The Emergence of the Indian Best-Seller: Chetan Bhagat and His Metro Fiction

Chetan Bhagat’s fiction touches an emotional chord in the new emerging Metro generation in India. His Metro Fiction shows the dreams and hopes of an aggressively ambitious generation whose laughter is tinged with tears. His characters are irreverent young people whose motto in life is—Get going, or get out of the way. Yet there remains a pall of gloom about these bright young people, an existential angst about their future and an unrelenting presence of their past. This curious blend of humour and pathos, of hopes and fears, of success and failure marks his best-selling dark comedies of contemporary India. The significance of Bhagat lies in the fact that he has dealt with the social, political, religious and racial conditions of the Indian milieu in an allegorical manner.

The present critical work is an outstanding story of Chetan Bhagat’s achievement as a novelist and socio-political activist. It is a pioneering study of this hugely popular author who has contributed to the emergence of the new wave of Indian English novel. The readers will find the serious purpose that lies behind the apparently flippant mode that Chetan Bhagat likes to adopt. This work shall give the rising star of Indian English Fiction the academic distinction he richly deserves.