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  • Spotify Is Tuning Into India

    We all remember a time when the Indian music scene was seen as being synonymous with Bollywood. At parties, at festivals, at weddings, Bollywood music was the default setting. For a brief period in the 1990s and early 2000s, Indipop and rock made an entry, with bands like Indus Creed, Pentagram, Viva, and musical stars such as Alisha Chinai and Anaida. Then, as the years passed, they either lapsed into obscurity or pivoted to … you guessed it…Bollywood. 

    A few years later, a universe of music apps blossomed: Saavn (now Jio Saavn after its merger with Reliance’s Jio platform in 2018), Gaana, Apple and Youtube Music, and others. Bollywood remained the mainstay throughout, of course. Into this crowded arena entered Spotify in 2019.

    Spotify came with a global playbook ready to whip out and deploy, but India was largely reluctant to pay for subscriptions; they were used to free streams of music through online platforms such as Youtube, and bundled apps. The streaming giant also grappled with competition from Jio Saavn and others, which offered more affordable subscription rates. Spotify learnt the hard way what most international companies such as McDonald’s figure out soon – in India, you adapt to the local culture or you perish. And so in its first fiscal year, the company tanked, losing Rs 156 crore in its first full fiscal year.

    “
    Spotify came with a global playbook ready to whip out and deploy, but India was largely reluctant to pay for subscriptions; they were used to free streams of music through online platforms such as Youtube, and bundled apps.
    ”

    So what changed? Indians, used to UPI payment structures, eschewed the credit card systems. So Spotify incorporated UPI AutoPay. Then Spotify built different pricing plans for different pockets. India was used to free music. So Spotify pushed the advertising-supported free tier making it the magnet that the company hoped would build a customer base. And eventually, in March 2025, the Indian arm reported a net profit of Rs 74.62 crore on revenue of Rs 513.77 crore. But the pricing is a mere footnote. The actual story? Bollywood music has become just one slice in a much larger pie.

    Spotify’s own data says that “I-Pop — popular Indian music released outside of Bollywood film soundtracks — accounted for half of Spotify’s 2025 year-end top 10 in India, with tracks from Kushagra, Anuv Jain, Faheem Abdullah, and Jasleen Royal charting right alongside film favorites. Aditya Rikhari’s track “Sahiba” made history by holding the number No. 1 spot on Spotify in India for more than 11 consecutive weeks.”

    As more listeners discover music made in India’s regional languages, artists who haven’t always held the mainstream spotlight are benefiting. Globally, the biggest year-over-year increases in generated royalties for regional-language music are in Telugu and Marathi. Haryanvi streams saw a nearly sevenfold increase from February 2023 to February 2026.

    This was the real cultural shift, and streaming made it possible. A song no longer needed a producer’s gatekeeping, a studio’s budget or a film release to find a million strangers.

    Image Courtesy: Pexels / Cottonbro Studio

    K-pop is its own global phenomenon, so why not Punjabi pop? Why not Haryanvi? Spotify claims that it has built the platform to support regional, independent artists as well, and that Indian music can, through the heft it offers internationally, make it big abroad too. As flattering a thought as it is though, we really do need to ask ourselves whether this simply means the gatekeeping has shifted from a Bollywood producer to a Swedish platform.

    Then there is the ledger. Spotify says the number of Indian artists earning over Rs 1 crore a year from the platform has tripled since 2022. That is a genuinely exciting number for the people on the right side of it. But it is Spotify’s own figure, and it describes the top of a pyramid. Streaming income is famously thin at the base, and the wider industry grew just 2.5 percent in India in 2024, down from 15.4 percent the year before. A bigger audience does not automatically make a living.

    The question then is not whether Spotify has been good for Indian music. In many ways it clearly has. It is whether the artists whose accents, languages and rough edges give the platform its Indian identity are sharing in what that identity is worth.

  • An Interpreter Of Bengali Identities

    Jhumpa Lahiri is in the news again, and this time it is because her work has been adapted by none other than Mira Nair. In December 2026, Lahiri’s stories will be tested on screen again, as Unaccustomed Earth will be released as an eight-episode long series on Netflix. This will feature a very interesting ensemble cast consisting of Freida Pinto, Siddharth, and Indraneil Sengupta. Perhaps through this, we will be again reminded of the fact that migration is not an event that occurs just once in a lifetime, but refers to a lifelong condition wherein one lives in translation.

    Lahiri’s writing delves into the immigrant experience while also shining a light on Kolkata’s past and present. For example, Gogol in The Namesake decides to go running around the city’s crowded streets, while his grandmother is anxious about this adventure. The Victoria Memorial is also an important site.

    ” “I don’t know,” she shrugged, munching on some puffed rice and licking the mustard oil from the corners of her mouth.” This is a quote from Interpreter of Maladies, the short story from the collection of short stories bearing the same name. When it was published in 1999, the collection won major accolades in the literary sphere, and Jhumpa Lahiri, its author, made a name for herself amongst the pantheon of South Asian American women who wrote about diasporic identity. The puffed rice, consumed by the character named Mrs. Das is certainly a recurring trope not only in the story, but also in the writings that came before and after in Lahiri’s writing career. If one closely inspects Mira Nair’s work, The Namesake, an adaptation of Lahiri’s writing, one finds a scene where Ashima Ganguly (played by Tabu) puts together a snack with the cereal Rice Krispies as the chief ingredient. It was perhaps the closest thing Ashima would have come to in her quest for jhal muri, a snack made up of puffed rice. She whips it up when she feels hungry and needs to head out to run some errands. Ashima, being a first-generation immigrant also doesn’t bother to change her sartorial style as she continues to wear her cotton sarees at home and outside it too. 

    It is only a handful of prominent literary voices that have managed to explicate the meaning of what migration means for the South Asian diaspora — and Jhumpa Lahiri is one of them. She has been put into the category as other writers from the region, the likes of which include Meena Alexander, Talat Abbasi, Bapsi Sidhwa, Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Divakaruni is perhaps the second most prominent voice to include the experiences of the Indian Bengali community in her writing. As Christiane Schlote notes, Lahiri and Divakaruni’s short stories and novels feature a series of Indian and Bengali women characters, embarking on their first flight to join their engineer husbands, who are most likely heading to Silicon Valley, or the New England Area as they attend schools such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 

    Now would there be a need to specify that one is an Indian Bengali? Why can’t someone simply be Bengali? The answer is perhaps yes and for the latter, no, since the Bengali community was divided into two factions following the Partition of 1947, which is often referred to as the event that forged the creation of India and Pakistan. In the process, the creation of another Bengal is overlooked.  Lahiri’s work touches upon the history of partition too as she writes about refugees residing in the areas near Tollygunge’s Golf Club, being ignored by the state apparatus, and in stories such as The Real Durwan, she embodies the trauma of loss through an old lady who had to leave her home in East Bengal.

