BackCan Chetan Bhagat change the non-fiction game?
Can Chetan Bhagat change the non-fiction game?
PremiumSelling the story: It remains to be seen whether Chetan Bhagat’s fans care about his vision of a new India.(Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint)
In the pre-release publicity for his first non-fiction book What Young India Wants, Chetan Bhagat answered the title’s implicit question by saying that young Indians, according to him, really wanted a “naukri (job)" and “chokri (girl)". He claims, though, that it is not paradoxical to assume that a generation intent on personal gratification will also have time to think about the “national issues" on which the essays in this book focus.
His publishers, Rupa & Co., are counting on it. Rupa, which has brought out all of Bhagat’s novels since Five Point Someone in 2004, says that 500,000 copies of an initial print run of 575,000 were sold to retailers in a day, and booksellers have already begun to place repeat orders.
“I felt I didn’t deserve this tag," Bhagat said in an interview on Thursday. “I was just writing stories and doing movie deals. This, I thought, was a new market. I felt I could reach out to young people. And I did feel a lot of things were wrong with the country. Writing this would be more fulfilling."
In his columns, Bhagat writes that Hindi is our mother and English is our wife. He thinks Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi must express remorse for the Godhra riots and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi must not be elected just because he reminds us of his father. He once wrote an open letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, which ended with the question, “Are you up for it?" and signed it from “Young India".
With his new book, Bhagat, who began his literary career as a banker who wrote novels, has confirmed his status as a novelist who is also a political writer. He combines his newspaper work with a busy career in motivational speaking, giving 70-80 talks at paid events every year.
India is rich in novelists who write political opinions. Bhagat is set apart, as always, by his extraordinary popularity. Can a non-fiction book in India sell half a million copies?
“Yes," says Chiki Sarkar, publisher, Penguin India. “Chetan is an icon and with him the question is whether his non-fiction will sell more than his fiction. But as a publisher I can say it’s easier to commission non-fiction. With fiction you never quite know what the magic ingredient is, but there’s a strong sense of what works with non-fiction."
In 2009, Sarkar, then editor-in-chief at Random House India (RHI), published Don’t Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight, a diet book by Rujuta Diwekar, which has sold 270,000 copies to date and is RHI’s most successful Indian non-fiction title ever. According to book sales tracking service Nielsen BookScan, Diwekar’s book remains on 2012’s non-fiction best-seller list in India.
The What Young India Wants print run has no real benchmarks. Rashmi Bansal, whose I Have a Dream (Westland, 2011), was one of last year’s biggest non-fiction best-sellers, had a print run of 150,000, selling 120,000 to date. I Have a Dream is 2012’s seventh highest non-fiction seller, and Bansal the highest-selling Indian author on the list (her first book, Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish, comes in at No. 5 this year).
It remains to be seen how much Bhagat’s fans, a demographic which includes people across several regions, age groups and educational qualifications, care about his vision of a new India. His novels have sold six million copies overall, and uncountable pirated copies have proliferated in big and small urban centres. Rupa’s initial figures, while staggering for non-fiction, don’t match up to Bhagat’s success as a novelist. In 2011, his novel Revolution 2020 sold 600,000 copies to retailers, and Rupa ran out of stock a day after release.
On the first day of What Young India Wants’ release, booksellers in Delhi and Bangalore unofficially reported sales figures in double digits—a sluggishness no Chetan Bhagat book since his debut has ever experienced. Flipkart.com reports pre-order sales of 8,000 for What Young India Wants; by contrast, Revolution 2020 had 35,000 pre-orders (there is a broad consensus among booksellers that the momentum of popular fiction and non-fiction sales is different, with the latter selling much more slowly and over a period of time: Bhagat describes it as the difference between a feature film and a documentary).
“For a good job you need a good education, good colleges, a good economy, reform," Bhagat says about his naukri-chokri formulation. “For romance you need liberty. You don’t need your parents telling you what to do. You don’t need society telling you don’t marry this or that person. You need to have spaces to which you can go out."
“Those are causes the youth care about. Those are the causes I take up. Maybe that’s why they’ve been listening to me for so long."
“The youth" (a favourite Bhagat phrase) who accost him at talks spend “5 minutes talking about my writing before they ask me, ‘How do I make it in life? If you tell me that I’ll believe you’re a real writer.’" But Bhagat prefers not to cast his opinions as advice, or community self-help. “I don’t want to be a guru. If I wrote a self-help book tomorrow about how to make it in life, I have a gut feeling that it would do far better than all my novels. This book is about national issues. It’s very different."
It is often said that Bhagat’s novels appeal to the first-time reader. His columns, criticized often and vociferously in the English press for being simplistic (a criticism Bhagat accepts in the book’s concluding essay), offer another view of his readership: first-time entrants into the public discourse, looking for direction, attempting to understand not only how to make it in life but also in a country where, according to Bhagat, “it is exceptionally hard to make it".
“How do you analyse a complex issue in 700 words, offer a different perspective and also offer a solution?" Bhagat says. “People should understand. These are really very condensed thoughts."
supriya.n@livemint.com
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!
