Once upon a time, not so long ago, there lived Dharma Kumar, teacher of economic history, “intellectual memsahib” and a woman with a talent for sniffing out the winds of change that were blowing across the landscape of Indian-English literature. She also saw that it was not such a barren landscape: Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Upamanyu Chatterjee and Allan Sealy had just published their earlier novels.

It was 1994 and Kumar had summoned her nephew, historian Ramchandra Guha and his friends Rukun Advani, Mukul Kesavan and Ivan Hutnik to her house to discuss the launch of a literary book-magazine that would publish the best of Indian-English writing. “We wanted it to be like the New Yorker but we didn’t have the resources. So we defaulted to a Granta-like format. A few years ago, there had been a spark in Indian-English literature and by the time Civil Lines was published, we had gotten ourselves a tidy little fire,” recalls Kesavan at the launch of Written For Ever: The Best of Civil Lines (Ravi Dayal Publisher/Penguin, Rs 499) at the British Council on Wednesday.

Edited by Advani, the anthology comprises some of the best original writing in English by writers who have now gained some fame and many more takers for their craft. Before their novels poured out into the ever-widening stream of Indian-English writing, every writer worth his pen sent his prose, poetry, essays to Civil Lines, which published five editions before folding up in 2001.

“For the first time in India, the pieces in Civil Lines revealed our Indian lives with a lightness of touch that was not associated with autobiographical solemnity,” says Kesavan, offering a humorous version of how the magazine came to named Civil Lines.

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