It’s an unlikely analogy, even an unfortunate one, but in some ways Arundhati Roy did for India what Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai had done just three years prior.

They made Indians pick up their game in categories we often simply hadn’t competed in.

It’s not that you can write a Booker-worthy novel simply because you decided to “compete” in that category. But for all the argument that mere representation is not enough, there is a powerful effect to seeing someone who looks like you, speaks like you, has the same broad cultural context as you, succeed in areas that seemed closed to you.

The Indian publishing boom, which in some ways has run counter to a decline in publishing or reading in many markets around the world, bears testimony to this, just as the presence of the glamourous Indian woman on world platforms does to the explosive effect of Sushmita and Aishwarya.

With the Booker prize for 2021 due to be announced soon, the most prestigious annual literary prize — we’re counting out the Nobel Prize for Literature because that is for a body of work rather than an award for an individual work — once again has the publishing business and readers abuzz. While Indian-origin writer Sunjeev Sahota was on the longlist for his novel China Room, itself a significant achievement, he didn’t make it to this year’s coveted shortlist; this was Sahota’s second showing on the Booker lists, he was shortlisted in 2015 for his novel The Year of the Runaways, and going by that track record, he’s definitely one to watch.

Which Indian origin or Indian writers have gone on to actually win, though?

Sir V S Naipaul
Naipaul and India have always had a complicated relationship but it is certainly true that India marked Naipaul in the same way as the literary colossus has marked Indian publishing’s relationship to writing in English. Sir Vidia won in 1971 for his novel In a Free State and was shortlisted once more in 1979 for A Bend in the River. He of course also went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, closing the circle; if the Booker awards a literary work, the Nobel awards the writer, and it is only fitting in this case that both gain unimaginable distinction.

Salman Rushdie
The contentious, celebrated, often controversial Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children remains for many his finest work. Whether you agree with that assessment or have your own underappreciated favourite, Rushdie has certainly made a generations long impact with that book. He has been shortlisted for the Booker for two other novels as well, Shame and The Moor’s Last Sigh and also went on to win the extraordinary honour of being awarded the “Booker of Bookers” — which is to say, both in the 25th year of the prize’s existence and in its 40th year, Midnight’s Children was recognised for being the best of the books that had ever won the prize previously.

Aravind Adiga
Born in Chennai, then Madras, and schooled in India and Australia, Adiga’s accomplishment has a few parallels to Arundhati Roy’s — his debut book White Tiger won the Booker, which means he was an unknown before being catapulted straight to the literary stratosphere. But while Arundhati has continued to make India home, Adiga’s adult life has been spent largely outside the country; he graduated with an English literature degree from Columbia and got an M.Phil from Oxford. The White Tiger’s film adaptation hit screens this year — thanks to Covid it went almost immediately to Netflix — and stars Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Rajkummar Rao. It was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 93rd Academy Awards.

Arundhati Roy
There was a lot that made Arundhati’s accomplishment unparalleled, even though other Indian writers before and after her have won the rare honour. She was the first Indian — not just Indian origin but living and writing in India — to be awarded the Booker, as well as the first Indian or Indian origin woman to do so. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written on her achievement but there remains a relatively less-known fact: Arundhati was “discovered” — which is to say, her Booker-winning novel God of Small Things was published — by the well-known editor and journalist Tarun J Tejpal. Perhaps because he is himself an author of three acclaimed books, The Alchemy of Desire, The Story of My Assassins (which was recently adapted into the wildly successful Amazon webseries Paatal Lok) and Valley of Masks, setting up a publishing house isn’t quite as out-of-character for Tarun Tejpal as it might seem for another editor or journalist. And given the stratospheric success Arundhati went on to have, it seems like Tarun Tejpal’s literary eye was spot on.

Kiran Desai
Is there a literary gene? Anita Desai and Kiran Desai seem to be evidence in favour of such a belief. Kiran, daughter of the celebrated and widely respected writer Anita Desai, became the then youngest ever woman winner of the Booker prize in 2006 for her novel The Inheritance of Loss (in 2013, Eleanor Catton became the youngest female winner). Desai was just 35 at the time, and went on to win the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award for the book in the same year. The Inheritance of Loss wasn’t Desai’s debut — she had written Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard in 1998 — but she has not published one since, despite working on a third novel for over a decade now, she has said. Readers, Indian and from across the world, wait.