India, Jan. 14 -- Writing essays and memoirs is a strange art. While cultural magazines in the West are always on the lookout for well-written personal essays, in the Hindi sphere, essays are hardly ever read. Why this is so is unclear. Perhaps there really aren't many readers for this form. While there are many readers of creative non-fiction in the Anglophone world, Hindi readers seem to be fixated on good fiction.

This doesn't mean Hindi lacks good essayists or writers of nonfiction. From Agyeya, Shivani and Nirmal Verma to Geet Chaturvedi and Mridula Garg, there has been a rich tradition of essay writing in Hindi. Still, they have always had a niche readership, one that appreciated how essays and memoirs allow readers to encounter th...