The first such book in English, Saif Eqbal’s Adventure comics and youth cultures in India, offers “a history and ethnography of adventure comic books for young people in India” with a strong focus on home-grown superheroes, detectives and some outright space sci-fi heroes (although I hear that hard space sci-fi is not very popular in India, as the mass markets are culturally attuned to fantasy). Routledge has managed to lumber the book with a very offputting cover, which must have taken them all of five minutes to slap together.

But the Contents suggest a useful brisk overview…

1. Action India
2. The Making of Modern Mythologies
3. The Golden Age of the Indian Superhero
4. Gendering Graphics
5. A Haven of Super Creativity
6. The Fantastic Familiar
7. The State of the Nation
8. A Forensics of Evil
9. Readers’ Worlds
10. In One of my Dreams, I Defeated America
11. Future Presents.
Glossary of Key Indian Adventure Comic Book Characters.
Index

For a historical take that stretches back further, there are essays on Indian genre in the first third of the recent summer 2018 collection Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories. Again, it’s billed as as a first, “the first substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages”. Though there was the 2008 article “Indian pulp fiction in English: A preliminary overview from Dutt to Dé” which starts in the 19th century. That article is paywalled but there’s a very long summary here with lots of name-checks.

I’m not sure how well Lovecraft fits into this cultural nexus, and a few minutes of searching for variants on India translations Lovecraft had no results. But Routledge’s Genre Fiction of New India: post-millennial receptions of “weird” narratives (2016) covers the scene in the post-2000 period. Apparently ‘the weird’ is quite commercially successful.