Imraan Coovadia examines Naipaul's Latin quotations, accuses him of misquotation and manipulation, and suggests that he tries to evoke fear, disgust and condescension. Raja suggests that the novel is less about a conflict of modernity and Third World development, but more about a representation from a bourgeois perspective, Salim being interested, not in revolutionary goals, but in maintaining a profitable enterprise. He asserts that Naipaul is not a postcolonial author but a "cosmopolitan" one (as defined by Timothy Brennan), who offers an "inside view of formerly submerged peoples" for target audiences that have "metropolitan literary tastes".