INDYLIT

From playgrounds to pride, from panels to podcasts—this is Indian English literature spilling out of the book and into everything else By ABS, The Literary Scholar, who believes that children’s books, queer poems, podcasts and comics are all literature—just written in different dialects of truth. You thought literature lived quietly between hardcovers? That it wore […]

Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, and the literary roots of India’s independence movement By ABS, The Literary Scholar, who believes that sometimes revolutions begin with a salt march, and sometimes with a sentence. Before Salman Rushdie made English magical, and long before Arundhati Roy made it Booker-worthy, a curious tribe of patriots, poets, philosophers, and

From Karnad to Amish, from Dattani to Sanghi—these writers made Indian English loud, layered, and wildly popular By ABS, The Literary Scholar, who believes that popularity isn’t a sin—and plot twists deserve literary respect too. Not all literature wants to be quoted in dusty journals. Some of it wants to be staged, sung, screen-adapted, or

Rushdie, Roy, Ghosh, and the Globalisation of Indian English Fiction By ABS, The Literary Scholar, who believes commas can cross continents, and novels can whisper louder than nationalism. There comes a moment in every literary tradition when someone turns around, tosses out the rules, and says, “Let’s make a mess.” For Indian English Literature, that

Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai, Nayantara Sahgal, Bhabani Bhattacharya—and the tea-steeped fiction of postcolonial India By ABS, The Literary Scholar, who believes in women who penned silence into thunder and sewed metaphors into every sari fold. Before Indian fiction got drunk on postmodernism and magic realism, it went through a rather elegant, emotionally complex phase—where characters

From Kipling’s jungle to Forster’s caves, the British who wrote India—sometimes gloriously, often cluelessly, and always with a baggage allowance By ABS, The Literary Scholar, who believes the British wrote India like a misunderstood metaphor—and India replied with footnotes. Let’s begin with the granddaddy of them all: Rudyard Kipling You knew he was coming. You

From Ismat to InstaLit, from epics to edge cases—Indian English literature closes one circle, and dares another to begin By ABS, The Literary Scholar, who believes the scroll never ends—only changes its ink, its tongue, and sometimes, its reader. Section 1: Echoes of the Past Before hashtags and hybrid forms, there were writers who had

Experimental, regional, poetic, political, and genre-bending voices who carved new shapes into Indian English fiction By ABS, The Literary Scholar, who believes the best stories are smuggled past genre police wearing metaphor like armour. Some writers write books. Others write possibilities. This scroll is not about tradition. It’s about disruption—not always loud, but always deliberate.

Khushwant Singh, Nissim Ezekiel, Shashi Deshpande, Shashi Tharoor, and other bold voices who shaped Indian English literature from within By ABS, The Literary Scholar, who believes literary rebellion requires ink, irony, and absolutely no permission slips. By the time the world had made peace with the fact that Indians could write Booker-winning epics and diaspora

Avni Doshi, Megha Majumdar, Akhil Sharma, Tishani Doshi & the writers who made Indian fiction sharper, darker, and globally relevant again By ABS, The Literary Scholar, who believes that emotional damage, when processed properly, becomes literary acclaim. Literature evolves like fashion. One day you’re wrapped in epic metaphors and Gitanjali gloom, the next you’re writing