Author as everyman

With the phenomenal success of his recently released third novel, Chetan Bhagat has become India’s largest selling author in English. G Sampath attempts to understand the secret behind his popularity

“Your paper and I have a lot in common,” says Chetan Bhagat, as we sit down for a chat. “Same target audience — young people. And similar readership figures.” As has been grudgingly, and disbelievingly, acknowledged, Bhagat is absolutely the only writer in India at the moment who can afford to make such a statement — coolly informing a newspaperman that this mass circulation daily’s readership figures (6.22 lakh in Mumbai as per the latest IRS 2008 survey) and that of his novels’ were about the same. Your initial reaction is that he’s got to be kidding. Sure, he is a bestselling author alright. In India any book that sells above 7,000 copies qualifies as a bestseller. But you later realise that he was being modest. Bhagat’s first two novels have sold more than 10 lakh copies. And his third one, The 3 Mistakes Of My Life, released this month, had a pre-publication order of 2 lakh copies. “The publisher, RK Mehra, is bewildered,” says Bhagat, “He’s never seen anything like this in the 46 years he’s been running Rupa.”

And this has been the underlying theme of every discussion about Chetan Bhagat: how can such a ‘bad’ writer sell so well? Bhagat himself is both amused and exasperated by what he perceives as the hostility of India’s ‘literary circles’.

The mixture of condescension and hostility with which Bhagat’s books have been received by the country’s ‘literati’ is not surprising. His first book, Five Point Someone, about three IIT kids who muddle their way through studies and romance, had a clear storyline, and was funny in parts, but was remarkable more for its abundance of verbal and cultural clichés. But it had a readymade cache of readers: the lakhs of youth who were either aspiring to, were already in, or had passed out of an IIT.

His second novel, One Night @ The Call Centre, is so bad that it’s worth reading. The story, an improbable one about six call centre employees with an evil boss, could have been held together only by divine intervention. And it is. God makes a call to the BPO where the characters work, and everything ends well. So well, in fact, that you will soon get to watch their story enacted in a blockbuster movie called Hello, starring Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif, and Isha Koppikar. This book again had a readymade cache of readers: the lakhs of youth who were either aspiring to, were already in, or had been in a call centre job.

His latest one, The 3 Mistakes Of My Life, is about three boys (yes, again) in Ahmedabad who just want to get on with their lives, making money, having fun and watching cricket. It is better plotted than his second one, and better written, though you’ll still find sentences like, “An awestruck Harsh air-struck a few strokes.” (p 22) and “My body trembled with violent intensity.” (p 107). Yet, this book is all set to damn his critics by selling more than both his previous novels. Why?

“People love to come up with every conceivable explanation for my success: that I am a great marketer, that I have priced them cleverly, that I have pandered to social and cultural stereotypes — every reason except the obvious one. Why can’t they for once consider that maybe — MAYBE — the books are selling because they have some merit in them after all?” asks an aggrieved Bhagat.

The merit, clearly, lies in his finely honed ability to gauge the mood of his readership and connect with it. His insight into the youth of today, which also permeates 3 Mistakes, is telling: “Only one thing can unite India’s youth, and that is money-making, making India rich,” he says. Not surprisingly, the protagonist of 3 Mistakes is a young man who wants to do “something different”, run his own business, and hates having to suck up to a boss. In today’s economic climate, such a philosophy is bound to resonate with the lakhs of youth who dream of ‘starting their own thing’.

Evidently, Bhagat knows his target audience — a strange concept for critics schooled in the idea of writing as a noble vocation and writers as artists who wrote for ‘self-expression’. Unlike so-called literary writers, Bhagat begins from the other end — the market. “It’s the readers who make you an author,” he says. “I lived in Hong Kong for 10 years. I could have written about the ‘migrant experience’ like so many have done. But what’s the point if nobody reads you? I write about the things readers want to read about. People like to say that they’ve read Salman Rushdie. It’s a way to show off, and gain acceptance into the literary elite. No one will admit to reading Chetan Bhagat. But then, there is no need to. According to sales figures, it seems nearly everyone has.”

Strangely, the three ‘secrets’ of Bhagat’s success are exactly the things for which he is vilified: First, his ability to connect with (or ‘pander to’) the petty aspirations of India’s urban middle class youth: chasing romance, getting rich, being cool. His books, like most popular novels, are powerful wish fulfillment fantasies. Second, his language. The functional English of Bhagat’s novels — with all the clichés, stereotypes, and careless colloquialisms — is also their biggest attraction. The irony is that if he were to clean up his language, his readership would most probably plummet. The polished prose that is so valued by critics is not the langauge his readers would easily relate to or care for. If he adopted it, he would cease to be ‘one of them’, and  jeopardise his mass appeal. The internet has plenty of blog posts by young readers who are thrilled to find his books so accessible — rendering their experiences in their own lingo — despite it being written in English.

The third factor is the price. At Rs95, it costs less than a pizza or a multiplex ticket. “Book sellers told me that if we increased the price by 50 per cent, to Rs150, sales would drop only by 10 per cent. But if a reader came and told me that he couldn’t read my books because he couldn’t afford them, I would be heartbroken. So we stuck to Rs95,” says Bhagat. Heartbreak apart, it is safe to assume that somebody who doesn’t read fiction in general wouldn’t want to risk much more on a possibly first-time purchase of an English novel.

It would appear that Bhagat, who graduated in Marketing from IIM, Ahmedabad, has mastered the authorial equivalent of the three Ps of marketing: product (youth aspirations), packaging (language, they say, is the skin of thought), and price. Having said that, it would be unfair to reduce Bhagat’s achievement to mere marketing chutzpah. Being a writer is hard enough, and to be one with a day job as an investment banker can’t be any easier. “I am only a part-time writer,” reminds Bhagat, “don’t compare me to someone who’s devoted 40 years of his life to writing. I enjoy writing, and I am glad to have a job because I don’t want my identity to be tied only to my books.” But doesn’t he secretly aspire to some form of literary greatness — something which not even 100 years of investment banking can give? “Greatness,” answers Bhagat, “is bullshit. Total bullshit.” 

sampath@dnaindia.net