“English like Hindi”: Chetan Bhagat, Popular Fiction, and India’s Voice

IN AUGUST 2017, in a speech marking the seventieth anniversary of India’s independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of a “New India” that would be “secure, prosperous and strong.” A New India of “equal opportunity for all; where modern science and technology play an important role in bringing glory for the nation in the global arena.” Launching a five-year plan called “Sankalp Se Siddhi,” the prime minister exhorted his “countrymen” to take a “New India pledge” toward a corruption-free, poverty-free, terrorism-free, casteism-free, communalism-free, clean nation.¹

Modi’s “New India” was yet another deeply cynical repurposing of what had become, in the preceding two decades, a familiar yet variously construed term.² The conventional story goes something like this: New India emerged after the liberalization of the nation’s financial markets, starting with the International Monetary Fund-led economic reforms in 1991. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the term gained traction as a descriptor of India’s economic “dream run” between 2003 and 2008, its neoliberal enterprise culture, global ambitions, and the confluence of its “hard” economic and “soft” cultural power. New India named a nation that had become central to the world economy and would rival a rising China in the Asian Century.

New India emerged as a market-driven discourse of aspiration. It also served as an ideological smokescreen for the self-aggrandizing, communalist, anti-Muslim politics motoring the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) “India Shining” campaign in 2004, unsuccessful though it was.³ New India was thus a highly contradictory, Janus-faced discourse that valorized both future-oriented economic globalization and historically revisionist fantasies of indigeneity and nativity. A reanimated New India discourse led to the BJP’s electoral triumph in 2014 and the appointment of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh member and former Gujarat chief minister Modi as India’s fifteenth prime minister. Even as India’s economic growth foundered in the 2010s, and despite Modi’s authoritarian enactments of disastrous policies like the 2016 demonetization, the rhetorical power of New India obtained, as evidenced by the bluster of the 2017 pledge. New India was “global” as opposed to postcolonial, “young” as opposed to old, and “modern” as opposed to traditional. It was a Hindu “Naya Bharat” as opposed to a secular republic, and a “Hindi-speaking” India as opposed to an English-speaking one.⁴

This New India no longer required—indeed, rejected—representation by its Anglophone diasporas in the West. Put simply, it was an India that could finally speak in its own voice. Moreover, it would speak Indian languages that would have greater purchase on the nation than English ever could. Down with Cambridge-educated prime ministers like Jawaharlal Nehru and Manmohan Singh; up with the Hindi- and Gujarati-speaking Modi. Down with self-appointed nonresident Indian ambassadors of the nation; up with “new, more independent voices that [could] talk more authoritatively about a changing India” (Jagannathan; see also Agrawal). Prominent among these new, authoritative voices was that of Chetan Bhagat, an investment banker-turned-bestselling-author who, in the early 2000s, became “a national youth icon” and “harbinger of a new India” (Basu 184). Bhagat belonged to a crop of popular writers who could “talk directly of, and to New India” (Varughese 152). Ironically, Bhagat talked directly to and about what Samanth Subramanian called an “India after English” in English.

This essay’s inquiry begins from this simple, counterintuitive fact: Bhagat became an icon of the post-Anglophone New India by writing English-language pulp fictions. His oeuvre came to signify a new phase in the indigenization of English in India and fresh possibilities for English’s purchase on Indian lifeworlds, even as the cultural and symbolic capital of English in India was being challenged significantly and arguably even waning for the first time since independence. How? The critical consensus is that Bhagat writes in an English that is accessible, provincial, global, and also undeniably Indian—a tangle of contradictory descriptions of a piece with the New India discourse. As Ulka Anjaria argues, Bhagat writes into “a new space where English and the bhashas can meet again” (History 12) and where “everyday lives speak for themselves” (Reading 35). His simple English, one reader reflects, is “like Hindi. It doesn’t tax my brain” (quoted in Basu 192). Bhagat has taken this description to heart, as per the account he gives in his motivational speeches: “Koi baar log kehthe hein ki aapka Angrezi Hindi ki tharah hein. That’s a good compliment for me, because I am able to communicate” (“Skills”; Sometimes people say “your English is like Hindi”).

But if Bhagat’s English is like Hindi, what relationship does it have to Hindi itself, and for that matter to any other Indian language it purportedly “meets” in the Indian and global literary spheres? What does the case of Bhagat, and in particular his emergence as an object of critical consideration in Anglo-American literary studies, tell us about English, the challenges of reading New India and teaching the global contemporary, and—contra long-standing efforts in postcolonial theory—the persistence of the fantasy of accessing India’s unmediated voice?

In what follows, I argue that Bhagat’s iconicity lays bare a problem endemic to English literary studies in US academe—namely, the problem of enacting comparative literary analysis within English itself.⁵ It is increasingly evident, even within departments dominated by the teaching of American and British literatures, that the discipline of English has a pedagogical responsibility to literatures of the non-West. The question is: How should English literatures of South Asia or East Africa, for example, be contextualized in terms of relevant subcontinental and regional literatures in other languages? Should texts originally written in Urdu, Swahili, or Arabic, and then translated into English, be taught in English departments, by faculty who may not work in the languages in which the texts were first written? Proponents of the pedagogy of world literature in translation—offered in this essay as a successor to comparative literature—might answer in the affirmative. Proponents of the global Anglophone—offered as a renomination of the postcolonial—might respond in the negative.

World literature and the global Anglophone are rival theories of how to enact literary comparison through English. Bhagat’s popular fiction at first presents an enticing solution to the seeming impasse between these contested pedagogies: between the limits of translation and the inevitability of untranslatability that haunt world literature, on the one hand, and the global Anglophone’s depoliticizing reappropriation of the formerly colonized world, on the other hand. Bhagat writes in English, so he need not be translated for Anglophone audiences, who are able to travel the world via his English. To this end, the Bhagat novel presents a curious instance of Rebecca Walkowitz’s “born translated” text: it focuses on a non-Anglophone geography, contains the world without circulating through the world, and reminds us that “readers do not own the language they read” (200). By that same token, Bhagat’s English does not read “like” English: neither like the “good” English that critics usually analyze, nor like the “hard” English with which Bhagat’s intended readers, who are typically not fluent in the language, usually struggle. His English is so accessible that it reads “like” a vernacular despite being devoid of vernaculars, and as a consequence affords a comparative vantage on other Indian languages from within English itself.

Additional enticement: Bhagat’s rise in India was cotemporaneous with the postcritical turn in the Anglo-American humanities toward less suspicious moods, dispositions, and methods. This turn involved a consequential reconsideration of the lay reader, as well as ambivalent efforts by scholars to unlearn our “academic habits of reading” (Skiveren 163). Less observed, but also symptomatic of postcritique, was the turn from the postcolonial to the Anglophone, which may be described in two ways: first, as a turn away from supposedly exhausted postcolonial shibboleths regarding the primacy of the nation, linguistic innovation, hybridity, and diaspora; and second, a turn away from postcolonial theory à la “Said-Bhabha-Spivak” toward the “earthy pragmatism [of] Global English” (Kantor 3, 8). Bhagat came onto the Indian popular and Anglo-American critical scenes just as literature scholars across fields were turning away from the hermeneutics of suspicion, elitism, and expertise, and as scholars of Indian English specifically were moving away from the postcolonial. “We” encountered Bhagat’s intimate address to “his” readers just as we were in the process of repudiating our own conventional critical operations.

