It might be confined to pockets, but the readership for the few writers left is dedicated. I believe there is still a market for pulp fiction. What is the place of pulp fiction in the urban Hindi market, where the likes of Premchand, Jaishankar Prasad, Bhisham Sahni remain most popular? That changed the market of books in India. Their writers visited literature festivals where they could be seen and spoken to. These books were priced at less than 200 rupees, and were made widely available. They wrote romances that felt real, that youngsters could relate to. Writers like Ravinder Singh and Durjoy Dutta followed. Chetan Bhagat opened a window to the new, changing India for them he wrote in simple English that everyone could understand, and stories that could be everyoneвЂ™s story. Around the end of the вЂ™90s, the tier-2 and tier-3 towns developed a preoccupation with learning English to get jobs, in order to keep up with the liberalised world. Two names that stood the test of time are Ved Prakash Sharma and Surender Mohan Pathak. The time of Ibn-e-Safi, Gulshan Nanda, Om Prakash Sharma and Ved Prakash Kamboj was long gone. Television could be one of the reasons the quality of writing could be another. But by the early вЂ™90s, the number of writers dwindled. Some authors even had imprints of their own, and published their books. It was deeply entrenched in its locales, appearing only in local crime magazines and as pocket books based out of Meerut. While Hindi pulp fiction used to be quite the rage at one time, it has seen a steep decline, even among its niche audience, in the last few years. Snippets from her conversation with VerveвЂ¦. And although the pool of Hindi pulp and its authors is still gradually growing smaller - with the exception of Pathak, and the late Ved Prakash Sharma (two of his books made an appearance in 2017вЂ™s small-town-set Bollywood hit Bareilly ki Barfi) there arenвЂ™t really any other writers whoвЂ™ve had much success - Thakur can be largely credited for their increased visibility in urban locales. With this move, Thakur (who now heads the languages division at the Amazon-owned Westland) managed to make Pathak a recognised name among a tier-1 audience, and even in elite literary circles. She signed on crime fiction writer Surender Mohan Pathak in 2013, introducing the cult icon to mainstream shelves and increased his reach in a short span of time - his book The Colaba Conspiracy sold around 25,000 copies under the HarperCollins imprint soon after its release. That was until Minakshi Thakur, who till two years ago was heading the Hindi Publishing Programme at HarperCollins, saw the potential of the genre. But the page-turners were always missing from stores in large metropolises due to their publishers not being big commercial players. From titles like Dulhan Maange Dahej ( The Bride Asks For Dowry) and The Colaba Conspiracy to Apne Qatl Ki Supari ( A Bounty For OneвЂ™s Own Murder) and Blackmailer Ki Hatya ( The Murder Of The Blackmailer), these Hindi pulp fiction books were once devoured by vernacular readers who remained devoted until the вЂ™90s. If you ever travel by local trains in certain parts of the country, you canвЂ™t miss the vibrant, kitschy covers that line the stationsвЂ™ book stalls.

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