     

    “
    It is only a handful of prominent literary voices that have managed to explicate the meaning of what migration means for the South Asian diaspora — and Jhumpa Lahiri is one of them.
    ”

     

    The Bengali identity does extend to the other side of Bengal, the country of Bangladesh, colloquially known as Opaar Bangla (the Bengal on the other side). Despite the similarities between the cultures of West Bengal and Bangladesh, there are some pronounced differences. One of them lies in the fact that the Bangladeshi diaspora has found different ways of setting themselves up post-migration to the United States. In the city of New York alone, one finds a sizeable Bangladeshi community, often referred to simply as the Bengali identity, as ethnic identities could perhaps override one’s national identity, but in that process, it is important to recognize that a subset of Indian Bengalis seek to be represented in different ways. However, to label Lahiri solely as a chronicler of the Indian diaspora risks flattening a complex literary identity. Regional identity, national identity and the notion of transnational displacement intersect all at once, and go on to transcend geographical borders.  

    In a bid to understand Lahiri’s place in the diaspora, one must look into her Bengali heritage — and why the broader umbrella of the ‘Indian diaspora’ cannot be understood as a monolith. The Indian diaspora encompasses a wide variety of languages, ethnicities and histories, and Lahiri’s narratives often find home in the cultural sensibilities of the Indian Bengali middle class, as her stories revolve around West Bengal. There is a deep-seated allegiance to literature, poetry, classical music, and a nostalgia for the home country. Born in London to parents of Indian Bengali origin, and raised in Rhode Island, Lahiri experienced a childhood that oscillated between two different worlds. In many ways, the essence of her parents’ city, Calcutta was turned into a portable commodity through its debates and distinct ways of cooking and consuming food. In stories such as This Blessed House or When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, Lahiri captures the nuances of what it is like to live in a Bengali household in suburban America. These are the spaces within which the adults find themselves attempting to recreate the charms of alleyways and coffee houses to be found back in the home that they have left behind, while the generation that comes after them are finding their way through the hostile corridors of public schools in America. Perhaps now, for this generation, Lahiri’s work matters more than ever because they find themselves and their crises being written about. 

    As the list of her works grew, to include novels such as The Namesake and The Lowland, Lahiri’s ideas branched out to include more experiences specific to the Indian Bengali community. In The Namesake, she delivers a masterclass in the friction and unease between two generations, and the duality of culture. Through the journey of Gogol Ganguli, who was named after a Russian author responsible for saving his father’s life in a deadly train accident, Lahiri explores the absurdity and beauty of ‘hyphenated’ identities. She refused to exoticize the Indian diaspora, something her predecessor in the literary field, Bharati Mukherjee was accused of doing—writing from a Euro-American perspective, for an audience that was primarily European and American. Lahiri’s characters experienced what other humans faced, including loneliness, ambition, and strains in one’s marital life, while migration remained in the backdrop. 

     

    “
    Born in London to parents of Indian Bengali origin, and raised in Rhode Island, Lahiri experienced a childhood that oscillated between two different worlds.
    ”

     

    Lahiri later on began to focus on a literary career where she would establish herself as an author who writes in Italian, and also published a book in Italian titled In Altre Parole. This was a departure from the foundational themes on which her career stood and was possibly seen as an act of betrayal by her readers in South Asia. However, it is important to remember that the way works of fiction become relevant or irrelevant is not operating on fixed timelines. One never knows when they are going to encounter Lahiri on the bookshelf, or on the screen. The upcoming Netflix series based on Unaccustomed Earth ensures that her previous work will be up for analysis and debate when December arrives. The Namesake might be screened in colleges, and The Real Durwan prescribed to students in their school syllabus. The stories themselves go beyond the persona of the author at times, and tend to find its own roots. 

    In another work of Lahiri’s — The Lowland — which courted controversy, she dwells upon the Naxalite movement that took shape in Bengal in the 1960s. The novel is written in a manner that engages deeply with the nooks and crannies of Kolkata, and paints a vivid picture of what happened in those decades in the educational institutes of Jadavpur University and Presidency. She describes the ostentatious colonial-era activities performed behind the high walls of Tolly Club—where the poor aren’t allowed, and the fences are raised higher when they start peeping. Lahiri’s works have not proffered convenient answers for the immigrant puzzle, or for what goes on in the Indian subcontinent. They simply shine a light on what is happening.

  • India Is Putting The ‘Fan’ In Fandom

    We have all felt the need to bond with others in the face of adversity at some point in our lives, reaching out to a friend, a colleague, perhaps even a teacher. Now, in the age of social media, connecting over online portals — cozy pockets within the vast expanse of space and time, separate from realistic responsibilities — and meeting people with similar interests has become the norm. This is what Henry Jenkins, fan-scholar, termed a ‘weekend-only world’: a space co-habited by fellow enthusiasts finally able to reach out from the margins and share their love for a television show, a movie, an actor, a musician, or anything that make them feel like they belong. 

    Spaces like these let people who don’t fit in elsewhere flourish. Comic Con is one such space. The comic book convention began as the San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) in 1970, and the idea has since spread across the world, including India. Comic Con India (CCI), was started in 2011 in Delhi by founder and managing director Jatin Varma. Held over 2 days, the exhibitions attracted close to 5,000 visitors. Now, the latest edition has just ended, and it was held not in one of the eight major metros but in Visakhapatnam (Vizag). With a reported 12,000 attendees, the Vizag edition of the Comic Con was the first of its kind in the city, inviting fans of comics, video games, film, and anime, among other fandoms. Gone are the days when participating in global fandoms was the luxury of only a select, privileged few. With outreach driven by social media, smaller cities are now able to not only participate but contribute. Cumulatively, the CCI has garnered a total of 200,000 participants and over 1,200 exhibitors since its inception. 

    Although the CCI started as an independent venture, in 2014, they began a collaboration with ReedPop, the company behind New York Comic Con and MCM London Comic Con, allowing them to increase their scale and outreach. CCI is the place to be for all things comic book related; but its most awaited event is the Indian Championship of Cosplay. Winners from the various regional Comic Cons — such as in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad — participate in the national finals, and the winner progresses on to participate in the Crown Championships of Cosplay, held in Chicago. Not only do participants show up in cosplay, but a large part of the CCI culture is for attendees to show up decked up as their favorite characters, from Luffy of One Piece to Nezuko Kamado of Demon Slayer.