My primary contention in this essay is that Bhagat’s anointment as an Anglophone literary icon with purchase on the “everyday” New India lays bare the ongoing challenges of teaching non-Western Anglophone literatures in the US university classroom. In order to distinguish Bhagat’s “global” writing, language, and voice from that of his “postcolonial” predecessors, critics have read Bhagat as a kind of vernacular Indian writer (read: “vernacular” as code for “authentic,” “native,” and “real”). But when we grant Bhagat’s popular fiction vernacular credentials, we risk undermining the case for reading Indian literatures in translation in the English literature classroom, participate in a rhetorical devaluation of the vernacular, and reauthorize the suspect position of the Anglophone reader seeking access to India’s “real” voice.

On the one hand, we have to contend with a pernicious politics of differentiation between Western and non-Western languages in the wake of poststructuralism. As Rey Chow argues, for the contemporary Anglophone literary theorist, the English language is not transparent; we are reading and writing after the separation of words and things. And yet non-Western languages (the ones anthropologists learn before going into the field) somehow still signify unambiguously and reveal the truth of the Other. In this way, the vernacular remains shorthand for “a privileged—because nativist—way into a culture, a key that opens all doors” (Chow 73). On the other hand, we have to contend with the linguistic and literary situation in India specifically, where, as Mrinal Pande argues, the vernacular does in fact signify a realm that is “unknown in the West,” the majority of Indian Anglophone elites have “never actually read a vernacular daily,” and “access to India’s largest markets is currently available only to the vernacular communicators” (xi–xiii).

In what follows, I therefore seek to disarticulate Bhagat’s claim on English from his claim on India, in order to understand what critical assessments of his work both afford and foreclose for literary comparatists, generally, and postcritical, post-postcolonialists, specifically. I ask: How does Bhagat’s “English like Hindi” travel, sound, and resound outside India? To what or whom does Bhagat give readers access? In whose voice does he write?

The Bhagat Phenomenon

Chetan Bhagat published his first novel, Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT, in 2004, transforming the sphere of Indian English writing with his demotic prose and direct address to India’s youth—initially, an elite, university-bound demographic whose experiences most closely matched his own at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad. His 2005 follow-up, One Night @ the Call Center (hereafter ON@CC), expanded his subject and audience to another socioeconomic segment of New India—call center workers—cementing his title as the nation’s “paperback king” (McCrum) and the first author of “truly popular” Indian English books (Sadana, “Writing” 137). By 2008, the pair of novels had sold over one million copies and Bhagat was India’s “biggest-selling English-language novelist” (Greenlees). His 2014 novel Half Girlfriend had an initial print run of two million (Joshi, “Chetan” 311). Bhagat’s novels sell so dramatically well that India-based publishers of English-language books divide the market into “pre- and post-Chetan Bhagat periods” (Basu 168).

To date, Bhagat’s ten novels have vastly outsold internationally known writers from India like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Amitav Ghosh. Five of Bhagat’s books have been adapted into popular Bollywood films, including 3 Idiots in 2009, which was the highest grossing Indian film of the first decade of the twenty-first century.⁶ He has written three essay collections, nonironically titled What Young India Wants , Making India Awesome , and India Positive. Bhagat also writes journalism in English and Hindi. In 2008 he began writing an opinion column in the Hindi-language newspaper Dainik Bhaskar. He described this opportunity as “a chance to reach the majority, the real India” (What xix). An early adopter of social media, Bhagat is a screenwriter, YouTuber, motivational speaker, reality TV judge, podcaster, and prolific tweeter whose aim is to spread his ideas by all available means. In 2014, Bhagat endorsed the BJP on Facebook with the hashtag #NaMo, and he has been called “the cultural logic of Narendra Modi” (Majumdar). Consistent with his carefully curated populist image as relatable pundit of the everyman, however, he denies partisanship, describing himself as “neutral” and “not aligned to any political party” (What xxiv).

In what follows, I primarily write about Bhagat in the past tense, with reference to the decade and a half after the publication of Five Point Someone. To be clear: Bhagat continues to write bestsellers. He remains a prominent, voluble member of New India’s club of “self-styled public intellectuals” and right-wing “raconteurs” (Basu 179). But this essay does not strive to keep time with Bhagat. My aim is to retrospectively assess Bhagat’s emergence as an object of criticism in Anglo-American literary studies.⁷ In the first decade of the 2000s, India-based reviewers largely pooh-poohed Bhagat’s “paperback atrocities” (quoted in Rao 92). Meanwhile, readers outside India were not yet aware of him. Writing in The Guardian in 2008, Randeep Ramesh called Bhagat “the biggest-selling writer in English you have never heard of”—you being the average reader in the West. I started graduate school stateside in 2009. In 2010, Bhagat made Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.” By the time of my doctoral candidacy, between 2012 and 2016, Bhagat’s work had become a key signifier of the transition from the postcolonial India to the global New India.

Rashmi Sadana’s English Heart, Hindi Heartland was published in 2012; Bhagat surfaced in her conclusion as representing a new Anglophone “phenomenon” (176). In 2014, Mrinalini Chakravorty read Bhagat’s ON@CC as signifying a new “speculative, uncertain orientation in depicting the postcolonial” in the last chapter of her book on South Asia in the global literary imaginary (190). The Bhagat phenomenon was the subject of two 2015 essays: Ulka Anjaria’s “Chetan Bhagat and the New Provincialism” and Priya Joshi’s “Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India.” Joshi’s essay is the twentieth of twenty-five roughly chronological chapters in a field-surveying volume on the Indian novel in English (the first examines Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1864 Rajmohan’s Wife); it is clubbed with entries on contemporary popular culture, including chick lit, graphic novels, fantasy fiction, and film adaptations. Manisha Basu’s 2017 The Rhetoric of Hindu India examined Bhagat as a “mediocre” but ubiquitous writer who cannily indigenized English in the process of becoming “the millennial avatar of Hindutva” (170, xii).

Sadana, Chakravorty, Anjaria, Joshi, and Basu are literature scholars working in US academe who are advancing the study of contemporary Indian literature in and beyond English. In each of their texts, Bhagat represents a key inflection point—from postcolonial to global—in India’s self-representation. This point is marked rhetorically with a claim to Bhagat’s former invisibility to critics. Sadana notes that “the fact that [Bhagat’s] novels are not literary makes most critics dismiss them” (“Writing” 138). Anjaria’s essay opens by stating that Bhagat is “virtually unheard of abroad” (“Chetan”). Joshi writes that Bhagat’s “novels have mostly been ignored in the culture of reviews, prizes, and metropolitan bookstores and most markedly by literary critics” (“Chetan” 318). Basu begins by saying that Bhagat “has so far not received a great deal of scholarly-critical attention from the Anglo-American academy” (167).

