Indian women writers are suddenly the flavour in European bookshops. So you see Bulbul Sharma's Anger of the Aubergines, Anita Nair's Ladies Coupe and Anita Rau Badami's The Hero's Walk rubbing spines with a lone Akhil Sharma (The Obedient Father) in Paris bookstores. But despite their visibility abroad, no woman writer of Indian origin has ever won the world's most coveted chicklit prize. But they figure regularly in the Orange longlist—from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (The Mistress of Spices), Anita Desai (Fasting, Feasting), Shauna Singh Baldwin (What the Body Remembers), Badami (The Hero's Walk), Sunetra Gupta (A Sin of Colour) to Meera Syal (Anita and Me).
The first thing his French translator did when translating Inderjit Badhwar's Sniffing Papa was to change its title. In an olfactory-sensitive country like France, that title was the biggest turn-off. But the book is fast scaling the French bestseller list, thanks to a more Parisian title: La Chambre des Parfums. A quick learner, his Indian publisher, Anuj Bahri of Tara-India Research Press, has decided to launch the paperback edition not just with the changed title, The Chamber of Perfumes, but also the French cover of an exotic-looking Rajput in an orange turban.