    While CCI has brought out guests such as Archie Comics artist Dan Parent and author of the 1980s version of the G.I. Joe comics Larry Hama, it also gives space to Indian creators, such as Abhijeet Kini, an illustrator for Tinkle, Saumin Suresh Patel, better known by his alias Pictorial Cinema, and Sailesh Gopalan of web comic Brown Paperbag. Shefali Johnson, chief executive officer of Comic Con India, speaks on the warm welcome Comic Con received in its Vizag edition: “Much like Andhra Pradesh’s rich food culture, known for its bold flavors and vibrant spirit, the city brought its own flavor to our maiden edition. From fans discovering Indian comics and artwork at Artist Alley to the crowd cheering for Telugu hip-hop artist Roll Rida, there was a lovely mix of local culture and fandom.”

     

    Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

     

    Vizag isn’t the only Tier-2 city in India home to the Comic Con. 2026 also brought Comic Con to Kochi, with its maiden edition held from February 28th to March 1st. CCI has also just announced an edition in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, to be held from 19th to 20th December 2026. There is a growing wave of such events across the country, from Nagpur, to Ranchi, Bhubaneshwar, and more. Coscon (previously known as the Orange City Otaku Con) was Nagpur’s first ever film and anime convention, held back in 2015 and organized by the Nagpur Anime Club. Samarth Thakral, founding member of the Nagpur Anime Club, says: “When I had asked Sonal [Varma], who was part of Comic Con India’s management, to have one in Nagpur back in 2015, she said it would take at least ten years to happen. So we decided to host our own version.” 

    We can trace the growing interest of East Asian entertainment in India to a few origins. The initial curiosity started back in the late 90s and early 2000s, with television shows like Pokémon, Beyblade, Dragon Ball Z, Shin Chan, and Doraemon becoming every Indian child’s afternoon pastime. Dubbed and translated versions of Japanese and South Korean dramas on Netflix and Amazon Prime then widened the scope of consumption across the Indian subcontinent. Crunchyroll, the world’s leading anime, manga, and East Asian drama on-demand streaming service, came to India in early 2024, ushering in a new wave of demand in the Indian market.

     

    “
    It is in spaces like conventions that these fans find a home away from home. Events such as Ichi-Go in Bhubaneshwar, Anifest in Ranchi, and Coscon in Nagpur allow online communities to expand offline, giving scattered fans the physical community they crave. 
    ”

     

    Regardless, India has always been of the fandom public. We have never shied away from expressing our infatuation with a certain celebrity, with cinema hall chants becoming synonymous with every Friday evening release and entire villages gathering in front of a singular television set to watch Sachin Tendulkar thwap another six-er into the sun. The first real change came about with the introduction of social media, affording Indians the opportunity to explore and rave about a whole other subsect of pop culture — anime, manga, Marvel, D.C., American pop, K-pop, et cetera. The next came as fans shifted from passive consumers of culture, to active producers of it. Varma discusses fan-led creation in his piece for The Indian Express: “Earlier, you expressed fandom by showing up at theatres, stadiums, book signings. Today, you also create…When fans in India demanded better subtitles for anime streams or when gaming creators lobbied to bring BGMI back after its ban, they were consuming and shaping.”

    A report by MYFANDOM further discusses this production capacity. Characterizing this trend as an “emotional capital economy”, the report notes how 45% of fans now prefer purchasing official merchandise. Not only are fans participating in fandom, the will to demonstrate this participation has grown. Infrastructure that was restricted to metropolitan cities in India is now reaching more and more members of fandom, those who reside in smaller cities. 

    Participation in organized fandom comes with its own stereotypes. The depiction of global fandom culture remains one of ridicule, with members assumed to be anti-social and even childish. A study by Jasdeep Kaur Chandi and Kulveen Trehan, published in the IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies, echoes findings of stereotyping and isolation: “The core frustration that Indian anime fans experience is that they are often a target of infantilization by their parents, relatives, and even friends…Most responses affirmed a lack of physical fan communities as the fans are scattered throughout the country.”

    It is in spaces like conventions that these fans find a home away from home. Events such as Ichi-Go in Bhubaneshwar, Anifest in Ranchi, and Coscon in Nagpur allow online communities to expand offline, giving fans the physical community they crave. Thakral says: “The people I met at the Comic Con Thyagraj Stadium in 2015 and became friends with, attended my wedding…the community I formed through anime is strong.” Jenkins’s ‘weekend-only world’ was once a pocket of the internet, kept apart from real life. In Vizag, Nagpur, Ranchi, Kochi, Bhubaneshwar, and other cities, it now has a physical address. The convention may last a weekend, but the community remains.

  • Everyone Everywhere All At Once

    The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.

    When historian Daniel J. Boorstin wrote that line in his 1961 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, he couldn’t have been describing the fame of the 2020s. And yet, you could paste it into almost any account of today’s celebrity world and it would fit like the last piece of a puzzle. That is the territory Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber map in I Want to Be Famous: When Everybody and Nobody Is a Celebrity, a hilarious and startlingly current tour of fame and pop culture. Their central question is simple: in an age when everyone has a platform, what does it take to become a celebrity?

    There used to be a formula to celebrity. Finger and Weber describe it with an early-2000s scene: you’re waiting at the grocery store checkout, glancing at the tabloids lined up beside the cashier. Some faces make you think “Oh, them.” Others make you think “Huh, who?” The ‘Thems’ were worth remembering, while the ‘Whos’ were recognizable enough to have a platform but forgotten the moment you looked away. These days, that line has gone rather blurry, with Whos multiplying in number by the second and the esteemed designation of Thems given only to a select few.

    So what makes a Who? Whos are the subset of individuals who are undoubtedly in and around the world of fame but haven’t quite reached the center. Finger and Weber’s opening example is that of Meghan Markle – an actor turned self-withdrawn member of Great Britain’s royal family. Her marriage to Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, catapulted her from Who to Them almost overnight. This renewed status meant taking on the onus of carrying herself differently, which was met with both scandal and intrigue. While this recipe for success is a very rare happenstance, there are many probable ways by which a Who can become a Them; and even vice versa. 

    They describe a few ways one can get thrust from Whodom into Themdom: scandal, releasing a hit, or just plain dumb luck. Take, for example, Nara Smith. She was never a nobody, starting her career off as a model for IMG and had a few successful campaigns. Her now husband, Lucky Blue Smith, was also a model but much more booked and busy. Then, in early 2024, Nara Smith began to gain social media fame for her viral and much-disputed ‘tradwife’ content, content that shot her to a whopping 12.6 million followers on TikTok, an upcoming film deal with Amazon MGM, and her very own cookbook, Homemade, capitalizing on her viral ‘made from scratch’ videos. There are many such examples of influencers leveraging their social media fame to become actors and musicians, or, as the joke goes, owners of an alcohol brand. Even so, one can hardly consider them Thems. 

