Writing fiction in a foreign language is not the same as writing it in the mother tongue. It throws up a number of challenges. The first task of the writer is to ensure that he has used the language correctly. This is only a minor challenge. The more difficult hurdle for such a novelist is to gauge whether his language is having the desired effect on the reader. Languages carry cultural contexts with them and these are often best understood in their own respective cultures. The novelist can find this a rather daunting factor, particularly if he is aiming his novel at an international rather than national level. Thus a novelist writing in a foreign language has the added responsibility of using the language in a way that it does not irritate the native user of the language. He needs to charm the native user of that language with something that is usually alien to its native usage. To ignore the native user of the language would tantamount to gatecrashing into someone’s house and abusing him on the top of it.

The English language is remarkable in this sense. It allows so many different kinds of linguistic patterns to blend into it and always keep its evolution on. No wonder so many novelists from the various continents have succeeded in using English to its maximum potential. It is not only novelists like Salman Rushdie, who have lived so long in England that they are no different to the native users, who need to worry about this aspect of their writing. Such a writer has to consciously introduce a difference of style and vocabulary to earn a distinct identity. Rushdie’s chutneyfication is amply known. The greater challenge lies for the writer who has not resided in England or another country where English is the mother tongue. Such a writer has to fight on more fronts and if he succeeds in winning readers in the countries where English is the mother tongue he has done a doubly difficult job. Arundhati Roy belongs to this category. She seems to offer newer possibilities of using the language to the native user by employing it with such originality and dexterity. Raja Rao had done this earlier in an even more complex fashion when he tried to blend the structures of English and his own language.

Non-British novelists have played a considerable part in deciding which way the English language has to evolve. Mikhail Bakhtin singled out the novelist for using language in its social dimension as no other user could use it. The poet, for instance, Bakhtin reminds us, does not use a language dialogically – saying something as though it were the reply to a question posed by another. The novelist does, Bakhtin tells us. The novelist, more than any other user of the language carries the social context as he builds through it a whole new world, as it were. Thus the novelist can have a greater thrust on the growth of a language than that of those who are not novelists. The novelist writing in a foreign language can actually play the greatest role in evolving it towards another direction. This is what is happening with regard to the English language. Native users may not always realize how their language is no longer quite under their control.