As you peer at the newsprint on this page, hunched over your breakfast in your dressing gown and slippers, I hope to be in Bhubaneswar, India, trying on saris for a friend's wedding. I cannot really believe I am actually two days away from catching a plane to India (as I write) after years of flirtation with the country through the Anglo-Indian literature of Forster, Scott, Narayan and Rushdie.

Never have I been so glad to be called up on a promise I made so rashly about 18 months ago as I was bidding farewell to friends I made during my first year away from Malta. One of those friends, an Indian journalist, is now special correspondent for the Hindustan Times in Mumbai, and gets hitched at some point during the four-day festivities which start on Wednesday and end on Saturday. It is this which has finally given me the perfect excuse to go to India.

But in reality I'm quaking in my shoes at the possibility that my dream will be dashed on landing in Mumbai. I have been fantasising about India for years, ever since I came to know it through the literature of E. M. Forster and Paul Scott, later Salman Rushdie and R. K. Narayan.

The mystery of India was first laid before me in Forster's Passage to India, which I adored, despite reading the scathing comments of the Indian writer V. S. Naipaul who said of Forster: "He was somebody who didn't know Indian people. He just knew the court and a few middle-class Indians and the garden boys whom he wished to seduce".

Then I read Scott's The Jewel in the Crown (the first book of The Raj Quartet) and everything changed. Reading about the love affair between Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar and its consequences, I began to recognise that there was a post-colonial pattern, from my family's stories of the British in Malta, to the division of history lessons at school into Maltese and English history, to the never-ending and extremely tiring discussions of the ascendancy of Maltese over English or vice-versa.

The Jewel opened my eyes to the question of Maltese identity in a way no other text before it had, something of an epiphany for me seeing that I have made the question of identity the focus of all my research.

The irony of reading about India through British authors did not escape me, not least because I later read for a degree in English literature and came in contact with the essays of Salman Rushdie, which are as pithy as his books are convoluted. For all those readers still caught up in the "euro vs ewro" debate, I highly recommend the essay 'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist and especially its parting shot: "The English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago".

With the discovery of Anglo-Indian literature came the realisation that a people should tell their story through their literature, and I started scrabbling around for Maltese literature. And found... very little.

At least, before I'm attacked for damning all Maltese literature with one stroke of the pen, I should qualify that last statement by saying I found little which appealed to me. It is not my intention, however, to discuss the merits or demerits of Maltese literature; that can best be left to the experts. I am lucky enough to have a good grounding in Maltese given the circumstances of my education but my command of the language remains pitiful and it is meant to be my native language, my mother tongue.

I have been educated in English and I have chosen to make a career of writing in English. Of course, it may be argued that it wasn't much of a choice, that English chose me, but to enter into such a discussion here would be to digress.

Maltese people are bilingual. But, strangely, Maltese literature is written only in Maltese. I have no doubt that, as a result of this statement, writers of Maltese literature in English, what little there is of it, will put pen to paper to correct this impression. But the point remains that a straw poll among friends yielded only the odd title.

I have actually read some Maltese writing in English but it happened to be of the mediocre kind and I spent more time wincing than taking in the prose.

The last time I attempted to read a book in English by a Maltese writer, I was immensely troubled by the author's insistence on using the word haunches to describe women's hips/rear.

After I came across the third such description in the first 40 or so pages, I had to stop reading, because I could only think of his women as centaurs with long eyelashes weighed down with mascara. The wrong imagery can unfortunately ruin the reading experience.

Thinking about India and its literature has led me to wonder: Why is Maltese literature mainly written in Maltese? Is there place for Maltese literature in English? What does this absence from the canon say about us? Some answers on the 25th. Watch this space.