At the recent Literary Festival in Jaipur, Karan Madhok spoke to a number of critically and commercially successful Indian writers about the future of fiction and how the ‘new wave’ will shape India novels of coming decade.

- Karan Madhok

It has been estimated that over one lakh visitors attend the annual Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF) in the capital of Rajasthan. Jaipur, the ‘Pink City’ is a colourful oasis of history, industry, art, and architecture, in the middle of the desert, a city spilling history from every seam, a tourist town that, for about a week in January, becomes the global hub of literature.

The 2020 version of the JLF was no different. For almost every minute of the opening hours of the five-day festival, the grounds at Jaipur’s Diggi Palace Hotel were overflowing with attendees. It was a true mela of sorts, featuring dozens of food stalls, chai and beer corners, and more selfie-backdrops than the Hawa Mahal. A number of celebrity guests—from Bollywood starlets to TV personalities to political thought-leaders—were around in person, commanding packed houses and autographs lines that snaked around every corner.

At times, it was barely possible to walk through the human traffic. The festival was loud, exciting, cultural, colourful. It was financially successful. It was popular.

And in this melange of festivity, you might run across some literature, too.

Yes, after all, this is a literature festival, and last month’s edition in Jaipur again featured some of India’s—and some of the world’s—top literary minds. In between all the hype and the shor, it was still possible to catch new ideas blossoming in real time, to hear complex concepts expressed with clarity, or experience other worldviews further complicated, questioned, attacked.

The festival itself felt like a reflection of the state of where popular publishing stands in India now, a reaction to the books displayed in the front section of each book-store, books added to the charts of bookshops in every airport, sold in pirated copies by hawkers at every traffic light. The biggest crowds attended for the biggest names, for the Shashi Tharoors, the William Dalrymples, the Ashwin Sanghis, the Ravinder Singhs.

Avni Doshi: “You know when you’re writing, when you’re going along, and then you hit a bruise. You hit a sensitive spot that almost hurts when you touch it. And you don’t wanna go there. But you always know that that’s where you need to go. So, for me, that’s I think where my future lies, in probing that bruise.”

Where does that leave the tradition of old-fashioned, actual, literature? You know, the type that says something deeper than the present moment, the type that plays with language in an elevated fashion, the type of stories that explore something further about the human condition? If mainstream literary festivals are pumped by the hype of the ‘Airport-Sale’ crowd, it is the same pump that helps prop up the rest of the ‘serious’ literary world, too. The success of every Shashi Tharoor helps publishing houses create space for a dozen debut writers who are craving for something timeless, who are approaching writing as a higher art form.

With Indian publishing swaying more towards non-fiction and ‘pop’-fiction, where does the future lie for the fiction industry for the next decade. Fortunately, JLF 2020 was blessed with a mix of contemporary and experienced authors and editors of Indian fiction; I posed these questions to a number of them, trying to piece together a literary tapestry of the future.

Avni Doshi

Formerly an art writer and curator, Avni Doshi switched to fiction and published her beautiful—and sometimes discomforting—debut novel Girl in White Cotton in 2019. The story explored a complex mother-daughter relationship in the backdrop of unreliable memories and trauma. I asked Doshi about writing for the moment—in reaction to current events—versus writing her more ‘timeless’ story, a tale of parents and children that would haunt anyone, anywhere.

“I think I’m drawn to timeless stories generally,” said Doshi. “I think I’m drawn to fairy tales. I’m drawn to myths. I’m drawn to different kinds of literature from different cultures in different eras, that all stand the test of time and continue to reappear in our cultural reimagination in different ways. But I don’t think of it as timeless, I think of it as human. And I think it’s just what is essential in our humanity.”

“In a way I think that the true reality of a lot of people isn’t their politics. I think your day-to-day reality is your relationship with your mother, your father. So, I’ve never understood why those are considered to be ‘small’ ideas, or small concepts. Why are mundane ideas always brushed aside? For me, those are the most pressing.”

“I don’t really write political novels. But I think the personal is political… and I think when you tell the story of a character holistically, it ends up turning into something that encompasses politics as well.”

