Anything for You, Readers: An Examination of Indian Campus Novels

In popular imagination, college campuses are this really rocking hub of incessant excitement, youthful vigour, perennial action, interesting characters and extra-curricular academics. While for those who are yet to or who never make it to a college, this imaginative picture persists until personal experience strikes, for those who do get to go to a college, this rosy picture gets all botched, butchered and bungled once the nervous initial weeks come to an abrupt end.

The aforementioned campus picture of endless excitement is produced and directed in popular imagination by various channels of mass media such as television, cinema, newspapers, radio etc. These channels, with certain rare few exceptions, accumulate the congenial from the campus buzz and propagate a thrilling image of campus life. This resultant image, needless to say, is prejudiced, incomplete and incomprehensive. The campus reality for the majority is actually a lot different.

The public demolition of such images should make for great art. In India, since movies, television and newspapers have largely refused to undertake this enterprise, the ever-dependable literature seems to have come to the fore to rescue. This deconstructionist exercise was weakly initiated by Five Point Someone, Chetan Bhagat’s 2004 debut novel that apparently still features on the best-seller popular fiction section of all bookstores.

Since the incredible success of Five Point Someone, a number of writers have trodden in Bhagat's footsteps, such that an entire sub-genre of campus novels has come into existence overtime under the wide gambit of Indian Popular Fiction. Now that it has been quite some time since the emergence of this genre, it is pertinent to analyze where this deconstructionist exercise has been ushered and where it is headed. This paper, In addition to doing this, would also examine some other aspects of the genre.

The Writers

Almost all Indian campus novels till date have been authored by young 20-something writers, many of whom did not have an “arts background”. Many of these novelists were also first-time novel writers—their campus novel was their debut work. And, some of these authors have only written their debut work up till now and nor do they seem to have any plans or intentions of coming up with more manuscripts.

So, this sub-genre has largely been dominated by amateur reader-turn-writers. They perhaps wrote to bask in some months of fame or to try their luck at a different profession. They may also have written for personal satisfaction or simply because they had the content and means to write a book. Whatever may be the reason behind their decision to develop a novel about their college life, the fact is that their young personality has intensively shaped up the genre in a distinct fashion. Not only are there recurrent themes (ragging, peer pressure, teenage angst, pre-marital sex, hostel politics, friendship woes, nagging parents etc.) to be found in their works, their characters and plot-lines also traverse similar tracks, as has been discussed later.

As mentioned above, most campus novel writers were first-timers who penned in their work their personal college-life experiences. This claim is also supported by the fact that most of the novels in the genre are first-person narratives. These novels apparently then are partly fictional, partly autobiographical. But do they represent and describe a genuine college experience? The answer to this question cannot be generalized—it needs be answered separately for every individual book and even for every reader as the “genuine college experience” has to differ for each individual.

The amateurishness of the campus- novel authors is conspicuously reflected in the writing style of their books that only use simple, short and straightforward sentences coupled with a juvenile vocabulary. Campus slangs and expletives are used in bulk and most characters are given hip nicknames. The focus is not really on character depth or circumstantial symbolism, but on the expression of the inner turmoil of the protagonist. The tone is often comic and irreverent and tends to border on exaggeration at times.

One peculiar common quality that needs to be especially noted among the group of writers of campus novels is that the majority of them are male. Amitabh Bagchi, Tushar Raheja, Animesh Verma, Abhijit Bhaduri, Harshdeep Jolly—all of these are male writers from prestigious Indian colleges. Unsurprisingly, their novels have all had a male protagonist. Thus, the genre has till now been overwhelmingly dominated by men—women’s experience of Indian colleges is therefore almost non-existent. In popular terminology, there have only been lad-lits in the genre, chick-lits are inexplicably absent.

The word “prestigious” is to be especially noted in the above paragraph, because almost all writers who have so far written in the genre have been alumni of only prestigious Indian universities. While a large number of writers have come from the IITs (Bhagat, Raheja, Bagchi, Verma), others have come from IIMs, DU or MU. Thus, even the campus experience of small lesser-known colleges or even popular colleges of small cities has been unavailable to the readers of this genre.

The teachers are also yet to write novels set in campuses. After all, teachers are as much a part of the campuses as students. Their perspective of the life in colleges is likely to make for thrilling and engaging reading. But, so far, there have been no attempts by the teachers to express their side of the campus story.

