MARGINS OF THE MAINSTREAM: GENRE, CATEGORY LITERATURE, AND LITERARY HIERARCHIES IN CONTEMPORARY INDIAN FICTION

Abstract

This paper examines the phenomenon of category literature within the landscape of contemporary Indian fiction published in English between 1990 and 2022. Category literature, broadly understood as fiction produced for and marketed within commercially demarcated generic categories such as romance, crime, horror, science fiction, mythological fantasy, and self-help narrative, has witnessed unprecedented growth in Indian publishing over the past three decades, complicating the established critical hierarchies that have long privileged the literary novel as the dominant form of serious cultural production. Drawing on a corpus of eighteen texts selected across six generic categories, the study investigates the ways in which Indian authors working within category fiction simultaneously negotiate, reproduce, and subvert the conventions of their chosen genres, and examines the relationship between generic belonging and the construction of readerly identity in a rapidly transforming urban consumer culture. Theoretically, the paper draws on Pierre Bourdieu's field theory of cultural production, Fredric Jameson's concept of the political unconscious and the ideologeme of genre, and the more recent revisionary work of scholars in popular fiction studies, including John Sutherland, Ken Gelder, and Rachel Noorda. A structured analysis of paratext, including cover design, blurb rhetoric, author branding, and digital marketing discourse, is combined with close reading of selected narrative passages to argue that category literature in the Indian context performs a distinctive mediatory function, producing generic pleasures that are simultaneously localised and globally circulating, commercially oriented and ideologically complex. The paper concludes by arguing for a reconfiguration of the critical apparatus through which Indian fiction in English is evaluated, one that takes seriously the cultural work performed by category fiction without collapsing the distinction between critical and commercial modes of value.