In the summer of 2009, I read my first Chetan Bhagat novel in one sitting on a muggy afternoon in Kerala. I was five years too late to the hype behind Five Point Someone . Two States had just released then, and I was to swallow its oddly-delightful, cliché-ridden tale of love in one whole as well. Since then, I’ve grown older by a Literature degree and several stacks of literary fiction, but last night, I sat up five hours straight and finished Bhagat’s latest, Half Girlfriend , in one go. And there it was: that same simple, momentary pleasure of slipping effortlessly into a minimally-painted, familiar world that lets you slip out just as easily.
Half Girlfriend is vintage Bhagat, in its coming-of-age narrative of hormonal teenagers in love. But, through the story of Bihar-bred Madhav Jha, who falls headfirst for Delhi girl Riya Somani, he also weaves in a subtle sociology primer on the politics of language, rural-urban divides, class, race, unequal opportunity and inherent inequality. Nope, I certainly don’t read Bhagat to drastically alter my world views, but I raise my hat to his attempt to open, and shape, unconventional conversations. Over the decade that Bhagat’s been in the business of writing, India’s commercial fiction industry has burst at its seams. In equal strength, though, it has grown fashionable within educated circles to sweepingly dismiss the entire gamut of indigenous genre fiction as uninfluential, escapist and lacking nuance.
Our literary snobbery shone through strongest in the early phase of the Facebook status trend that went viral, asking users to list their top 10 books. For a generation that had grown up on the Jeffrey Archers, Danielle Steels and Stephen Kings, we were listing Dostoyevsky and Faulkner by the title. Once the trend had flooded Facebook though, the honesty grew too, and the J.K. Rowlings, Enid Blytons, and George R.R. Martins surfaced. We’ve talked ourselves blue in the face about the commercial versus literary fiction debate, but there’s still only a niche readership that finds different kinds of value in both.
I met the first of this tribe in Anees Salim, author, most recently, of The Blind Lady’s Descendants . Anees had spent two decades of his life writing literary fiction manuscripts that he sent out to numerous publishers, only to receive rejection slips in return. On the verge of giving up, he penned a slim delight of a commercial fiction novel Tales from a Vending Machine about a cheeky, sprightly, uneducated girl, Hasina Mansoor, who spends her life vending beverages at an airport lounge. Tales… turned out to be the first manuscript he sold, followed in quick succession by his next three considerably more literary works. In the merit of its deep insights into human nature, though, it stands in equal stead.
Bestselling author Stephen King displays a similar honesty in the superb memoir of his life On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft . At the book’s close, he lists a hundred books that shaped him: everything ranging from the ‘entertainers’ to the high classics. King offers up stories of his writerly life, with fantastic wisdom on writing itself, all in an attempt to reveal that “many of us popular novelists also care about language, in our humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper”. And what better way for us readers to learn, than from a wide-ranging, non-hierarchical variety of masters.
