I woke up on Monday morning only to experience an existential crisis, for there was an interview of Nikita Singh in the newspaper — an author at 23 years who had already written seven books.
And as I read more it turned out that she was the latest in the crop of new, small town Indian English writers. The crop that began with Chetan Bhagat, and now includes Durjoy Datta, Ravinder Singh, Sachin Garg and after seven books, Nikita Singh is sure to be a part of it.
There is something common among these writers. They aren't of the same league as the Amitav Ghoshes and the Arundhati Roys of the literary world. In fact, if anything, they are on the diametrically opposite end. But they have something that award-winning authors lack in India, and that’s sales figures.
Although Goodreads reviews for these authors are less than charitable — Nikita Singh’s Love @ Facebook has been called “cliched and immature”, while Ravinder Singh’s I Too Had a Love Story has one review that goes “sleep was inevitable” — one cannot ignore the fact that they are bestsellers.
Within the reading community, small as it may be, readers of popular literature are usually scorned upon. The Harry Potter series too was subject to this when ‘high fantasy’ fans looked down upon such simplistic fantasy writing — what they call ‘low fantasy’. The mockery that the Twilight fandom is subject to begs a whole different column altogether.
But this is Indian English writing. While the postcolonial nature of IWE (Indian Writing in English) has been ridiculed for a long time, the sociological aspect that has lent itself to categorising the readers of such works has changed a lot since the advent of this new order of writers. It is that these stories resonate with a certain section of the country — the modern, upwardly-mobile young Indian.
English has always been the preserve of the privileged few in India. But ever since Chetan Bhagat became popular, small town stories have been given a new lease of life. The stories aren’t much to write home about. They mostly have linear narratives, a he-said, she-said way of storytelling that is easy to follow and understand. At the same time, thanks to the impediment the language forces on a larger part of the populace, simplified writing is a plus that many cerebral Indo-Anglian writers seem to discount.
These stories are either about being confined to one place for all of the protagonists’ lives, or the one that Bollywood loves — the story of the small town boy or girl in the big city. There is no magical realism or hybrid language here, or even any kind of experimentation, but just more relatability.
Books about love, loss, college life and the idea of a newly educated middle class consumer coming to the fore may irk serious readers, but they are here to stay. Maybe this is the time when we celebrate the fact that more people are reading and not concentrate on what they’re reading.
