Chetan Bhagat in a Mumbai local train. Chetan Bhagat in a Mumbai local train.

My competition is apps like Candy Crush or WhatsApp," says Chetan Bhagat. "I don't see other writers as my competition at all. I want a share of people's minds. I have to wean them off YouTube, movies and apps. I have to make them interested in books."

Gautam Padmanabhan, CEO of the publishing house Westland, the hothouse for much of India's emerging commercial fiction, pays tribute to Bhagat another way: like John Lennon said that before Elvis there was nothing, Before Chetan (BC), there was nothing. Nothing except a boss who, at the turn of the millennium, denied young Bhagat a promotion at his Hong Kong-based bank, and set off a chain of events that would change Indian publishing forever. Will somebody please summon the villainous figure of Bhagat's recollections and duly credit him? Could he be forgiven? Or even indicted, if you snobbishly so prefer? Because had the young IIT and IIM alumnus working at Goldman Sachs not felt humiliated about being passed over, had he not contemplated drowning his disappointment in drink that night only to instead pull himself together and put pen to paper to find comfort in nostalgia, there would not be the neat break from the BC (Before Chetan) timeline, as consensus in the publishing industry has it.

"I was very low," Bhagat now recalls. "I missed my college, I missed my friends. I wrote a few pages. Then it became a book. It may not have happened if I had gone out for drinks that night. I may not have written the first page." As figures of a three million-plus target in first-year sales for his new novel Half Girlfriend fly around, it is apt to recap the passage of time since Bhagat published his first book (Five Point Someone: What Not To Do At IIT! in 2004, the end product of that scribbling that miserable day at the bank, later adapted to the Hindi film 3 Idiots). To do so is to fold into his narrative the revolution in English commercial fiction that followed.

By way of context, back in the BC years, a book that sold 5,000 copies was an Indian bestseller, and if you happened to scout around to assemble, say, ten bestselling fiction writers in the country, your struggle may have forced you to ease the benchmark.

Today, Bhagat's publishers, Rupa, are reviewing a drill that will take a couple of million copies of Half Girlfriend to bookshops for a countrywide release on October 1. To get the book out and moving, says Rupa Managing Director Kapish Mehra, it is being printed at seven locations, and the size of cartons and the capacity of trucks have been precisely calculated, the dispatch schedules coordinated. Flipkart has already bought the most expensive newspaper space to advertise its exclusive online retail of Half Girlfriend (for a month from release). Even so, when Bhagat hits the streets of Mumbai for a photo shoot, the pavement booksellers mob him, requesting copies right now.

By the Millions

A decade after he presented himself, we still have not got a measure of Bhagat's transformative role, the good and the doubtful. The book review pages certainly have not. The obvious dilemma is that his writing does not have the complexity to be diced by the established instruments of analysis. Call him out for linear storytelling, for easy, pleasing language? But that's his forte, that's the framework he operates in, it's part of his toolkit to draw in first-time book readers and buyers. Moan about his English? His readers obviously don't care to heed the critics' benchmarks for literary writing. So reviewers ignore him-and by extension, they ignore the gigantic, growing mass of readers, with all the economic, political and social messages they send by picking up a Bhagat book. The numbers essentially mock the critics (alright, they mock us) for not finding the language and analytical frame to get under the skin of his readers without sounding either elitist or patronising or, perhaps worse, being evasively accepting of anything that sells.

Publishing has not figured him out either. Every publisher loves a bestseller, but in the first generation of mass sellers, Bhagat and the handful who approximate his numbers (see box) have announced their success. Their reach has not been crafted by publishing houses. Publishers see in hindsight the reasons for the Age of Bhagat, but he leads a pack that's shining a white light on new demographics, searching out with their books a readership that simply was not a mass before. Publishers follow in their shadow, targeting readers the first-moving writers have located, and wondering who else they may yet find.