The dominance of male student writers belonging to only eminent colleges has begun to make this genre stale and repetitious. The sales of campus novels have begun to plummet and new novels tend to fuzz out unknown without much buzz. The readers are now looking for something fresh and novel which the genre has not been supplying of late. There is now a prominent dearth of good writing that has begun to threaten the existence of the genre. If this continues, then the genre is likely to become severely endangered, if not extinct, in the near future.

The Readers

In later Indian literary history, campus novels are going to find a special mention as they have raised an entire new breed of novel readers from a huge population of traditional non-readers. Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone has to be applauded in this context for introducing to people who had never read anything beyond their school books to the unparalleled joy of reading.

Several factors were responsible for this major readership evolution: a) as mentioned above, the writing in these books was lucid, contemporaneous and, most importantly, sans any use of heavy words, b) the books talked about issues that the youth could relate and identify to and c) the price of these books was kept low enough to appeal to youngsters living on tight budgets and always-seeming-less pocket money.

Campus novels have also been guilty reads for traditional literature readers. Suddenly, there were novels that did not demand intensive brainstorming, that could be taken into the Metro and read among all the noise and the rush and that were entertaining and even hilarious at times. But these were also novels that had to be bought, read and necessarily chucked out by this section of readers. They were not the kind of paperbacks that could be added to one’s personal book-collections as adornments.

An important aspect of the readership of campus novels is that these novels have been created almost exclusively for Indian readers: their use of local slangs, desi themes and Indian campus settings are unlikely to be enjoyed much by international readers. Some of these books are not even released outside India. This is in stark to the literature produced by veteran Indian writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai and V. S. Naipaul that often is read more outside than inside India.

The Publishers

Bhagat’s Five Point Someone was published by Rupa Publications in 2004. The book brought both fame and money to the publishing house and apparently played a major role in helping Rupa emerge as a leading publishing house. One major factor, as mentioned above, behind the tremendous success of the book was its low affordable cost of Rs. 95. Most campus novels since then have been priced around the same denomination and this has so far ensured their decent sales.

Publishers say that even though they are aware that these novels do not constitute what is called high-literature, they are sometimes forced to publish them since they register enormous sales and, in this manner, pay for the publication of real literary stuff that does not get sold as much. Therefore, though these novels may not be worthwhile of entering into the Literature lists of English literature scholars, they are now essential for the steady growth of these lists.

Some leading publishing houses have now begun to complain about the quality of the huge quantity of manuscripts that they have been receiving for some time now. An editor at Rupa goes as far as to say that it seems that almost every student with decent writing skills has a manuscript to submit these days. Most of these manuscripts, she says, don’t even manage to hold your interest even till the end of the first chapter. They almost constitute what in publishing vocabulary is known as slushpile.

All these manuscripts that constitute the slushpile have begun to find to the Internet after having been rejected by all possible publishers. Their authors either publish then on their blogs or go for the option of online publishing through online publishing ventures such as Serene Woods. The manuscripts, in this manner, become more or less non-profit enterprises and receive nominal readership.

The Plot and the Characters

The male protagonists in this genre are almost always these low-key diffident youngsters who conform neither to the conventional male stereotype nor to the image of the campus stud as popularized by Indian movies set in campuses. He is generally not the good-looking and the good-natured heartthrob of the campus for whom the female readers tend to easily fall for. Instead, he is more of a guy-next-room whom you may not even notice if you did not belong to his class or course.

This protagonist usually has a couple of true close friends who deeply influence his story along with his love—interest who is often a smart pretty girl whom the protagonist finds superior to him in some way or the other. The protagonist manages to surprisingly woo this girl but her parents are usually difficult catches. This love story becomes either the central or the sub-plot of the plot and is mostly concluded positively towards the end.

The plot in this manner is more or less predictable. It ends at a happy note when all the problems come to a satisfactory conclusion. But its course is not as predictable—there are often both funny and unusual incidents that fill the middle pages. However, new themes and issues are rarely explored through these incidents. Thus, both the territory and the destination of these novels are familiar, and although their route is newish rarely radical.

Conclusion

Let’s get back to the deconstructionist exercise mentioned in the introduction of this paper. It seems to have come to a standstill courtesy authors with similar resume who seem to be somehow apprehensive of experimentation. However, the enterprise has not reached a dead-end as yet—it just needs to be directed in diverse directions for its consistent growth because the genre still has a lot of unexplored potential that is likely to bear interesting and successful results only if it is probed properly