He is the biggest-selling writer in English you have never heard of. His name does not grace any Booker list, but it is found on the lips of every college student in India. While the global literati dwell on the fiction of India's past, Chetan Bhagat has become India's favorite writer by embracing the present.
At 35, Bhagat's chronicling of the trials and tribulations of the country's middle-class youth has made him a publishing phenomenon in India. His first two novels have sold more than a million copies, dwarfing those of writers in English labelled best-selling.
His latest novel, a bittersweet small town comedy set amid a trio of Indian obsessions, cricket, religion and business, sells a copy every 17 seconds. His work will reach parts of India others can only dream of when the Bollywood film Hello, adapted from his book One Night @ the Call Centre, opens on Friday.
Bhagat covets mass appeal. His books are priced at $1.95, the same as a cinema ticket. The author says his work is a mass market product in a country with no tradition of English-language pulp fiction.
His last book was launched in supermarkets. "We don't have bookshops in every town. We have supermarkets. I want my books next to jeans and bread. I want my country to read me," he said.
Bhagat's formula is simple: write in the quirky, quick-fire campus English that young Indians use and focus on the absurdities of how to get ahead in contemporary India. "What is the purpose of literature? It is to raise a mirror to society. What is the point of writers who call themselves Indian authors but who have no Indian readers?" he said.
Such brash populism has drawn barbs from the literary world. Many critics say his books have no lasting value. He is condemned for not using "proper" English and writing novels fit only for "toilet reading".
But Bhagat is unperturbed. "It's just the old establishment in India that controls too much of the media. They do not ask what my sales say about a generation of young people in India."
With a booming Indian economy and loosening social mores, Bhagat's first novel, Five Point Someone, was published in 2004 at an opportune moment. Young people had begun to have far more options than their parents but their choices remain circumscribed by a traditional education system and overbearingly high expectations.
Five Point Someone is a story of the exam-overloaded lives of students who get into the country's top university, the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, only to rebel against the stultifying atmosphere of academic competition. It features drinking games, soft drug use and an affair between a student and his professor's daughter.
Bhagat, himself a graduate of the university, says the book's breezy manner should not undermine its message: that India's overachiever ethic smothers creativity in the pursuit of passing exams. "[In India] people are just mugging up and puking out whatever they study. It's not a proper education."
One Night @ the Call Centre, his second novel, is a romantic comedy set in an office where bored young Indians sit behind terminals helping to resolve inane queries from technologically challenged Americans.
(China Daily/The Guardian October 10, 2008)