Ten years ago, as the ’90s came to an end, every second guy I met wanted to be a writer. Arundhati Roy had won the Booker Prize a couple of years before that, and writing novels was suddenly a glamorous thing to do. Following Roy’s success, a handful of Indian writers had received big foreign advances, and hordes of wannabes from here were flooding foreign agents and publishers with manuscripts — who reportedly got fed up with the volume of new novels they received from here, most of them quite horrid.
In one respect, things haven’t changed much. Every second guy I meet still wants to be a writer. (And everyone who doesn’t is writing a screenplay or making a film. I live in the Versova-Lokhandwala belt in Mumbai, which no doubt influences my sample.) But one thing has changed — this is a much better time to be a novelist in India than it was 10 years ago.
In 1999, a book was a hit for publishers if it sold 5,000 copies — anything more was a wild, runaway success. Our most-hyped authors – Rushdie, Ghosh et al — could sell around 20 to 30 thousand copies of a book. Roy’s God of Small Things was one of those rare books that sold more than a lakh, but her winning the Booker had a lot to do with that. By and large, Indians didn’t seem to be reading much. And the only way to make a living off writing books was if you sold a book abroad and got a fat advance for that.
Much of the literary writing in those years was what I call ‘tourist-guide writing’ — India written up for the West, with suitable exotica, all cinammon and spice and lentil soup. Even when writers weren’t writing specifically with a foreign reader in mind, they were, as the literary critic Nilanajana Roy puts it,
“clearing their throat before they started speaking into the mike.”
The resultant fiction was often contrived and sometimes inauthentic. (This is not true of all of it, of course, but the remaindered books that fell into this trap could account for a minor forest.)
It is no surprise, then, that readers didn’t flock to bookstores to buy these books. A literary first novel in India till a few years ago would sell between a few hundred to a couple of thousand copies — the point at which the publishers had made their money back. Maybe readers were intimidated by the gravitas of these books; perhaps they were repelled by the pretentiousness. But they certainly didn’t consider it worth their while paying Rs 250 for a book they might lack the will to finish.
Might as well see a movie with the entire family instead, no?
All that has changed in the last 10 years — and a big part of the reason is Chetan Bhagat. Once Midnight’s Children and The God of Small Things had created a space for Indian writing in world literature. Now, Bhagat’s books have created an audience for Indian Writing in English in India. In a market where a book would be hailed as a bestseller if it sold 5,000 copies, Bhagat reportedly sold around 10 lakh copies each of his first three books.
A majority of these readers are new not just to novels written in English, but to English itself. In a chat with the Delhi blogger Jai Arjun Singh, Bhagat had said that his books “are read by government-school kids, for whom English is very much a second language, and who know that they have to learn it if they want to get anywhere in life.”
English is aspirational for them, reading a book in English bolsters their self-esteem — but the Rushdies and Ghoshes of the world are beyond them. Bhagat is not.
Bhagat’s language is simple and the subjects of his book capture the spirit of the times. Is he a ‘good’ writer? Does his work have literary merit? All these are irrelevant questions in the context of his achievement.
He has shown us that there are lakhs of people out there who are willing to read a book that respects them as readers, does not talk down to them, and tells them a compelling story. The rest is up to us.
— Amit Varma is the author of My Friend Sancho. He blogs at www.indiauncut.com.