Given the vagaries of publishing timelines, it is possible that each scholar began working on Bhagat at the same time and had the experience of having to draw on journalistic sources to make up for the lack of critical treatment, as Joshi notes. My intention is not to suggest that the later critics did not read those who came first. What I am observing is that the Bhagat phenomenon in India was followed by a distinct, microphenomenon of critical attention in US-based studies of Indian English literature. For a few years, everyone was reading and writing about Bhagat, while claiming that nobody was reading and writing about Bhagat. The fact of writing about Bhagat as a literature scholar situated outside India was consistently presented as an authorizing condition of discussing his work. “Firstness” was more than a claim to having identified a formerly unidentified object. It established that critique itself had until now been withheld from this object, as if Bhagat had been denied certain readers and forms of readings—that is, critical readers and critical readings.

As for the scholar of Indian English literature, the affordances of the emerging Bhagat oeuvre were multiple. A prize-winning fictionist like Aravind Adiga might have greater claim on the contemporary. A newspaperman-turned-novelist like Raj Kamal Jha might have greater claim, via his journalistic depictions of the New Indian city, on the real. A graphic novelist like Sarnath Banerjee, who shares a visual idiom with comics and fantasy fiction, might have greater claim on the popular. But Bhagat could be used to annex all three: present concerns, authentic narratives, and mass appeal.

If initial evaluations of the Bhagat phenomenon were that he had “something to do with middle class youth . . . and something to do with India’s growing affluence and presence in a globalized world,” it was clear by 2012 just what that “something” was (Gupta 48). Bhagat was writing English-language books for non-elite, lower- and middle-class Indians with “weak English” whose relationship to the language had changed dramatically in postliberalization India (Joshi, “Chetan” 310). Bhagat called them “E2” Indians, who went to vernacular-medium schools, whose parents don’t speak English, and who “have not been taught in an environment that facilitates . . . continuous improvement through the consumption of English language products” (What 115–16). Bhagat offered them an accessible English literature that would seed “a new consciousness about their own social mobility” (Sadana, English 179). In the process, he became the “voice of the new [Indian] middle class” (Anjaria and Anjaria, “Fractured” 200).

As Bhagat’s star rose, he explicitly dismissed other Indians writing in English, especially postcolonial expatriates and elites, whom he called “E1s.” “What is the point of writers who call themselves Indian authors,” he asked, “but who have no Indian readers?” (quoted in Ramesh). Unlike “Rushdie and friends,”⁸ who Bhagat claimed pandered to Western audiences, he held a mirror and microphone up to the “real” India. At a book reading in Dehradun, a young woman reportedly asked Bhagat a “silly question” about his hairstyle. “She would never have asked that question to Salman Rushdie,” he proudly said, affirming his relatability to average Indians. “She would not even have raised her hand” (quoted in Sinha).

To be clear, numerous readers approached Rushdie in the 1980s and 1990s with similarly intimate questions and gratitude for his having “told their stories” (Remnick 2023). Rushdie became Rushdie precisely because he reached readers—not because he alienated them. But the strategic forgetting of a writer like Rushdie’s Indian audience enabled Bhagat’s identification of his own intended readership. “I want my books next to jeans and bread,” Bhagat said. “I want my country to read me” (quoted in Sinha). In service of this goal, publisher Rupa Publications complied with Bhagat’s requests to keep his books at unusually low prices: initially an average of about ninety-five rupees each, or $1.15 at the present exchange rate.⁹ As a result, Bhagat’s books reached “constables, drivers, low-brow security personnel at airports, even tribals in the Indian hinterlands” who used his novels to “learn the English language, and implicitly therefore, to make themselves in the image of a new, youthful, middle-class India” (Basu 191–92). Many of these readers had never read a book in English before reading Bhagat. For them, Bhagat’s fiction served as the uncanny, belated occasion for what Homi Bhabha once called “the discovery of the English book” (102).

Bhagat’s novels were marketed and read almost exclusively within India. They were an exemplary instance of novels that “stay home,” in contradistinction to “world literature” that travels (Damrosch). Indeed, this anti-worldliness, ironically consummated by the figure of the global Indian, was the substance of Bhagat’s appeal to US-based critics. Here was a writer with a finger on the pulse of the New India who was expressly not cosmopolitan in sensibility nor trafficking in the “the postcolonial exotic” (Huggan 2001). Here was someone writing for an exclusively Indian audience, who was not going to win any literary prizes, whose novels were not meant to be translated, and who wrote in an anodyne call center English (Anjaria, “Introduction”; Butalia 201–2; Joshi, “Chetan”). “[Bhagat’s books] represent the actuality of what many people in the world are reading today,” Anjaria wrote. “International readers will likely find little exciting in Chetan Bhagat. But that, it seems, is precisely the point” (2017).

Bhagat achieved the symbolic heft in conversations on global Anglophone Indian literature that only Rushdie had in the postcolonial context. He was described as having renewed the relationship “between English and the vernaculars” (Anjaria History, 12) and as representing “a new kind of genre and . . . a new readership” (Sadana, “Writing”). He was credited with using English as if it were “‘native’ to the Indian habitus” (Gupta 50) and with “inspiring a vast readership within India” (Sadana, English 176) that had never before been reached “by India’s literary fiction in any language” (Joshi, “Chetan” 318).

Let me emphasize that striking final point. Bhagat’s books did what the literary qua the literary had not been able to do: they made readers out of nonreaders. At the same time, as discussed in the next section, they called into question the reading habits of certain other readers—namely, academic critics. Bhagat became a compelling object in US literary studies not because he won any international awards—which is how Booker winners Rushdie, Roy, Kiran Desai, and Adiga came to prominence—but because he didn’t. Not because his books were circulated in the West, but because they weren’t.

Bhagat emerged as the iconic Anglophone writer of New India specifically because “we” were not supposed to read him. What would happen if we did?

On Reading Chetan Bhagat

The trouble for literary critics is that Bhagat’s novels are not literary. They’re “anti-literary” (Joshi, “Chetan” 319) self-help manuals and English primers that seek to provide his Indian readers with a mirror of their lives and the tools and inspiration to transform those lives. The novels map the New Indian universe of social positions, and each of Bhagat’s characters is legible as a stock New Indian type. In addition to IIT students and call center workers, Bhagat has depicted aspiring businessmen, cricket players, Hindu priests, medical entrance exam-takers, corrupt politicians, activists, students on athletic scholarship, rural schoolmasters, and young Indians bound for the United States and the United Kingdom. Many of these figures embody a form of entrepreneurial personhood associated with New Indian neoliberalism (Gooptu).

We (over here) read Bhagat because we want to know the characters of New India (over there). Bhagat knows this. His books have the requisite “aspirational” and “authenticating” components of middlebrow cultural production, and in public appearances, journalism, and interviews, he advertises his work’s credentials on precisely these fronts (Edmondson 10). In his novels, he positions himself as both a member of and ambassador for his addressed readership, while soliciting a reading of his novels as species of native intelligence. His authorial persona is consolidated through strategic identification with his fictive protagonists and through his own metafictional appearance in his novels’ frame stories and primary diegesis. He makes himself a character in order to authenticate the rest of his cast of characters and to provide for his readers a model of character to which to aspire.

