The Peacock Throne Sujit Saraf Sceptre, 768pp, £12.99 ISBN 0340899697

It appears that the highest compliment that critics can pay a novelist today is to describe her as a great storyteller. But where would that have left Proust, Joyce or Camus? Look at any of the novels currently on display at the front of the large bookstores, promoted by book clubs, overloaded with advances and accolades, and you come across (sometimes excellent) storytelling, but little else. Where are the novels experimenting with narration, style, ideas, conventions, newness? They are probably being written, but they are not being awarded prizes (unless it is the Nobel, which sometimes goes to great literary writers for the wrong political reasons) or put on high-street shelves.

Perhaps there was a time when storytelling needed to be championed. After all, storytelling is the proletariat of novel-writing: just as basic, as essential, as likely to be dismissed by the cerebral classes. But I have never been convinced by the leftist tendency to mythologise the workers. For Marx, the communist future was one in which workers would be able to engage in high culture too, not one in which we would all have to downsize.

Of course, that is exactly what happened with Stalin and others, with their stress on the stories of workers and tractors. Hence Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered, a huge "story" shared - willingly or not - by all in Stalin's USSR. Something similar is happening today with liberal capitalism. With the worker having been hastily buried by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and their intellectual descendants, the stress has moved to the "consumer". So now we have readers' literary awards and storytelling - the most commonly accessible element of the novel.

There are two main objections to the emphasis on storytelling in novel-writing today. To take a generic objection first - and those of us who write in English can at least have no excuse to ignore the name of the genre. By definition, a novel (at least in English, where it is not a "roman") is something new. The premium should be not on storytelling - which is an age-old art - or any other component of the novel, but on experimentation in the novel as a whole.

I am not arguing in favour of newness for its own sake. Like all gods, it is capable of much mischief. Yet to take newness out of the novel is to take the novel out of this world.

My other - worldly - objection relates to the ways in which storytelling (unlike the narrative of a novel) operates. Storytelling is a collective art that depends on large areas of agreement. This is what explains, for instance, all those novels by "coloured" writers that tell us about the confusion of third-world immigrants in the west, or about Indian or Muslim women contending against (eastern) patriarchy in London or New York.

It is not that such stories are implausible, but that they are told, more often, because that is how western readers see eastern women and men. What about other stories - for example, those of Indian women with professional degrees and work experience who marry Americans or Europeans and are turned into housewives for years, or for ever, because their visas do not permit them to work? I know more eastern women turned into housewives by the west than eastern women who are being civilised into modernity by contact with the west, but I am still more likely to read about the latter in prize-winning novels.

Even bestsellers such as Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian display this "consumerist" bias in favour of stories that are already visible. Have we become incapable - at least in the supermarkets of literature - of reading novels that make us question our own roles and assumptions, our own complicity in the horrors of the world?

Given the above context, Sujit Saraf's The Peacock Throne manages to make a virtue of necessity. It is a novel stuffed like a paratha with stories, and will surely be praised as an "epic" of modern India. For once, however, I will go along with the praise: it is one of the best novels I have read this year. Starting off in 1984 with the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the novel takes us - and its main protagonist, Gopal Pandey, initially a tea-seller - through 14 turbulent years and various turning points of recent Indian history. In the process, it produces some powerfully drawn characters, vivid descriptions and gripping stories.

In other words, it is a novel distinguished by the writer's capacity to tell a powerful and ambitious story. But it is a bit more than that, for Saraf does not confine himself to the east-west cultural bridge or the usual histrionics about urban or cosmopolitan India. If he succumbs to the market's demand for linear storytelling, he subverts it partly by telling less commonly shared stories: those of tea-sellers, prostitutes, Bangladeshi immigrants, petty traders, road-side barbers, as well as the usual cast of middle-class characters.

After all, if stories have to be told in a linear and consumer-friendly manner, why not tell stories whose value is uncertain? Not that this answers the main question: need we stop at "great storytelling"?

Tabish Khair's "Filming: a love story" will be published by Picador in July

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