I have read Amrit Dhillon’s article in The Guardian with the attention it deserves, and I write this response not out of defensiveness but out of a deep and abiding love for Indian literature, for reading, and for the millions of Indians who do, in fact, read—passionately, voraciously, and with profound engagement.
The article paints India as a nation that does not read. It tells us that ‘India does not have a great book-reading tradition,’ that middle-class homes are ‘devoid of books,’ and that literature festivals are essentially carnivals where books serve as mere backdrop. While some of these observations contain grains of truth, the overall framing is reductive and, frankly, condescending—the kind of narrative that reduces 1.4 billion people and their extraordinarily diverse literary cultures to a single dismissive brushstroke.
To say that India lacks a great book-reading tradition is to erase millennia of literary heritage. The Vedas, the Upanishads, the epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Sangam poetry of Tamil Nadu, the Bhakti literature that swept across the subcontinent, the towering works of Kalidasa, Mirza Ghalib, Rabindranath Tagore, Premchand, Ismat Chughtai, Saadat Hasan Manto, Mahasweta Devi—these are not footnotes in literary history. They are cornerstones of world literature. India’s literary tradition is one of the oldest, richest, and most continuous on earth. To reduce it to English-language sales figures is to confuse one metric with the whole reality.
The article’s most revealing admission is buried within it: ‘There are no statistics for book sales in regional languages.’ And yet, the entire argument about India’s reading habits is built on English-language sales data—a language that is the mother tongue of less than one percent of the population. This is like measuring France’s literary culture by how many books it sells in Mandarin.
The article itself concedes that regional literary scenes are ‘very vibrant’ with ‘much discussion of authors and ideas.’ It acknowledges that authors in regional languages are influential figures whose views on social and political affairs matter deeply. And yet, this vibrancy is treated as an afterthought, a footnote to the ‘real’ story of English-language publishing. This is not analysis; it is an inherited colonial lens that equates English with culture and everything else with folklore.
Furthermore, even within the English-language market, the picture painted by the article is grossly incomplete. Indians do read books written in English—but a great many of them buy these books from roadside vendors and pavement stalls, where a book can be had for as little as two hundred rupees. Walk through any major Indian city, and you will find these informal booksellers everywhere: under flyovers, outside railway stations, along busy pavements, their wares spread on tarpaulin sheets or stacked on makeshift wooden tables and metal stands. These sales run into the millions, and they are entirely invisible to official statistics. The Nielsen figures and industry data cited by publishers like Pramod Kapoor reflect only books purchased through registered bookstores and online platforms. They do not—and cannot—capture the vast, thriving informal book economy that puts English-language literature into the hands of ordinary Indians every single day. To declare that the average English book sells only three to four thousand copies, and to build an argument about Indian reading habits on that figure alone, is to mistake the tip of the iceberg for the whole.
The article’s disdain for the festive atmosphere of Indian literary gatherings is puzzling. Since when did literature require solemnity to be legitimate? The idea that a ‘hushed, decorous setting’ is the only proper environment for literary engagement is not a universal truth—it is a specifically Western, specifically upper-class cultural norm. India’s literary tradition has always been communal, oral, and celebratory. The kavi sammelans (poetry gatherings) that draw thousands, the mushairas that have electrified audiences for centuries, the kathas and pravachans that blend storytelling with spiritual discourse—these are not lesser forms of literary engagement. They are different forms, rooted in a culture that has always understood that literature is not a solitary act of consumption but a shared experience of meaning-making.
When young Suryavansh Raj, eleven years old, says he is at the Banaras Lit Fest because he loves history ‘other than textbooks,’ we should celebrate this, not diminish it. When Deepak Madhok speaks of seeds germinating into a new generation of readers, we should recognise that this is exactly how literary cultures are built—not through elite gatekeeping, but through joyful, accessible encounters with ideas.
Former diplomat Pavan Varma is quoted lamenting that readers now want ‘neatly packaged, short, simplified’ texts rather than ‘works of lasting literary value.’ With great respect to Mr. Varma, this is not an Indian phenomenon—it is a global one. Attention spans are shrinking everywhere. Publishers in New York, London, and Paris face the challenge of competing with screens just as acutely as those in Mumbai and Delhi. To frame this as an Indian failure is to misdiagnose a universal condition.
Moreover, the assumption that only long, complex texts constitute ‘real’ reading is itself a form of literary snobbery. Short stories, novellas, graphic novels, poetry, and accessible non-fiction are all legitimate literary forms. As someone who has spent years analysing short fiction from across the world, I can attest that brevity and depth are not mutually exclusive. A single short story by Manto or Chekhov can contain more truth than many a doorstop novel.
The article fails to acknowledge several crucial realities. First, economic inequality: when a significant portion of the population is still fighting for basic necessities, the fact that literature festivals draw hundreds of thousands of visitors—many from modest backgrounds—is remarkable, not lamentable. Second, the explosion of self-publishing and digital reading platforms in Indian languages is transforming who can write and who can read. Third, the extraordinary role that Indian schools and educators play in nurturing young readers, often with severely limited resources. Fourth, the sheer volume and quality of literary output in Indian languages that never gets counted because it never gets translated into English.
The article celebrates Banu Mushtaq’s International Booker Prize win, but uses it primarily to illustrate how regional writers remain invisible until they are translated into English. The more important story is that Mushtaq was a ‘huge name’ in Karnataka for years—she was read, loved, and awarded long before English-speaking India or the wider world noticed. Her readers did not need a Booker to validate their reading habits.
As an Indian educator and author who has dedicated her career to the analysis and promotion of literature, I find articles like these both frustrating and motivating. Frustrating, because they perpetuate a narrative that undermines the very real literary engagement happening across India every day—in classrooms, in homes, in chai stalls, in WhatsApp groups sharing poetry, in community libraries, in the dog-eared copies of Premchand passed between friends. Motivating, because they remind me why the work of literary education and analysis matters—not to prove anything to Western publications, but to serve the readers who already exist and to kindle the flame in those who are just beginning their literary journey.
India reads. India has always read. India reads in twenty-four languages and in scripts that are among the most beautiful ever devised by the human mind. That its reading does not always register on the radar of English-language publishing houses and Western journalists does not make it any less real or any less profound.
Fiza Pathan
Educator, Author, and Literary Analyst
©2026 Fiza Pathan
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