This is the Cezanne landscape, a sprawling canvas of white and green bathed in the autumn sun. More than 100 years ago, Paul Cezanne stood before the white mountain of Aix-en-Provence and painted nature in subversive tone and colour. He was the brainy impressionist who would become an inspiration to cubists and abstractionists. Today, it is the classified countryside-the French way of protecting great art and heritage. And passing through Route Cezanne at this moment is a minibus. The passengers, a group of Indian writers, are marvelling at the intact source of a defining phase in the history of art. Cezanne may not have appreciated this intrusion. But literary France indulges "beautiful foreigners".

BEAUTIFUL STRANGERS: 1. Tharoor and Devi; 2. Chatterjee; 3. Vaid (centre) and Mukundan (right); 4. Ananthamurthy; 5. Verma, Vajpeyi and Ananthamurthy; 6. (from left) Bama, Badami, Baldwin and David

Les Belles Etrangeres, loosely translated as the Beautiful Foreigners, is a typical Gallic celebration of letters strange and distant. For 12 days from November 18, it was India's turn to be feted in Paris and the Provence. Twenty writers, with 20 ideas of India, travelling across more than 30 destinations, talking their art, making sense of their strange society and signing the French editions of their work-it was a grand Indian road show in France. They were all there: the Indian writer in English, the newest brand in the international literary market; the Indian writer from the Indian language; the conscience keeper; and the foreign-friendly untouchable. And the cliché was vindicated: there was unity in polyphony. At least from the point of view of the host, Centre National du Livre (National Centre for the Books).

The so-called Indian diversity was on display from day one. It was a filmed exotica at the Opera Bastille, the grand venue of the inauguration. Michel Smith's documentary on the beautiful strangers was a lengthy tribute rich with stereotypes-half-naked poverty, dispossessed crowd, slums and temples, bullock cart and computer, caste and Coke ... Smith's India was a strange country. For some characters in the film, like West Bengal's Mahasweta Devi and Tamil Nadu's Bama, it was far from beautiful, and they were full of beastly tales from the land without justice. Ah, two lonely women in combat with the wretched homeland. Devi, the frail old woman who writes and fights for securing the Indian tribals a right place in history. Bama, the teacher-writer who is still struggling to survive in the land of untouchability-"Anybody can exploit the Dalit woman and she is the first target in any riot."

Even offscreen, these two sounded pretty exotic. The India they unravelled made their French picnic spots rather banal. Take Saint-Nazaire. One of the oldest harbour towns on the Atlantic, this shipbuilding centre is full of legends of the steamers. And it falls on the adventure route of Tintin. Today, the steamers are still there, and the new adventurers who pass through Ville de Saint-Nazaire are not as strange as Tintin. They are Indian writers like U.R. Ananthamurthy, Nirmal Verma, Shashi Tharoor, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Anita Rau Badami, Shauna Singh Baldwin, M. Mukundan, Akhil Sharma, Krishna Baldev Vaid, Esther David, Mukul Kesavan, Alka Saraogi, Udayan Vajpeyi and Narayana Reddy. And this is Bama, the Dalit woman who found casteism even in a convent, at Saint-Nazaire: "Dalits are lovers of nature. They speak to animals and trees. They are treated as untouchables in villages and cities. I'm a Dalit. So what? I'm proud of my identity." So what? Even if Bama got a chance to talk to objects other than trees. The French loved it-writer outcast. And the French adored the grand old lady from Kolkata. For she too caricatured herself as a stranger in her own country.

Andre Malraux, the civilisational pilgrim, didn't write about such wonders of the Orient. He was happy with the primordial fires of Benaras. The French had to wait for our ladies of cause to listen to Autumn Atrocities from Inde. For a while, India looked so dark, so savage, well, so strange, the land of tyrannised untouchables and wrongly criminalised tribals. The poor snake charmer, he has every reason to feel left out in this text. Redeemingly, there were other women novelists from a much more familiar India: Badami of Hero's Walk and Baldwin of What the Body Remembers, for whom there was no cause other than imagination. And novelists like Chatterjee, Tharoor, Ananthamurthy and Mukundan didn't fall into the angst trap. In the heavy atmosphere at Saint-Nazaire, Chatterjee on the stage was an exception: the lightness of being an Indian novelist. Don't be fooled: the posture was an English understatement. And when he introduced Agastya's second coming in The Mammaries of the Welfare State, it was an effective counterview to the bleeding text of the cause junkies. And when a first novelist who learned his craft from the creative writing school proclaimed, "I'm interested in higher art" and went on to explain the techniques of higher art ("start with a fight ... build up suspense"), the performance could have passed off as the arrogance of the arriviste. But he was very much part of an Indian literary tradition: didn't a veteran poet from Telugu tell the French that "poetry is a creative art?" There was unity in diversity.

Such comedies apart, Les Belles Etrangeres Inde was a deserving French salute to Indian literature. In Aix-en-Provence, Ville d'Art (city of art), all tree-lined boulevards and terrace cafes and bookshops, they, the incorrigible book lovers, travelled from far away towns to listen to what writers like Ananthamurthy, Kesavan and Tharoor have to say about their art and its context. And it happened in La Cite Du Livre, the city of books, and more specifically in an abandoned match factory. In Nantes, they listened to India-and Reddy's ghazals-from an art centre that was once a biscuit factory. In Uzes, a heritage town with a population of 8,400, they defied the rain to reach a bookshop to listen to the Malayalam novelist Mukundan. Suddenly India is captivating.

Maybe the French novel itself is rather placid today, with the lone exception of the art of Michel Houellebecq, who is currently the post-postmodern bad boy in European literature. "After Joyce, what can you write?" asks Josyane Savigneau, the literary editor of Le Monde, which gave two pages to Indian writing last week. And lying on her table are the brand new translations of David Davidar's The House of Blue Mangoes and Chatterjee's The Mammaries of the Welfare State. "The Indian novel in English is not exotic," she says. "We are used to India as a beautiful place, but the Indian novel is radically different from that idea of India." For Anne Freyer-Mauthner, editor of the prestigious Editions du Seuil, publishers of Tharoor, Ghosh and Baldwin (and they come in a list that includes Gunther Grass, Philip Roth and J.M. Coetzee) every Indian writer unveils a different India. "India has become fashionable," admits a senior editor from the venerable Gallimard. And there is now the Rajesh Sharma imprint: quality French translations from Indian languages.

Europe, the society of the novel, says one of its famous citizens in one of his essays, has abandoned its own self. The novel has gone on a tropical tour. Still, it may not be the day of the stranger in Europe. In France for two weeks, the Indian writer was an intimate stranger.