A.K. Ramanujan, whose posthumous volumes are beginning to rival the ones he wrote in his lifetime, could be devastating in his gentle way. "Bad writing is not the monopoly of Indian writers," he declared in an interview that is published in the latest—and heftiest—volume, The Oxford India Ramanujan. As for that eternal debate on IWE vs the rest of Indian literature, the Chicago-based poet did not pull his punches: he considered that the best writers were in regional languages, but there are "more competent second-rate writers in English than in the languages".
So the novel isn’t dead after all. The man who declared it dead has just put the finishing touches to his latest work of fiction. V.S. Naipaul has recently packed off his post-Nobel novel to his publishers. Is this the Other Half of Half a Life?
