Inside and Outside the Literary Marketplace: The Digital Products of Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie

Abstract

For Indian authors writing in English, the changing landscape of publishing in the digital age presents both unique challenges and opportunities for claiming their authority as public intellectuals and producing content that exists both within the established literary marketplace and outside of it. This paper examines the digital products and platforms of three such authors, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy, all of whom can claim substantial influence in the literary marketplace thanks to their traditionally published novels. In addition to their literary fame, they are well-known for their public commentaries using digital platforms like social media and blogs on everything from popular culture to politics. These digital products and platforms function to extend the authors’ literary products past the traditional literary marketplace and into the wider public, with the potential of dismantling certain barriers like income, language, and education levels that often shape the landscape of traditionally published work. For these authors, digital spaces provide largely unmediated avenues for reaching wider audiences, for cultivating their public intellectual personas, and for promoting issues which may or may not have an audience in the traditional literary marketplace.

Keywords:

• Digital
• humanities
• literary
• marketplace
• Salman Rushdie
• Amitav Ghosh
• Arundhati Roy

Notes

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Huggan (2001), Mendes (2014), and Lau (2009).

2 For an analysis of Rushdie’s former Facebook feed, see Ravy (2018).

3 See Huggan (2001), Mendes (2014), and Ponzanesi (2014).

4 See Ravy (2014).

5 For a full analysis of Rushdie’s use of Twitter, see Ravy (2016). See also Partyka (2017) for an examination of how Rushdie represents himself in his memoir as it compares to his self-representation on Twitter.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tawnya Azar

Tawnya (Ravy) Azar is a Term Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University. She is a graduate of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and received her M.A. and PhD. in English at The George Washington University. Azar has been an instructor of composition and literature in higher education since 2009. Her research interests include South Asian literature, diaspora studies, digital humanities, and hybrid pedagogy. She is the creator of the Salman Rushdie Archive.