Lately, I’ve been finding myself tired of reading stuff by and about Western people. I’m mainly talking about the U.K. and the U.S.; I don’t think I’ve read much stuff by Canadians or Australians, including blog posts and online articles.

I don’t necessarily have anything against such writers; in fact, most of the books (and online stuff) I’ve read in my 25 years had been written by folks from these countries.

What I’m feeling is a sort of fatigue. For someone who never intends to visit the country, I know a lot about the USA’s geography and culture; most of that knowledge came from reading. I’m tired of reading about USAmerican experiences because increasingly, and especially since reading R. F. Kuang’s Babel and then learning about the deep impact of colonization on Indian culture and education during my M.A., I see the gap between those lives and mine. Yes, reading is a way to understand lives different from ours, but certainly there’s a problem when an Indian girl like me grows up reading and learning more about a foreign culture than her own.

It is limiting to only seek literature that’s “relatable,” but what I’m looking for is not the story of a girl who grows up in similar circumstances as I did. What I’m looking for is a familiarity of place, of culture, of language. I’m looking for imagination that’s closer home, that shows what’s possible here, with and among our own people.

Literature isn’t obliged to do that, but reading is also hunting for hope. I’m looking to learn about my own roots, which I never sought to learn more about through books. What I know I learned from living, from school. But that is too little. There is so much more.

Earlier, when I used to add books by Indian authors to my to-read list, I did so out of guilt. As an Indian, I should be reading and talking about my country’s literature, shouldn’t I? There’s an additional layer of guilt attached when the language of the text is concerned–shouldn’t I be exploring more of Hindi and Marathi literature and books translated from other Indian languages?

I still feel some of that obligation, but increasingly, I also find myself looking for Indian names on book covers. I find myself feeling defensive; I want more of their work to be well-known, even among us Indian readers, even when I’m anything but well-versed in the books that they’re producing.

For some time now I’ve been thinking that come 2026, I’ll try to make sure that every other book or short story or essay I read has been written by an Indian writer, ideally in an Indian language.

Maybe I’ll try to write in Hindi and Marathi too; for the first time in my life, I’ve been having moments during writing when I recognise that I’m using the language of my country’s colonizers. Sometimes, I also feel a pull to write in Hindi, and sometimes in Marathi, my mother tongue and the language I’ve written the fewest words in.

This is a feeling I need to dig deeper into another day when I’m not feeling like a spammed wet cabbage; for now, all I know is that I am tired of reading about USAmerican and English experiences. I feel drawn to anything that has a non-American/non-English author–I feel a sort of kinship with them, in our shared experience of not having English as our mother tongue, even though we may have chosen to write in it (or written enough to have our words be translated into it).