    The designation of Them is not always a positive one. Scandal, public trials, whistleblowing, and virality are all events that could catapult you from Who to Them instantly – whether famous or infamous, is the real question. Consider the viral ‘Pooja, what is this behavior’ clip from Bigg Boss 5 that went viral on social media in India. The clip made Pooja Misrra instantly recognizable, years after the episode aired. And yet, there are not many that would count her as a popular celebrity, even though she is still a public figure. 

     

    “
    You don’t have to actually watch any of these shows. You just have to know enough for conversation with your peers and coworkers, or other over-curious commenters under these posts. That’s the identity of Whos today: you know just enough. But the issue is, you know just enough about everybody. 
    ”

     

    If we were to describe a more current-day scenario to explain Finger and Weber’s grocery store scenario, it would go something like this: You’re scrolling through social media, the usual platforms designed for pop culture – Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X. The most recent dazzling cast of offensively attractive actors shuffle between the big marketing grabs: Brittany Broski’s Royal Court, Sean Evans’ First We Feast, Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Netflix, Fallon, Kimmel, Colbert, Myers, you get the gist. A few years ago the list would have included James Corden and Ellen DeGeneres, but they have, surprisingly yet not for naught, faded off into the woodwork of Whos. But as you scroll, you get a low-down of everything that’s ‘hot’ right now, or rather, everyone. You don’t have to actually watch any of these shows. You just have to know enough for conversation with your peers and coworkers, or other over-curious commenters under these posts. That’s the identity of Whos today: you know just enough. But the issue is, you know just enough about everybody. 

    Unless you live under a rock or are taking a much-needed detox from social media as everyone attempts to at least once a month, chances are you’ll know enough about celebrity culture to have a conversation. And if it’s in a niche that you hold interest in, those celebrities will become important enough to you to become Thems. Fans, or rather, stans, create environments where public Whos become private Thems, often wanting to ‘gatekeep’ their favourite artist in order to be able to say that they were here first. Fanbases often have their own dedicated names – Swifties for Taylor Swift, BLINK for Blackpink, Beliebers for Justin Bieber, and so on. But the universal designation of Thems has depreciated; they don’t give that stature out to just anyone. More importantly, it’s harder to know who to give it to. As Finger and Weber discuss, the A-list to D-list hierarchy is hard to maintain when some B and C-listers get more traction with the public than A-listers. 

    Chris Rojek, author of the book Celebrity published back in 2001, says: “Celebrities are cultural fabrications…No celebrity now acquires public recognition without the assistance of cultural intermediaries who operate to stage-manage celebrity presence in the eyes of the public.” Therefore, one is only a celebrity as long as the public deems them one. With dwindling attention spans and an intensive network of exceedingly similar individuals swarming about on the internet, the public’s capacity to remember and the celebrity’s capacity to impress have both gone down severely. 

    Thus, not everyone is important enough to be deemed a celebrity. Stardom, as it used to exist, simply can’t anymore; the routine pathways through which one used to become ‘one of the greats’ – a blockbuster movie, critically acclaimed albums, or being a politician with a personality – have been, if not overshadowed, oversaturated with the plethora of Whos from social media, none famous enough to gain the credibility a celebrity requires. Shah Rukh Khan once told fellow actor Anupam Kher on his talk show ‘Kuch Bhi Ho Sakta Hai’ (translated ‘Anything Can Happen’): “I’ll tell you honestly? I’m the last of the stars.” While his statement has been contested by critics and the public alike, his celebrity status cannot be questioned. 

     

    “
    Stardom, as it used to exist, simply can’t anymore; the routine pathways through which one used to become ‘one of the greats’ – a blockbuster movie, critically acclaimed albums, or being a politician with a personality – have been, if not overshadowed, oversaturated with the plethora of Whos from social media.
    ”

     

    Finger and Weber dedicate their concluding chapter to the unfortunate group of Whos who always fall just a hair short of becoming Thems. Chapter 12, titled ‘On Rita Ora’, describes the British-Albanian singer’s touch-and-go relationship with fame, both as a singer and an actress. Indian equivalents could be Sanjay Kapoor, Parineeti Chopra, and Sohail Khan. But if you think about it, isn’t Whodom a great place to be? With a semblance of fame and allowance into Thems’ outer circles, isn’t it popularity without responsibility? Finger and Weber explain why this isn’t true: “It’s the constant striving for Themdom (or just “celebrity” at large) that makes a Who that much more compelling”. More importantly, being a Them gives you access to the opportunity many people don’t consider: legacy. There are members of the Kapoor family that are recognizable solely by their last name and nothing else, but this was possible because of the undeniable legacy of Prithviraj Kapoor, Shashi Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, and now, Ranbir Kapoor. This legacy gives you something much more important than fame; it gives you power. 

    As an audience, we’re always watching, regardless of whether the person on our screens is a Who or a Them. Finger and Weber discuss this plainly: “We celebrate Whos not only because they keep us entertained but also because we truly believe that the liminal space occupied by celebrities before reaching Themdom is a better and more interesting place to be.” So, whether it’s the next contestant on Bigg Boss or Love Island, no matter how much we may hate ourselves for it, we are tuned in. As Finger and Weber say, the perfect celebrity may just be a Who. 

  • In Defense Of The Small Town Lit Fest

    It is a truth universally acknowledged that every Indian town must have a literature festival. Not Jaipur though. Everyone knows the Jaipur Literature Festival, that absolutely carnivalesque spectacle melding books with a soupcon of music, dance, food and handicrafts.

    I mean Dehradun, Bhopal, Dibrugarh, Kozhikode, Nainital, Puducherry, Mangaluru. (Name a town; there’s a festival. Maybe even two.) So ubiquitous has the Indian lit fest become that travel sites now publish listicles on which lit fests to fly across the country for; it is impossible not to acquiesce to the suggestion that this is now a fairly lucrative part of the literary industry.

    But in all the plaintive edits written about the commercialisation of the literature festival, something gets left out. The idea that even the most obscure lit fest might actually be doing some good!

     

    “
    A small-town festival is one of the places where they can be part of the larger literary conversation. A Marathi-language crime novelist can be the headliner at a Pune festival, while the Odisha lit fest might underline the works of local-language historians
    ”

     

    The regional bookfest might be the only networking chance that a marginalised writer might get in an otherwise insular industry; one that prioritises a very particular kind of reader: Anglophile, well-educated, perfectly-dressed, articulate.

    The actual reading ecology in the country stretches far wider and more disparately. Marathi pulp thrillers. Bengali detective serials. Malayalam magazines whose readers dwarf many English publications. Hindi self-help, devotional texts, graphic novels, and even Substacks. These readers are enormous in number and almost absent from the cultural narrative.

    A small-town festival is one of the places where they can be part of the larger literary conversation. A Marathi-language crime novelist can be the headliner at a Pune festival, while the Odisha lit fest might underline the works of local-language historians. They aren’t part of one larger panel hoisted into the festival simply for tokenism. And they aren’t the sideshow. They are the main event, as they should be.

