The Indian English Novel: Kim and Midnight's Children
"Is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality?" (75), asks Salman Rushdie in Midnight's Children. The answer is, I think, yes, but it is a disease to which only those like Rushdie, who write about India in English, are vulnerable. To write about India in any of its vernaculars, even in Hindi its national language, is inevitably to divide it. Rushdie knows as much. In 1956 Nehru divided India into