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I have a hot take about the so-called “popular” Indian writers who dominate the global literary stage—names like Jhumpa Lahiri and Arundhati Roy. This is not a dismissal of their talent, nor a political rant. What I offer here is a fair critique, born out of my love for literature, my own lived experience, and my desire for stories that feel closer to the India that is, not the India that is endlessly packaged for global consumption.

What I long for is Indian writing that is rooted in the everyday lives of ordinary people. I want stories set in the narrow, bustling lanes of small towns, shaped by the rhythm of rural life, filled with the subtle joys and struggles of the common man. I want literature that captures the mundane, the ordinary, and the deeply human moments that define what it means to come from a small town in India. Much like the Russian classics once portrayed Tsarist Russia with all its contradictions. Much like Harper Lee painted the tensions of the American South. Or the way Chinua Achebe wrote about Africa not as an exotic land to be pitied, but as a lived world, full of its dignity and depth.

I want Indian characters who are just that—characters. People. Lived lives. Not metaphors, not exotic symbols, not exhibits for the Western gaze that is always eager to “fix” us.

R.K. Narayan came the closest to this kind of writing. His stories felt lived in, grounded, and unpretentious. His India was not curated for outsiders; it simply existed. It was messy and charming, simple yet profound. He didn’t try to smooth life into neat lessons or simplified truths. His stories stayed in that hazy, in-between space of the everyday struggle, the quiet rhythms of life, and the small moments of joy. And that is often how life is.

By contrast, I often find Lahiri or Roy’s works, while beautiful in language, strangely distant from the life they claim to portray. There is a sense that their India is not lived in, but observed from a careful distance. It feels framed, packaged, and then presented as poetic poverty or political tragedy. Their characters seem to exist less as people with full, messy, contradictory lives and more as vessels for larger messages. Everything feels imbued with weight. Every line carries a heavy sense of significance. Every character seems to walk around carrying the guilt of India’s problems.

And slowly, this begins to feel like a performance. India has been turned into a museum exhibit of suffering. Pain rendered palatable for the approval of the Western gaze. A nation framed as being in constant need of fixing, of rescue, of saving.

Of course, India has deep-rooted problems. Poverty, inequality, caste, and corruption—these are real and undeniable. But in much of the global literature that gets celebrated, these issues lose their depth. They become flattened into easy narratives that fit stereotypes the West already believes. The result is that our literature begins to feel less like an authentic reflection of our lived realities and more like a product meant to satisfy the curiosity and moral conscience of an outside reader.

All I want is for literature to let us be. To let us exist as humans—complex, flawed, joyful, absurd, tragic, resilient. Not metaphors. Not spectacles. Not subjects for foreign sympathy. Just human.

I am not asking for our problems to be erased or hidden. I am only asking for them to be written in a way that feels more honest, more textured, more balanced.

When I express this, I am often told that I must dislike these authors because of their politics or their activism. But that is not the case. I have my political views, yes. But my critique is about their literature, about their way of portraying India. And to be frank, I do not care much for the opinion of an American-Indian writer who views India through the same lens as any other American might. I do not believe they have the same right, or rather, the same ground, to critique a country they no longer truly inhabit. To be blunt, I would rather listen to a committed Indian communist than an American-based activist wrapped in the righteousness of Western “do-goodism.” At least the communists stay here, fight here, and struggle here.

I felt this disconnection very early on. Just a few stories into Interpreter of Maladies, I was left disappointed. I had expected so much more. Instead, the stories felt soaked in nostalgia, crafted for sentimentality, staged almost. Too neatly packaged. The kind of writing that makes you feel something, yes, but in a way that feels manufactured, not lived. With Roy, the problem is even more glaring. It often feels like every single sentence in her work must carry political weight. There is little space left for lightness, or humor, or the simple joys of living. Only struggle, only pain, only despair. It is exhausting, the same way reading A Little Life was exhausting—beautiful in parts, but unbearably heavy.

But here is the difference. A Little Life is one book. It is not expected to define an entire country or culture. Roy and Lahiri, however, have somehow become the global faces of Indian literature. And that is what hurts. Their particular style—centered on pain, politics, and palatable activism—has come to define India in the global imagination.

My quarrel is not with Lahiri or Roy for writing what they know. They are free to do so. My quarrel is with the global publishing industry and the media that crowns them as the representatives of “Indian Literature.” Call it diaspora literature. Call it immigrant writing. Call it postcolonial commentary. Call it anything else, and I will rest my case. But to let them be the sole posters of Indian literature is to flatten an entire subcontinent into a single narrative of suffering and nostalgia.

Because everyday life in India is not only suffering. It is not only despair. It is also love, laughter, contradiction, absurdity, warmth, and complexity. There are struggles, yes, but there is also joy. And I wish, more than anything, that the literature we celebrate globally would reflect that truth more often.

Let literature, especially Indian literature, be more than a cry for rescue. Let it be a mirror, not a message. Let it be lived, not curated. Let it be.

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