At the turn of the millennium, if 5000 copies of your book were sold, you would be a best-selling author. Then, in the next few years, the Indian publishing industry expanded by leaps and bounds. As the industry burgeoned, there was this author whose re-print runs usually exceeded 500,000. He was described by the New York Times as “the biggest selling English language novelist in India’s history” and many others ascribed to him the “phenomenon” tag. The man in question, Chetan Bhagat, changed many rules of the game.
You will agree that the paragraph above is replete with clichés. You will also agree that clichés, whether you like the incontrovertible fact or not, do start as truths; and they usually do work. So have the five novels of Bhagat. If print runs and sales are to be a collative yardstick, you cannot deny that Bhagat is one of the most-read authors in this country today.
If anything has changed dramatically in this “millennium”, it has been the scope of commercial fiction. A 2009 article in The Telegraph put it succinctly, “It’s not as if Indian writers never penned commercial fiction before. […] But this never developed into a body of work. That has changed ever since bestselling author Chetan Bhagat hit the scene.”
But does this make him a phenomenon?
If “phenomenon” is measured by figures, UK-based journalist-writer Salil Tripathi would agree. “He exists for readers who are new to the English language and new to the idea of reading, and to that extent, he promotes a certain amount of literacy.” Author-columnist Santosh Desai agrees, “It marks a breakthrough of sorts – writing in English becoming popular in a mainstream sort of a way, moving away from a desire to exclude, speaking to a new set of aspirations with simple but resonant stories, cocking a snook at elitism.”
That certainly happened. As Bhagat’s reach among youngsters increased, the non-books market cashed in on the IIT-IIM alumnus. Newspapers started carrying articles by him on issues he does not seem to be the best expert around, and before you knew it, he had been branded a youth icon. If our man had not become a phenomenon by his own mite, he did have a halo string around behind him. Bhagat has an opinion about everything, and worse, there is a nouveau riche class that accepts his rants as the gospel truth.
Mayank Chhaya, US-based author of Dalai Lama: Man Monk Mystic (Random House,2007), wants to delve deeper. He explains, “He has all the trimmings of a phenomenon, including a media profile far beyond his core substance. In a sense, he could well be a character from one of his own books, someone who has succeeded beyond his wildest expectations by catering to the urban and semi-urban readership that is not particularly discriminating in its literary tastes.”
Many, who have worked with Bhagat, believe that he knows his audience well. And he markets himself just as well; grammar and syntax be damned. In a milieu where the largest English language daily believes that selling newspapers is akin to peddling soap, it is no surprise that certain books have become products that only need to be sold to a consumer.
When readers become mere consumers, a potential readership base becomes a playground for sellers of wares (read ‘books’), and books permeate from producers to end-consumers in the same fashion as fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) do. There’s nothing wrong with that; but a spade needs to be called a spade too. And market compulsions inevitably rule.
An international literary consultant contends, “Bhagat’s first book was Five Point Someone (2004). I do not recall much of a marketing buzz around that one. Subsequently, yes... there has been a fair bit of spin doctoring around him.” Desai agrees, “Marketing has a role to play with his later books, but essentially it has to do with knowing his audience and in some ways being them. He writes non-deliberatively; the connect is a natural one.”
Larger issues crop up here. Does or should an author write to suit his/her audience’s tastes and sensibilities? Yet, this is not an issue central to this write-up; ethics are a different ballgame altogether. Let’s stay glued to what Bhagat does instead of looking at his literary prowess, or rather the lack of any. Because there is a demographic of youthful urban readership not particularly concerned about the nuances of language. Bhagat is able to tailor his content to appeal to them. Remember, we have to perforce look at books as products here.
This “phenomenon” we are talking about gradually becomes a Bollywoodisation (pardon the term, please) of Indian fiction in English. Chhaya contextualises it for us, “His success is reminiscent of Hindi filmmakers of the late 1970s, particularly Manmohan Desai who had a grasp of the inner workings of the average urban mind. Bhagat has achieved the rare distinction of reaching a level where the commercial success of his books feeds on itself quite like Desai’s movies did. His books, it appears from afar, market themselves.”
