginder Singh, Congress MP Jayanti Natarajan, poet Javed Akhtar and Ghosh's wife, Anita.

Ghosh told Kesavan that he had been fond of the works of James Baldwin and V S Naipaul since his college days, and these two fiction writers had influenced him the most in all his writings. Particularly, Naipaul's art of using words moved him a lot, confessed Ghosh.

He also said that while writing The Glass Palace, he had struggled against the whole idea of writing it in English. "It brought out my confrontation with the language and I think every bilingual Indian has the same dilemma," he said.

Why The Glass Palace? "One of my uncles is in Burma," Ghosh explained. "While spending some days there, I talked to many people and these changed my understanding of history. There is very little writing about the Indian National Army and no one has examined the racism, apartheid and self-hatred among us, among the Indian armymen there, which sprang up from our colonialism. We are so complacent.

"The anxiety among the armymen as to why we are here? What cause are we dying for? These, I think, led to the Indian people declining to cross the Kala Pani, a reason cited for the Sepoy Mutiny."

Questions about the writer's political wariness in writing this book came naturally then, though Ghosh tried to duck them. To a question from Shabana Azmi, he replied, "It is cannibalistic and who knows it better than you?"Answering a question from Joginder Singh, Ghosh asserted that the plots of his books came straight from the characters. "The plot comes to me after I talk to people as in the case of The Glass Palace," he said.

The Glass Palace is set in Malaya. Its protagonist is a boy, Rajkumar, who helps out at a market stall in the dusty square outside the royal palace in Mandalay. The period is around the time when the British drove the Burmese king, queen and court into exile. Rajkumar is rescued by a far-seeing Chinese merchant, in partnership with whom he builds up a great logging business in upper Burma. But haunted by his vision of the royal family and one of its attendants, Dolly, whom he later marries, Rajkumar journeys to an obscure town in India where the royal family are. Finally, Rajkumar's granddaughter brings the readers back to contemporary Burma, and completes the circle he started long ago in Mandalay.

In his book, Ghosh has tried to picturise the tension between the Burmese, the Indians and the British forces. The story follows the fortunes-rubber estates in Malaya, businesses in Singapore, estates in Burma-of Rajkumar, and his Chinese, British and Burmese relations, friends and associates, from 1870 through World War II, and then the scattering of the extended family in New York, Thailand, London and Hong Kong in the post-war years.