Wknd sat down with six women writers - Kiran Manral, Andaleeb Wajid, Venkatraman, Vohra, Singh and Payal Dhar - to talk about what it’s like to write romance novels in India today. stories that reflected my understanding of women in India,” she says. “I wanted to tell stories where romance is part of the story, but it’s not the only goal. After that first Mills & Boon, she moved away from the template too. But there is a search for other things too: the self, survival, happiness in, as Vohra puts it, “more than just one room”. Some are struggling to rebuild confidence, some to see themselves as beautiful, some to define what they want.Īlways, there is a search for love.
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In many of the romance novels written by Indian women, the women protagonists tend to be the focus, and the drivers of the plot, rather than just the objects of desire. Unusual themes have been adopted in these romance tales: some protagonists are tackling divorce or depression there are discussions of abuse and consent stories of college dropouts reinventing themselves and women and men overcoming childhood traumas. “Every book of mine comes with the message that one can live with self-respect that women have a right to claim their place in the world,” says Sundari Venkatraman, 60. They aim not merely to titillate, but to speak to the woman reader, as a woman who inhabits the same world. So they played to the strengths they did have: the female gaze, and lived experience. The women who did begin to write romance in India, then, felt compelled to stand out. It was so in the greatest romance factory in the world, Bollywood, where directors, producers, writers and those calling the shots remain overwhelmingly men. “The Indian reader was used to the idea of the male gaze, or a man speaking for women,” says Swati Daftuar, senior commissioning editor for fiction at HarperCollins India.
Women aren’t really allowed as much freedom of expression in general, let alone when it comes to something like writing about romance, is how romance writer Nikita Singh, 30, puts it. Romance novels must, almost by definition, include writing on sex, and this was not comfortable territory for women.
The women romance writers who have since emerged say there’s an additional factor at play. Here, boys equally dream about who their romantic partners will be,” she says. “That’s mainly because, unlike the West, there is a huge section of men, between the ages of 15 and 35, who read romances in India.
“That surge was associated with authors such as Ravinder Singh, Durjoy Datta or Sudeep Nagarkar ,” says Milee Ashwarya, publisher with the Ebury and Vintage divisions of Penguin Random House India. That first Indian M&B writer was a woman, Milan Vohra, but most of the others in the growing genre were, unusually, men. Romance writing by Indians in English began to see an uptick. About a decade ago, Mills & Boon published its first book by an Indian author.