Wherein lies the charm of these Pied Pipers of our fast-changing world? The western literary establishment's tendency towards exotica -- the flavour of the decade, as it were -- is routinely offered as an explanation. Just as it was Eastern Europe in the 1970s, Latin America in the 1980s, goes the oft-repeated argument, so it is India in the the 1990s. Hence the prophecy chimed like a faithful grandfather clock after every acclaimed tome: this is a passing phase. But India's millennium hopefuls needn't despair. As ever, Rushdie provides a clue. As his narrator in The Ground Beneath Her Feet confesses: "The only leaps of faith I'm capable of are those required by the creative imagination, by fictions that don't pretend to be fact, and so end up telling the truth." With cyberia blurring old certainties, the promised benefits of the scientific age delivering a bewildering maze of conundrums, and redrawn trade barriers and dwindling ideologies mishmashing securenational and religious identities, fin de siecle discomfiture is more than palpable. Facts are no longer what they used to be and are more easily found in fiction.

And who better to chronicle this terra infirma -- and offer dual citizenship in a more enduring republic -- than a tribe which has never really enjoyed the benefits of single identities and the certainties taken for granted in the developed world. Indian writing in English is by definition an eclectic mix of diverse influences and accents, unconstrained by anything as weighing down as a literary tradition; a skillful weaver of words and ideas enjoys the unfettered freedom to invert, to pervert, to subvert the givens and evolve his own grammar. Therein lies the USP, as too a career hazard. A careful scrutiny of the novels that have left an impress makes it amply clear that each has surpassed everything before in some measure, whether it be style, structure or usage. Therein also lies the future of Indian writing in English: as long it keepsevolving and capsuling truths in ever more fanciful flights of imagination, it will endure and continue to transport us to familiar yet unknown worlds.