Looking forward to the coming decade—the 20s—Doshi sees a continuing rise of women writers in the country, and hints at how she hopes to continue her own literary journey.

“This year, in particular,” said Doshi, “I’m seeing and hearing about so many fabulous debut writers who are women. I think that’s been really exciting. I think there’s an acceptance and openness about the fact that women’s stories are worth telling.”

“For me, I feel that the thing I’m seeing in myself is wanting to get more personal, more raw, and more fearless about what I write about. I want to talk about things that are taboo. Not because I want to shock anyone or create a sensation. But more because I think it’s maybe the role of an artist to look at things that other people shy away from talking about.”

“I like to think about this image: You know when you’re writing, when you’re going along, and then you hit a bruise. You hit a sensitive spot that almost hurts when you touch it. And you don’t wanna go there. But you always know that that’s where you need to go. So, for me, that’s I think where my future lies, in probing that bruise.”

Ashwin Sanghi

One of the highest-selling English fiction authors in India, Sanghi was one of the true ‘author-celebrities’ at the Lit Fest. After publishing bestsellers like The Rozabal Line, Chanakya’s Chant, The Krishna Key, The Sialkot Saga, and Keepers of the Kalachakra—as well as several popular non-fiction books—Sanghi was in Jaipur to launch his latest novel, The Vault of Vishnu.

Sanghi has a front-row seat in one of the most-popular contemporary ‘trends’ of Indian writing: mythological fiction. At the Lit Fest, he explained why Indian readers continue to be so interested in reinterpreting their past—and points forward to where the coming decade could go in popular fiction.

“What mythology is doing is helping an entire generation that has never connected with its roots,” Sanghi said. “For example, not just in India but those in the Indian diaspora in USA, Canada, or the UK, when we were growing up, we had grandparents living in joint-family homes, who would narrate us stories from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Puranas, and so on and so forth. That has completely disappeared because families have become nuclear, and in many cases both parents are always working – they don’t even have time. And even if they did have time, probably they themselves are not aware of many of these stories.”

“Today you ask the average child, and they would know about Harry Potter, but they wouldn’t know about Amar Chitra Katha. The point I’m making is that, popular fiction of the sort that myself or Amish Tripathi or Anand Neelakantan, or for that matter even the retelling of myths by Devdutt Pattanaik, are all a way for a generation that has gotten delinked from its roots to reconnect.”

“We have a treasure house of stories which have not even been spoken about. When people are talking today about mythological fiction, they are still talking about Ramayana and Mahabharata. There are thousands of lesser characters that still need to be covered, and stories and subplots that need to be covered. So, I don’t believe that this is the end of it.”

Looking ahead, Sanghi sees many more unexplored terrains of fiction that could still be popularised for the Indian market.

“There is a big opportunity in crime thrillers,” he said, “because all over the West, if you go into any store, you’ll find so many crime thrillers in the top-10 titles. I believe there is a huge potential for science fiction. And currently, not too many authors are stepping into it because of some reluctance. There is a herd mentality—they only want to go into spaces that work. I believe that horror and paranormal is again a huge space. Because this is a country which has tens of thousands of superstitious elements.”

“The publishing industry has already tasted success with a lot of Indian authors—so they are not reluctant to try out new ideas.”

Chandrahas Choudhury

The author of three works of fiction—Arzee the Dwarf, Clouds, and Days of My China Dragon—as well as an editor of Indian fiction collections and a well-known essayist and literary critic, Chandrahas Choudhary has been a prominent force in Indian literature for over a decade. With his experience both as a writer and an editor of fiction, I found it apt to question him if Indian fiction works in ‘trends’—and what would be the trends coming out of the country in the future.

“I’ve always found, that, because Indian writing is so decentred, and is in so many languages, what may look like a trend is just someone who knows only a small part of the entire thing,” Choudhary said. “And that’s all they can see.”

