INDIAN ROMANCE IS FICTION

The bestselling romance novels written by Indian men are no bodice-ripping erotic fantasies. Here, love is more an entrepreneurial enterprise

Over the past decade or so, the romance novel has emerged as India’s hottest literary genre.

But unlike in the West, many of India’s most successful romance novelists are men, as are their protagonists. The most famous among them, Durjoy Datta and Ravinder Singh, have written nearly 20 such novels over the past decade—many of them bestsellers. Sudeep Nagarkar, Novoneel Chakraborty, Faraaz Kazi, Rochak Bhatnagar and Anuj Tiwari have added another 20-odd books to the pile.

“Women bring in too much emotional quotient,” Datta remarked in an interview last year. But emotions aren’t missing from these books. It’s just that they are connected to the masculine inner life.

With titles like You’re the Password to My Life (2014), Our Impossible Love (2016) and Can Love Happen Twice? (2017), these books are less bodicerippers than reflections of middle-class male angst, complete with ultra-competitive engineering degrees and campus placement interviews, with people trying to get laid in a society that is simultaneously open and prudish, and falling sentimentally in love.

The books are too deeply rooted in the quotidian, even the banal, to provide the erotic frisson of romantic fantasy found in female-centric romance novels like those of Diana Gabaldon, Danielle Steele or Barbara Cartland. They’re thus better understood as a particular, new form of user-generated cultural product; the re-casting of the novel as not a literary, but an entrepreneurial enterprise.

The title of Ravinder Singh’s first novel, I too had

a Love Story, perfectly illustrates that. Everybody has a love story—but Singh’s book offers a path to converting that into social and cultural capital. In fact, the heroine of Of Course I Love You ..! Till I Find

Someone Better by Durjoy Datta and Maanvi Ahuja facilitates the publication of the hero’s novel as the happy ending of that book.

In a society where social capital has always been feudally inflected, this creation of new cultural capital is a powerful idea. It’s also powerful because it depicts the lives of the upwardly mobile middle class in a way that aspirational contemporary cinema rarely does. Plots revolve around urban professional migration, college and corporate life, shaadi. com marriages, SMS English, the dichotomies around sex, and an Indian masculinity that is quite deeply invested in the domestic and emotional. Women may not receive the insights into the male psyche they hope for, but they do find their experience of men reflected there to some extent. At Rs 100-200 a copy, these books are also cheaper than cinema tickets.

As more women (like Nikita Singh) enter the space, the genre is changing to include more storytelling pleasure. But these authors, their books and their readers are all young—we must wait to see what they become when they grow up.

Emotions aren’t missing from these books. It’s just that they’re connected to the masculine