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The Kerala Literature Festival, held in late January in the beach town of Kozhikode. From beaches to hilltops, young people are driving a boom in literary events as they read more in India’s dozens of native languages.
The Kerala Literature Festival, held in late January in the beach town of Kozhikode. Credit…
By Anupreeta Das
Photographs by Gabriela Bhaskar
Anupreeta Das spoke to more than two dozen people at four different literature festivals across India in reporting this story.
March 8, 2025 Mizoram, a state in India’s remote northeast that shares boundaries with Bangladesh and Myanmar, has one. Surat, a city best known for its diamonds and textiles, has one. Bengaluru, the country’s tech hub with a touch of hipness, has one. Kolkata, whose residents take their reputation for erudition seriously, has at least three.
And then there’s the big one: the Jaipur Literature Festival, which calls itself the “greatest literary show on Earth” and recently celebrated its 18th year.
While India may appear consumed by Bollywood, cricket and phone screens, literature festivals are blooming, bringing readers and writers together in hilltop towns and rural communities, under the cover of beachside tents or inside storied palaces.
Some of the festivals, like the one in Jaipur, attract tens of thousands of people. The Mizoram festival, held for the first time in October in Aizawl, the state capital, was a more intimate affair with around 150 guests.
The boom has been driven by young people who, in a country of dozens of languages, are increasingly reading literature in their native tongues alongside books written in English. For these readers, books open worlds that India’s higher education system, with its focus on time-consuming preparation for make-or-break examinations, often does not.
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Shopping in the bookstore at the Kerala festival. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
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