“Perhaps the main trends in the last ten years is that nonfiction became much bigger at the expense of fiction. In bookshops, you’ll see that nonfiction sells a lot more than fiction. That’s sad because I can’t think of anything better, more condensed, more beautiful, than great novels. Which is the ultimate multidisciplinary form.”

“In these ways, I think the balance has shifted. But I think the main pleasure of being a reader in India is that, because there’s no centre, you can read three new books in a month, one of those was written last year, and the other was written a 100 years ago and has been newly-translated and made available. It’s for readers to put them into a shape together. That pressure and responsibility is on the best readers in India, who are not hostage to the trends of the day or the fashions of the moment.”

“In a way, there’s a difference between literature and publishing. One is dependent on the market; the other not necessarily so. In the end, finally, literature never goes away from its primal encounter, which is a single person, with a single person, through a single book.”

“So, if you think of the depth of that encounter – does it matter if another five or ten thousand people have read it or not? And I want to protect that in novels. It was never a mass form in that way.”

When it comes to the ‘trends of the day’, Choudhary has found space for current events in his own work—as long as it’s framed as an appropriate part of the story.

“I think the point is to show the hidden currents of a certain trend,” he said. “I remember in Clouds there’s a speech by Narendra Modi, given in 2010 in Gujarat in Gujarati to the Parsis of Gujarat. But, when I was writing it in 2013, and Modi was rising in power, I felt that it was a more interesting to put [the speech] in the book, and then to invent a frame around it. People are going to this event, and the protagonist goes with his girlfriend, who is very obsessed by Modi. So, he’s kinda looking at her and thinking, ‘Wat is this other person?’ There are different kinds of masculinity at work there. There are so many interesting things you can do with real events to shift the focus.”

Devapriya Roy: “When you open a book, the world around you recedes, and that world, that world is nothing but paper and words, sucks you in. And yet, there’s nothing—you’re there, but you’re not there. That I believe is something only a book can do in a particular way. A book is a uniquely solitary act.”

But, Choudhary also gave the example of his most-recent novel, Days Of My China Dragon, about the life of a restaurant, a story beyond the box of a particular time and place. What, then I asked him then, would be the dominant trend in the future of Indian fiction for the next decade?

“I don’t know the shape of the future… Strangely, some books are getting longer. Biographies are becoming very fat. There’s a lot of talk about the politics of literature without a lot of reading going on. Some of this are infections from the west about questions of representation and appropriation, which, I can’t say I have a lot of sympathy for.”

“It’s easier to find a pattern in the past than predict one for the future in literature. In a way that’s good… if you know the shape of the future, what is the point of going towards it?”

“Indian novels are 150 years old. It’s still working out all the things it can be, based on mixing what’s happening in the West, and the different forms of Indian storytelling. So, if humanity hasn’t yet disappeared from the world, there’s plenty of more work to be done.

Devapriya Roy

Devapriya Roy wrote three novels The Vague Woman’s Handbook, The Weight Loss Club: The Curious Experiments of Nancy Housing Cooperative, and The Heat and Dust Project, before her two recent projects that have taken curious twists in Indian storytelling. In 2017, she authored a graphic biography of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Indira, a book that stuffed non-fiction and fiction in the same, vibrant frame. In 2018, she began Friends From College, a novel was published chapter-by-chapter every week in the The Telegraph, before being released as a complete work last year.

Her storytelling style looks both backwards and forwards, in the past and in the future. With more projects on the horizon—projects that challenge both the form and content of storytelling—Roy happens to be in an ideal place to gauge the future directions of Indian literature.

“Right now, I believe that if you speak to the publishers, what they’re going to say is that it’s nonfiction that is selling, and it is at the expense of fiction and literary fiction,” Roy said. “Apparently, people want very much is to read about history. History has become a contested site because of the place we are in as a country.”

“[In the coming decade] I imagine there would be more historical fiction, and also the telling of history in different ways. That would be a trend.”

“One of the projects which I am working on with the artist Priya Kuriyan is a graphic history of the Indian freedom movement. And I think this is very much keeping with the trend that history has to be popularised. In people’s heads, the shift has to come from history being in classroom subject to being alive, to be happening around us, to inform us consciously and subconsciously.”

