I did not grow up in a house that had books – not one novel or shelf of stories was read for pleasure or kept by our beds. The only books I knew were school textbooks and competitive exam guides – to pass exams, to move to the next class and later to try for a government job, which I did not get.I was born into a Dalit household in north India. None of my forefathers attended school. My father studied through the eighth grade before leaving to work as a daily-wage labourer to support his family of five. When he died last year from a preventable medical tragedy, he left us resilience, integrity, endurance, medical bills and debt – but not a shelf of books.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Today, I am a graduate student in the United States. I read for work and for pleasure. But for much of my life, “reading for pleasure” was not a thing I could afford.This is why I have been struck by the recent debate over whether India “reads for pleasure”. The argument began after an essay questioned how a country that hosts hundreds of literature festivals each year could still struggle with pleasure reading. It sparked a debate online in which many well-intentioned critics called the question patronising, a misrepresentation of Indian realities or “ignorant and irritating”.Soon after, an Indian magazine published a confident rebuttal. It painted lush scenes of book fairs, invoked the vibrancy of multilingualism and marshaled publishing statistics to argue that the question’s premise was flawed. India’s reading culture, the rebuttal insisted, is public, collective and not reducible to Western measures of solitary leisure.I do not dismiss the rebuttal. It is right that the English-language trade market is only one slice of India’s print ecosystem and that reading cannot be measured solely by sales charts. But it replaces one fragile assumption with another: it mistakes spectacle for substance.A crowd at a book fair can mean many things, like curiosity, aspiration or simply a pleasant winter outing. None of that is insignificant, but conflating attendance with access is grossly problematic. Footfall is not a habit.The International Kolkata Book Fair reports about 3.2 million visitors. Delhi’s fair claims roughly two million. Add Jaipur, Pune, Bengaluru and other marquee festivals, and you might generously reach eight to ten million entries in a good year. In a country of 1.45 billion people, that is well under 1% of the population – and these include repeat visits and are not all confirmed readers, not even necessarily book buyers.The deeper question is not whether Indians read at all. Of course, they do – students read for exams, aspirants read for competitive tests and professionals read for credentials or promotions. But reading for pleasure – as a habitual, socially normalised activity – requires time, disposable income, quiet space, libraries, bookstores and the legitimacy of being a “reader”. These conditions have never been evenly distributed in India.A book priced at Rs 300 may seem inexpensive to the urban middle class. Yet recent household expenditure data show that the average monthly per capita consumption expenditure in rural India is just over Rs 4,000. A single book can absorb more than 7% of a rural person’s monthly budget. Before we even account for the time required to read it, the purchase itself is a significant luxury.At the same time, approximately 800 million Indians are provided with subsidised food grains through public distribution programs. That is more than half the population. In such a landscape, it is difficult to argue that pleasure reading is a mass habit simply because a few million people gather at urban fairs each winter.India is a caste society, and caste shapes not only income and occupation but also proximity to knowledge. The higher one stands in the hierarchy, the more likely one is to inherit books, literate elders, the confidence to see oneself as a “reader” and the overall cultural capital. The lower one stands, the more likely it is that reading remains purposeful – a ladder out of poverty rather than a pleasure practice.Educational inequalities based on caste and class remain well-documented, yet discussions of India’s “reading culture” often universalise the experience of a narrow, urban elite minority. A glance at prize lists and major festival lineups suggests that the same social groups disproportionately dominate publishing houses, prize committees, festival panels and literary visibility, whether in English or regional languages.As a result, the claim that “India reads” frequently reflects the habits of those already embedded in print networks, while vast sections of the population remain structurally distant from bookstores, libraries and the inherited legitimacy that makes reading for pleasure feel more natural than aspirational.India is not a single republic of print. It is what economists Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen once described as “islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa”. Parts of urban India resemble global cultural capitals. Other parts still struggle for basic amenities. More than half the population lives in rural areas. For many of them, the bookstore is hours away, if it exists at all.Despite all that, things are changing – unevenly, but undeniably. Cheap mobile data and smartphones have brought text, audio and video content to millions. Dalit and other marginalised people are gaining access to educational institutions, books and reading materials; writers from these groups have been writing and publishing on digital platforms as well as in mainstream media, despite their small numbers and as they bypass traditional gatekeepers.Social media can expose someone to a poem or a political text who might never set foot in a bookstore. Even this exposure is crucial. If someone attends a festival for selfies but leaves with a pamphlet or a name to Google later, that is meaningful. But exposure is not the same as structural equality. Reading for pleasure remains a privilege shaped by caste, class and access. Festivals and footfalls add texture to that story, but they do not resolve it.My father never owned a book. This was not due to a lack of curiosity, but rather because the world he inherited did not allow for leisure reading. If India wants to claim a culture of pleasure reading, it must build the conditions and break the social and economic barriers that could make it normal in homes like my father’s, where books are not heirlooms of privilege but fixtures of everyday life. Because why should a small minority of Indians read for pleasure?Ravinder Kumar is a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon’s history department.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.