Bhagat’s first novel, Five Point Someone, begins with a prologue in which the writer, present as a character, vows to write a book about the unfolding events. His second novel, ON@CC, tells the story of a failing call center in Gurgaon, where agents fabricate an e-terrorism threat to save their jobs. In the novel’s frame story, a passenger on a train incites the narrator, introduced as Bhagat, to tell the story of India’s youth. She critiques the classism of his IIT novel, which depicts elites who do not face “real challenges” (6). She then offers Bhagat the call center story, on the condition that he make it his second book: “If I tell you, you have to use it . . . as if it’s your own story” (8). This demand is significant: Bhagat, the IIT-educated banker-author, is asked to give voice to young Indians with real challenges. Or, more precisely, Bhagat the author writes himself into the narrative as a character called to offer this ventriloquial performance.

The prologue to Bhagat’s 2008 The 3 Mistakes of My Life begins with an emailed suicide note addressed to [email protected] from a self-described “ordinary boy in Ahmedabad” (xi), a city less “hip” than “Delhi, Bombay, or Bangalore” but part of “the real India” (8). The boy, a twenty-five-year-old businessman, writes that he has “no reason to live” and is taking sleeping pills. “Somehow I felt I could write to you,” he tells Bhagat, who then resolves to find him and tell his tale: “I couldn’t help but get involved” (xvii).

Bhagat’s 2014 novel Half Girlfriend also begins with a frame story in which “a writer on a book tour” named “Chetan Bhagat” is accosted by a young man, Madhav Jha, at a hotel. Madhav thrusts on him some journals written by his “half girlfriend” Riya, who is supposedly dead. Bhagat reads the journals; he then asks Madhav to tell him his abortive love story, which comprises the substance of the novel.

These frame stories position Bhagat not just as a vocal medium for New India’s youth but as their chosen representative. His self-reflexively unadorned English completes the project of weaponizing distinction. In ON@CC, Shyam introduces himself by saying, “My English is not that great. . . . So, if you’re looking for something sophisticated and highbrow, then I suggest you read another book with plenty of long words” (14). Half Girlfriend begins with Madhav’s similar profession that, despite his having attended the elite St. Stephen’s University through the athlete’s quota, “My English is still bad” (2). The final plot twist centers on Madhav having an opportunity to give a speech in English in front of Bill Gates, which, if successful, will result in his mother’s rural Patna school winning a grant from the Gates Foundation. In pursuit of this goal, Madhav enrolls in Patna’s Pride English Learning Centre, where the instructor says, “Don’t be scared of people who use big words. These are elitists. They want to scare you with their big words and deny you an entry into the world of English” (128–29). Riya gives Madhav a ten-step plan to learn English, including watching YouTube videos, “calling call centres and choosing the English option,” and “reading simple English novels, like, the one by that writer, what’s his name, Chetan Bhagat” (149).

I noted earlier that Bhagat’s novels are primers for those who want to learn English. This is not an accidental by-product of their style but Bhagat’s express intention:

Rather than require English fluency, the Bhagat novel cultivates the English-language proficiency of its reader. “Bay-gulls. That’s how you pronounce them, spelt b-a-g-e-l-s,” a seasoned Goldman Sachs employee tells newbie Radhika in One Indian Girl (32). Bhagat’s style is “laddish” (Joshi, “Chetan” 315), with short sentences, stripped-down dialogue, and little narrative description. He writes syntactically simple prose like “I think Indian mothers have two tasks—to tell children to eat more or study more” (3 Mistakes 64). As a result, Bhagat’s readers are “inspired” by his novels and made to feel that they are “better at English” than they are (Sadana, “Writing” 139). It is as if his prose reads itself to them, not the other way around. Not knowing English well thus becomes a sign of belonging for the Bhagat reader, who joins characters like Shyam and Madhav in the fellowship of newly valorized nonknowledge and whose belonging to this fraternity of proxy Anglophones is predicated on the strategic maintenance of partial nonfluency.

This is why some critics professed that they at first did not know how to read Bhagat. He didn’t appear to be using “bad English” artistically or poetically the way a literary writer uses “rotten” or “weird” Englishes for effect (Ahmad; Ch’ien). He was just sort of bad. “We are schooled in old English,” Urvashi Butalia reflected, “and suddenly people are writing in what appears to be ‘bad’ English. . . . They are defeating our old, elite notions of what good writing is” (201–2). Bhagat’s arrival led to the renewed consolidation of the group Butalia terms “we”: “we” scholars and critics; “we” English professors; “we” postcolonials and diasporans. What were “we” supposed to do with Bhagat? What does the popular evidence, generally, and what could the Bhagat novel be taken as evidence for, specifically?

A consensus developed that our default, deconstructive modes of reading were not going to be adequate to this object. Bhagat wasn’t writing for a reader we knew, nor in a language we were used to reading. His arrival meant elite comeuppance: we would have to pay heed to Raymond Williams’s “ordinary” culture without impugning the tastes of “ordinary” people, while also recognizing new aesthetic forms and literacies. The critical embrace of Bhagat entailed a return to the 1950s mass culture debates: a return to the question of what was to be done with lay readers, to the literature of “mechanic accents” (Denning), and to working-class cultural production with purchase on the zeitgeist. Reading Bhagat was plainly “a form of behavior,” and “the event of reading” a Bhagat text itself merited consideration (Radway 7).

Of course, not all critics were interested in updating their notions of “good writing.” For Aatish Taseer, Bhagat was a sign of India’s perpetual subalternity and defeat. Bhagat produces books of “such poor literary quality that no one outside India can be expected to read them,” Taseer observed. “Some justly speculate that perhaps this is the authentic voice of modern India. But this is not the voice of a confident country. It sounds rather like a country whose painful relationship with language has left it voiceless.” Taseer’s 2015 essay on the poverty of “homegrown” Indian English literature is a textbook example of what Vikram Chandra once termed a “complicated ritual war-dance against the West.” By calling Bhagat and his ilk “voiceless” Indians, Taseer impugned demotic forms of Indian English while reasserting the value of Western-sanctioned literary bona fides in their place. What Chandra called the “absolute necessity of Western recognition” was confirmed by Taseer’s note about Bhagat’s lack of appeal outside India. At the same time, Taseer went on to lament that writers like Rushdie and Roy (standing in for the postcolonial canon) “came to India via the West, via its publishing deals and prizes.”

This is the zero-sum game of evaluating Indian literature in English, given the dominant ideology of Anglophone nativity. The writer is either too literary or not literary enough; either capitulating to the West or leaving India “voiceless.” Critics who rejected this zero-sum game read Bhagat as deliberately anti-literary, not accidentally deficient, and as voicing something so fresh that the likes of Taseer could not hear it at all. Some performed close readings of Bhagat’s fiction in relation to books like Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (Chakravorty; Connell). At the same time, in order to establish popular fiction as an object of scholarly interest, critics continued to fetishize Bhagat’s readership. Just who in India was reading Bhagat, and why? Sadana answered a version of this pervasive question:

Bhagat’s novels displayed English in action, opening professional doors. Critical attention thus confirmed the Bhagat novel’s primary interest as a species of literary sociology: as an artifact that would give critics insight into India’s changing youth and business culture. “It does not really matter to us what Bhagat writes,” Gupta noted tongue-in-cheek. “What matters is that they read him prolifically—those Bhagat readers in India” (48–50).

