I know what you read this summer

Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga, Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series, the Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan: the names trip easily off their tongues. But ask them about Young Adult (YA) books written by Indian authors that rolled off the presses this past summer and you hear a studied silence.

“I generally don’t read books by Indian authors,” says Kinnisha Michellin Andrew, a third-year student of Mount Carmel college.
Andrew, a voracious reader, gets most of her recommendations for books from her college peer group or from social networks for bookworms (Shelfari, Goodreads). She is currently reading the latest in the Hunger Games series (Mockingjay) and Name of the Wind, the first book in yet another fantasy series The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss.

The hyper-success of Twilight was supposed to draw all these young readers into bookstores and into exploring the burgeoning YA literature from India. This past summer, a large number of young Indian writers have published their books; among them are Samit Basu with his Terror on the Titanic: A Morningstar Agency Adventure, star blogger Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan with The Confessions of a Listmaniac, Vodafone-Crossword book award winner Siddhartha Sarma with The Grasshopper’s Run (all three published by Scholastic India), Giti Chandra with The Fang of Summoning (Hachette India) and Tushar Raheja with Run Romi Run (Roli).

Most are competitively priced and actively promoted by their publishers. Yet, college-goer Diya Ballal has not laid hands on any of them and echoes Andrew when she says that she hardly reads anything written by Indian writers. More to the point, her peer group doesn’t read these books, hence the all-important word-of-mouth is missing.

“None of my friends are reading YA books by Indian authors. Everyone is into the post-Twilight books like City of Bones by Cassandra Clare or the Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead,” says Ballal, who is looking forward to reading the last Vampire Academy book, which will be out in December.

According to author Monideepa Sahu, who has recently published children’s book (Young Zubaan), distributors and bookstores are to blame for this apathy. “Good books are being written by Indian authors in the YA space, but there is a problem in getting them out to a wider readership,” says Sahu. “If our books were better stocked and displayed by stores, I feel there would be many more buyers and readers.”

Mayi Gowda, founder-owner of Blossom Book House on Church Street, denies this. “YA books written by Indian authors sell slowly but steadily,” says Gowda. “Of course, books like the Twilight series sell more, but I would say the Indian authors’ books do about 20-25% of the business done by the international YA best-sellers.”

Sayoni Basu, Director Publishing, Scholastic India Pvt. Ltd, also takes a more optimistic view. “We have sold more of Samit’s and Meenakshi’s new books than we have of the Hunger Games books, distributed by us, which are huge internationally,” she says. “So in terms of YA books, we have definitely achieved more success with Indian authors than foreign ones.”

Anita Roy, commissioning editor, Young Zubaan books, has an interesting take. Unlike most adult readers and critics who are dismissive of the Twilight and post-Twilight books and blithely categorise them as pulp, Roy feels authors such as Stephanie Meyer,  Rick Riordan, Philip Pullman, Suzanne Collins and Malorie Blackman (Noughts and Crosses) are exploring Big Issues and tough dilemmas — racism, sexuality, the nature of God, friendship, love, murder…

“I do think that there’s a huge potential market for Indian writers of YA fiction. Yet, in India a lot of writers are still very cautious about the kinds of issues they will ‘allow’ themselves to tackle. It makes for a restricted canvas; not a good thing, and perhaps why we’re yet to see a book from an Indian writer that really grabs you by the throat and says ‘Read me now! (and then tell all your friends!’),” says Roy.