     

    Image Courtesy: Pexels / Tahir Xəlfəquliyev

     

    And of course, the advantages abound for the readers. For one, they can discover names beyond William Dalrymple or Amitav Ghosh, names that might resonate even more deeply since they come from a shared language and cultural space. A literature festival is, after all, an event built to bring together writers and readers, and at festivals like JLF, the chasm between the two yawns dangerously wide. Besides, a literature festival at readers’ doorsteps is a literature festival they are far more likely to attend.

    That is not to say that a festival set outside of the metros is necessarily small in stature. The Shillong Literary Festival, for instance, has headliners such as Booker Prize winners Kiran Desai and Damon Galgut, some of the biggest names of our time.

    Does a festival in Dehradun fix the world? No. It may feel faintly frivolous to hold one when the world seems to be on fire. But a room of curious people, listening to each other, is a small argument that we can still imagine things together.

    The debate about whether India reads will continue, because it is really a debate about what kind of cultural self-image we want. That is worth having. It would just go better if it began by taking seriously what Indians actually read, and where they are willing to turn up to talk about it.

    The Jaipur ideal has a place. It is just one part of a much larger picture.

  • Is Patronage The Future Of Animation?

    There was a time when kings, queens, and members of the aristocracy emptied their coffers to sustain some of the greatest art in the world: from Isabella d’Este as one of the foremost female patrons of the Italian Renaissance, to Catherine the Great’s benefaction supporting artists such as Fyodor Rokotov and Dmitry Levitzky.

    In the last few centuries, the identity of patrons – and the art they support – has changed quite a bit; but the intent remains the same. Today, corporations are at the front of the line, moving past traditional marketing and sponsorship goals to funnel money into contemporary art and artists. Their motivation has shifted from simple brand identity and commodification to building culture from behind the scenes, with the people behind the scenes. 

    In the world of social media, for instance, Substack is following a unique sponsorship model. The revenue from flagship partner companies like Uber, T-Mobile, and Balenciaga will directly support select influential creators on Substack. The motive is to make connecting with budding talent “easier and better than ever before.” Dan Robbins, head of brand sponsorships at Substack, says, “An ad is sort of grabbing you by the collar, and a sponsorship is kind of like the wind at your back.” 

    This is what patronage in the times of brand culture can look like. Design-led tech company Nothing launched its Club Nothing Fund, which offers $10,000 to four music collectives in support of their next “rebellious” and “innovative” event. While this can be viewed as a two-way deal – with Nothing being tagged in social media posts and having the Club Nothing ® logo stitched on merchandise – such investment has the ability to encourage and shape culture at the creator level. Charlie Smith, chief brand officer at Nothing, says: “The way I see it, modern-day brands can be patrons of the arts and help support artists, musicians and filmmakers. That’s when the creative community can see that you want to engage in a dialogue and not just take from them.”

    The question, then, is: in a world where competing with AI creations has become the new norm, will artists be compelled to rely only on monetary goodwill to create the art the world needs so badly?

    The most recently talked about partnership between the industrial and the creative world is that of Laika Entertainment and their new film, Wildwood. In 2005, Nike co-founder Phil Knight acquired the financially troubled Will Vinton Studios and rebranded it as Laika. His son Travis, then an animator at the studio, became its CEO in 2009. Laika released its first feature film, a stop-motion animation film titled Coraline in the same year, which grossed approximately $188.2 million worldwide, and has taken a seat in the cult film hall of fame. 

     

    Image Courtesy: Unsplash / Charles Chen

     

    Now, Laika has released Wildwood, a film that has been 16 years in the making, and has received stellar reviews. The New York Times says: “In a world of A.I., reboots and repeats, it feels quietly remarkable to encounter a film whose every frame – every stitch of clothing, every feather, every leaf – is so painstakingly rendered by human hands…the enchantment of Wildwood is the ambition and expertise demonstrated in every frame.” Even Rotten Tomatoes, known for its stingy reviews, has offered the film a 100% on its Tomatometer. The painstaking and laborious work of stop-motion animation speaks volumes for the passion that this film and its creators have for the art. Director Travis Knight speaks to this emotion: “At the time when entire worlds can be built with the click of a mouse, and videos generated from a prompt, choosing to make a stop-motion film feels like a quiet act of rebellion.” 

    As these conversations take place, it is important to ask: how much of this dedication is possible only because of the support of Phil Knight behind the studio? Phil and Penny Knight are among the most prominent philanthropists in America, having directed millions of dollars toward a wide range of causes through their foundation. While Laika doesn’t follow the traditional playbook of corporate patronage ventures, the presence of a business bigwig such as Knight in its C-suite undoubtedly finances its ability to keep on competing in an industry that seems to only reward box-office hits, not creative passion.

     

    “
    While Laika doesn’t follow the traditional playbook of corporate patronage ventures, the presence of a business bigwig such as Knight in its C-suite undoubtedly finances its ability to keep on competing in an industry that seems to only reward box-office hits, not creative passion.
    ”

     

    Hollywood’s relationship with animation is one of love and hate. With Disney and DreamWorks Animation as household names, animation has found its undeniable seat at the table; and yet, in the last 50 years, only seven animated films have finished their year as the No.1 domestic release. Amidst the plethora of live-action remake after remake, somewhere along the line, animation faded into the woodwork as nothing more than a genre created for children. Pixar’s chief creative officer takes on part of the blame, “You look at 90% of the [Hollywood industry’s] movies, and they’re funny, goofy, a little bit like babysitter material. We could step up our game [as an industry].” But does ‘for children’ mean any less effort? As Guillermo del Toro put it: “Animation is not a genre; it is a medium.” 

    In May 2024, Pixar cut 14% of its computer animation studio staff. Sony Pictures Entertainment laid off hundreds of employees across its film and TV studio, with CEO Ravi Ahuja citing evolving industry requirements as a key reason in his statement, “To support our growth, we are aligning our organization with where the business is going — not where it has been. That requires changes to how we are structured and where we invest.” Sony consequently shut down its VFX firm, Pixomondo, amongst other restructuring decisions. 

    It is here that we can revisit the question we asked in the introduction of this article: is patronage the way forward for projects that are built on passion rather than profitability? Our knee-jerk reaction is to say yes. Former Disney animator Tom Bancroft, who worked on superhits such as The Lion King and Aladdin, speaks about how AI can shift the world of animation, “It’s hard to think of a positive scenario where artists help train an AI and then aren’t needed anymore…AI is not going away. Artists need to get involved in shaping how it’s used.” Spiridellis Bros. Studio is developing Space Unicorn, an ‘AI-forward’ animated film estimated to finish the film in only two years using only 40 animators — a fraction of the 1000+ creatives that worked on Wildwood. The opinions on the matter of AI in animation are varying; yet recognition of its presence and persistence remains throughout.

