Who Can Identify Byomkesh?

The Mystery of the Missing Indian Mysteries.

- J. Madison Davis

The impact of British literature on India was profound, altering the poetry, fiction, and drama of the many cultures and languages unified by the empire, and it has lingered. Victorian attitudes in public entertainment remained powerful enough to embarrass many Indians with the sexuality decorating their own ancient temples. Kissing was illegal in Indian cinema until the 1990s, though that has hardly slowed “Bollywood,” which annually produces twice as many films as Hollywood and was estimated by Forbes to be a $2.28 billion industry in 2014. Book publishing is a similarly gigantic industry. Nielsen reports that literacy is predicted to reach 90 percent by 2020, and one-quarter of the youth population (83 million) identifies as book readers. Although most books published are textbooks, as might be expected from a dynamically developing country, pleasure reading is a significant part of the market and promises huge growth as well.

Strangely, however, what is written in India tends to stay in India. The sixth largest book market in the world, India is second only to the United States as the largest English book market in the world. Indians have scattered around the world, providing Trinidad with barristers, the US and Canada with physicians, and the United Kingdom with skilled and unskilled labor. London has hundreds of curry shops, and George Harrison incorporated the unique attributes of classical Indian music into Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But where are the Indian novels? Not the sacred texts like the Vedas or the Kama Sutra, which opened so many Western eyes—where are the Who-Shot-Johns?