Abstract
The post-millennial publishing scene of Indian fiction in English within India has proved explosive with significant departures in Chick Lit, crime writing, detective fiction, narratives referred to as ‘mythology’ as well as young, urban India storylines. The identity of Indian fiction in English has changed significantly and also relatively quickly in the last 15 years. This change can be explained in part by a rise in commercial Indian fiction over Indian ‘literary fiction’. The latter term—often ‘regarded as coeval with “Indian English literature” per se’ according to Suman Gupta (2012, p. 47)—has dominated the ‘postcolonial’ Indian literary scene in English for many years. Of the new Indian ‘commercial fiction’, Gupta explains that it is a domestic product, consumed primarily within India and that its narratives are of India, primarily for Indians. He describes it as ‘the gossipy café of Indian writing in English at home’ (2012, p. 47) underscoring its difference from the more ‘literary’ Indian writing in English which finds its home in the West.
The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-40354-4_15
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Notes
- 1.
See Penguin India: http://www.penguinbooksindia.com/en/book-categories. I have elsewhere (Dawson Varughese 2013, 2014) categorized some of these texts as ‘Bharati Fantasy’.
- 2.
For a critical survey of these genres see Dawson Varughese (2013).
- 3.
I am using the terms ‘genre fiction’ and ‘popular fiction’ interchangeably here. I use the term ‘commercial fiction’ following Suman Gupta (2012).
- 4.
This chapter does not mean to suggest that no fictional precursors to this body of fiction exist, although it must be acknowledged that sports journalism has been particularly more productive in writing about cricket culture(s). Alex Tadié (2010), however, offers a broad survey of Indian cricket fictions in his article ‘The Fictions of (English) Cricket: From Nation to Diaspora’ and there are also the Bengali novels of Moti Nandy—his Kolkata-based novella Striker (1973), followed by Stopper (1974)—published some 40 years ago.
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Varughese, E.D. (2016). Genre Fiction of New India: Post-millennial Configurations of Crick Lit, Chick Lit and Crime Writing. In: Tickell, A. (eds) South-Asian Fiction in English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40354-4_9
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