Veteran journalist Kajal Basu disagrees, scathingly so. “He is 85 per cent marketing (including self-promotion) and 15 per cent ‘knowing his own target audience’. His target audience happens to exist; even if it hadn’t, I have this sneaky feeling that Bhagat wouldn’t be able to write any differently. If the main demographic of the publishing industry had not been Young Adults but, say, from the middle-aged to nonagenarians, Bhagat would still have written some version of his anodyne call centre paeans, and gone gurgling down the tubes. One can hardly take offence at the serendipity of his success – he happened to be here at the right time – but it might have been nice if he had a bulb in his head that would light up, every once in a blue moon, that he’d had an ‘idea’, and let us know that he’d had one.”
The perceptible intellectual bankruptcy that surfaces would beg us to ask: how much is the Chetan Bhagat “success” reflective of the Indian publishing industry itself?
Desai, author of Mother Pious Lady: Making sense of Everyday India (Harper Collins India, 2011) doesn’t accord this too much importance, but points out that the publishing industry in India “does not impose itself in any significant way.” One will tend to agree. Gone are the days when you had to play by the rules framed by publishers alone. The publishing industry, as it has grown, has become mature too. Unmet needs have become fulfilled, and there is something for everyone to grab in the books market.
The best overview comes from Tripathi, author of Offence: The Hindu Case (Seagull,2009), “I suppose just as Hindi literature had space for Srilal Shukla and Gulshan Nanda, English language writing in India has space for Rushdie/Ghosh/Seth and Bhagat/Amish Tripathi.”
The literary consultant sees two independent spaces. She feels Bhagat’s success is not a comment on the Indian publishing industry, but on the growing reader base and the possibilities of this genre. “I have been hearing anecdotes of teachers, tourists, visitors, etc, meeting youngsters in different parts of this country who say they read, but the sum total of their reading is a Chetan Bhagat. If he was truly successful and had influenced or rather encouraged people to read, I would term it as a success of the industry. Instead, publishing houses are being impacted by this phenomenon and diverting resources from present lists to create a commercial fiction list. This is bound to have a long term effect on the industry.”
The average is always the largest segment of any market and the Indian publishing industry has understood and internalised that simple truth. Bhagat is the most compelling example of the industry recognising that it pays to cater to those who read books that do not demand a whole lot of their didactic abilities. Now you know why Chetan Bhagat seems so omnipresent.
Since we keep talking of Bhagat’s target audience and his consequent success, how much is this reflective of the Indian readership / psyche? The independent spaces referred to earlier would tell us that there’s no homogenised Indian readership; there are segments, and Bhagat appears to appeal to some of them. There is no need for purists to panic. Desai thinks it is much more: “Most writers who are well regarded are too obscure for the mainstream reader. For those who know the language without necessarily enjoying its nuances, there hasn’t been too much by way of options.”
Basu throws the question back at you. “What is that monolith everybody seems to know as ‘the Indian readership/psyche’? Is it an established demographic that can be studied using Gompertz models or parity progression ratios or population projection? No, it’s not representative of the youth in the Maoist ‘liberated zones’, nor of minor girls in Malda bucking their parents’ wishes to get married to men four times their age just in order to continue to study to be doctors or school teachers or, in one case, an astronaut. Bhagat’s relevance is a notional thing, much of it a chimera built up by assiduous marketing.”
It is, therefore, no surprise that Bhagat often exceeds his brief. Much as he gets the chance to lecture people at facetious seminars on subjects ranging from leadership to well-being, he has no qualms about playing to the galleries. So, the man who uses his own right to free speech to the hilt, feels the need to “castigate” Salman Rushdie about free expression.
Bhagat needs to dish things that are lapped up by his readers; he needs to expand his reach too. It works both ways. He says things that smack of ideological perversion, and justifies issues that reek of cerebral deviousness. His tweets, therefore, are a veritable catalogue of this demagoguery. This strategy has helped him hold on to his readers. But as he grows older, so does his current readership. How long is this going to last?
Tripathi doesn’t make predictions. “Think of Shobhaa De, another writer whose fiction is targeted towards popular readership. She was successful when she began, and has remained so, and even attracted a new generation of readers. That’s because she has the ear for the urban idiom and stays in tune with the zeitgeist. I’m not sure if Bhagat is capable of that. He may well be.” With a fad you can never be sure till it is proved to be one.
And as you read this, the man in question is probably hatching a plot somewhere.
