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The costs are not abstract. Writers work for decades in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil or Urdu with print runs in the low thousands, while their eventual international “discovery,” if it comes at all, arrives too late to change a working life. Publishers, knowing that domestic acclaim moves little, underinvest in exactly the literary fiction that prizes abroad later reward, an irony that outsources India’s literary risk-taking to foreign juries. And readers lose most of all, since a reading culture that waits for permission will always be reading yesterday’s list, curated by juries answering questions Indian readers never asked.