Pulp Friction

At any railway station in India, there is a moment before the train arrives when the platform fills and people start looking for something to do with their hands. Some scroll, some pace, and some make their way to an AH Wheeler stand, a fixture of Indian stations since the 1870s, where stacks of newspapers sit alongside rows of slim, brightly covered paperbacks. The titles are lurid and the prices are low, rarely above Rs 150, often as little as Rs 30. The books are not in English. You will find Hindi titles across most of the country, Tamil if you’re travelling south, and Gujarati in the west. A coolie picks one up, a student bargains for two, and a taxi driver, waiting for a fare, folds his copy open at the spine. The train pulls in and the stack is a little shorter than it was before.

This is pulp fiction in India. Not a genre exactly, though it has recurring ones within it, detective stories and family dramas above all, but something else. A structure that is cheap, widely available, and embedded in transit and in the texture of working life. To understand what that means, it helps to know what pulp actually is, and what it isn’t. An American reader might reach first for the Tarantino association, or picture the garish magazine covers of the 1920s and 30s. Those original ‘pulps’, printed on wood-pulp paper so cheap it yellowed and crumbled within a decade, are where the genre gets its name. Those, however, were primarily magazines. What followed them, from the 1940s onward, were mass-market paperbacks. They were pocket-sized, illustrated, and sold on wire spinner racks in drugstores and railway stations and supermarkets for the price of a pack of cigarettes. That format, disposable, democratic, and built for transit, is what India’s pocket books most resemble. The difference is that in America, that format seems to be dying a slow death. ReaderLink, the country’s last major independent mass-market paperback distributor, stopped carrying them at the end of 2025, after sales collapsed from 131 million units in 2004 to 21 million in 2024. The spinner racks are gone and the drugstores that held them are largely gone too.

In India, the stacks are still there, albeit thinner than before.

The American mass-market paperback had its own history of doing what Indian pulp has always done, reaching readers who were not being reached otherwise. During the Second World War, the US government produced over 1,300 specially printed Armed Services Editions, paperbound books small enough to fit in a uniform pocket, shipped to soldiers on every front. It didn’t matter that they were stapled and printed on cheap paper. They did the most important thing of all, they moved. Mickey Spillane sold 1.5 million copies of his pulp thrillers in the 1950s, Philip K Dick started his career in the pulp ghetto, as did Raymond Chandler too. The cover art was lurid, the prose was taut, and the audience was enormous and largely working class. What the format did was make reading a thing you did because it was cheap and available, not because it was aspirational.

India’s pulp ecosystem has worked the same way, just at a greater scale and for a longer duration. Rajesh Kumar, the Tamil crime and science fiction writer, has produced over 1,500 novels and more than 2,000 short stories since 1968, an output so relentless that his son’s full-time job is digitising the backlog. His stories move through crime, conspiracy, and science fiction, written to be read quickly and passed on.

Surender Mohan Pathak, the central figure in Hindi crime fiction, built a readership around recurring characters and long-running series that readers followed across decades. His Painsath Lakh Ki Dakaiti, first published in 1977, sold over 50,000 copies in its first run and has moved around 2.5 million since. Both authors have been invited to literary panels, both have seen their work adapted for screen. They were read at a scale most literary authors never reach, and still sat outside the category of literature.

That gap, between scale of readership and degree of institutional legitimacy, is worth sitting with. Pulp in India has always circulated through informal channels. From small presses in Delhi and Meerut to book-stalls on platforms and at bus stands, readers pass copies hand to hand on long train journeys. Sales figures are sparse precisely because the infrastructure is informal. Which is why pulp authors were typically paid a flat advance rather than royalties, their livelihood decoupled from sales volume. When something isn’t taken seriously, its economic footprint tends to go unmeasured too.

To understand pulp, you have to understand that price has always been the mechanism. At Rs 30 to Rs 150, pulp asks almost nothing of a reader who is on the fence. The opportunity cost is low enough to disappear. Reported profit margins once ran to 100%. But as technology grew, television eroded that, pulling sales down by an estimated 80% and squeezing margins to around 15%. Then, there was the 5% tax on pulp that didn’t help. And yet the format survived, because the readers it served had nowhere obvious to go. While literary fiction seems like an option, it costs more, is largely in English, and assumes a reader with time and education. Another place that the readers could have turned to would have been quick commercial fiction, think Chetan Bhagat or Durjoy Datta, but it sits at Rs 150 to Rs 300. While it shares pulp’s accessibility instincts, it targets a different kind of first-time reader, someone who is more urban and more English-comfortable. Pulp asks less than any of them.

In the last decade, some of that informality has begun to formalise. Audible India produced Thriller Factory, a ten-episode dramatisation of works by Hindi pulp writer Ved Prakash Sharma, directed by Anurag Kashyap and starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Tabu, as serious a creative team as Indian audio fiction has seen. The Blaft Anthology brought Tamil pulp into English translation, making it available to readers outside the script entirely. HarperCollins took on Pathak and found that a readership large enough to sustain a nearly 300-novel career already existed, even if it had never been counted as part of the mainstream market.

What all of this suggests is not that pulp is suddenly worthy of attention, but that it always was. The readership was never small. The infrastructure was simply invisible to the people who decide what counts. The American parallel is instructive here, if inverted. The US had a vast popular reading ecosystem built around cheap, accessible, and transit-friendly fiction, and it let that ecosystem erode. The spinner racks went first, then the independent distributors, then the newsstand culture that had sustained both. What’s left is a book market in which even paperbacks have become objects of taste, priced and positioned accordingly. That the mass-market format is now discussed in elegiac terms, as something that once democratised reading, is not incidental. It was democratic. And now, it is gone.

India still has the stalls. The question, as small presses thin out and the physical sites of pulp distribution contract, is for how much longer, and what disappears with them when they go?