On the one hand, we critics knew better than to reduce Bhagat’s texts to species of “native intelligence” (Bahri). On the other hand, we needed access to New India. We wanted to know about “New Indians,” and we could not write about them if we did not read about them and certainly not if we didn’t know what they were reading. The trouble was, Bhagat’s novels were not just received as examples of “what Young India wants to read” (to adapt the title of his first nonfiction collection). They were read as representations of who young Indians are.

That the Indian English text circulating outside India would be read as representing India is nothing new. This is the burden of representation assumed by all non-Western Anglophone literatures, postcolonial writers, and even scholars of Indian English literature: all are dogged by their (our) inevitable interpellation as informants. But, in reading Rushdie or Roy, postcolonial critics in US academe at least had to be critically self-reflexive about their resemblance to the object that circulated in their name, threatening to represent them, along with India. The Bhagat text, by contrast, was an object that the US-based critic could hold at a distance as emphatically other, because it informed on someone else. Critics read Bhagat because he did not seem to be writing for us and because of the promise of being escorted to the New Indian backstage. We read him because he said he did not care if we read him—except, of course, that he did.

Bhagat’s disavowals of “people who use big words” and “PhDs in literature” are perpetual provocations in his books. His “bad writing” is calculated, too. Consider this September 2020 podcast exchange with Cyrus Broacha. After teasing Bhagat about his bad spelling, Broacha asks him to respond to critics in “the literati.” Bhagat replies, annoyed:

Bhagat’s response to Broacha admits two things I want to underline. First, his writing is carefully crafted and vetted, even at the level of orthography. Second, in name-dropping Davidar, cofounder of Aleph Book Company and former CEO of Penguin International, Bhagat acknowledges his own place within the elite literary establishment, which in public he continues to impugn. Online, Bhagat frequently attacks the demographic to which Davidar and Seth ostensibly belong, as in this November 2021 tweet: “The battle in India’s opinion space is between these English-upbringing losers who think they know better and real Indians who know have [sic] a stronger and more real voice, even if not as polished. The losers are losing, but one must ensure such elitism is stamped out today.”

Bhagat’s bad faith performances of anti-elitism are well documented. But we have been so taken in by the character of Bhagat as the ambassador of the everyman, and of Bhagat as the “real voice” of young India, that we risk removing “all the signs of that which is not consistent with it” and have generated the “object even in its failure to be realized as object” (Ahmed 231). To borrow the terms of Kinohi Nishikawa’s work on urban street fiction, Bhagat’s emergence as New Indian icon is what happens when we allow the “crudeness” of a text to become the condition of its “credibility” (698). We ignore the fact that Bhagat is himself an elite repatriated expatriate: a foreign-returned Indian who grew up in a middle-class Delhi family, was educated at IIT and IIM, and worked in Hong Kong for the investment banks Peregrine and Goldman Sachs. We have to suppress hard-won evaluative criteria regarding the literary. And we sideline the postcolonial in the moment of its eclipse and renomination as global Anglophone.

Two decades after Bhagat’s debut, it is clear that his privileged position of enunciation as the voice of New India has been jointly authorized by his readers and his critics. Bhagat’s readers recognize themselves as his characters and in so doing cathect to him, the author. It is equally significant that he asks them to repudiate a certain other set of characters—namely, Anglophone elites, postcolonials, expatriates, and critics; in other words, readers like us, who have been educated into the position from which we launch our readings and, ironically, authenticate his project. Bhagat’s real readers engage fictional characters whose commentary serves as ammunition against his real critics, through his writing of fictional readers, like Madhav, who encounter real characters, like Gates and Bhagat himself, who empower him to take on his fictional critics. In this way, Bhagat is not just a popular writer; he is a populist writer producing a spectral enemy, mobilizing the affect and imagination that makes anti-elite, anticosmopolitan, antisecular, and anti-Western politics possible.

All of which is to say something that may be uncomfortable for critics and scholars to hear: We have already been written into the script. When we encounter lines like “Don’t be scared of [elitists] who use big words” or “One must ensure such elitism is stamped out,” we have to recognize that we are being inducted into a particular hermeneutic circle with and by Bhagat. We know how we are supposed to read him, and he knows how we are going to read him, so reading him otherwise might not be the salutary, reparative critical operation we think it is. If we are going to read Bhagat, we need to be vigilant both about the massifying, quantitative operations of the global and about postcritical desires to supersede the postcolonial highbrow. In this way, reading Bhagat’s fictions “might help us to reveal the fiction of character” (Ahmed 231)—in particular the fictions of Bhagat as the voice of New India and of a scholarly social position that could ever remain unimplicated in its object of critique.

On Not Reading Chetan Bhagat

We could also not read Bhagat.

If the revaluation of the popular text is symptomatic of current dispensations against the literary and critical reading itself, then perhaps not reading Bhagat is the most appropriate way for critics to read him. In not being read, Bhagat would be in good company, joining David Foster Wallace, for example, in not being read by Amy Hungerford. There is not world enough and time to read everything, after all. Instead of reading Bhagat, we could enlist various methods of historical and social scientific analysis to study him: from the interviews, polls, questionnaires, and surveys of reader-response criticism, to distant reading and the algorithmic projects of the digital humanities (Underwood).

“Not reading” would be the least technical method, and one that enacts maximal distance from the text. That said, as Sheila Liming observes, it ironically requires “quite a lot of reading.” In order to not read Wallace, Hungerford reads around Wallace. What she learns raises her hackles about the “profound connection” between Wallace’s misogyny and his writing, and Hungerford refuses to play along (91). Liming reads this refusal as “more enticing—and easier—than genuine involvement.” Not having read X is of course the perfect pretext for not having to say anything about X. But Hungerford doesn’t not read Wallace because she doesn’t want to say anything about him; indeed, she has plenty to say about Wallace, specifically because she hasn’t read him. Daily, Hungerford renews her commitment to refusal. Her not reading becomes a political and ethical stance, as well as a critique of the “self-replicating” canonization machine (94).

I have read half a dozen of Bhagat’s books. I have also not read half a dozen of his books, deliberately, and I have been writing about Bhagat for over a decade. But my not reading Bhagat, from where I sit in an English department in US academe, doesn’t have quite the same charge as Hungerford’s not reading Wallace. Most of my colleagues are already not reading Bhagat. The majority of my students have never heard of him. Is there a politics or ethics to my not reading Bhagat? Does anybody care if I don’t?