Resetting the Bar

Bhagat, at 40, is a familiar figure today, and one way or another you know him: from his books, newspaper columns and TV appearances, film tie-ins for his novels and standalone scripts (screenplay for the Salman Khan-starring Kick), from what he calls stage appearances (talks, many of them motivational, with listeners ranging from PSU chiefs gathered by Union ministers to schoolchildren in India's small towns), endorsements, social media (he has almost three million followers on Twitter). Put another way, it can be safely assumed you have read Bhagat or at least have an opinion about him, or perhaps both. What's to introduce? Rival publishers say Bhagat sells a million books a year.

His personal aggregate is slightly more conservative. But this is a book-release year, and in addition to the possibly three million (Rupa's aiming at five) books he may sell in the next 12 months, his backlist (of five novels and a collection of columns) is likely to move faster than the usual pace. Bhagat took a few years getting to this point, and he did so by reconfiguring the market for English fiction in India. First, it is not only that he reset the bar for a thumpingly successful novel, he created the market. That market was not in anybody's sight before Bhagat. He did it in part by pricing the first book to attract young readers, at Rs 95 back then, an audacious risk as it meant he'd have to sell in huge volumes in order to even recover cost and then make profit. Second, he forced a definition of commercial fiction in India. It is, as Karthika V.K., editor-in-chief at HarperCollins, puts it now, "something that goes farther in its reach, captures new readers, in prose that is accessible and more plotdriven, entertaining, fast-paced".

It was not easy getting book editors interested, and Bhagat still smarts from early rebuffs. Memories kindle a rebellious spirit, of breaking a cosy elite's control on what stories were published and in what idiom.

It's a sentiment that connects Bhagat to the clutch of bestselling novelists who've followed him: "Snobbery cost the industry. There must have been about 20 people who controlled what was published. And you still see them judging everything. And justifying. What is the purpose of literature but to hold a mirror to society-I don't know what they are seeking. They were out of sync with India. They were hiring people like themselves. It was like a little club. And they had the odd success with the Booker Prize. So that kind of justified (it for them)."

No longer. As Anuja Chauhan, writer of fast-moving, smartly written books like The Zoya Factor and Those Pricey Thakur Girls, says, the figure for declaring a book a bestseller needs to be re-examined, the bar needs to be raised.

Five novel someone

Here is Bhagat on his stories so far. Hearing it from him, getting the wrinkle-free self-profile, serves another purpose. To get it from him as he goes through just another hectic day in his life takes you closer to hazarding what it is about his stories that makes them click. He tells it after a corporate lecture on a flight back home to Mumbai from Delhi, knocking back a painkiller to ward off a threatening flu, but not disrupting the run of the conversation. Fellow passengers eye him from a distance, some come up just to talk, to get a photo with him, even an autograph. He finishes it the next morning after a meeting with readers, before another talking engagement. His readers are students, young professionals, almost all of them wannabe writers. They thank him for clearing the thickets in Indian publishing to make space for his writing and writing like his. They insist that that one book he wrote was truly a story about their life. Through it all, the thread of the conversation does not break.

He says he wrote Five Point Someone in his Hong Kong office, whenever he could snatch time: "It took me threefour years. There was no benchmark. It was an era where nothing existed." In three years since its 2004 publication, the campus novel had sold a million books (see graphic). Get this, he points out: "It was the first English book that sold a million copies (in India). Now you are calling it mass market. But English and mass market did not go together till then. I guess they do now."

Does this mean there is a sense of being an insurgent? "No." Earlier? "Pehle tha. I am very secure now. Then there was a point to prove. I was judged a lot. And that elitism! At that time there used to be a lot of blogging. And they used to trash my books. I also had a blog, and I would try to seek validation. It went away after I started getting reactions from readers. I started feeling OK, but it took a while because I already had self-esteem issues. I thought I wasn't good enough. And I think it affected my second book because I was trying too hard."

The second book, One Night @ the Call Center (2005, film adaptation: Hello), captured the BPO generation that was coming together as a demographic just then. But it called up too many forced plot devices, of a group of young people being stuck in an enclosed space, of God speaking to them, etc. It remains the Bhagat novel slowest to sell a million. "Time to hang up Mr Bhagat," punned a headline.

