Is India's English-language publishing failing its readers?

If you are looking for easy rage-bait on social media, look no further than the English-language publishing ecosystem in India. Writers, publishers, festival regulars, and a ragtag assembly of stakeholders recently revealed their thin skin when it comes to less than laudatory, cynical, and (largely) misplaced hot takes on the state of the literary establishment.

In February, an article in The Guardian left the literati fuming because it made the unpopular point that despite the proliferation of literary events, “India does not have a great book-reading tradition.” It was a tall claim, considering the robust reading cultures in Indian languages, but English-language publishing in India is a different story. Other than the fortunate few with big hitters (mostly mass-market fiction and non-fiction), authors barely earn decent royalties, let alone make a living, from the sale of their books. Still, the angry handful, cocooned in their mutual admiration clubs on social media and lit fests, insisted that reading is alive and well in this country.

A few days ago, another article, Why Almost Every Major Indian Writer Lives Abroad and What It Has Done to Indian Fiction in Times Now, touched a raw nerve with some India-based writers, who leapt to the defence of their compatriots. That the piece begins by co-opting writers like Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri and Amitav Ghosh as “Indian” is warning enough to take it with a pinch of salt. But, once again, it opened the floodgates of overreaction.

First, the aforementioned writers have lived outside the country all or most of their working lives. And while they write about India, their books are about many other things. It would be unfair, if not silly, to label their work as “Indian writing”, just as it would be absurd to describe Arundhati Roy, who lives in India and is hated by a large section of Indians, as an “Indian writer” alone.

Second, while the article was refuted widely on social media, no one seems to have objected to the ethno-nationalist labelling, “Indian”. Is Kiran Desai a successful writer because she has Indian genes or writes about India? Or is it that her books are objectively good enough to appeal to a global readership? Good writing doesn’t need labels to stand on its feet, but, in reality, terms like “Indian”, “American”, “British”, and so on, play an outsized role in the global politics of publishing. These epithets, along with access to international networks of influence (namely, London and New York), decide who gets to be published, which books get circulated, and who wins the big prizes—all of which, in the end, turn a gifted author into a “major” writer.

By these yardsticks, English-writing in India has indeed had several “major” writers—those who have won or made it to the shortlists and longlists of some big-ticket prizes—but those have been the exceptions rather than the rule. For the most part, a cursory glance at India’s English-language publishing landscape shows a poverty of imagination, lack of intellectual ambition, and no quality control—except in the case of a few indie publishers, who continue to champion writers and books they believe in.

It’s a different story when it comes to the behemoths that have a near-monopoly in the market. The highlights of their publishing lists are usually a mixed bag of celebrities peddling beauty tips, fitness advice, parenting gyaan and self-help hacks, with influencers (who are unable to string together a coherent argument) bringing up the rear. Even the “literary” lists are conspicuous in their lack of editing rigour, with most of the writers fading away into the great oblivion of the midlist.

I don’t make the last point lightly: for reference, compare Shehan Karunatilaka’s novel Chats with the Dead, published in 2020 by Penguin Random House India, with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which came out from Sort of Books in 2022. Both are essentially the same book, but it is the rigorously edited edition published by a small London press that led to the author winning the Booker Prize in 2022. This small detail got buried in the hullabaloo over the announcement of the award, but it said everything you need to know about the state of English-language publishing today.

It is easy to make a scapegoat out of editors but having once worked as one in the same industry, I am acutely cognisant of the impossibility of doing justice to every book if you have to commission, acquire, edit and publish two dozen books every year, and be left exhausted, underpaid and unthanked at the end of it. This belief, by the management mostly, in quantity over quality also explains the rise of the nepo-list, a special niche reserved for festival producers, friends and family, and ministers and leaders of industry, who get a free pass to publish anything they fancy so long as they reciprocate favours. Be it vapid stories of paranormal encounters, self-congratulatory memoirs, anthologies to platform friends, insipid collections of poetry, or threadbare retelling of religious and mythological stories, anything goes.

As editor, critic, panellist, writer and occasional jury on prizes and writing residences, I have witnessed a steady decline of excellence in English-language publishing in favour of market economics, along with a rising propensity for ticking the right boxes and playing it safe, in the last 20 years. There are compelling reasons to rage against this systematic dumbing down of the publishing machinery, rather than take umbrage at a couple of provocative articles.

If we look beyond the fragile ego of a few writers and their solipsistic, often badly-framed, defence for a moment, the biggest injustice is being done to committed readers in this country—those of us who care for good writing and deserve much better than what we are currently being served by a directionless industry, clutching at any straw to stay afloat.