Three weeks on, and the Indian media still can't get enough of Kiran Desai's Man Booker Prize win. Granted, not all of it has been glowing - there's been a fair bit of chatter about why she italicised Hindi words and didn't wear a sari to the prize-giving, whether she pandered too much to a western audience - but for the most part, it's been pretty gushy.
It's not just her though. Equal invocations have been made of her mother, Anita Desai (three-time Booker nominee), and previous winners Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. And when her UK agent, David Godwin arrived in Delhi last week (talent-scouting so soon?), it set the entire English-language Indian literary world aflutter.
Godwin is best known in these parts for having got on a plane from London to Delhi to sign up Arundhati Roy immediately after The God of Small Things landed on his desk. With two Booker wins under his belt (three, if you count Ben Okri's Famished Road, which he was responsible for publishing), he's the agent every Booker-aspirant wants. After Desai's coup, he can expect the number of manuscripts from Indian women landing on his desk to treble.
It's difficult to say exactly why the Booker is India's favourite literary prize. It just is. Just as Wimbledon is our favourite grand slam. No other literary prize, no matter how wealthy or honourable, captures our imagination quite the same way.
And Desai's win ensures that more Indian women will take up the pen, simply because they'll get less of a hard time about it. There's nothing quite like a bit of success and money to legitimise what's seen as a dodgy occupational choice. In 2005, when Sania Mirza became the first Indian woman to reach the third round in a grand slam, there was a mad rush of parents to tennis coaches all over the country, hoping that their daughter could be the next Sania.
We'll have to wait and see whether another Kiran or Arundhati emerges, but in the meantime, I'm really glad about all this Booker brouhaha. Not just because it's wrested away column inches from the beauty queens and politicians who are the usual front-page heroines. And If it can make people go out and buy more books, thus addressing the abysmally embarrassing statistic of 2,500 books sold counting as a bestseller in a country of one billion, then I say, bring it on!
