Thanks to Andy Crouch for this story:

Le Monde Diplo (English), a heady French journal of international affairs and culture, has published a profile of reading in Malayalam, one of the major languages of South India.

While India at large has a literacy rate of 65%, in Kerala State it approaches 100%. And the people actually read—and write. LMD quotes from an experimental novel finding it (surprise, surprise) akin to a great French novel of the 20th century.

Author of the article Mridula Koshy looks at the Malayalam scene in light of the English Language juggernaut (a loan-word from India, by the way), finding the literary scene in Indian regional languages very much alive and kicking:

When Rushdie claims that “the true Indian literature of the past 50 years has been made in the language the British left behind”, it is worth asking what he means by “true”. An Indian novel in English might do well to sell 5,000 copies, but each week magazines churn out – in the best Charles Dickens tradition – serialised novels and short stories by the score in regional languages. India reads, but it reads overwhelmingly in Indian languages.

All of which betrays a bit of a simplification: India has a billion people. It is the amalgamation (originally by force) of many kingdoms and civilizations. Several of the regional languages, if their own countries, would be considered major languages in their own right: There are more Bangla speakers than French, according to the Ethnologue; there are 35 million Malayalam speakers, ranking the language far above most European languages.

So, while it's great that languages of 35 million are doing well, a question is: what is a regional language? A linguistics professor of mine once quipped that the difference between a dialect and a language is the presence of a national army. In that case, Indian languages may be forever doomed to being footnotes, while Danish, for instance, spoken by 5 Million, gets greater attention.