The festival, now in its fourth year, drew in thousands of visitors and bestselling authors such as Britain's Ian Rankin and Anthony Beevor, South Africa's Gillian Slovo, India's Amit Varma and Pakistan's Mohammed Hanif.
Blaft is a two year old independent publishing house that turns out English translations of Indian pulp fiction originally written in local languages, a pioneering initiative that bridges this literary divide.
Cross Border
Now, Lalchand wants to extend the formula to Sri Lanka and the region.
"Our next project is to publish in the South Asian region. I am looking to translate Sinhalese and Sri Lankan Tamil writing."
Blaft has already sourced work from Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Originating in the 19th century, pulp fiction gets its name from stories published on cheap paper like news print, and is famous for its sensational storylines and covers.
In India, pulp is the literature of the masses; the bus driver who stashes a copy under his seat, the man in the roadside teashop, the average housewife and the hundreds of others who don't read in English.
Tamil and Hindi pulp fiction sells thousands more books than English fiction. Just six million of India's 1 billion population read in English and nearly every other literate person is reading something else.
Grandmasters of Indian Pulp
Bestselling Indian author Surender Mohan Pathak is considered the godfather of Hindi crime fiction having sold a staggering 25 million books, but few English readers have heard of him.
One of his most famous books now translated as the '65 Lakh Heist' by Blaft, was first published in 1977 and reprinted over 15 times. It may remind some of the famous English movie 'The Italian Job'.
"In India, if an English book sells 5000 copies, it is considered a bestseller. In pulp fiction, a first print-run has a minimum of 100,000 copies," Lalchand said.
Author Ki Rajanarayanan spent 75 years collecting folktales from Tamil Nadu, a series of wild and colourful stories about conniving goddesses, jealous husbands, ghosts and angry demons.
A translation of 'Where are you going, you monkeys?' has now been published by Blaft.
Pulp cover art is distinctive. They are outlandish and bold and drip with blood, sex and scandal. Among the more famous artists is Mustajab Ahmed Siddiqui a.k.a Shelle, a name which derives from the Hindi word for 'style'.
Breaking Boundaries
"The vamps are always in Western clothes, the good girls are always in Indian clothes and are always the wronged ones," said Lalchand at the Galle Literary Festival that was held recently.
Some of the literature published is, what Lalchand calls, 'experimental transgressive fiction'. In other words, it may shock, offend and disturb polite society.
Take 'Zero Degree' by Charu Nivedita, which has attracted a cult following since it was first published in Tamil ten years ago and features a patchwork of torture scenes, phone sex, tender love poems and mythology that has sent shockwaves through South India.
Blaft, which has ten pulp fiction books to its credit now, has begun marketing overseas, with distributors in the United States, Malaysia and Singapore and is on the hunt for a distributor in the United Kingdom.
"The response to the books, in India and overseas has been incredible. People are talking about it, writing about it and blogging about it," Lalchand said.
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