    There are fewer and fewer flowers growing out of the cracks in the pavement. Flow, the 2025 Oscar winner for best animated feature, was made on a budget of $3.7 million on Blender, and grossed over $66 million in profits worldwide. It seems to be an outlier rather than a norm slowly taking shape. Despite Wildwood’s clear artistic mastery and perceived Oscar buzz, its domestic box office numbers for the weekend reached only around $11.6 million – a dismal number contrasted against its $100 million budget. 

    The creative impulse survives. But with AI reshaping industries and layoffs gutting creative teams, we risk a future where art reaches the masses only if a patron decides to fund it. 

  • Changing The Game(Play)

    Bollywood actor Vidyut Jammwal is basking in the limelight of his latest film release – Street Fighter, in which he plays the role of Dhalsim, alongside 50 Cent and Jason Momoa. Square-jawed Jammwal’s character is rippling with muscles and schooled in martial arts; he uses his extraordinary abilities of elongating arms and fire breathing to bring down his opponents one by one.

    But Dhalsim is also ridden with stereotype, cast as a yogi using his extraordinary abilities to save his poverty-stricken village. As a final touch, he also wears a necklace made of skulls.

    Games made in the West have long perpetuated these Orientalist cliches. But recently, there has been a changing of the guard. The South Asian diaspora has been helming gaming studios, using their games as a lens to explore complicated idea of Indianness, hybridity and migration. Working from North American cities of Toronto and Seattle, these game developers are not only centring South Asian characters with South Asian stories, they’re doing it without the prism of traditional diaspora tropes.

     

    “
    The game mixes turn-based combat, skateboarding and cooking. But most radically, it centers the experiences of a young queer South Asian woman.
    ”

    Take for example Venba, made by the Toronto-based game development company Visai Games. The gameplay revolves around Venba and Paavalan, a couple from Tamil Nadu who have set up home in Canada in the 1980s. The story is absurdly simple. Venba’s treasured old cookbook is falling apart at the seams. The ink is smudged, pages are town, and you, the gamer, are required to recreate each recipe from scratch, using a combination of accompanying diagrams and page fragments, and a healthy amount of guesswork. But perhaps not much guesswork is required, for the recipes included well-beloved dishes such as idli and dosa.

    The emotional anchor comes via Venba and Paavalan’s son Kavin, who grows up as a diaspora kid immersed in Canadian culture. Kavin tries to put together the recipe but faces a stumbling block since he cannot read Tamil. He compensates, in the way many children of immigrants do, by cooking from her drawings. Food is the shared language that brings the family together.

    And then there’s Seattle’s Outerloop Games and their latest creation Dosa Divas, which pulls from RPGs such as Super Mario RPG and Octopath Traveler. The story revolves around a family of three sisters, in which the oldest sibling has captured the family restaurant, turned it into a capitalist corporation, and is using it to sell slop in tubes. At one level, this is a simple gameplay in which the younger sisters fight off lawyers and staff. On the other, it becomes a comment on the commodification of South Asian culture and the way Indian food gets packaged and sold abroad. Players may be reminded of the way haldi doodh and chai has been co-opted by big corporations.

     

     

    Equally fun and equally stereotype-busting is Thirsty Suitors in which Jala faces a litany of ex partners while dealing with her sister’s wedding and the familial expectations that always stem from such celebrations. The game mixes turn-based combat, skateboarding and cooking. But most radically, it centers the experiences of a young queer South Asian woman, even winning a Tribeca Games Award in 2022 and earning a BAFTA nomination.

    Ubisoft itself has supported Thousand Star Studios on Aikyam, a Bollywood-inspired fantasy role-playing game.

    These are games that bring diaspora culture to the fore; What unites these games is how they treat culture: food, language, and family duty are both the mechanics and the plot, immediately recognizable to South Asians who have grown up in North America. That alone is a rare shift. For players in India, the games offer something else: a view of how relatives abroad hold on to home, and a reminder of what migration costs and what travels with it.

    In that sense, these games work as a link between the diaspora and the homeland. A mother’s hand-written cookbook, a grandmother urging her grandchild to get married, a queer young woman navigating her identity while dismantling stereotypes are shared cultural references on both sides. Nor are these games meant only for South Asians.

    By telling these stories on their own terms, these games invite players everywhere to lookbeyondstereotypes and discover the messy, joyful, deeply human experiences that shape identity. In doingso,they make room for a richer idea of Indianness — one that travels across borders without losing its roots.

  • The Not-So-Noble Nobel

    When Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 1913, he became the first Indian, rather, Asian, to do so. Since his historic win, only 8 others of Indian origin or long-term Indian residents have won this coveted accolade in all categories. That makes the grand total number of Indians who have won the prize a mere 9 out of 1000 individuals and 28 organizations. That is, 0.8% of Nobel Prize winners come from a country with roughly 18% of the world’s population.

    The Nobel is considered one of the most distinguished and difficult prizes awarded to only the most exceedingly talented scholars in their respective fields. Yet such a small share of winners cannot reflect a shortage of talent on the Indian subcontinent; far from it. A more telling explanation appears on the Nobel Prize’s own website, in its citation for Tagore: “…He has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.” The Nobel made space for Tagore within its existing hierarchies, a social stratum that defines the West as the standard. 

    The marginalization of Global South scholars has long been a part of any conversation about the Nobel. Every October, the prize commands about two and a half weeks of attention, with laureates celebrated across Sweden; before the spotlight fades and we are reminded that, beyond the already exclusive world of the award, there are many equally accomplished scholars and pioneers worth hearing from. 

     

    “
    The Nobel is considered one of the most distinguished and difficult prizes awarded to only the most exceedingly talented scholars in their respective fields
    ”

     

    It is of course natural to look beyond the Nobel for other honors. Take the Pulitzer Prize, which was long open only to US citizens and now also admits long-time US residents. The change was a way to widen its pool of voices: Indian-origin winners in the Books category include Jhumpa Lahiri, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Vijay Seshadri. As Ingrid Rojas Contreras, a 2023 Pulitzer finalist, put it: “The Pulitzer changing their citizenship requirements matters on so many levels…Migrant literature is American literature.” 

    The shift is certainly welcome, but books must still be published by a US publisher to qualify, and as award-winning translator Daisy Rockwell wrote on her now deleted X account: “This may seem an unsurprising fact to many but it’s taken nearly thirty years to get one of my translations published in the US.” Rockwell, who has been translating books from Hindi and Urdu to English for nearly three decades, never had a translation published in the US till Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, after it received the International Booker Prize.

