Suman Bhuchar meets India's answer to Jackie Collins

SCOTLAND can take the credit for having created Shobha De, India's first mass-selling sex writer. At 50, she is something of a phenomenon in her own country, where she has broken taboos by writing racy novels featuring explicit descriptions of sex - from a woman's point of view. Not surprisingly she is dubbed India's Jackie Collins.

Her latest work, a non-fiction book, Surviving Men: The Smart Woman's Guide to Staying on Top, has had Indian men apoplectic. It's a sort of guide on how to keep a man, how to ditch a man, and so on. In India, still a conservative country, her sex and shopping novels and their super rich, bed-hopping urban milieu still cause controversy.

De is a glamorous, much-photographed figure on the Bombay scene, a must for visiting foreign journalists. She was included in Clive James's Postcard from Bombay, shown on BBC TV.

In London to conduct workshops for other budding writers, she attributes her success to her reaction against the teaching by the Scottish missionaries at the Queen Mary secondary school she attended in Bombay. She remembers she was taught: ''There was only one way to write English. Any attempt to innovate or break the rules was frowned upon.''

However, she argues that Indians now have their own way of speaking an English language which is more reflective of their society today, and that is the language in which she writes. This is basically a mixture of easy English with a smattering of Bombay Hindi and cross-linguistic puns.

This debate about a language for the subjects of former colonies continues unabated, and she is not really the first person to create a distinct Indian English. By all accounts this credit goes to G V Desani for his novel All About H Hatterr, published in 1948.

What De has done is strike a chord with modern India and taken the lingua franca of the urban citizens out of the literary circles and into the homes of a large cross-section of the public.

''I do not set out to shock,'' she says. ''I am not a streaker in the literary field. That the books end up shocking is a by-product. I feel that I have held up a mirror to what I have seen, what I have been very much a part of.''

Her novels are in-yer-face books where women end up on top, literally and metaphorically. Her first book, Socialite Evenings, published in 1989,

was about a small-town girl

who wanders into the rich Bombay society. Although it was slated by the critics, it became

a best-seller.

The novel initially sold 13,000 copies. It is still in demand and sales now stand at 50,000. This may sound conservative by western standards, but for English-language novels in India to sell more than 2000 copies makes publishers ''delirious''. Her second, Starry Nights, set in Bollywood, tells the story of a mother who pushes her daughter to become a star. The only way she can do this is by the casting couch.

De's books have been picked up by many universities, including the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

De blames Indian coyness over sex on British rule. She points out that despite the fact that women hold many top jobs, they are still reluctant to challenge the status quo within their own family. De's books have made her a champion for women in India. However, she is reluctant to label herself as a ''feminist''.

'' I am a conventional wife and mother,'' she says.

She was born Aneradha Rajadhyaksha in a small district in western India, where her father was a judge. The family moved to Delhi for the first 10 years of her life, and then to Bombay. She went to St Xavier's College where she read psychology and, by her own admission, was a mediocre student. She became a top model, much to the dismay of her family, but quit at the age of 23 to edit a new magazine, Stardust, a glitzy gossip

fanzine about the film wallahs. This is where she honed her style of writing.

Married and divorced, she was 34 and due to take up a Reuters scholarship to spend a year at Stanford University, when she met her present husband, Dilip De, a Bengali-born shipping magnate in Bombay.

She had been taken by a friend to a cocktail party at his penthouse suite and, upon meeting her, he asked to see her parents. ''I thought: he's mad,'' she says.

But, the next day he met her parents and four days later they were married.

She says it is the best thing she ever did, and the couple have been together for 16 years, with six children between them, aged between 25 and nine.

The other turning point in life came when Penguin launched in India, and the publisher David Davidar asked her to write a book about Bombay. He wanted a

non-fiction portrait of the city but, because she was pregnant, pounding the streets for research material was out of the question, she offered a fiction book.

That is where Socialite Evenings was born and the De phenomenon began.

Publishers are now clamouring for her to write her autobiography, but she confesses she is not ready to ''do the full monty, yet''.

But she has dipped her toes into this genre. In September her new book, which includes personal memoirs of people who have shaped her life, will hit the stands.

She says she is not superstitious but now finds she is terrified of changing the initial letter of the titles of any of her books. All her success stories have begun with the letter ''S''.

Just like Scotland.