In an earlier phase of this research, I planned to spend two weeks reading Bhagat. One book a day. I would pay as much attention to a popular writer who directs the decisions of his Indian publisher as critics have always paid to literary writers championed by the Western market (Brouillette; Huggan). I would then write metacritically about the experience, enacting a form of what Lucas Thompson calls “method reading”: “reading as a form of spontaneous method acting . . . that takes literary texts as invitations to engage in a particular kind of activity, wherein the reader does not merely identify with, develop sympathies for, or even recognize herself in a fictional character, but actually performs as someone else” (295). For Thompson, method reading is a mode of inhabiting character (297). By contrast, I would be performatively inhabiting the extratextual position of the Bhagat reader. Instead of imagining how Bhagat’s characters’ imaginations operate, I would imagine how Bhagat readers project themselves into the imaginations of Bhagat characters.

Even before beginning, I recognized that the undertaking would fail. I could not perform my (method) reading of Bhagat without highlighting the act as one of my reading books not intended for me, popular books that I, no matter my critical appreciation of “ordinary” culture, would not read “for pleasure”—although I grant there are critics who do. For me, it would be like reading children’s books. However meaningful, radical, or crassly ideological the book might be, I would either be attempting to perform a reading from a position from which I am structurally excluded, or offering a reading from my own reading position, which is by definition outside the text’s intended address. To return to the lessons of the mass culture debate, if Bhagat’s popular fiction demands an “ethnography of reading” (Radway 5), and since even ethnographic representation is fundamentally an act of interpretation, what are the stakes of writing about the Bhagat text if you are not and cannot become a Bhagat reader?

Writing “My Two Weeks Reading Bhagat,” I would swiftly hit the limit of possible critical responses. Would I enjoy Bhagat’s books, and if not, could I perform enjoyment? I could try to put the “mazaa” back into my reading, but whose mazaa would it be (Anjaria and Anjaria, Mazaa)? I didn’t want to voyeuristically slum like an American tourist-reader in the narrative universe of young India. Neither did it make sense to claim that I was licensing my professional reading self to read like an amateur.

I would probably conclude that Bhagat is a bad writer. But I would need to find something new to say about his badness. Would I discover that he is bad in a good way? That his books are more sophisticated than they appear? This case has already been made in persuasive terms: that despite the seeming artlessness of his texts, Bhagat’s work is attuned to the contradictions of the New India discourse and offers a “subtle framing of the political ethics of enterprise, beyond either celebratory acceptance or straightforward critique” (Anjaria and Anjaria, “Fractured” 203). Anjaria credits even Bhagat’s “formulaic characterization” with formal experimentation and argues that Bhagat turns the “present into an aesthetic possibility” by moving away from the familiar concerns of the postcolonial, including the fetishization of the nation, depictions of diasporic hybridity, and Rushdian wordplay (Reading 31). She writes: “While Bhagat’s might be bad writing, it is bad writing with a purpose: by taking English away from the elitist sphere of art and into the populist domain of economics and self-help, Bhagat produces a popular, indigenized English that is not only a counterpart to Rushdie’s esoteric ‘chutnification’ but language that reflects how many Indians actually speak” (50). To the extent that we accept this characterization of the postcolonial—certainly these are the familiar concerns of academic postcolonialism—Anjaria’s estimation of Bhagat is right on point: the classic concerns of postcolonial literature are emphatically not Bhagat’s concerns. By that same token, this argument risks reproducing one of many “ritual gestures” of the critical reader, who, when confronted with an uncritical text or practice of uncritical reading, must argue that the uncritical text or reading “really was critical in some sense or another” (M. Warner 32).

There are two aspects of the argument for the criticality of Bhagat’s badness that need to be disentangled. First, there is the question of the scholarly-professional critic’s reading of Bhagat versus the lay-amateur reader’s reading. The normative position of the critic is to become a reader who never fully joins the text’s audience; the critic stops short of cathecting to the text in order to apprehend it from a distance. To read as a critic is to surrender to the “ongoing [romance] of the empirical availability of other people’s reading practices” (Da 477). The scholarly reader might discern in Bhagat’s work greater critical potential (“aesthetic possibility”) than we expect to find in his work on the basis of our assumptions about his texts’ aims and audience. But what this means is that the excavation of the text’s formal possibility depends upon the affirmation of the critic’s essential difference from the Bhagat reader, and vice versa.

Then there is the matter of the position of the scholarly-professional critic of the New India, who in this case views her postcolonial predecessor as temporally, ethically, and aesthetically out of step with the present. The perspective of the postcolonial critic must be transcended for the post-postcolonial critic to read, appreciate, and understand the contemporary India that Bhagat represents. But the postcolonial focus on the past was never simply about withdrawal from the contemporary; it was also a perspective on it. If the contemporary is “collagist,” to borrow Toral Gajarawala’s term, why should the postcolonial be excised from its frame (373–74)? Can we perform what Anjaria terms “reading alongside the grain” and “with a loving eye” without dispensing with the postcolonial? Can a new reading position be installed that is postcritical but not post-postcolonial?

Whether our readings are paranoid, suspicious, reparative, loving, against the grain, or alongside the grain, Bhagat’s critic cannot, by virtue of being a critic, universalize her reading position; she can neither read nor write as “the reader.” Even those who enjoy Bhagat must hold themselves at a remove from his intended audience in order to assess his politics of address. Put simply, Bhagat’s bad writing demands a kind of bad reading, which the good critical reader is professionally obligated to withhold.

This is why I abandoned my method reading plans, even though professional critical reading often involves wading through undesirable texts. Reading Bhagat, I would have had to offer a performance of postcritical amateurism, which would have entailed constructing an uncritical reader’s response to the text. In the process, I would have had to forward certain assumptions about the India and Indians he represents—about their voices, interests, aspirations, and dreams—that I feared risked condescension and cynicism. Rather than display my reading of Bhagat, I needed to further interrogate my assumptions about what knowledge that reading would yield.

On Not Teaching Chetan Bhagat

The preceding sections have focused on how literature scholars navigate the trap of reading (or not reading) Bhagat. The Bhagat text makes a different set of demands on the pedagogue, and in what remains of this essay, I consider those demands from the vantage of my particular location as a professor of English literature. To date, my undergraduate and graduate students have primarily been Anglophones of mixed socioeconomic backgrounds at a land-grant, research university in the US Southwest.¹⁰ The following discussion centers on but does not stop with these students. As I consider Bhagat’s place in my classroom, I seek to expose assumptions underlying decisions to teach or not teach Bhagat in other institutions and to other kinds of students: assumptions about what kinds of readers our students are; assumptions about Bhagat’s relationship to other Indian writers; and assumptions about what English literature is and whose work should represent it, in what contexts, and to whom.

If university teaching always involves inhabiting an institutional situation in which one risks canonizing the texts taught, what are the stakes of teaching Bhagat? How do we instruct students in the reading of “bad” English that purports to sound “like Hindi”? In what curricular contexts is teaching Bhagat warranted? What are we teaching our students about literature, India, the contemporary, and English when we assign a Bhagat text?

