Is English language writing in India now thoroughly desi-fied?

To begin with, the panel decided to trade the topic ‘Is English Language Writing in India now thoroughly Desi-Fied?’ for a new one: ‘What makes Cool Writers?’ Which in itself was a fairly accommodative classification, and one that ostensibly intended to cover the personality of the writers on the panel: Shovon Chowdhury, Amitabha Bagchi, Yashodhara Lal, CP Surendran, and moderator, Indrajit Hazra.
The conversation soon got around to the English language and the question of whether it falsified the Indian experience. “English 'ironizes' you as a narrator,” Surendran insisted. The narrator is questionable because he’s taking a stand in a language that’s essentially adopted. It was the concern of inauthenticity that compelled Surendran to render a key character in his novel Hadal, mute he said rather than have him articulate unconvincingly in English, given his vernacular moorings.
The others were of a different mind. For Bagchi, author of The Householder, English was the only language he could write in, and one that credibly conveyed what he wanted to say. Lal, who wrote the novel Just Married, Please Excuse, said she preferred to write in the English people around her identified with. “Moreover, I’m comfortable writing in it,” she added.
And then language moved off the table and made room for a debate on whether comedy was the genre du jour. “Is there a pressure on new writers to be comedic?’ inquired Hazra. “In a hard socio-political climate it’s easier to make your point with humour,” claimed Chowdhury, author of The Competent Authority. “The Russians were at their comedic best in the Soviet era,” he claimed, adding that our own present political climate could just as well produce a serious body of the funnies.
Until a few years ago, there actually existed a ‘genre’ called Indian writing in English, they acknowledged. But the wave of new writers and writing in the English language in the recent years has made the genre redundant and upturned the stereotype of the elite English author.