Aravind Adiga, whose The White Tiger bagged this year's Booker Prize, is the eighth winner of the prestigious award who has an Indian connection. India has been consistently producing award-winning authors or inspiring other writers to base their works on Indian colours, themes and identity.
Besides Adiga, Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children, 1981), Arundhati Roy (God of Small Things, 1997), and Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss, 2006) won the prize for India.
Indian-origin V S Naipaul bagged the award in 1971 for In a Free State, a collection of short stories that dealt with displacement.
Canadian author Yann Martel who won the prize in 2002 for Life of Pi deals in his novel about the life of a youth who lives in Pondicherry. In a 'Noah's Arc' sort of situation, the protagonist Pi finds himself with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a royal bengal tiger after their cargo ship sinks.
Germany-born Ruth Prawer Jhabwala was awarded the Booker in 1975 for her work Heat and Dust, which views India through the lives of two English women living 50 years apart.
British novelist J G Farrel won the prize in 1973 for The Siege of Krishnapur. Set in the imaginary town of Krishnapur, the events are inspired by those that occurred in the Uttar Pradesh towns of Lucknow and Kanpur during the First War of Indian Independence of 1857.
Adiga's novel features a protagonist who will use any means necessary to fulfill his dream of escaping impoverished village life for success in the big city.
It tracks the ambitions and divided loyalties of Balram Halwai, the son of a rickshaw-puller from an Indian village.
As he passes through two different Indias on his journey from the darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success, Balram begins to realise how the tiger might finally escape his cage, and he is not afraid to spill a little blood along the way.
Adiga is the fourth Indian-born author to win the Booker Prize since it was set up in 1969, joining compatriots Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai.
"India just teems with untold stories, and no one who is alive to the poetry, the anger and the intelligence of Indian society will ever run out of stories to write," Adiga said.
The writer-journalist said he saw The White Tiger as the story of a man's "quest for freedom".
