Chick Lit in India: Possibilities for a Feminine Aesthetic in Popular Fiction

Implicit in the primary project of traditional aesthetics is the distinction made between “high” and “low” culture via standards that feminist critics have argued bar creative work by women from entry into the artistic canon. Since the mid-1990s these standards have been evident in the critical reception of the genre known as “chick lit” which is largely written by women using a distinctly feminine style and address. While the question of chick lit’s merit as a form of women’s writing and its claim to literary status remains undecided, chick lit has travelled a long way since Bridget Jones’s Diary and the conclusions drawn about Western chick lit cannot be seamlessly mapped onto chick lit’s others – its racially inflected and transnational iterations.Drawing on theories of feminine aesthetics, life writing, performativity, confession and memory, this paper moves from a consideration of the main arguments surrounding the aesthetic possibilities of the Western chick lit novel to the distinctive creative expression present in Indian chick lit to argue that the answer to the question of the genre’s aesthetic value may be found in some of its global transformations.