Within this historical context, what has happened in the last twenty years is quite significant. Our economy liberalized completely in early 1990s. The foreign businesses were accorded red carpet welcome, where before they were scorned. Along came the likes of IBM, Pepsi, McDonald’s and yes, even the Walmart. What the largely western influence changed significantly is India’s exposure to the world. A mushrooming Indian middle class was waiting for this to happen for a very long time. Since the early 1990s, English has become almost mandatory in schools in India. And by mandatory I don’t mean it to be studied as a subject, like in many Asian countries (Japan and China, in particular), but English has become a medium in which education is imparted. In layman’s terms, all subjects are taught in English for the last twenty five years.

As a natural consequence of the nation’s destiny getting altered in the early nineties, today, we have a burgeoning population of young people who were born twenty five years or so ago, and they are a big consumers of English literature. What has happened to India’s indigenous literature is a matter of a separate article, however, the following of a J K Rowling, a Stephanie Meyer, an E L James, and a Dan Brown is as passionate and as colossal as anywhere in the world. You would find massive bookstores in India today, and they are stocked with English books to the tune of minimum ninety percent. Several clones of Amazon (and now Amazon itself) have been doing exceptionally well in India and almost all their revenues come from selling English books online. Every publisher worth its salt, by that I mean the likes of Penguin, The Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Warner books and every other big name, have India as a cornerstone of their strategy for the future. They have set-up big operations in this country, have invested massively in establishing distribution chains and are making significant long term plans for India.

Within this chaotic but rapidly growing ecosystem, a smaller, hitherto unnoticed revolution was happening – that of Indians writing their books in English. I would sound facetious if I deem all the English writing in India as a modern phenomenon. Like all things Indian, we have a rich history of contributing to English literature. Authors like R K Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai have won international awards like the Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize and are quite well known, even famous in the world. They have been so for the last fifty years. However their writing has been distinctly catering to the western sensibilities of India, and I am not being critical here when I say that.

What we lacked, until a few years ago, is a bunch of authors who were indigenous and told stories based in India, for the Indians and in English. This is the phenomenon I want to highlight. In the past seven or eight years, we have a number of authors like Chetan Bhagat, Amish Tripathi and Durjoy Datta, who have proved that you can crank out a million copy bestseller written in English, sold largely within India. It is a massive thing, because earlier, Indian authors would be glad if they sold a measly ten thousand copies here. Not anymore. There is a revolution of sorts happening here. Today we have all the international publishers like Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Warner Books et all, backing Indian authors, signing them up for multiple book deals, giving them advances and promoting them heavily.

The reason for this is simple – English unites a billion people. Just think about it for a moment. 20% of India’s population of a billion people is middle class and is based in the cities where there are numerous bookstores and online retailers like Amazon have big presence, and they are the potential target market for English books. That makes it two hundred million potential readers! It is, number-wise, seventy percent of the overall US market. And they want to read English Books, because they associate more with English than any other language, as they were educated all through their lives in English.

I am not the child of booming nineties, I belong to the staid seventies of India. But I am now part of this revolution. I am an author who writes in English. Believe me, today, that’s a very Indian thing to say!!