The Chetan Bhagat ‘Phenomenon’

As an Indian writer of fiction in English without any publicly proclaimed claims to genius or even to high literary merit, the redoubtable success of Chetan Bhagat in attracting extremely large numbers of Indian readers is something of an enigma. The voluminous sales figures of his novels and the loyalty of his readers who not only buy but also read his books repeatedly indicate that he is no ordinary writer but one whose accomplishment needs to be regarded as a cultural phenomenon, some aspects of which may lay legitimate claims to being investigated. Certainly his status as a bestselling author has something to do with the present day condition of India which is at this moment poised on the cusp of a great economic leap forward, and with the emergence of radically new cultural values particularly among the country's educated youth. However, the popularity of Chetan Bhagat seems to have links with recent trends of development in the terrain of popular writing all across the English-reading world, as in and around the last decade the publication industry has globally witnessed, and often consciously contributed, to the emergence and establishment of a number of new sub-genres of writing identified by (and sold under) such classificatory brand names as ‘chick lit’, ‘mummy lit’ and ‘inspi-lit’. According to Brenda O’Neill on the BBC network, the first of these types of fiction refers to ‘comedic novels about singletons looking for Mr Right’, the second are ‘tales of new mums making a hash of juggling child and career’, and the third are texts which narrate stories about ‘triumph[s] over personal trauma’. Few samples of this kind of writing lay any serious claim to status as ‘literature’, but the modesty of the authors themselves about the quality of the work they produce in no way affects the popularity of their writing, for many of the individual titles in these literary sub-genres have been known to have gone into scores of reprints and sold in the hundreds of thousands.