In a paper at Regional Conference of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Held at India International Centre ,New Delhi on February23-6,1975,R.Parthasarathy , while exposing the position of Indian writers in English reffered to the comments of American poets Allen Ginsberg ,Gary Snycler and Peter Onlovsky: "If we were gangster poets we would shoot you"(1), his threat was direct against the Indian writers’ failure to take risk with the English language.

To explain the reason behind this R.Parthasarathy says that there at least two problems which prevent Indian writers to take the risk.First is related to the kind of experience he would like to express in English .

Indian who use the Emglish language gets in some extent alienated . This development is superficial and this is why many blame ‘Indian Writers in English’(IWE) as writers who present India in a foreign view-point .There work doesn’t contain a deep analysis of the Indian realities and Indian characters .

Many regional writers (many of who are even Jnapitha Awardees) say writing in English in India is a severe handicap as it tends to make their writing export oriented .Hindi writer Rajendra Yadav puts it as : "The IWE take a tourist look at India , like Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics , where he is simply a tourist who does not know the inner psyche of people or a more clever device Vikram Seth uses in A S uitable Boy ,the pretext of looking for a bride-groom ,which takes him to different locales and professions . It is a creatively written travelers’ guide .They travel into our culture , describe a bit of our geography ; their total approach is a westerner’s :a third rate ‘serpant-rope trick’"

Many believe that IWE is circumscribed by what only westerner can appreciate :either exotica or erotica .Both these elements are visible in Ruth Prawar Jhabavala’s Heat and Dust .There is description of shrines , Sadhus ,Nawabs ,Princes and their castles along with sex and gay-parties and Hijraas .Jhabvala’s picture of princely India is extremely un realistic ,quixotic and pseudo-romantic .Similar is the case of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things . B.Jaya Mohan in a recent interview to Out Look magazine (February 25 , 2002) said :"Writers like Roy are superficial and exotic .When Roy uses English to express a Malayalam idiom , it might be exotic for westerner , but for Indians it is not very exciting ."

Still there are writers in English for whom a little praise is made ,but that even by another English writer.In an obituary to R.K.Narayan in Time magazine ,V.S.Naipul writes :"His people can eat off leaves on a floor in a slum tenement ,hang their upper clothes on a coat stand ,do all that in correct English ,and there is no strangeness ,no false comedy ,no distance" But still regional writers believe ; " …but any Tamil writer would have put more life into his novels than R.K. did".

The battle of the first kind of problem guides us into the second and this is ‘ the quality of idiom the writer uses’ .R .Parthasarathy says that " there is obviously a time lag between the living , creative idiom and the English used in India .And this time lag is not likely to diminish".

It is because the historical situation is to blame .Besides there is no special English idiom ,either .English in India rarely approaches the liveliness and idiosyncrasy of usage one finds in African or West Indian writing , perhaps because of the long tradition of literature in Indian languages .

This is explained by Kannada d Oyen " writers in Indian language have a rich back-ground -- centuries old literary traditions,flok tales and life all round them -- the IWE only have frontyard".That’s why Rushdie draws fom the ethos and Hindi of Mumbai,while writers like Narayan draws from Tamil and Raja Rao from Kannada .But still the idiom they use lacks in liveliness, because "it’s impossible to transfer into English the cultural traditions and the associations of language".This is why it is not surprising that writers in English tend to over emphasize their Indianness . This also explains why Michael Madhusudan Dutt after publishing thesis first book The Captive Lady(1849) in English turned to Bengali to become the first modern Indian poet .

While a regional writer can directly concentrate mode of writing the IWE has to face a complex problem---‘he has to go through the tedious explanations of the idioms he uses in his book ,leaving little space for creative writing’.