Many of them also became members, like Naipaul and Rushdie, of what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a 'comprador intelligentsia': 'a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery'. Some others began to think, after close observation of European and American politics and history, that Voltaire and Kant, after all, might not hold the key to redemption, which may lie closer to home, in indigenous religious and cultural traditions.