The last sixty years have witnessed the rise of a new genre in literature. This new genre is the “campus novel,” also alternatively known as the “academic novel.” Campus novels, as the term itself suggests, are novels usually comic or satirical, written in unpretentious language, with the action being set within the enclosed world of colleges or universities, that is, the academe, highlighting the follies of academic life, and dealing with wayward academics let loose on the wider world. This kind of novels originated in America with the publication of Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe in 1952. This work is a watershed in the history of English literature, primarily because the World War II had ended, heralding the rapid growth of American universities. These new universities first absorbed the returning war veterans and then took in a larger percentage of the baby boom population. There was a repetition of the same situation in Britain in the post-Second World War era, where with the emergence of “red brick” universities in the cities of Liverpool, Birmingham, Leicester, Leeds, and Manchester and “white tile” universities in Sussex, York, East Anglia, and Essex, university education became readily accessible to most young people residing there. Access to university gave the muchneeded impetus for the proliferation of campus literature, especially campus novels. The genre then traversed the globe, mainly Australia, South Africa, and the South Asian country, India. Since independence from colonial rule in the latter half of the twentieth century, the South Asian countries have primarily dedicated their energy to writing back to the empire. Post-colonial literature tends to dominate the realm of South Asian literature. However, simultaneously, a small but recognizable and important genre, that is, campus literature, with a small body of criticism devoted to it, has also been taking shape in India all the while. The genre gained prominence with the publication of Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point
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