Techie Lit: India's New Breed of Fiction

Zackary Canepari for TIME

Head of the class: Chetan Bhagat, an investment banker, is probably India's most popular writer

Salman Rushdie. Anita Desai. Amitav Ghosh. If you have to describe Indian literature written in English, words like highbrow and worthy come to mind. But while the country's serious writers — most recently Aravind Adiga — continue to attract international acclaim, domestically they are being overshadowed by a new breed of author.

The books produced by this generation are "not about partition, or the Emergency, or three-generational family sagas written in Oxford English," says New Delhi literary agent Renuka Chatterjee. Instead, the topics are populist and contemporary (college,...

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