Let’s begin in India. In April 2017, Delhi University (DU) proposed adding Bhagat’s Five Point Someone to the reading list in Popular Fiction for the BA in Honors English, alongside work by Louisa May Alcott, Agatha Christie, and J. K. Rowling.¹¹ Many India-based commentators and DU professors who had not been consulted balked. An English major worried that nonmajors already “know very little” about the BA in English: “And now, if they start teaching Chetan Bhagat, students will think that this is literature. Log value nahi karenge” (Sharma; They won’t value it). English professor Gorvika Rao worried about legitimizing “trash.” Distinguishing between pulp fiction and fiction meriting instruction, Rao stressed: “Students are not masses” (quoted in Sharma). How would faculty deal with Bhagat’s “political leanings” (Kausar)? Bhagat’s own giddy response did not help:

By September, DU had pulled the plug on Bhagat’s inclusion in the Popular Fiction list, pledging to revisit the issue in the future.

In the US university, the stakes of teaching Bhagat are both similar and different. For all the reasons explored in the preceding pages, you would not teach a Bhagat novel as a representative “Indian” text in a world literature class, following the likes of The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Shakespeare, and Proust, in English and English translation. You would not, for the same reason that the DU faculty balked at including Bhagat alongside Alcott, Christie, and Rowling: such a syllabus enacts an analogical operation that flattens key differences between each text’s audience, reception, and circulation. (Which popular? Whose world?)

By that same token, you might select a Bhagat novel as a representative “Indian” text in a class in US academe on Contemporary Pulp Fictions or the Global Popular, for the same reason that his inclusion was challenged at DU. In most English literature classrooms in the US, there is no broad base of knowledge about the Indian popular sphere that would contest his inclusion; in India, there is. In a US university, you might teach Bhagat, whose novels have been adapted into popular films, in a class on Bollywood cinema and adaptation. Equally, Bhagat might serve as a representative pulp fictionist in a class on the Indian novel in English, in the context of plural linguistic and literary Indian Englishes developed over the course of the long twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Versions of this last class are taught, I suspect, in many English departments that employ a scholar of the South Asian Anglophone. I teach one: a course that begins with the colonial institution of English literary studies, via Gauri Viswanathan; that elaborates English as a “literary and cultural system” (Mufti) and not just a language or literature; that asks, after Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao (and, equally, Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), what can be said about India in English and whether English has in fact become an Indian language; and that strives to radically defamiliarize the study of English for English students. Such a class might begin with Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife (1864), considering its serial publication and relationship to its vernacular contemporaries. After reading the 1930s modernist fictions of Anand and Rao, the class might turn to G. V. Desani’s All about H. Hatterr (1948), which destabilizes English with its unruly, plurilingual polyphony. Questions about linguistic and cultural impurity, standardization, and syncretism might lead to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). Rushdie would motivate a turn to postcolonial theories of mimicry and hybridity, while raising questions about the narration of the nation and the representation of oral storytelling traditions in the written text.

Bhagat’s novels might be an appropriate next stop when constructing a narrative about the itineraries of English in India: from colonial, to postcolonial, to post-postcolonial; from realist, to modernist, to postmodernist, to pulp. The challenge is that Bhagat’s very contemporaneity lends itself to his presentation as the telos of Indian English literature. The question, fundamentally, is what story we want to tell. If one teaches chronologically, the risk is seeming to move progressively toward Bhagat as if he resolves the problem of English as a colonial bequest or completes a trajectory of indigenization. Of course, chronology need not be the determining factor of a syllabus: one might begin with Bhagat’s stripped-down English and continue on to Desani’s music and Rushdie’s puns, in service of a story about Indian English that is not developmental, but rather exhumes a rich body from seemingly spare bones. Do rhythmic, accented textual innovations or reader demographics determine the “Indianness” of English? It might be easier to teach Bhagat if he didn’t have the final say.

Questions of contemporaneity may be resolved by time. My more acute concern is signaled by this essay’s title: how to teach Bhagat’s “English like Hindi,” and how to stage the encounter between the Anglophone and the vernacular in contemporary India. Bhagat’s novels produce the impression that simple, unadorned English can access India more directly than does the English of Desani, the cosmopolitan philosophy professor, or Rushdie, the globe-trotting expatriate, or Roy, the florid wordsmith, or Adiga, the ventriloquist of the Indian subaltern. Bhagat’s novels explicitly tout their purchase on the “real” India, and the extant criticism amplifies his self-representation.

To be clear, none of the critics I have discussed argue that demotic Englishes and Indian vernaculars are equivalent; nobody claims that call center English and Agyeya’s Hindi poetry exist on the same linguistic and literary plane. And yet my concern is that this is how both the Bhagat novel and the postcritical, post-postcolonial Bhagat discourse position student-readers to understand his English: as if it gives them access to an Indian vernacular sphere that would otherwise only be accessible via the “vernacular languages” themselves. For every time we make the argument that Bhagat’s English allows everyday Indians to speak for themselves, we participate in the ideological production of the popular as authentic and the non-elite as the real, of Joe the Plumber’s voice as more “American” than Barack Obama’s, and the chai-wallah Modi’s voice more “Indian” than the economist Singh’s.

The “postexotic” Bhagat text—to borrow Ravinder Kaur’s term for the visual iconography of New India—therefore presents a different challenge in the US university classroom than did the strictly “literary” postcolonial archive. It also distinctly complicates the argument made by proponents of world literature for teaching Indian literatures in English translation. Works like Midnight’s Children and The God of Small Things (to stick with the heuristic example of “Rushdie and Roy”) may have been commodified by the Western publishing industry and canonized in Western classrooms—or, as some charge, their success may be partially owed to “the skill with which they manipulate[d] commercially viable metropolitan codes” (Huggan 81). But what is striking about their efforts at chutnification and “aesthetic play” is how explicitly they acknowledged the limits of their own referentiality. Chutnification meant that the absence of the vernacular was always keenly felt through its shadow presence at the level of word, syntax, rhythm, and metaphor. Reading Rushdie and Roy, it is impossible not to recognize the constructed, contingent, provisional nature of their claims—of any claim—on Indian lifeworlds. As even Graham Huggan acknowledges, “They are conscious that their writing, ostensibly oppositional, is vulnerable to recuperation. . . . They know that their work might still be used as a means of reconfirming an exoticising imperial gaze” (81). Moreover, the disproportionate attention paid to Anglophone literature in postcolonial literary studies—if only as “a tool to force English departments to make space for the rest of the world” (Kantor 5)—itself made the case for curricular reinvestment in vernacular literatures, as did Rushdie’s notorious 1997 argument for the superior world literary merits of “Indo-Anglian” literatures (“Damme”).

By contrast, Bhagat’s transparent, hyperaccessible English explicitly solicits an analogical comparison with the vernacular (as opposed to placing itself hierarchically above it), obviating reparations for its absence in the English literature classroom. “English is not competing with the vernacular,” he writes. “Hindi is your mother, English is your wife and it is possible to love both at the same time” (What 117–18). Bhagat’s goal is to induct his readers into a pragmatic relationship to English as a tool for professional advancement; he seeks to manipulate his readers via English, not to manipulate English (what Achebe described as fashioning a new English) for the benefit of readers. If we leave aside the by now overfamiliar smattering of words like yaar, bhai, and haan that accent Bhagat’s text to signal a Hinglish-speaking milieu, his novels are strikingly spare in their incorporation of any vernacular. Instead, they masquerade as vernacular.