    Both iterations of the Booker – the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize – consider only books published in the UK and Ireland. Although its recognition of the vital work of translators is valuable, it still leaves open the question of whose stories are positioned to travel. The Booker does well to bring recognition to insightful and deeply personal stories from India – consider The God of Small Things written by Arundhati Roy and Heart Lamp, written by Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhasthi – and yet, other Indian genres, such as science fiction and satire, rarely find recognition at such a scale, while their Western counterparts flourish.

     

    “
    India has plenty of esteemed awards of its own: the Jnanpith Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Rabindra Puraskar (named after the Nobel laureate himself), the Yuva Puraskar, and more.
    ”

     

    Why must we look outwards at all? 

    India has plenty of esteemed awards of its own: the Jnanpith Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Rabindra Puraskar (named after the Nobel laureate himself), the Yuva Puraskar, and more. These awards provide recognition as well as monetary support, and have reach that travels far and wide. Like any long-standing institution, these awards have occasionally faced controversies, a reminder that the work of making literary recognition more transparent and inclusive is ongoing. 

    It would be patronising to say writers shouldn’t seek recognition at all; for many, it is a way out of poverty, abuse, and discrimination. And even when it isn’t, art that appears once in many lifetimes deserves to be appreciated. It is not the pursuit of accolades that we must dissuade writers from; it is that the nesting ground of acclaim seems to be in one corner of the world. Looking beyond this space – and the English language – opens up countless stories, experiences, and emotions waiting to be felt. We must be careful to tread the thin line between peer-led validation and Indian subordinance.

    What matters most are the stories: accounts of human experience that differ vastly from our own, yet are whole and worth listening to. If we approach literature with a little sonder, a recognition that every life is as vivid and complex as our own, perhaps we won’t need prize lists to tell us what to read. Our recommendation is to read widely, read fairly, and read uncomfortably. The world is far wider than the juries at the top would have us believe; we only have to open our eyes to the brilliance that already exists.

  • The Real Reel Problem

    We’ve done it, you’ve done it – we’ve all scrolled past an Instagram reel in T-minus 3 seconds. Either the thumbnail isn’t attractive, the content looks uninteresting, or you’ve seen one too many reels like the one on your screen before – but the seemingly automated thumb movement pushing one video into the next is an adaptation even Charles Darwin couldn’t have anticipated. 

    While this is a very real, very apparent problem for consumers, it poses an even greater challenge for creators, who now have to squeeze their content into a hook that not only captivates the audience for those three seconds, but keeps them coming back for more. 

    The attention span problem is not a new one, and certainly not bound to the world of media. Centuries ago, when there were no phones, internet, or even electricity, scholars and monks pondered over the question of distraction. Books were once seen as the agents of destruction – the very habit people are struggling to get back to was once the root cause of dismay and alleged impropriety. From the 12th century Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi’s proclamation: “The reason people today read sloppily is that there are a great many printed texts,” to a Time news article from 2008 warning about the dangers of ‘newstritional disorder’, our attention has always been perceived of being in danger of slipping out of our hands. 

    The difference between the philosophers and modern-day skeptics lies in the fact that attention is no longer something personal that can be engaged and disengaged at will. Attention is a commodity, for which there is both an industry and a consumer base. The contemporary understanding of the relationship between the two originates in a 1969 lecture by Herbert A. Simon.  He argued that in an emerging attention economy, the cognitive capacity to process information was itself a productive resource. This means that an individual’s capacity to take in information, that is, their attention, is subject to the same logic of scarcity and allocation as any other. By diverting attention to one video above another, we are treating that video as a resource; and the creator on the other end of the transaction receives monetary compensation for that attention. 

     

    “
    The issue with this premise is fundamental. The simulation of continuity while the content remains the same as it would in one long-form video promises both effort and new information while seldom providing so.
    ”

     

    And so, creators must innovate. With the attention span having declined from about two and a half minutes in 2004 to an average of 47 seconds currently, they must come up with new ways to break through the video noise and grab the fancy of whichever randomized consumer’s For You Page the video happens to land on. One such innovation is the Instagram Series. Even before it became a formal feature in June 2026, creators were cutting down Get Ready With Mes (GRWMs) and story times into multiple parts, recreating an episodic strategy to compel watchers to stay on their feed. If a creator manages to tell one half of a gripping story in a 30-second video, chances are, people will click on their profile to search for the next part. The new feature makes this search even simpler by allowing creators to organize their content into different series of clips, which users can binge by using the Watch Next option. 

    The interest still lies in the completion of a story; the problem arises when one only gets a few seconds to do so. Herein comes the hook, which works as the USP of every video. Often misleading and laden with clickbait, the hook enraptures the audience in a way that forces them to watch more. This method mirrors the 1-2-3 filing system popularized by the Associated Press close to 20 years ago, when faced with the problem of oversaturation of news consumption. This method suggested starting with an alerting headline, followed by a short explanation, and then added details regarding the event. 

    By making content into a series, the creator has the explanation portion taken care of. Audiences are already invested in the story. Social media strategist and entrepreneur @juliabroome, whose Instagram currently has 390,000 followers, talks about this feature: “The algorithm wants you to have a signature series…the goal is to give your audience a recognizable premise, a consistent format, and a reason to come back for more.” Making a consistent comparison to television, Broome explains how the feature can be used to reach more potential followers. 

     

    Image Courtesy: Pexels / Mizuno K

     

    Christina Kirkman, social media influencer, has filed her very popular boxing videos under such a series. Brooklyn Coffee Shop, a satirical mini-video series created by Pooja Tripathi, is an Instagram page of its own, with over 677,000 followers as of this article. Sophie Silva, known for her ‘31 days of Halloween Costumes’ series on Instagram and TikTok, amasses millions of views on each video of her dressed up in shockingly elaborate and detailed outfits, from Black Swan to the Fairy Godmother from Shrek 2 and more.

    This format is also used in the now booming vertical movie industry. These ‘verticals’ are essentially episodic movies which last around 1 to 3 minutes, stretched across multiple small bits. Seen across countries, verticals now have their own apps dedicated to the 9:16 aspect ratio: ReelShort, DramaBox, and Goodshort in the US, and KadhaiShorts and Jio Hotstar’s Tadka in India. Revenues for the industry are expected to exceed $16.2 billion by 2030 in China, and about $3.8 billion by 2030 in the US, according to Deadline. 

    The issue with this premise is fundamental. The simulation of continuity while the content remains the same as it would in one long-form video promises both effort and new information while seldom providing so. Short-form video continues to proliferate, rewarding creators for posting more by boosting their videos onto the algorithms of more consumers, while the audiences continue to engage with content with little to no critical thinking. The ramifications are worrying – there is very little research done on the effects of short-form video on the brain. Yes, the words ‘dopamine’ and ‘serotonin’ are thrown around once in a while, but the way the videos actually affect the human mind in the long-term is scarily unknown. Dr. Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California Irvine, talks about the relation between rapid attention switching and an increase in perceived stress. University of Bristol researchers correlate the constant change of context with degradation of prospective memory – the ability to recall something you had intended to do. 