Devapriya Roy. Photo: Karan Madhok — Devapriya Roy. *Photo: Karan Madhok*

This will be Roy’s second project with Kuriyan, after the two collaborated on Indira. Roy described Indira as a graphic biography framed as a novella, non-fiction inside a fictional framing story. Biographies are usually the worship of an individual, or a ‘people’s history’, either looking down or looking up. In Indira, Roy and Kuriyan did a little bit of both.

“In order to tell the story of someone who’s now been gone for many years, we felt that young millennial readers and young readers would need a context,” said Roy. “It is a very rigorously researched biography, with original stuff which is not there in any other biographies. Yet, we felt the need to re-invent the way in which it could be told most effectively. There is also a little fictional element during the Emergency, where we wanted various voices to be heard, of young Indians at that time. We created a little fictional group of friends, friends who meet in the coffee house… And that fictional group comes in again to tell the biography better.”

“You see the truth is a complex thing. In order to present a whole version, you need various strategies.”

If Indira told the past in a modern way, Roy’s Friends From College was a contemporary story composed in a decidedly old-fashioned approach, evoking Dickens and Dostoevsky and great Bengali traditions of publishing a novel in a serialised fashion, week by week, chapter by chapter, for the course of months, even years.

“[Friends From College] was a bit resistive. In the age of Netflix and binge-watching, where you have the entire series downloaded and don’t even have to wait a week to watch the next episode. Here, you had to wait. It was serialising in the age of Netflix, of instant gratification.”

In Friends From College, Roy—who was actually writing new chapters every week—populated the novel with current events as they happened. “In the world around us, specially to the novelist and the fiction writer, everything is material,” Roy said. “So, even when I was serialising the novel, as seasons were changing, as things were happening, those made their way into the book.”

Roy further discussed how she and her contemporaries in Indian literature approach writing in response to the outside world—or answering the call deep from their within.

“I think Indian writing in English now is very deep world,” she said. “There are all kinds of writers. And it’s big enough to have this kind of diversity. So, there will be writers who will write very politically-charged fiction. There will be other writers who will do it gently. There are mass-market writers who will write mythology, or write about young people using a ‘younger’ language and reach more people. There are historians, there are social scientists, there are economists, and their work in nonfiction influences the fiction of that time.”

“There is no one kind of English writing in English, which is great. At one time I remember, the joke used to be that Indian writing in English is very much ‘mangoes and monsoon’. That is definitely not the case now. There are brilliant new novels coming every day.”

And what does Roy think about the future of books and literature in India, with the changing times?

Jeet Thayil: “I think Indian fiction in English is on its second or third wave, where it has become very sophisticated. It’s no longer your grandma’s Indian English. There’s no kind of condescension. There are none of the usual clichés about India.”

“I think the ‘book’ as we know it is going to survive. It’s not going to go out of fashion. The book is also reinventing itself. Technology has disrupted storytelling, but it cannot come up with an alternative to what a book does. Because a book is an organic world that comes together only with words. In a tweet, you will need 200 tweets to provide context, to provide nuance.”

“When you open a book, the world around you recedes, and that world, that world is nothing but paper and words, sucks you in. And yet, there’s nothing—you’re there, but you’re not there. That I believe is something only a book can do in a particular way. A book is a uniquely solitary act.”

KR Meera

One of the greatest voices of Malayalam literature, KR Meera has published five collections of short stories, two novellas, five novels and two children's books over the past twenty years. Unlike the other authors I interviewed, Meera was looking from the outside in, into the world of Indian fiction in English. While some of her award-winning work has been translated for English publication, she remains a steady force in the world of Malayalam fiction—and her vision for the industry’s future was shaped by this steadiness.

“As a writer, I don’t think there’s any trend that I follow,” she said. “The only trend I follow is to tell the story better. To make it more touching.”

