In a 2019 lecture for The London Review of Books, American writer Patricia Lockwood revealed that she began keeping a diary to track her experience of using the Internet; she describes her interest not as academic but to interrogate how the Internet made her think differently. For the rest of the lecture, Lockwood read out from her diary, describing events from her life, subcultures she stumbled upon, questioning specific online terminology, eventually building up to that very lecture but mediating this entire journey through her use of Twitter. Lockwood is among the crop of writers who, in the late 2010s, became interested in how the internet blurs lines between truth and fiction, an experience that she would explore in the form of a novel, dubbed one of the first of its kind, an Internet Novel.
What is an Internet Novel? Broadly, a novel that considers the Internet or smartphone as central to its plot. Several such books have emerged globally in the 2020s—No One is Talking About This (2021) by Patricia Lockwood, I’m a Fan (2022) by Sheena Patel, Several People Are Typing (2021) by Calvin Kasulke. These books also stand out with the way they treat form, often written in short bursts of prose. The first half of No One is Talking About This features a healthy balance between tweets and prose. I’m a Fan is written in chapters not larger than a long Instagram caption, a platform the narrator is obsessed with. Several People Are Typing is written in the form of a Slack chat. The experience of reading these novels, on the level of form, mirrors the fragmented experience of browsing the internet or indeed, as in my case, the experience of reading while being addicted to the Internet.
The 2010s have been India’s Internet decade. The first half of the decade saw the rise of Internet platforms targeting the urban elite: shopping online on Flipkart or Myntra, ordering food on Swiggy, taxis on Ola, groceries on BigBasket or Grofers. In 2016, the dynamics of Indian Internet usage changed dramatically. Mukesh Ambani’s new telephone network, Reliance Jio, was launched with a staggering deal: 4GB of internet everyday, for free. Rival data providers were forced to lower their prices to compete. The result was this: in six months, India became the highest data consuming market in the world.
It was only a matter of time until the Internet became a prominent participant in recent Indian fiction. Tanuj Solanki makes judicious use of emails, texts, and Tinder in The Machine is Learning (2020), Prayaag Akbar’s short story The Twenty-Sixth Giant (2018) is mediated primarily through SMS texts, Devika Rege’s Quarterlife (2023) paints a picture of the buildup to the 2014 election through YouTube sketch comedy videos.
Three titles from the recent past interact deeply with the landscape of the Indian Internet. In Nisha Susan’s short story collection The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories (2020), several short stories bristle with the ubiquitousness of the internet. In the titular story, the protagonist and her friend make a list of all the men they’ve slept with, a sex atlas, when they realise they could make an online portal with more information on all these men: whether they were still single, if they had cheated on their partners, where they were currently; they, however, never end up creating this portal. The most prominently online story in the collection is ‘Gentle Reader’, where a newly commissioned novelist struggles to make headway into her draft and spirals into a Twitter addiction: “‘At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction’”, the narrator ponders this correspondence between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her novelist friend Mary Russell Mitford, before remarking, “But that was because Liz and Mary didn’t have Twitter”. What makes this collection stand out is Susan’s use of the Internet not just as a marker for contemporariness but also as nostalgia: in ‘The Singer and the Prince’, the protagonist trawls through Orkut and stumbles across a fake account of Jagjit Singh having an argument with a fake account of Lata Mangeshkar.
In another recent title, A Burning (2020) by Megha Majumdar, Facebook is the catalyst of the plot. Jivan, a Muslim woman who works at a nearby store, witnesses a mob setting fire to a train, killing hundreds of people. She uploads a video of the incident to Facebook the next day, attracting multiple comments. Jivan gets sucked into an argument where she questions the purpose of the police and compares the government to a terrorist state. A few days later she is arrested and accused of chatting with a terrorist recruiter on Facebook. A Burning provides an interesting account of the reach that social media and indeed Facebook has in India, not just among the urban elite but also the country’s working classes.
In Aravind Jayan’s Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors (2022), the Internet features in multiple dimensions. A sex tape of the unnamed narrator’s older brother Sreenath leaks on a porn website and goes viral. This news spreads rapidly through WhatsApp, and within no time, the narrator’s entire neighbourhood knows. The family is ashamed, and this is where the drama kicks off, with Sreenath moving away from home. Jayan adeptly navigates through the sensibilities of multiple generations of Indians in the book: the narrator and Sree are slick operators on WhatsApp, Tinder, Facebook and torrents; their parents are slower and clunkier with their smartphones. Their father, at one point, asks a policeman if he can remove the leaked video from the Internet, to which he is told that the Internet is not a fridge where he can put things in and take them out whenever he pleases. Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors announces its arrival as an intergenerational Internet novel in India.