He hit it big with the third book, The 3 Mistakes of My Life (film adaptation: Kai Po Che), in 2008, on the Gujarat riots. To write it after the disappointment of the second, he had to first recover his storytelling equilibrium. "I asked, what is it I want to write? I had studied in Ahmedabad, and back then it was a very peaceful city. I had passed out in 1997 and three-four years later there was a big earthquake and then riots in the same city where I had found my wife. It really affected me. So I did a story on that without thinking whether people would buy it. That's when it started improving." Even his editors were aghast at the choice of subject, he recalls, and notes: "To integrate a book on Godhra riots and make it mass was a big challenge."

Letting Go



That was, in any case, a pivotal year. In 2008, Bhagat plunged into writing full-time, and he put closure on a very strained, and by then estranged, relationship with his father. "At the time I was holding on to my job. Then one day, a French journalist said to me, 'Chetan, you have father issues in all your books. You are holding on to this job even though you are so successful as a writer because you want stability, a father figure. Just let go, write something to forgive him.' So I left my job and said I have to do a popular book, because I have left my job and cannot get it wrong now-and I want to do a book in which I forgive my father. I wrote 2 States: The Story of My Marriage (film adaptation: 2 States). It's not a north-south story to me. To me it is not a Tamil-Punjabi shaadi story (a template plucked from his marriage to his Tamil sweetheart from IIM). It is a father-and-son story. In reality, my father never came for my wedding. In the book, the father goes and sets things right, which to me is forgiveness. 2 States became big."

And then came the fifth book in 2011, that overlapped with the Anna-Kejriwal anti-corruption mood: "I had started giving a lot of talks. I saw so much corruption in the education sector, all these random colleges, these mithai shops opening colleges. I thought, what is happening? So I wrote Revolution 2020."

Tipping point?

The stated ambition of Half Girlfriend may be accounted for by the public profile he has now put together. He speaks of tallying all his interventions-on TV, in books, columns, lectures, social media-to be an agent of change. He says he may even consider joining politics at a later date.

"My books are political in the broader definition, not party politics," he says. "In Half Girlfriend, the hero knows Engish, but he doesn't do spoken English so well. The difference between a fluent speaker and non-fluent speaker-jo hamein Bharat vs India dikhta hai-is that they think in Hindi, then translate word-for-word. So they'll say good name, shubh naam. And this girl, she really likes the guy but she can't get herself to date him because he doesn't speak English well. Most girls in Delhi won't date a guy who doesn't speak good English. He may be the most amazing guy, but... English nahin bolta! And a whole world of English is denied to him-job, culture, arts, coolness."

In a neat loop, the hero stands in for a demographic that Bhagat has scoped for his writing: "There is a lot of angst in people. And they are reading my books and saying, humne bhi English book padhi hai yaar. So I thought, let me go there. It was a very difficult book to write because the main character doesn't speak good English, and the book is in English. He's in St Stephen's, and someone like him can get into Stephen's because he plays basketball well. And he finds that wahan to ghas bhi English mein ugti hai. That's where he meets this girl. Nobody has done this (kind of book). Why? Why hasn't it been written about till now?"

Pushing the envelope

So what's the barrier he's tried to break? "Class, it's a class novel. 2 States was a community novel. 3 Mistakes was religion. And I'm lucky, the UPSC issue happened now. It has become a big issue. And it's not as simple as English vs Hindi." Any other barriers? Gender? "It's tough because I'll have to write it from a female point of view, or put the female point of view. I still have to get the language right on that. I want to do a good feminist novel but I have to understand it first. I have to learn it, and I'll learn it. I'll do it my way. My core readers are used to seeing women in a certain way. I have to get them here. How do I get them here?" For now the scale of his core audience, his reach in middle India, is intimated to him another way. He shares a screen grab from Kaun Banega Crorepati. Amitabh Bachchan wants to know, "In the film 2 States, the Punjabi boy falls in love with a ____ girl?" Note this is a Rs 10,000 question, he says. That means it is an easy question, viewers are expected to get it right. They are expected to know his work. That's the responsibility Bhagat says he is conscious of. That is the Age of Bhagat.