Mythological fiction an underexplored genre in India: Kevin Missal

Mythological fiction remains an underexplored genre in India despite the market being awash with books based on mythology, promising young author Kevin Missal has said.
The 21-year-old writer, whose new book 'Dharmayoddha Kalki: Avatar Of Vishnu' has created quite a flutter and was recently reprinted, asserted that fantasy has become a "different" genre and people learn more from it than they do from reality.
"We have 33 million Gods in Hinduism. When you dig deep, you'll find so many diamonds. A lot more needs to be explored," he said.
"We can always mix genres like science fiction or romance or comedy into it to be innovative. Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it," Missal told PTI.

He said his deep desire to create a superhero which the Indian kids could relate to propelled him to write his new book.
Running into several hundred pages, the book is a mythical fantasy novel on the supposedly tenth avatar of Vishnu and his fight against Kali and Adharm.

"I always wanted kids to look up to an Indian superhero, where readers could be like Yeah well Britain had Harry Potter, we had this. Somewhat like that," he said.
"I wanted a fantasy book but I wrapped it around mythology because Kalki Avatar is by far, the most interesting god to write on," said Missal, who has written four novels.

The Delhi-based author wrote his first book at the age of 14 which was launched by former Chief Minister of Delhi Sheila Dikshit.
"Ever since its launch, the book has been doing very well and has struck a chord with the readers. It went out of sale in the very first month or so," said Neeraj Chawla, Marketing head of Fingerprint, the books publisher.
"Because of the tremendous response, we decided to reprint it and are doing it aggressively. 18,000 copies have been sold so far," he added.