Not only is the Internet Novel in India an experiment with contemporary form, but also a sign of a difficult political moment.
While the penetration of the Internet beyond just urban centres in India has become a marker of the country’s modernity, its wide reach has also made it a site for disinformation, propaganda, and policing. Hate speech targeting minorities has been so rampantly spread, unchecked, on platforms such as WhatsApp, that researchers consider it as the primary site where mob violence is incited. Internal reports at Facebook suggested that religiously inflammatory content was at a 300% increase in the buildup to the Delhi pogrom in 2020. The Indian State also recognises the power the Internet has to mobilise support and dissent, and resorts to censorship to prevent this—India has had more recent internet shutdowns than any other democracy.
When thinking about the Indian Internet Novel, it is essential to keep this context in mind. In 2012, a young woman in Palghar, Maharashtra, was arrested for a Facebook post questioning the Police’s decision to shut the city of Mumbai down after the death of politician Bal Thackeray. Her friend was arrested for liking this post. A Google search for ‘Arrested for Facebook post India’ shows many such examples over the years since. In this light, Jivan’s arrest over a Facebook post in A Burning takes a grander cultural significance—not only is the Internet Novel in India an experiment with contemporary form, but also a sign of a difficult political moment.
While the narrator in Nisha Susan’s ‘The Singer and the Prince’ enjoys an argument on Orkut between a fake Jagjit Singh and a fake Lata Mangeshkar, mimicking celebrities has had severe consequences in the recent past: in 2016, the comedian Tanmay Bhat was investigated by the Mumbai Police for making a video on Snapchat with a face filter of Lata Mangeshkar. In ‘Gentle Reader’, the experience of the narrator being bombarded with abuse on Twitter is the reality of many Indian women on the platform—the journalist Rana Ayyub, for instance, tweeted in 2022 about receiving 26,000 tweets in one month that were threatening death or sexual abuse. Unlike their western counterparts whose Internet fiction is a response to a larger ideological shift, there are very tangible, material consequences faced by writers posting on the Internet in India.
Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors also examines how moral panics translate in the age of the Internet. Indian popular culture is no stranger to the trope of the leaked pornographic clip. The Delhi Public School MMS Scandal of 2004, where an explicit clip of two students was leaked and auctioned on portals online became the subject of a moral panic across the country. Multiple Bollywood films like Dev D (2009) and Love Sex Aur Dhoka (2010) were loosely based on the incident. Teen Couple poses the question of how such a scandal would unfold in the smartphone era, where data is cheap and WhatsApp is the hotbed of unverified information. It is a deft study of how the ideas of tradition and morality are deceptively warped tightly to ideas of progress and indeed the Indian Internet.
Unlike their western counterparts whose Internet fiction is a response to a larger ideological shift, there are very tangible, material consequences faced by writers posting on the Internet in India.
In a decade where the Internet has transformed life in India, the form of the novel is catching up, both in its conception and as a reaction. Over the course of this decade, the Internet will only penetrate further in India; and along with it, many such cracks and crevices that show the ugly direction democracy in the country is headed toward.
In such an India, it remains to be seen how Internet fiction shapes up. While at the level of plot, Indian Internet fiction grapples with the reality of the Internet in India, one of the salient stylistic features of the Internet Novel is notably absent: the fragmented style of writing. Will we see more novelists move towards this experimental style, where the Internet becomes the novel, and the novel becomes the Internet? Or will there continue to be restraint, to maintain clear demarcations between the two, possibly a decision to prolong the shelf-life of the novel considering the fast-changing landscape of the Internet where platforms look dramatically different every three years. Perhaps there is a resonance with Lauren Oyler’s narrator’s remark in her Internet Novel Fake Accounts (2021): “If I wanted a book that resembled Twitter, I wouldn’t write a book; I would just spend even more time on Twitter.”
Irrespective of which way the stylistic direction swings, considering the sociopolitical conditions in the country and the emergence of novelists who have come of age in the age of the Internet, it is apparent that this should be the decade of India’s Internet Novel. Will it be?
