Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature.

I myself, at one time, wanted to be like the explorers of the Himalayas that I used to read about; people intoxicated on the myth of history.

There is a lot of anxiety in India about writers selling out to foreign audiences, but I’m neither flattering the Indian audience nor the American audience. I’m uneasily somewhere in the middle.

I guess I am nostalgic for a time - the nineteenth century and early twentieth - when writers were, to use Stefan Collini's phrase, "public moralists" and politicians, plutocrats, bankers, arms dealers, and experts and technocrats were not solely defining the moral norms as well as the political lives of our societies. We do have some writers claiming to be public moralists, but, as I said, they have actually been more jingoistic than even the henchmen of Bush and Blair.

As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.

When I moved to London in the 1990s, it had changed a great deal. Racism had become deeply uncool. But there has been a return of racism in the guise of "antiterrorism." People who look like myself are immediately suspect. I've become extremely self-conscious about going into crowded public places.

I am a secularist in the Gandhian sense of the word, not the Nehruvian one. Nehru thought religion was an antique superstition which stood in the way of rational modern politics. I side with Gandhi, who wanted religious figures out of politics but also was suspicious of purely rational politics.