In David Lynch's Wild at Heart, Lula (Laura Dern) is driving a car, changing stations on the radio, while Sailor (Nicolas Cage) sleeps in the back seat. The pair are on their way to California. The news on the radio opens a highway of blood and gore. First, we hear about open-heart surgeries, then multiple murders by a recent divorcée, then an item about a man in court who had sex with a corpse. Finally, a voice with a BBC accent takes us to Benares. The state authorities released 500 turtles into the waters of the Ganges in order to reduce human pollution, and now they plan to put in crocodiles to devour floating corpses.

Lula is disgusted. She locates another station, which is playing a song that makes the lovers kick their legs in the air and embrace each other with joy. Ah, the romantics....

India and Pakistan, by going nuclear in 1998, might have provided occasion for Lula to change the station once again. But Booker Prize-winner Arundhati Roy's response to the Indian nuclear test, an essay titled "The End of Imagination," forcefully delivers the unromatic image of a single world both responsible for and doomed by the nuclear madness. That essay, first published in the West in The Nation [September 28, 1998], serves as the introduction to a new collection, India: A Mosaic. The other pieces were all published earlier in the pages of The New York Review of Books.

Roy expresses her bafflement at the peculiar meeting of East and West in the applause over the bomb in the streets of India. The ultranationalist young men who were celebrating India's nuclear bomb and simultaneously emptying crates of Coke and Pepsi into public drains are asked by Roy: "Coke is Western culture, but the nuclear bomb is an old Indian tradition?"

In the concluding article of the volume, Pankaj Mishra observes that in the new, nuclear India, populism is going to extract a grave cost from the most vulnerable. He writes that "the poor may find that the small portions of bread that occasionally went with the circuses have become even smaller."

Clearly, the essays by Roy and Mishra on India's nuclearization, serving as the volume's bookends, emphasize the importance of that event and hence of India as a subject of attention. Other essays in the collection--Ian Buruma's report on Chandigarh and Lucknow, Christopher de Bellaigue's brief but hard-hitting and informative account of Bombay, Roderick MacFarquhar's look back at the partition riots of 1947 even as India celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of independence in 1997--all touch upon India's right-wing turn with the rise to prominence of the Bharatiya Janata Party. As it was the BJP government that was responsible for the nuclear tests, this attention to the growth of sectarian ideologies is in sync with the above-mentioned articles by Roy and Mishra.

On the last page of his essay on nuclear India, Mishra writes of the pundits and psephologists discussing the 1998 parliamentary elections. "For days and nights on end," he says, "they discussed events and personalities about whom the most accurate thing one could say was that they would soon be overtaken by events and personalities equally inconsequential." This comment raises a point about the volume as a whole: If the quick flow of events and elections has made some of the essays already appear a bit outdated, what role does India play in the global imagination so as to justify this volume?

It is said that the great Brazilian poet, Joâo Cabral de Melo Neto, had reached a dead end as a poet "until he happened to read one day that life expectancy in his native Recife was even lower than India." The result was his marvelous The Dog Without Feathers, a turn away from symbolism to poetry with social value.

A similar, related impulse might be at work in the publication of India: A Mosaic. One of the essays in the volume, written by Amartya Sen and focusing on Tagore, attests to the complex and progressive response that writers in India have made to the legacies of colonialism as well as to India's troubled modernity. As in the case of Tagore, this response has also often been against the dominant expectations of the West.

Arundhati Roy's recent arrest in protest of a dam project, and her frank and open denunciation of both the Indian government and the World Bank, emblematizes that sophisticated stance. A collection like India: A Mosaic can be considered a tribute to it.

In the larger world, of course, this picture changes a bit. The same year that Roy sold millions of copies of The God of Small Things, another Indian, called Sabeer Bhatia, the inventor of Hotmail, made $400 million from the sale of the e-mail service to Microsoft. Most of the yearly H1-B visas granted by the US government go to Indian software programmers. It is the software writers from India rather than the fiction writers who are wired to the circuits of global production. In this scenario, regardless of all intentions, the publication of a book like Hindoo Holiday or India: A Mosaic, or even The Romantics, is more likely to fill the needs of a holiday at the beach or a transcontinental flight. This, too, is a part of the unsentimental education that World Bank Literature has to offer us.

Lately, an Indian software mogul, Azim Premji, with a personal net worth of more than $9 billion, opined that the United States is hurting itself with "too much liberal-arts education." I guess we ought to consider ourselves well warned.

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