Growing up or dumbing down?

I recently saw a fourteen-year-old girl buried in a book at school. She read it everywhere, in class, in the dining hall, walking around. So I – innocuously, I thought – asked if she was enjoying it. I did not expect her slightly guilty response: "Yes, but I've never read about" – her voice dipped – "er, affairs, before…so openly and all." I was unprepared for her embarrassment, knowing that at the school where I teach, girls eagerly consume books on high school romances, faithful best friends and unfaithful boyfriends. Books on daughters coming to terms with their mothers' divorces are also widely read. Popular Bollywood movies, songs, and American high school television series deal far more explicitly with sex and sexuality than this rather muted account of an extra-marital affair. Why, then, should this book about 'affairs' have prompted such a shocked, even scandalised, response from this urban young lady? Trying to answer this led me to consider what she had read so far that made this one aspect of the book loom so large in her mind. It transpired that she had almost never read a book featuring an adult protagonist. She was used to reading about confused teenage characters, but encountering a confused adult protagonist was new to her. She and her friends had been reared on something called 'young adult' fiction that has now become an accepted and popular category in Indian English speaking society.

Most students in their early- to mid-teens baulk at the thought of reading fiction meant, as they perceive it, for adults. Instead, they are almost virtuous about the correctness of reading fiction meant specifically for them. Their perception of themselves as "teenagers" seems to be the most defining part of their identity. And it is no wonder that they should think so. Young people between the ages of twelve and sixteen have become a targeted market readership in India. In all the major bookstores selling fiction in English, 'young adult' books occupy a space separate from those meant, presumably, for adults. However, while there is a variety of writing in English by Indian authors (IWE) for adults and very young children, the "Young Adult" bracket has, as yet, few writers from India. The category of Young Adult has been adopted full-formed from the West, typically America. Moreover, although "young adult fiction" is now ubiquitous in the bookstores, some of it is not always easy to distinguish from the unmarked variety – i.e. writing meant for adults. Serious readers, both girls and boys, may, for example, read the works of Michael Morpurgo, who explores the sombre themes of courage, loyalty, family, and loneliness in his novels. It is only the label of young adult (YA) fiction that indicates Morpurgo's writing is for younger readers. The themes may be as grave and complex as those in Lord Jim or The Grapes of Wrath but the treatment of these (both language and content) make for a simpler read.