Is Bhagat’s English (a) “vernacular”? The answer to this question again hinges on what story we are telling about the relationship between the postcolonial and the global Anglophone. Bhagat is read as a post-postcolonial writer of a global Indian English that has supposedly been divested of colonial baggage and merged with the people it speaks. The Bhagat reader is similarly understood to have emerged through decisively global social forces—that is, in the contexts of expanding access to English and India’s increasing prominence in the world economy, as opposed to in the midst of debates about the politics of English as a colonial bequest and broader crises of Indian national imagining wrought by the experiences of 1947, 1971, and Emergency. But postcolonial language politics, broadly defined, continues to fundamentally shape the landscape in which Bhagat is writing and the critical context in which he is read—calling into question just what we mean by “global” in the first place (Srinivasan 2018; T. Warner 2019).

In Vernacular English, Akshya Saxena points out that scholars of postcolonial literature have for too long pitted English and the vernacular against each other, as if they have a strictly antonymic relation in which the vernacular is immediate and local, and English is distant and global. Contra conventional accounts, Saxena argues that English is a political and popular vernacular in India that touches those who can neither read nor speak it, and for whom it has an embodied, sonic, and visual—if not necessarily linguistic or literary—life. English is not strictly global, she insists; it is also familiar, ordinary, and exists for most Indians beyond “conditions of formal literacy” (6–8). Despite the rhetorical promise of a New India “after” English, English in India remains a vital tool of advancement and a powerful medium of middle-class aspiration.

Curiously, Saxena never once mentions Bhagat in her 2022 book, despite the fact that, at first blush, he is an almost too obvious purveyor of “vernacular English.” Perhaps this is because Bhagat—with his constant, explicit repudiations of Anglophone elitism and literary culture—still seems lodged in the quagmire of the postcolonial language debate, while she seeks a way beyond its binarism. For Saxena, reading English “as a vernacular” is meant to “deprive it of its singularity” (15). But English is absolutely singular for Bhagat. He describes knowing English as one of the “most important skills to succeed in a global world” and attributes his own fame to the language: “Think about this: if Chetan Bhagat did not write in English, would he still be Chetan Bhagat—as famous?” (“Skills”). By that same token, Bhagat also fundamentally rejects the key premise of the postcolonial language debate, which is that living between languages poses a kind of existential crisis. He effectively denudes English of its symbolic power while refashioning it as an expressly nonidentitarian tool for the non-Anglophone. To borrow Sadana’s description of the young Indians she meets while teaching in India, Bhagat tells his readers that “English vocabulary is their right and provenance even as they are told they can’t speak it” (Sadana, “Managing” 71).

This important contradiction in Bhagat’s attitude toward English (he upholds its value while neutralizing its identitarian force) suggests again that the global Anglophone does not signify the transcendence of the postcolonial; it instantiates a new orientation toward it. Put simply: English remains singular in India, but differently singular than it once was. In this light, Saxena’s omission of Bhagat offers a revealing tell about the distance between “vernacular English” and English that is “like” a vernacular. Vernacular English “lives in other Indian languages and media such as Hindi literature, bureaucratic documents, language legislation, Bollywood and international films, and public protests” (Saxena 6). Rather than carry English into Bollywood film, Bhagat has been smuggling Bollywood plots and characterization into his English novels (for example, his 2020 One Arranged Murder Indianizes the Agatha Christie novel with a Punjabi wedding plot). His demotic English can then travel between vernacular Indian and Anglophone Indian spaces—as in the circuit from the English novel Five Point Someone to the Hindi film 3 Idiots, or Nikhil Sachan’s intertextual references to Bhagat in the 2017 Hindi-language campus novel UP 65 (Tiwari). If what Saxena calls vernacular English is English that lives (sonically, textually, visually) in non-Anglophone Indian spaces, then Bhagat’s English may not be “vernacular English” at all. It may, however, be a consequential component of its prehistory.

On Teaching Chetan Bhagat

I have been developing an argument that teaching Bhagat in the US university is an inherently risky endeavor given the assumptions about authenticity that subtend the reading of demotic non-Western Englishes. If the Bhagat novel encourages its target Indian readers to think they know English better than they do, then it also encourages readers outside India to think we know New India better than we do—and on Bhagat’s terms. We might be wary of teaching Bhagat, then, because of the kinds of arguments we have to make about the postcolonial in order to stage his legibility to our students. We might be wary because of the kinds of claims we have to make about the literary in order to justify his place on a syllabus. We might be wary because of Bhagat’s politics, and because of the burden of representation his novels bear as hyperaccessible works of Indian English literature. We might be wary because of the exaggerated operations of close, distant, critical, and uncritical reading we have to perform in order to stage our relationship to the object itself.

At the same time, I have been developing a counterargument: a case for teaching Bhagat, in the form of a series of questions we must ask if we decide to introduce his texts into the English literature classroom in US academe. What is the value of Bhagat as a critical object, and how does that value change depending on what we desire from Bhagat as object? If you wanted to understand the “real” India, would you read Bhagat, and what would that indicate about your assumptions about the real? To whom or what does Bhagat give voice? To read New India, must we read like New Indians?

Teaching Bhagat, who is explicitly addressing Indian readers, might be an opportunity to unschool students in the United States who have been habituated into the assumption that every text is addressed to them.¹² A chance to problematize the ideological construction of the “real” by deconstructing Bhagat’s claims to represent it. An occasion to point out that the critical frame for the postcolonial has hitherto excluded the popular, and to insist, at the same time, that we remain critical of the supposedly reparative operations of the global Anglophone. Teaching Bhagat might force us to make a clear distinction between English that is accessible to non-Anglophone Indians, on the one hand, and English that makes their lives accessible, on the other. It opens up an investigation of the premise of “English like Hindi” and the comparative project it inaugurates between English and the vernacular.

Our students don’t need to be taught how to read Bhagat. They need to be taught how not to read Bhagat: as if he is the translational medium of India’s authentic voice, or as if his accessibility is compensatory for a reader’s not knowing Hindi (or Tamil or Bengali or Malayalam). They need to be taught what not to read for; what readerly positions not to inhabit; what modes of criticism not to perform. The Bhagat text demands neither an uncritical response, nor a postcritical response. It demands a pedagogical response. It demands grappling with the consequences of the leveling of the field between popular forms of global English and the vernaculars with which they vie in the New Indian and international literary spheres.

My hearty and abiding thanks to the following readers for their critical feedback on this essay: Michael Allan and two terrific peer reviewers; Nasia Anam, Monika Bhagat-Kennedy, Roanne Kantor, Kalyan Nadiminti, and Akshya Saxena; Stephanie Brown, Marcia Klotz, Leerom Medovoi, and Scott Selisker; and Christopher Fan, Paul Nadal, and Sunny Xiang. My gratitude also to audiences at Ashoka University; Vanderbilt University; University of Nevada, Reno; University of Mississippi; and the 2018 ACLA for variously engaging parts of these arguments.

Notes

Works Cited