A welcome and new maturity

A great deal more needs to be done before this literature, which for the most part speaks from, and for, metropolitan India, can be said to be truly representative in the social sense and truly independent in the linguistic, aesthetic and philosophical sense. Again, from the publishing side, a literature appears mature when it is not just one or two big presses that control what is published, distributed and consumed, but when a wide array of publishing agendas and interests compete for the attention of readers, and a large pool of talent is available to make good books better through the processes of good editing, production, design, and astute publicity. There is often good new work to be found in literary journals such as The Little Magazine and Sahitya Akademi’s bimonthly journal Indian Literature. There is also excellent work to be found in three online literary journals, or “webzines”: Almost Island, Muse India and the bilingual journal Pratilipi, each with a distinctive literary vision and high editorial standards. If there is a complaint to be made about Indian literature today, it is that bookshops, especially the big chains, don’t stock a wide enough range of books and do not have a book-literate management and staff, and that newspapers and magazines have for the most part not established a reviewing culture equal, in commitment to craft and attention to detail, to the literature to which it constitutes a response.