The Man Booker prize turned 40 this year, and it marked the occasion by awarding Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie the “Booker of Bookers” for the second time - 15 years after he first won that accolade, on the Booker's (as it was then) silver anniversary.

So it is perhaps fitting that this year the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker prize is Aravind Adiga, with a compelling portrait of modern India, The White Tiger, that takes his country - and the reader - into the present day, a follow-up to the moment of a country's conception that Rushdie portrayed.

The White Tiger takes the form of letters written from a Bangalore businessman, Balram Halwai, to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Prime Minister. Halwai - the white tiger of the title - wants to describe his country for the soon-to-be visiting dignitary. “Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well-off. But the river brings darkness to India - the black river.”

Halwai is a self-made man with his own darkness to confront; he is an embodiment of the contradictions inherent in modern Indian society, where a huge increase in prosperity co-exists with terrible poverty. Adiga has worked as a journalist but, when asked what research he did for the book, replied: “The book is a novel: it's fiction. Nothing in its chapters actually happened and no one you meet here is real. But it's built on a substratum of Indian reality. Here's one example: Balram's father, in the novel, dies of tuberculosis. Now, this is a make-believe figure, but underlying it is a piece of appalling reality - the fact that nearly a thousand Indians, most of them poor, die every day of tuberculosis.”

This remark calls to mind the best that fiction can offer: remaking the world through a vision of actual circumstance was the work of Dickens and Tolstoy, too. In many senses it is impossible to get a sense of a place or a time by reading mere facts: statement without sensibility is nothing. The White Tiger is an exciting novel because it understands how to make reality suit its needs.

Adiga cites Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin as influences; both authors who depicted worlds that their audiences hardly knew. This weekend at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival a panel - which includes me - will imagine which book might have won the Booker had it been around in 1948; one of the contenders is Alan Paton's novel of South Africa, Cry, The Beloved Country - and Paton is an author who could stand with Ellison and Baldwin as powerful writers and agents of social change. Will Adiga come to be ranked alongside them? This is his first novel, so it is a bit too soon to tell. But the Man Booker Prize is a good start.

Tiger of a tale

Aravind Adiga, 33, is the second-youngest novelist to win the literary world's most important fiction award, Dalya Alberge writes.

Educated at the Universities of Oxford and Columbia, he is also the award's fourth Indian-born winner, alongside Sir Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai.

Michael Portillo, the chairman of the judges, described The White Tiger as “in many ways perfect. It knocked my socks off,” he said.

He applauded it for undertaking “an extraordinarily difficult task” - getting the reader's sympathy for a hero who is nothing less than a thoroughly unpleasant villain, a man who is corrupted financially and sexually.

It also tackles issues from which others have steered clear, including corruption in Indian politics, Mr Portillo said.

Adiga, who was born in Madras and now lives in Bombay, is the third first-time novelist to win.

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