Literary industries, audiences, and authors in India have changed drastically over the past couple of decades. Just recently, I was reminded of this fact while watching an interview with Indian “chick lit” writer Anuja Chauhan. Asked about her personal measure of her writerly success, Chauhan responded, “Readability. I feel blessed when readers tell me that they read my books when they travel or that my book is on their bathroom shelves.”1 What is this new literary ecology in which a book in the bathroom is a trophy, I wanted to scoff. But my knee-jerk skepticism was checked by the young interviewer's enthusiastic admission that, in fact, Chauhan's novels were the only books she had carried from Mumbai to the United States. It struck me then that only last year, I, too, had picked up Chauhan's book Those Pricey Thakur Girls (2013) at the Nizamuddin Railway Station in Delhi. Before...
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