The tradition of the great writers of preindependence India, such as Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan, and Mulk Raj Anand, has given way to Indian writers of the global village led by two important and fundamentally different authors, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. These two writers brought Indian literature in English to the attention of a wider Western reading public, first with Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and then with Seth's The Golden Gate (1986). Rushdie's wildly imaginative experimentation with postmodernism contrasts with Seth's conservative approach to poetry and prose, but both writers established the economic viability of Indian writing and paved the way for the wave of South Asian writers in the market today that includes Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, and Romesh Gunesekera. Seth has promoted himself as a traditionalist uninterested in literary theory and the tastes of what he has called, in a 1999 interview with Katherine Knorr...