Literary festivals flourish in India

Lit fests in India bring together book readers to listen to and watch stories come alive [Indrajit Hazra]

India hosts 60-odd literary festivals every year, with the next big one starting on January 17 in Jaipur.

With India producing more books than ever, the country is witnessing a boom in literature festivals.

Last year saw more than 60 ‘lit fests’ across India, an average of more than one a week; their scale, quality, brand visibility and attendance varying from the biggest to the smaller ones scattered across the country.

The biggest draw is the Jaipur Literature Festival, starting on January 17, and billed as the “largest free literary festival on earth”.

The correlation between a book-reading culture and literary festivals is obvious.

But the real draw of such events – dismissed by some frowning critics as ‘tamashas’ or spectacles – is to allow readers and non-readers alike to meet and listen to authors, some famous, many of them to-be-discovered.

Indian literary festivals are modelled on the broader cultural festivals, especially film festivals, but without the traditional dowdiness of government-sponsored affairs.

International events such as the Edinburgh Festival – the collective arts and cultural festivals that take place in the Scottish capital each summer – serve as a role model for the bigger lit fests in India, and these in turn serve as templates for the smaller ones.

These conglomerations of the curious drawn-to-culture, people interested in seeing and listening to ‘famous personalities’ (that may or may not include writers), as well as those genuinely interested in what writers have to talk about, form the clientele that have put lit fests firmly on the Indian annual calendar.