Raj Kamal Jha, an author whose works are rather difficult to get hold of in a physical bookstore today, was described by India Today as having secured ‘a reported advance of over $275,000 – the largest paid to a first-time Indian novelist since Arundhati Roy and The God of Small Things.’ This was possible because he was signed up by Picador. Stories of similar advances paid to Vikram Seth, Ramachandra Guha and others are not infrequent in Indian newspapers. We do not now see Jha, he does not figure in discussions of Indian writing today – but wait till the news of his next whopping advance comes along. Demonstrating the power of global publishing, such news items not only tell us that an Indian author is a celebrity because she or he commands this kind of money from a global publishing giant, but also subtly suggest that the advance presents the author as a celebrity even without a word in print – a celebrity in advance, shall we say?

‘Celebrity culture,’ writes Tom Mole, ‘has changed the way it operates, reflexively revealing some of its mechanisms. The structure of the apparatus is becoming as much an object of fascination as the individuals it promotes.’ I propose in this chapter that Indian writing in English (hereafter IWE), mainly its fiction, is one such celebrity genre that draws attention to the apparatuses and mechanisms that have made it a celebrity. By ‘celebrity’ I mean an instantly recognizable ‘face’ or space that is a regular presence in various media and whose presence within the public sphere cannot be ignored.

IWE's celebrification – the process of becoming a celebrity – is possible through a convergence culture (a term from media theorist Henry Jenkins to describe the convergence of multiple media and functions into miniaturized, single-platform devices3) that brings together the public sphere, media, festival culture, literary production, academic discourses and author-centred discourse to produce an amplification of the genre itself. It should be clear that I am interested less in specific texts within the genre than in the factors of ‘cultural production’. I use Pierre Bourdieu's term4 here because it describes perfectly, in my view, the process of the ‘making of IWE’.