    Short-form video series now exist on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and even LinkedIn. The new Instagram feature is just one of many designed to retain maximum users on the app. However, it also adds to an existing roster of harmful repercussions, and this mustn’t be taken lightly. That which is easily digestible is made so at the cost of critical analysis. As long as information is spliced and spoon-fed, any new feature will thrive. While creators learn to grapple with a new turn in an already overwhelming industry, consumers must at least attempt to be cognizant of the stratagem. 

  • Judging A Book By Its Cover

    We’ve all grown up with the distinctive memory of the vivid illustrations that adorned our favorite books. They were too heavy for us to carry around at the time, yet we clung to their pages in hopes that we too could be whisked away to distant, imagined lands. From the iconic dust jackets of Amar Chitra Katha and The God of Small Things, we learned to recognize books simply from their emblematic art. What if we told you that book covers, like art, have gone through their own phases of modernism, maximalism and cultural renaissance? And what if we told you that India is the perfect case study?

    Indian art is inseparable from its loudness. In a country of many languages, cultures and histories, maximalism seems inherent to the way Indians live, seeping into every crevice of artistic expression. In search of the holy grail of contemporary Indian book design, one must look back to the origins of writing and bookbinding in the country, which evolved from stone tablets to palm leaves between the 11th and 14th centuries. The Mughal era brought Persian influences, further diversifying the intricate art of design – from the brass block designs of Rajasthan to the Banaganapalli lacquer work of Southern India. Paper and modern printing were introduced in India from the 15th century onwards, a byproduct of proselytization by Christian missionaries.

    From Madhubani and Tanjore to Pattachitra and Thangka art, Indian book covers draw on their own history and enmesh it with Western art forms, creating a syncretism of sorts. These influences are captivating: the push and pull of modern realism set against the vibrancy that Indian writing and experience demand. An example that immediately comes to mind is the Mughal miniature on the cover of Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, a split cover with a white base and plain red text. A book recording eccentric moments from Indian culture and history calls for a look into that history, but not without Western script that would appeal to the target audience.

    Most importantly, Indian design is birthed from the story being told. Tales of deep domestic scars and historical resistance come with covers that may not be explicitly visually stimulating, but their restraint speaks volumes. Take, for instance, Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim. The muted, papyrus-toned background and understated typography recede, leaving the image of a half-burnt book to dominate: dusty, charred pages that evoke the brutality of war.

    Perhaps the most interesting period of Indian book cover art is that of Indian pulp fiction. Identifiable by gauche horror fiction and blood-curdling murder mysteries, with just a touch of exaggerated sex appeal and grandiose dialogue, pulp fiction art was the bread and butter of the 1970s and 1980s. With its literary base in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, pulp fiction covers were electrifying, provocative and arresting. One of the great artists of this time, Shelle, is praised by Amit Khan, a prominent pulp fiction writer: “…if he’s making fingers or hair, they were amazingly detailed illustrations, incomparable to even photographs.” Other popular artists of the time included Mohan Manimala, Suresh and Anil Pathak, who would spend hours on their detailed sketches.

     

    Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons / Khushala

     

    Hand-painted and meant for the populace, pulp fiction became popular at a time when mass-produced paperbacks were taking India by storm. People wanted covers that excited them, ones that helped the masses escape their regular realities into worlds of riveting fiction. Accessible to a majority of the Indian public, these books found their primary audience among the blue-collar workers of India – coolies, rickshaw drivers, vegetable hawkers, street food vendors – those who wanted something quick, legible and stimulating, in languages they could easily understand. Closely following were female audiences, for whom these books served as a connection to the world outside their homes. “Girls used to be the important character of the illustration for any pulp novel,” says Pathak.

    Critic Mrinal Pande links the appeal to the real-life experiences of its key readership: “There’s a lot of violence in small-town India, with kidnappings and killings, and so they can relate to the plots – only they want a hero going against the system who wins.”

    On the other end of the spectrum came Satyajit Ray’s modernist design principles. Starting out as a junior visualizer at the advertising firm D. J. Keymer and Co. and going on to become principal artist at its sister publisher, Signet Press, he incorporated traditional Bengali Alpona and Patachitra art with Western influences, among many other genre-bending stylistic choices. In books such as Aamabasya and Bonolota Sen, he pays homage to Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings in his depictions of the female form, using negative space and asymmetrical titling to break away from the traditional Bengali book covers that permeated the space in the early 1950s.

    India’s art scene bounced in and around the socio-political turmoil of the times. The Bengal famine, the Partition and the struggle for independence brought literature more rooted in realism, portraying local challenges and leaping away from art that appealed only to the urban spaces. Zainul Abedin, an artist from Bangladesh, is recognizable through his work with negative space. Background features are flattened and minimal to give focus to the subject, evoking emotion and representing the despair of the time. This emphasis is also seen in Ray’s work, integrated with his own individuality through realism.

    Unfortunately, hand-painted and drawn illustrations are in decline – largely owing to e-books, AI, and graphic artists working on computers. Shagun Sharma, one of Meerut’s biggest pulp fiction publishers, speaks to this change: “The era of computer and technology came up with its repercussions…We have some stock paintings, and now instead of asking an artist to draw a cover for us, we take our old stock images and merge them with pictures available on the Internet.” There is a growing priority on marketing and salability over creative direction, compounded by the increased quantity of books published. This boosts demand faster than illustrators can keep up, leading to the recycling of older artwork.

    Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

     

    Even so, it is by no means “out with the old”; we are also “in with the new,” with a wave of Indian artists producing beautifully intricate and meaningful compositions that catch both our eyes and our hearts. Prominent names include Bhavi Mehta, who won the 2024 Oxford Bookstore Cover Prize for her design of Pradeep Sebastian’s The Book Beautiful, as well as Aarushi Menon and Antra K, both story-driven artists with innovative styles. Manimala and Suresh are still freelancing for publications, drawing on their old habits of sketching and combining them with digital design.

    Further, many people are working to keep the old art alive. Author Quinn Dombrowski maintains an incredible archive of old South Asian book cover art through her visual blog on Flickr. Blaft Publications, co-founded in 2008 by American-born Rakesh Khanna, is a house that translates and publishes contemporary regional pulp fiction from India and abroad, keeping the genre alive and accessible to a whole new audience. Their work includes The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction Vols. 1 and 2 and The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, among others.

    Thus, art persists. The next time you pick up a book, stop and look for a while. The depiction may be more captivating than the words themselves.