Love in the Time of Durjoy Datta

Courtesy of Penguin India Author Durjoy Datta.

A lot of young women you have never met are crazy about Durjoy Datta.

Mr. Datta, 25, is a writer of romance fiction with a smutty edge, who deals with extreme fandom and total literary obscurity almost simultaneously. The situation is not uncommon in the stratified world of India’s English-language readership. Ranked India’s third-highest selling writer by Nielsen Bookscan in 2011, Mr. Datta’s six books have sold 1.5 million copies since they first came out in 2008.

The high sales figures are only one sign of Mr. Datta’s success. There’s also the spate of online fan groups and Facebook pages where hundreds, often even thousands, of 20-somethings swear their total devotion to him on a daily basis.

The talk is often about his books, with some readers even counting the number of times a particular character swears over an entire story, but it almost always lapses into rhapsodies of praise for the fresh-faced writer’s looks (“Ps. I love ur dmpls ♥ ♥”) followed by declarations of true love (“ohh god… this pic makes me fall in love with u again and again…”).

The media can’t resist focusing on his appearance either. “Portrait of the Author as a Cute Guy,” said the headline of a news report from March 2012 about a Mumbai book release. It began by describing what Mr. Datta was wearing (low-waisted trousers). He was dubbed the “Indian male Candace Bushnell,” after the “Sex and the City”! writer, in another rare article about him in India’s traditional media.

Mr. Datta’s furious success could easily be attributed to his arrival as the demand for youth fiction in India hits new heights. But that’s not enough of an explanation: he is, after all, just one among a proliferating breed of “lo-cal literati,” a term coined by Outlook Magazine to describe a crop of new best-selling writers who once “couldn’t get past the security guards outside plush publishing houses.”

His wild popularity implies that he is offering to his publishers’ target readership â€" young Indians in white-collar jobs â€" something previously in very short supply in Indian pop culture. Through an assembly-line supply of admittedly autobiographical novels, Mr. Datta has introduced raunch to Indian English fiction and has become, in many readers’ perception, ineparable from it.

Courtesy of Penguin India Durjoy Datta and Nikita Singh’s book, “Someone Like You.”

I recently finished reading Mr. Datta’s latest book, “Someone Like You,” which was released by Penguin’s commercial fiction imprint, Metro Reads, last month and is being billed by the publisher as a runaway best seller. This wasn’t my first.

After learning his books were imperfect and dark-humored takes on modern Indian love, I had read over the course of one week in 2012 his entire body of work at the time, all of it published by Shrishti Books: “Of Course I Love You! …Till I Find Someone Better!” (2008), “Now That You’re Rich… L! et’s Fa! ll In Love!” (2009), “She Broke Up, I Didn’t… I Just Kissed Someone Else!” (2010), “Ohh Yes, I Am Single… And So Is My Girlfriend!” (2011) and “You Were My Crush… Till You Said You Love Me!” (2011).

The first couple of books follow, by and large, the story of a one young couple as they go from having a wild time in college to a “totally messed-up” professional world of salary slips, scheming human resource managers, threesomes and orders to please the boss, sexually, in the parking lot to save one’s job.

In the remainder of the books, Mr. Datta keeps returning to the campus, mostly with the original couple surrounded by a colorful set of different side characters, to narrate, in his laddish voice, stories of the cultural decadence of the young people of New India. “Girls and sex make the world go around, and I am no different,” one character proclaims.

Always narrated by the central male character, Dev, the books are unsparing in their portrayal of a univers where self-gratification, whether through unlimited money or unlimited sex, matters above everything else.

“Sex was engulfing every part of Delhi. It was everywhere, schools, office, backrooms, movie halls and parking lots. Secluded places were paradise. Tinted glasses were in,” says Dev in Mr. Datta’s first book, “Of Course I Love You!,” describing Delhi in the early 2000s. At the time, the capital was in fact recovering from a famous scandal involving a camera phone, a studious schoolgirl, and her school’s rakish cricket captain.

The books’ female protagonists are inevitably male fantasies, who wear very little (a “pleated skirt that ended inches after butt line” or a “glittery blouse held in place only by threads”), are back from or headed to drug rehab, and resigned to Botox at the first sign of aging. It is somewhat surprising to learn, therefore, that all but one of Mr. Datta’s books are co-authored with women â€" all of whom are, no doubt completely coincid! entally, ! pretty.

Also notable is the fact that while women in his books matter only for the feelings they evoke in men (one woman is described as “not like the ones you would stare at and shag until you are blue and frothing but the ones you would take home to your mom”), Mr. Datta’s fan base is predominantly female.

When we met to talk about his work last year, I asked Mr. Datta why his novels had what I considered a warped approach to the young universe. He countered that he was making up very little of it.

He wrote his first book after a breakup as a final year student at the Delhi College of Engineering, and continued to write during a management course at Gurgaon and subsequent jobs at Siemens and American Express in Delhi.

He had never read a book before he wrote his first, he explained, so he drew solely upon his own experiences as a young urban man from a middle-class background who was, as he said, “a little observant of the world around him.” He also said he believed himsef to be the voice of his generation, which has found no real representation in Indian English fiction.

To fill this great gap, he quit his job in 2011 to start with an old friend, Sachin Garg, a publishing house, Grapevine India, to promote books for the current generation of young people who might not relate to the concerns of older popular fiction superstars like Chetan Bhagat or Amish Tripathi, both of whom are nearing 40.

Since I last met him, Mr. Datta has written two books, “If It’s Not Forever… It’s Not Love” and “Someone Like You,” and there has been a pronounced change in his tone, which is suddenly mellow and cautious. His readers attribute this to his co-author on both the books, Nikita Singh, a pharmacy student in Indore who had already published a novel, “Love @ Facebook,” before she befriended Datta (on Facebook, naturally). Mr. Datta affirmed Ms. Singh’s differing ideologies, saying she was more of a fantasy person.

Some readers have welcomed the c! hange, pl! ain both in the newer books’ titles and their treatment of sex, which doesn’t proceed beyond “extended pecks” anymore. “Datta is finally changing his writing style and delivering something I always wanted from him rather than the same sex saga,” says one of them in her review.

Many, though, are yearning for Mr. Datta’s racier impulses to take over: “Put smthng more real! Miss d old durjoy buks,” says Shefali on Twitter. “Please tell it’s from a guy’s perspective,” a person called Viral on Facebook begs Mr. Datta about his next book.

Surely his generation wants it darker and dirtier. And no one is more aware of it than Mr. Datta.

Snigdha Poonam is Arts Editor at The Caravan. She is on Twitter at @snigdhapoonam