“In Malayalam, no publisher asks a person to write fiction of a ‘type’… Maybe nonfiction they might ask. But in the case of fiction, no publisher has a say. Because the kind of editing you have in English publishing is absent in Malayalam publishing.”

“I’m not an author who will ask a publisher whether they are ready to publish my book. And if the publisher tells me what theme to write on, I won’t do it.”

“For me, the process of writing happens in the subconscious. There are certain other stories which occurred in the spur of the moment. There are some stories that I’ve waited for five years to write, and the result is amazing even to me. There was one story, which in English would be called “What has happened to Achama?” I wrote the first sentence of that story when I was sitting in office in 2005 or 2006. Suddenly, this line came to my mind. And it was only years later, around 2011, when I sat down to write, this line came to me again, and with it, the whole story.”

One of Meera’s most-celebrated works was the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel Aarachaar (2012), published in English as Hangwoman: Everyone Loves a Good Hanging, which tells a story of a family of executioners that go back several millennia, deep into history. Meera, whose work is often laden with the weight of history, believes in the importance of literature as a ‘historical document’, too.

“Historians go back to literary texts when they don’t have other documents,” she says. “So, literature is an integral part of society. And, of course it has some elements of the contemporary lives and lifestyles incorporated into that.”

Jeet Thayil. Photo: Karan Madhok — Jeet Thayil. *Photo: Karan Madhok*

But, with the pace of history accelerating faster than ever, with new technologies disrupting every industry—including literature—I asked Meera if storytelling will change in the future, too.

“Of course, the format might change. The actual book would change. The material of the book will change. But I don’t think stories will change. It will be the same stories told with different metaphors.”

Jeet Thayil

Jeet Thayil is the author of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature winner Narcopolis, The Book of Chocolate Saints, and most-recently, the critically-acclaimed, Low. He also has written five poetry collections including the Sahitya Akademi winner These Errors Are Correct.

Thayil said that many of his ideas have been simmering within him for years, giving his work a kind of long-term view—set within the frame of the contemporary world. Low, his latest, tells of a dark, self-destructive weekend in Mumbai of a man who has travelled to the city to sprinkle the ashes of his departed wife.

“Low took about twelve years to really think about and put into a kind of formal casing,” Thayil said. “But it is also full of current events. There’s a lot of Trump in it. There’s a lot of Modi in it. It’s full of this moment. But it’s absolutely internal as well.”

But, while Thayil’s work continues to push boundaries, he expressed disappointed in some of the trends in the industry—particularly, in the rise of the ‘in the moment’ pop-fiction that populates the bestseller lists.

“It’s gonna get worse than it already is,” Thayil said. “In terms of depth, of creating characters that really matter, that are alive… Its gonna get worse. So many writers are rewriting a book that they have already written. It’s just awful. And, you never know, those guys might have an interesting book inside them.”

With technology changing mediums and attention spans, Thayil also foresees more books losing that depth in the coming decade.

“I think if you’re writing a book that is going to be consumed on the telephone, by necessity, you’re going to dumb [it] down a bit,” he said. “It’s gonna be more ‘insta’ than permanent.”

“And really, the question is, who are you writing for? Are you writing for this moment? Or are you writing for 20 years from now. And that’s something each person must make their decision about.”

But there is still hope, he said, in the voices of Indian English writing that continued to push towards greater sophistication, greater storytelling, towards a permanence that lasted beyond shallow immediacy.

“Right now, there’s the myth in Indian publishing that non-fiction is where it’s at. It’s not true. There’s lot of amazing fiction happening. I think Indian fiction in English is on its second or third wave, where it has become very sophisticated. It’s no longer your grandma’s Indian English. There’s no kind of condescension. There are none of the usual clichés about India. There is lot of Indian fiction beyond the ‘spices and mangoes’ and all that. You don’t get that kind of novel anymore. People are taking risks in a way that they didn’t previously. I think it’s an exciting—it’s going to be an exciting decade.”

***

Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in The Literary Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. Karan is currently working on his first novel. Twitter: @karanmadhok1

Writing Ahead: The 2020s in Indian Fiction