Fantasy fiction seems to have little to do with the fantastic in a literary-theoretical sense – as defined by Todorov for instance – although it lives in constant tension with it. In general, there seems to be a divide between fantasy fiction and fantastic literary fiction (such as magic/al realism): while both inevitably seep into one another, they tend to be read, critiqued, and sold separately. One can argue that in the European context, this divide replicates the old eighteenth and nineteenth-century tension between “fancy” and “imagination,” as well as “low” and “high” cultures. In the non-European context, the matter gets even more convoluted, partly but not only because of matters of anglocentric discursive hegemony and the colonial gaze (as examined by John Rieder in the context of science fiction). For instance, as Khair has noted with reference to magic realism, no matter what the intentions of the authors and the interpretations of theorists, twentieth-century magic realism, from Carpentier to Rushdie, echoed a prevalent European mode of looking, ranging from ancient Roman histories to medieval and colonial accounts, in which non-Europe was often portrayed as a mix of the magical and the real, the fantastic and the mundane (Khair, Gothic).

Hence, before we can even get to grips with fantasy fiction in English from India, we will have to put on record the fact that a dominant mode of literary fiction – often called magic realism – employs similar thematic and stylistic modes as fantasy fiction. But while the latter is usually bunched together with popular genre fiction, even pulp at times, the former enjoys the prestige of being considered “high” “literary” fiction. After all, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children features elements from Eastern epics and myths, as do the fantasy novels of writers such as Amish Tripathi. Shashi Tharoor's critically acclaimed The Great Indian Novel (1989) is a rewriting of the Mahabharata, but so, for instance, is the “Krishna Coriolis” series by Ashok Banker, who is often also called the Dan Brown of Indian English pulp. All such acclaimed “literary” novels share a mix of the fantastic and the “real” that is also the province of usually much less acclaimed fantasy fiction.