As India celebrates its 65 years of independence from Britain in 2012, we go to the pages of the growing number of Indian novels written in English to hear the new, emerging voices and in order to better understand this ‘New India’, the India of the noughties and beyond. So what does this new writing say about ‘New India’? This panel will discuss some of the departures in contemporary Indian fiction; crime fiction, chick lit and science-fiction/fantasy, exploring what they say about this rapidly changing nation.

Bhavit Mehta is a director of the annual DSC South Asian Literature Festival and runs an independent children’s publishing house, Saadhak Books. Nilanjana Bhattacharya, is assistant professor of comparative literature at the Institute of Languages, Literature and Culture in Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. Dr Alex Tickell has published widely on South Asian and colonial literature and is the author of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: A Readers’ Guide, and Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830-1947. Sampurna Chattarji is a poet, novelist and translator whose works include a poetry collection Absent Muses and two novels Rupture and Land of the Well.

Emma Dawson Varughese researches world literature in English through fieldwork and textual analysis and is the author of Beyond The Postcolonial: World Englishes Literature and Reading New India.