Literary industries, audiences, and authors in India have changed drastically over the past couple of decades. Just recently, I was reminded of this fact while watching an interview with Indian “chick lit” writer Anuja Chauhan. Asked about her personal measure of her writerly success, Chauhan responded, “Readability. I feel blessed when readers tell me that they read my books when they travel or that my book is on their bathroom shelves.”Footnote ¹ What is this new literary ecology in which a book in the bathroom is a trophy, I wanted to scoff. But my knee-jerk skepticism was checked by the young interviewer's enthusiastic admission that, in fact, Chauhan's novels were the only books she had carried from Mumbai to the United States. It struck me then that only last year, I, too, had picked up Chauhan's book Those Pricey Thakur Girls (2013) at the Nizamuddin Railway Station in Delhi. Before the train pulled into the Gwalior Junction about five hours later, I had finished reading the novel.

Indian English literature did not always circulate like this. Read largely by an English-educated (thus, elite) demographic, its success was measured by international recognition. It was not sold at railway stations—stacked alongside cheaply printed American self-help books and Hindi pulp fiction. It also did not have a local fan following among India's youth. Today, Indian English literature is accessible and readable in a way it has never been before. There is a growing body of genre fiction that prides itself on its “simple English,” a solid middle-class readership, and newer web-based publishing platforms that make literary fiction available on 3G cellular devices. Perhaps for the first time, Indian English writers are read more in India than outside the country. Clinched by high sales figures, Indian English popular fiction is actually popular in India. I want to say that this change has been quiet and recent. But in fact, as scholars of Indian literature, we have often simply dismissed it as a market phenomenon of questionable politics.

Ulka Anjaria's Reading India Now attends to India's shifting literary landscape with the necessary urgency and precision. The book structures its exploration of post-2000s (what it calls “post-postcolonial”) literature and culture in three sections—“Locations,” “Publics,” and “Representations.” It brings together a few different kinds of texts with mass appeal: English-language “bestsellers” by Chauhan and Indian literature's enfant terrible Chetan Bhagat, a Hindi television show, and Bollywood and documentary film. This variety makes vivid a range of political formations found in a cultural terrain that is too often dismissed as market driven. As products of capitalism, critics assume that a bestselling novel or a television talk show cannot reflect critically on the present. Because all of these cultural texts sell and circulate widely, they are studied only as commodified products.

Reading India Now asks a different question: if so many Indians read a Chauhan or a Bhagat novel, shouldn't scholars also read these? In response, the book does exactly what its title promises: it models literary study that draws meaning from the world it lives in and acknowledges the vitality of literature. In a sharp contrast to the historical bias of postcolonial literary studies, Anjaria marshals the idea of the “contemporary.” For good reason, postcolonial studies have long focused on the legacy of British colonialism in India. This temporal bent has either neglected contemporary literary and cultural production or studied it only in relation to colonial history. Against the critical tendency to read the lived realities of India as metaphors and allegories in Indian English literature, Reading India Now pursues the materialities that shape this body of work and how it is read.

The “contemporary” both invokes the present moment and names a mode of reading literature that opens onto the world around the text. It tracks the diminishing distance between a literary work and the people who read, write, and aspire to it. Early on in the book, Anjaria stages her interventions thus: “What would happen to our understanding of today's Indian Literature if the doors [ . . . ] were figuratively opened and the sea air, and the smell of the city outside were allowed to pour in. If the hawkers selling printed pulp novels, the snatch of a film song, the hum of millions of satellite dishes, the twenty-four hour newscast, Twitter, and the smell of rupees exchanging hands—if those were allowed to enter and disrupt the quiet spaces sanctified by literature and cosmopolitan history?” (p. 2).

To open the figurative doors between literary criticism and the world, Anjaria follows Rita Felski's call to read beyond critique. Her literary analyses do not rely on reading as an anxious and suspicious act of uncovering bad politics but see it as an act of love toward the text. While the rhetoric of love can risk turning a blind eye to the pro-market, misogynistic, and fascist views of an author like Bhagat, it can also provide the critic a better purchase on the popularity of his ideas. Anjaria believes that popular genre fiction offers insights about contemporary Indian experiences and sensibilities. But, to get to these insights, we need to shift how we read. For instance, a defining feature of much of contemporary literary production is that it is set in small Indian towns and cities and oriented toward a local audience. In the overwhelmingly diasporic and globally oriented body of Indian English literature, the idea of location/place has always been fraught. India is often figured as a place of oppressive and/or fetishized tradition. Rather than interrogate the authenticity of these representations (a predictable line of postcolonial inquiry), Anjaria notes how small Indian towns and cities have become sites of future possibilities. That authors like Chetan Bhagat and Chauhan turn to Indian provinces reveals the changing nature of aspiration in today's India, where a class-, gender-, and caste-marked demographic wishes to realize its potential in India and no longer looks to international jobs as synonymous with success.

Reading India Now offers a necessary corrective to scholarship on postliberalization India that remains attached to a story of cultural and political decline. In doing so, it adds a much-needed chapter to studies of Indian English literature which have favored globally circulating works over those that enjoy readership in India. By examining the political stakes of the kind of readability coveted by Chauhan, Reading India Now leaves us with fundamental questions about postcolonial literary criticism today and its “inbuilt mistrust of the present” (p. 4): what is the relationship between the critic and her world? What does it mean to read politically?