In Aspiring writers from India in The Guardian Anita Desai contrasts the situation there in the 1950s and 60s (”when it was an act of solitary confinement and the actual existence of writers was no more than a rumour spread by their books”) with the post-Midnight’s Children boom.
But there’s still a sense of nostalgia for the bad old days, where:

In this distinctly discouraging atmosphere, one could only withdraw to write without any hope of there being publishers who might want to publish what one wrote, still less of readers who might wish to read it