ABSTRACT
For Indian authors writing in English, the changing landscape of publishing in the digital age presents both unique challenges and opportunities for claiming their authority as public intellectuals and producing content that exists both within the established literary marketplace and outside of it. This paper examines the digital products and platforms of three such authors, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy, all of whom can claim substantial influence in the literary marketplace thanks to their traditionally published novels. In addition to their literary fame, they are well-known for their public commentaries using digital platforms like social media and blogs on everything from popular culture to politics. These digital products and platforms function to extend the authors’ literary products past the traditional literary marketplace and into the wider public, with the potential of dismantling certain barriers like income, language, and education levels that often shape the landscape of traditionally published work. For these authors, digital spaces provide largely unmediated avenues for reaching wider audiences, for cultivating their public intellectual personas, and for promoting issues which may or may not have an audience in the traditional literary marketplace.
