Lily’s denunciation comes full circle.Kunzru’s is a self-conscious performance. He has an often seductive lightness of touch; he deftly avoids the earnest summaries of historical events and stagey dialogues which are so often the staples of period fiction. His prose is practised and glossy, but his unremitting present tense, beguilingly cinematic in set pieces, soon becomes tiresome.His novel begins to lose momentum when it leaves the terrain of Anglo-India. Although English scenes are convincingly painted, we have a stunned sense of d? vu towards the end of Jonathan’s English sojourn. When the rejected impressionist takes off for the heart of African darkness, it’s difficult to decide whether Kunzru is venturing further into colonial allegory or whether, like his name-changing hero, he has lost a sense of purpose.In a very different vein, David Davidar, too, is writing about the past as a foreign country.

Of South Indian birth, he lives and works in Delhi (as a publisher), but has located The House of Blue Mangoes in a lovingly detailed but imaginary region on the border of Tamilnadu and Kerala. His Kilanad is, in its way, as vividly evoked as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and Narayan’s Malgudi.In this region Solomon Dorai, the patriarch, builds the eponymous house. The section about him, which leaves little room for reflective writing, is a chronicle of caste warfare. The novel really takes off with the story of his sons, Aaron and Daniel, the first a freedom fighter, the second a cautious, conventional doctor. Aaron is martyred; Daniel, the herbalist, compromises with British rule, grudgingly seeing advantages.Through the portrait of a clan (the catalogue of births, marriages and deaths is endless), Davidar does also develop his characters.

But his real talent is for the struggle of the individual in a reassuringly collective way of life, and the desire for change in conflict with the need for roots.The Dorais, though Christian, have no aspiration to Westernisation. Their manners and aspirations, even their rituals of worship, are indigenous. But when Daniel’s renegade son, Kannan, marries a Eurasian, he begins to aspire to English norms and a place in the tea-planting colonial hierarchy. Fleetingly, we wonder whether Davidar’s scrupulously impartial technique, which allows both coloniser and colonised a voice, endorses Kannan’s view; but a near-magical adventure with a man-eating tiger turns the narrative around again. Kannan’s desire for assimilation goes the way of his Eurasian wife.Davidar’s prose is clear and sinewy, with an occasional over-kill of nature poetry. His narrative span is ambitious, but his technique – in spite of mandatory intercalations about Indian in-fighting, colonial in-fighting, and mangoes – is unpretentiously traditionalist.