01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, April 17, 2005

BY TOM D'EVELYN
Special to The Journal

In The World Republic of Letters (Harvard, 420 pages, $35), the French scholar Pascal Casanova argues for a "republic of letters" with its capital in Paris (naturally). After all, Paris recognizes literary genius first, from Poe to Joyce. How does the capital dominate the colonies? Calcutta-born Vikram Seth's novel A Suitable Boy is pronounced by publishers and critics as "revenge of the old colonies against the British Empire" while also being "in the great tradition" of Dickens.

Weaving between the warp of dialectical concepts like whole/part, center/margin, and a rich "anecdotal" history of books, Casanova's own book has been heralded as "groundbreaking." It will be plundered for its accounts of Faulkner and Naipaul and others, and it furnishes a contestable vision of "world literature."

Acknowledging that world literature is a "problem," in his voluminous anthology The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (Vintage, 646 pages, $15), Amit Chaudhuri presents his broad survey in terms of India's cultural complexity (the sections are both chronological and geographical). Throughout the varied selections, one recognizes a triumph of style. Raja Rao writes: "I was born a Brahmin -- that is, devoted to Truth and all that." Chaudhuri's introductions combine biography and pithy critical commentary in a spicy blend that rivals Indian cuisine.

Yet one misses Arundhati Roy, and now there's Abha Dawesar, born in New Delhi in 1974. Her second novel, Babyji (Vintage, 356 pages, $13), already promoted as "gay literature," has many of the virtues of Chaudhuri's selections -- wit and irony, passion and intelligence, above all the conscious joy of style.

Its 16-year-old protagonist Anamika is both a superior student and a romantic who names her first lover, a woman her mother's age, after her other first love, India. In her school uniform, Anamika revels in quantum physics and differential calculus; out of it, she can't separate the mind-bending pleasures she feels in the arms of her lovers from the abstract worlds she's exploring in her textbooks.

Eventually, it simply hurts to be Anamika: "A cacophany of real and imagined lovers filled my head." As she grows up, indulging her own difference leads Anamika to some hard truths. Reduced to an epigram, Chaudhuri's argument applies to Babyji: If we like to lump all Indian writers together, it's because we have no curiosity about how they see themselves; but once we see how they see themselves, we will recognize ourselves in their works.

Tom D'Evelyn is a freelance editorial consultant in Providence.