An Unequal Text

I USED THE DELIBERATELY provocative title ‘Indian Literature: Extinction or Renaissance’ for my invited keynote address on March 10 at the Sahitya Akademi’s annual Festival of Letters. With the Sahitya Akademi’s impressive record of managing, preserving, and promoting Indian literature in 22 and more languages, the question would have seemed contrafactual.

India’s literacy rates have reached historic highs, creating the largest potential readership in the nation’s history. We are, moreover, the most populous and among the youngest of nations. According to recent statistics, literacy rates have surpassed 75 per cent, with younger generations approaching near-universal literacy. This is not merely a statistical uptick; it represents millions of first-generation readers, particularly in rural areas and smaller towns, hungry for stories that reflect their lives.

The proliferation of regional language media, from newspapers to digital platforms, has further amplified this demand, ensuring that literature in languages like Bangla, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, or Marathi, among others, remains vibrant and relevant. This expanded readership creates demand for content that speaks to diverse experiences across India’s social spectrum.

The richness, diversity, depth, and number of speakers in India’s major languages (and numerous other linguistic traditions) represent not a limitation but an extraordinary asset. Each language carries distinct literary traditions, cultural references, and modes of expression. Digital platforms increasingly support multiple Indian scripts and languages, enabling literature to flourish beyond the constraints of print economics.

What is more, self-publishing opportunities are more numerous than ever before. No author needs to depend on the largesse or caprice of the half-a-dozen or so major publishers. AI, and the many tools and agents it has spawned, has made churning out not just reams and reams of words, but images, designs, plots, scripts, essays, entire short stories, novels, or non-fictional works easier than ever before.

Translation initiatives have gained significant momentum, allowing works to transcend their original linguistic boundaries. Major publishing houses have established dedicated imprints for translated works, while digital platforms facilitate cross-linguistic literary exchange. A novel written in Malayalam or Bengali can now reach readers throughout India and beyond through thoughtful translation.

Literary festivals have also proliferated across India, from metropolitan centres to smaller towns, creating spaces for literary conversation and celebration. These gatherings foster connections between writers, readers, and publishers while elevating the cultural status of literature in public life. The Jaipur Literature Festival, now has many imitators, exemplifying this flourishing literary culture.

New literary forms have emerged that blend traditional storytelling with contemporary concerns. Graphic novels, digital storytelling platforms, and multimedia narratives extend the boundaries of literature while maintaining connections to India’s rich storytelling heritage. These innovations attract younger readers who might otherwise drift away from literary engagement.

This is one side of the story. There is, of course, another. The empty chairs in the inaugural session of the Sahitya Akademi’s own annual conference suggested that there are many more writers than readers, more speakers than listeners, more performers than members of the audience. If everyone is a “creator”, as the ubiquitous AI term goes, then where are the consumers of these creations? Moreover, by elevating a “prompter”, the one who can tap out a few commands to elicit increasingly complex and lengthy responses, to a “creator,” are we not admitting that real poets and artists no longer have a place in our society?

Yes, the encroaching age of artificial and general intelligence presents a formidable challenge to traditional literary production. The rise of smartphones, social media, and streaming platforms has fragmented attention spans and shifted cultural consumption away from the written word. Where once the novel, the poem, or the short story held sway as vehicles of imagination and reflection, today’s youth are more likely to engage with bite-sized content— memes, reels, or 280-character quips—than with the sprawling narratives of a Tagore or Premchand.

The physical book, too, faces an existential threat: e-commerce giants prioritise mass-market bestsellers over literary works, while e-books and audiobooks, though accessible, often lack the tactile feel, heft, and reverence that print commands in a culture where storytelling has deep oral and textual roots.

Hegel’s 200-year-old prophecy of the death of art looms large now. He envisioned a world where literature and art, having exhausted their capacity to grapple with the profound, would be supplanted by philosophy’s precision and rigour. In India, this could manifest as a turn away from literary exploration toward utilitarian pursuits—STEM education, digital entrepreneurship, or the endless scroll of trivial entertainment.

Let us not overlook linguicide. Smaller languages like Bodo or Konkani, rich in oral tradition, struggle to find a foothold in a market that increasingly favours homogeneity over diversity. In the even more remote areas of the Northeast, tribal languages are dying by the dozens each year with no living speakers left. Are we witnessing, then, the slow death of Indian literature, reduced to nostalgia of great works of the past coupled with the tepid, rather than torrid, kiss of death that is the literature of identity politics? Indeed, remove the last and very little is really left of contemporary Indian literature.

Add to this gloomy scenario market pressures and commercial imperatives. Publishing worldwide has increasingly prioritised marketability over literary merit. Works that promise commercial success often receive disproportionate attention, while more challenging or innovative literature struggles to find publishers willing to take financial risks. This commercialisation has created an environment where a few bestselling, celebrity authors prevail, potentially stifling the creative exploration that has historically characterised Indian literature’s greatest achievements.

We all know how despite India’s Constitutional recognition of 22 official languages, English continues to dominate the literary marketplace in terms of prestige, distribution, and financial reward. This imbalance creates hierarchies where literature in regional languages, regardless of quality or significance, receives less attention or critical engagement. The resulting ecosystem perpetuates inequalities that threaten the diversity that has historically defined Indian literature.

There is a way out: a true literary and cultural renaissance in India that proves that in a land of 1.4 billion individual stories, the word will never fade—it will only find new ways to sing. But the way forward requires a critical overhaul of our current cultural proclivities and attitudes.

commercialdigital publishingIndian cultureinnovative literaturelanguageliteraturepublishingreadershipstorytelling