For most critics, and possibly for most readers, contemporary Indian literature entered a decisive, cosmopolitan and globally popular phase with the publication of Midnight's Children in 1981. The following decades have witnessed the growth of a literature that has been outward-looking, confident and increasingly widely read. It is arguable that in that time the Indian literary diaspora has had a greater impact on English Literature than writing from any other nation. The revolution inaugurated by Rushdie hinged on the subversion of the nationalist euphoria of midnight, August 15, 1947. One version of this story is that the euphoria continued until the arrival of Indira Gandhi, when disappointment set in with a vengeance. The 1980s saw the flourishing of a literature – particularly the Bombay novel (Ashcroft 2011) – virtually obsessed with Gandhian corruption. But whatever the confluence of forces, it seems that Midnight's Children triggered scepticism about nationalism that has characterised India's increasingly vital and outward-moving literature.

My argument in this chapter is that the ‘Rushdie revolution’ represents a continuation rather than a break. It regenerates a hidden tradition of anti-nationalist utopianism in Indian literature most prominent in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi. The irony of this is that both Tagore and Gandhi have become nationalist icons and, in Gandhi's case, he is sanctified almost as a national deity. Yet it is their insurgent anti-national philosophy that best survives in the contemporary novel. Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and we can follow the trajectory of subsequent Indian Booker Prize winners, the inheritors of Rushdie's prize-winning revolution, to understand how India came to be ‘re-written’: Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (winner in 1997), Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008) and a novel that perhaps more than any others demonstrates the direction of Indian writing: the expatriate Hari Kunzru's Transmission (2004).

To understand the manner in which India is being written anew today, we need to understand the history of the Indian relationship with the idea of nation, in particular the history of its literary imaginings, undergirded by a utopianism that goes hand in hand, ironically, with a deep anti-nationalist skepticism.