I don't know about you, but for me it was a matter of literary precedent, and the allure of the titles. The bright, caring teacher who introduced me and several others to the joys of Dostoevsky and Descartes had a dark secret that we discovered a year into knowing her: she kept the finest collection of vintage Mills & Boons available in Calcutta under lock and key, reading them furtively into the evening instead of the Coetzee and Kadare we imagined was her preferred literary diet.

It was, however, the titles that got me. I admit that Catch 22, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Their Eyes Were Watching God have tremendous resonance. But can they really match up to the tawdry but irresistible promise of The Greek Tycoon's Defiant Bride, The Chequered Silence, A Perilous Refuge and Bride at Wangatapu?

It didn't take me long to discover that ‘M&B' — the generic term for Harlequin romances, Silhouette romances, Woman's Weekly's special two-for-one romance issues, and of course the venerable Mills & Boon themselves — were the guilty little secret of a surprisingly large number of women (and men, we know you're reading your wife's stash on the sly). Those of us with intellectual pretensions set up an elaborate hedge of defences. We only read these retrograde, unfeminist romances in order to sneer at them; we wouldn't read Barbara Cartland or Danielle Steel because one had to draw the line somewhere, etc etc.

As Mills & Boon set up shop in India, it raised an old but unanswered question. In a country where the appetite for romance fiction has never diminished — in contrast to the UK and the US, where some romance publishers have been struggling over the last two decades — why had we never successfully created our own desi M&Bs?

There'd been an attempt a while ago, when Amrita Shah kicked off a desi line of M&Bs with Sandstorm, writing under the pen name of Nikki Pasha. Sandstorm followed the classic M&B formula faithfully and with some chutzpah, uniting a dewy-eyed heroine with her manly hero somewhere in the regions of Jaisalmer after they'd gone through the ritual ups and downs and miscommunications. But while Sandstorm was of acceptable M&B standard, it didn't catch on here — and the few books that followed were pretty dismal. M&B diehards returned to their Penny Jordans and Lucy Walkers without a trace of regret.

In every mainstream publishing company that I've consulted for or worked with, one of the first ideas to be discussed at the inhouse meetings has concerned an Indian line of M&Bs. I haven't yet seen a successful line, or indeed, more than that one botched attempt. Some people suggest that reading about Indian romance violates the "safe" world that M&Bs provide — it's fine to read about people panting in the respectable territory between first and third base so long as those people aren't Indian themselves. These advocates suggest that we would be deeply troubled if Savita Didi got it on with Madhav Bhaiya.

But that line of argument is belied by the success of Shobhaa De's books, and by the generation of chicklit/ arranged marriage writers who followed in her wake. Aside from De, very few of the chicklit writers from Rupa Gulab onwards have been phenomenal successes, but most of them have done reasonably well in India. Turns out we're not that troubled at the thought of desi romance, so long as it ends in a decently respectable marriage — and since all but the most recent crop of avant-garde M&Bs follow that ancient, safely generic formula, you could argue that M&Bs were actually tailor-made for the Indian reader.

The problem may have been that we were tapping the wrong kind of writer. Journalists, media/advertising/ publishing professionals may seem like the perfect M&B writers, but if you look at the original M&B's line up, that fallacy lies exposed. The "typical" M&B writer has been as unusual as ‘Jan Tempest', a reclusive woman who ran a sheep farm; others were nurses, doctors, teachers, housewives. M&B had an open-door submission policy coupled with a massive rejection rate (about six in every 1,000 manuscripts were considered for acceptance, according to one account). The real brilliance of M&B was to see that its best writers were out there among its readers. We haven't yet managed to crack that conundrum in India, but if we did, what a wave of purple prose we'd unleash.

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