Another kind of pen pushing

India's English-language writer-bureaucrats are a unique breed

It’s strange but true. Celebrated, usually sotto voce, by a very tiny section of the media and largely unappreciated by the ever-dwindling group that reads English novels — or reads anything at all that’s longer than 800 words — there lurks in India a very unique creature, the babu who writes novels, short stories and poems.

Until about the mid-1980s, bureaucrats had to know “good” English. This meant not only did they have a large vocabulary, they also had to string these words together in a grammatically correct way, complete with articles and the correct prepositions. That last skill is pretty