I'm not in a position to argue with deepad's experience, but I note that an Indian won the 2008 Booker Prize, and that an Indian also won the prize in 2006. I've seen at least one article maintaining that India is currently the place where exciting English prose is written. So the position that Indian literature lacks diversity and richness does not seem to me to be obviously correct.
Now, one might ask why all these Indians are writing in English (which you say is not their language). Clearly, that is a consequence of colonisation, but who are we to tell people what language to write in? (Similarly, I remember a Catalan writer complaining about people saying he should write in Catalan (as opposed to Castilian), when that would drastically reduce the potential readership of his books.) I suspect that there are plenty of Indian writers writing in Indian languages, but that they fail to come to the notice of British readers for obvious reasons.
Coming to the other point: it's easy to pluck out a statistic and say, "This is too low/high", but what is the standard for acceptable infant mortality? From the handy map attached to your link, I see that Sweden has an infant mortality rate of 2.75, whereas the US has an infant mortality rate of 6.3. Does this mean that Swedish people can reasonably call the US a developing country?
I think should say what they mean in any particular instance, rather than try to establish a once for all division of the world into "people like us" and "other people", which is what the easy dichotomy seems to me to amount to. If they mean countries with low GDP/person, they should say that (or simply "poor countries"). If they mean countries which do not belong to the world-dominant culture, they should say that. That seems to me to be what this particular discussion is about, and if the definition raises obvious difficulties, then these are real difficulties, which ought to be addressed.
"Majority world" is not very satisfactory, because it doesn't tell me who you mean, other than that there are a lot of them! Similarly (as you say), North and South are hardly satisfactory as descriptive of the groups in question (if only someone would move Australia!).
no subject
Now, one might ask why all these Indians are writing in English (which you say is not their language). Clearly, that is a consequence of colonisation, but who are we to tell people what language to write in? (Similarly, I remember a Catalan writer complaining about people saying he should write in Catalan (as opposed to Castilian), when that would drastically reduce the potential readership of his books.) I suspect that there are plenty of Indian writers writing in Indian languages, but that they fail to come to the notice of British readers for obvious reasons.
Coming to the other point: it's easy to pluck out a statistic and say, "This is too low/high", but what is the standard for acceptable infant mortality? From the handy map attached to your link, I see that Sweden has an infant mortality rate of 2.75, whereas the US has an infant mortality rate of 6.3. Does this mean that Swedish people can reasonably call the US a developing country?
I think should say what they mean in any particular instance, rather than try to establish a once for all division of the world into "people like us" and "other people", which is what the easy dichotomy seems to me to amount to. If they mean countries with low GDP/person, they should say that (or simply "poor countries"). If they mean countries which do not belong to the world-dominant culture, they should say that. That seems to me to be what this particular discussion is about, and if the definition raises obvious difficulties, then these are real difficulties, which ought to be addressed.
"Majority world" is not very satisfactory, because it doesn't tell me who you mean, other than that there are a lot of them! Similarly (as you say), North and South are hardly satisfactory as descriptive of the groups in question (if only someone would move Australia!).