By the time you read this, I shall be in India, filming a documentary. I'm worried, of course, about the standard things - Delhi belly, mosquitos, smog, how a modern PC man is supposed to react when the people there do that head-shaking thing that they actually do in real life and not just in It Ain't Half Hot Mum (does it mean yes? No? Maybe?). But I'm also concerned about which book to take. The problem is, I'm reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It's astonishing - a slacker Ulysses, genuinely - but it is a housebrick of a book. Trying to fit it into my hand luggage is out of the question - I'll kill a steward if my man-bag swings round too quickly - and even in my main suitcases it'll probably incur excess baggage.

The good thing about not taking Infinite Jest, however annoying it is to have to hang fire on a novel you're really into, is it would allow me to take a relevant book instead. By relevant I mean: Indian. And not before time. A quick glance at my shelves reveals a selection of that great sub-continent's literary classics - Midnight's Children, of course, A Suitable Boy, A House For Mr Biswas - all sitting there, accusingly, vehemently unread.

I don't know why I've read so little Indian literature. I think, undoubtedly, it demonstrates a prejudice. Not a racial one, hopefully, but a literary one: a prejudice that Indian novels are likely to be magical, mythic, sweepingly historical, quirky of humour, and spring from the tradition of folk tale; all things I don't want in a novel. This prejudice is of course entirely not based on reading these novels; although it is based on opening them occasionally and seeing sentences such as “Was it then - yes why not - that Dr Narlikar first dreamed of tetrapods?” (Midnight's Children).

The only Indian novel of any stature that I can claim definitely to have read is Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters, which I had to read when I was a judge on the Booker Prize in 2002. It would have been great if that had shattered through my prejudice but it did not; my overriding memory of the book is that it was very 19th century in feel. Stating again that I speak mainly out of ignorance, the novelist who many of the great Indian writers seem to aspire to is Dickens: the books are always very long, the comedy is always very broad, the moral emphasis is always very foregrounded, and blimey there are a lot of characters. All of which I'm already not that keen on in Dickens.

And talking of the Booker, the fact that Indian novels are so beloved of the judges may form another plank of my prejudice. Generally, in my book-choosing life, I avoid the Booker shortlist like the plague (except in 2002); year after year (except in 2002), it's a compilation of the worthy and the worthier, and, however good the recent winners by Kiran Desai or Aravind Adiga might be - obviously I haven't read them - that can make the ever-presence of Indian novels on the list feel like it's because someone at The Guardian would have a fainting fit if there weren't any.

Anyway, obviously, I'm at fault, not Indian literature (if I was splitting up with Indian literature, which I sort of have been all my life, I would say “it's not you; it's me”). I know my prejudice against it is a narrow-minded impulse, a fear that these books, full of odd names and customs and sometimes with ornate decorative covers, will, as Morrissey - perhaps not the most multiculturalist thinker - once said, “say nothing to me about my life”. So I'm going to take one.

Obviously, I need to ease myself in, so the book I'm choosing is by an Anglo-Indian, Glen Duncan. The Bloodstone Papers is his ambitious last work, one of very few novels in English to deal with the almost invisible history of the almost invisible Anglo-Indian community, both here and in India.

Of course, it makes me sound very earnest and genuine to say that I'm choosing it because of such fascinating, rarely touched subject matter; really, it's because I feel safe with Duncan, three of whose novels I've read before (does that count? In terms of being able to say I have in fact read some Indian literature? He's from Bolton and lived his whole life in the UK, but he is Anglo-Indian, and that phrase does include the word Indian ...) and whose normal themes include sex, drugs and more sex. Thus saying something to me about my life. Or at least, the life I'd like to be leading.

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