Fantasy Fiction in India: Beyond Mythology and Religion

"The inside story: Indian writers are told by publishers to base their stories around the time of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, or, at least, have some references to these epics by way of plot, characters and names. Why? One answer is that bookshops prefer to display titles that have a perennial cachet - and anything relating to the Indian epics fits into that category. Which in turn is because such novels often make readers out of non-readers..."