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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, finding a job, looking for love) and the English is as unpretentious as a call-center cubicle. At the same time, these novels still do what novels have always done: serve as guides in a confusing world. "Suddenly, everything has changed so much," says novelist and publisher Namita Gokhale. "So people use these books to try to find where they're located in all this." And that has made the new pop fiction a runaway success. Helped additionally by low prices (novels are priced around $5) and new distribution channels (the books are sold on street corners and in department-store chains like Big Bazaar, not just in conventional bookstores), first-time authors are moving more than 20,000 copies a year.

At the top of the pile is Chetan Bhagat, whom fellow pop author Anirban Bose calls the "Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary of Indian mass-market publishing." Bhagat's three books, the first of which was published in 2004, have sold more than a million copies. One has been made into a Bollywood film and another is in production. "Chetan Bhagat's success demonstrated that there was a huge market for Indian fiction, with everyday Indian characters acting out everyday Indian stories," says Bose. "Publishers took note that homegrown talent was finding a voice, and that publishing authors like us was not only not risky, but could actually be profitable."

I met Bhagat recently for dinner in Mumbai. He brought with him his assistant, a chatty, young aspiring actress whose main responsibility is answering the thousand or so fan letters he receives every week. They were preparing for his next speaking engagement, an address at a university in Baroda in western India where he expected a crowd of at least 8,000. It is hard to imagine any author — besides, say, J.K. Rowling — as the object of so much adulation. In his rumpled white shirt, and with a slight paunch and wire-rimmed glasses, Bhagat looks much more like an overworked investment banker (in fact he is one, and has been for 15 years) than a best-selling author (which he has been for the past four). The success of his first book, Five Point Someone, a campus novel following three best friends at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, took him by surprise. "I didn't have the baggage of other Indian authors," he says. "I just wanted to write a fun book."

And so he did — the characters get drunk, fall in love and steal exam papers — but Five Point Someone also taps into the pressures facing students at India's élite educational institutions. One character's brilliant research proposal gets shelved because he's considered an underachiever, with a "five-point-something" grade average. Another nearly breaks down under the pressure from his mother to find a job that will pay for his father's medical bills and sister's dowry.

Bhagat could have written a postgraduation sequel (his fans still ask for one) but instead he tried to get closer to the average young Indian by setting his second book, One Night @ the Call Center, in a workplace familiar to many of them. In his most recent novel, released in May, he ventured out to the provinces, following three cricket-mad friends who start a business in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. Entitled The Three Mistakes of My Life, the book has already sold 500,000 copies, thanks to a text that is accessible to readers whose first language isn't English. "These kids may have only studied English as a subject in school, and they might not be able to read any other novel in English," he says, "but they can read a Chetan Bhagat novel."

"You may love him or hate him, but Chetan Bhagat's big contribution to Indian publishing has been to bring out of the woodwork a whole segment of readers that publishers had traditionally believed never existed," says the agent Chatterjee. She describes them as "college and high school students, the under-25s, whom we all liked to believe would rather buy a pizza or go disco-dancing than spend money on a book." But they will buy books relevant to their own lives. Amitabha Bagchi, author of another IIT novel, Above Average, says young Indians want to read about themselves "not entirely as an act of narcissism but also as part of a process of adapting to, and learning to live in, a social milieu that is evolving faster than most people can comprehend."

Changing notions of gender are a part of that. "The so-called techie lit or business-school books will all take you through a series of different notions of what it means to be a man in India," Bagchi says. Male protagonists struggle with a world that challenges them to break free of their parents' expectations: Will they be dutiful sons and find good jobs, or will they indulge in idealism and take risks? In one passage in Above Average, the character Arindam experiences an epiphany while playing in a band: "That first roll to the end of the song was the one time in my life when anything seemed possible ... the one time in my life when I was not a bespectacled Bengali computer scientist sitting in a small room in Mayur Vihar, but Mitch Mitchell himself, the master of the drum set."

Books targeting young women pose similar questions: Will the characters get married and have children, or will they defer having a family and live on their own? Sassy singletons making their way in the big city are the usual heroines, wrestling with what it means to be an independent woman in a country where premarital sex is still considered shocking and the vast majority of women live with their parents until they get married. A boxed set of recent popular novels by Indian women could be called "Every Girl's Career Guide," says Rupa Gulab, who wrote Girl Alone based on a dating column for the Indian edition of Cosmopolitan magazine. "Between the lot of us, we've covered advertising, marketing, p.r., the hotel industry, Bollywood, TV serials, gosh, even beauty pageants!" she says. This flood of novels has been extremely rapid. "At the time I wrote Piece of Cake, nothing had ever been written about the single working-woman experience in India," says Swati Kaushal, whose book about a young marketing exec was published in 2005. Neither Kaushal's book nor others that followed are feminist treatises, however. In fact, fictional heroines usually end up in love, if not wedlock. But the mere fact that the books raise gender-related issues makes them valuable. "There are a huge number of anxieties floating around young women," says the New Delhi publisher Gokhale. "It's very reassuring to read a funny and well-written novel in which you can see your own problems reflected."

The uncompromising modernity of the new writing is also uplifting. Speak to any of these authors, and there is a sense of defiance in choosing to write about the present — an insistence that the stories of how Indians live now are just as worthy of being told as the more self-consciously literary sagas set in some supposedly more romantic past. Indian pop fiction might be banished to second-class status by critics, says Bhagat, "but it's not that to the people who read it." For them, it tells the stories of their own lives, and looks ahead to India's thrilling if uncertain future.

— with reporting by Madhur Singh / New Delhi

• Jyoti Thottam