Indian Writing in English and the Discrepant Zones of World Literature

For world literature studies, Indian writing in English offers an exceptionally rich and variegated field of analysis: On the one hand, a set of prominent Indian or diasporic writers accrues substantial literary capital through metropolitan review circuits and award systems and thus maintains the high international visibility that Indian writing in English has acquired ever since the early 1980s. Addressing a readership that spans countries and continents, this kind of writing functions as a viable tributary to world literature. On the other hand, a new boom of Indian mass fiction in English has emerged that, while targeting a strictly domestic audience, is always already implicated in the dynamics of world literature as well, albeit in a very different way: As they deploy, appropriate and adopt a wide range of globally available templates of popular genres, these texts have globality inscribed into their very textures even if they do not circulate internationally.