Vernacular fiction and digital platforms: An ethnography of contemporary Indian book worlds

The global publishing industry is increasingly present in India.

Furthermore, corporate capital from both theinternational and the Indian IT industry is investing in literary “content production” for variousdigital platforms, including book publishing.

This process has reverberations within the “the vernaculardomain” of Indian fiction writing, consisting of literature in 22 officially recognized regional languages.A book market that until recently was fragmented in both linguistic and regional dimensions is rapidly transforming and expanding. The increasing literacy in India is an important factor.

From a corporate point of view, India has a huge untapped market for books: hundreds of millions of people, newly literate in the so-called vernacular languages.The aim of this project is to understand how the worlds of Indian literature is transforming in theconjunction between large scale media organization, new publishing technologies and regional Indianlanguage publishers.

What kind of vernacular books and authors become relevant in these emergingworlds of literature?The project works with ethnographical methods, including participant observation, interviews andtextual studies of books as well as mass media material.

Intensive multi-sited fieldwork in India willbe conducted two months per year (totally six months) among staff at digital publication platforms aswell as among vernacular publishers and authors, for example at literary festivals.