The Jaipur Literature Festival, which I help to direct, has in just six years grown like some monster from an Indian epic. Each year it doubles in size and we struggle to keep up with the vast crowds who come to hear our authors speak. We’ve also inspired nearly 40 daughter-festivals across South Asia. The great Bombay poet Javed Akhtar aired a theory about why the region has suddenly taken to literature like this: ‘We abandoned language and arts in the last 40 years,’ he said. ‘We wanted cars and fridges. Now today’s generation takes them for granted. They want something else. They want arts and literature.’
‘Everywhere sales of novels are declining,’ claimed Howard Jacobson at his Jaipur session on the future of the novel, ‘yet attendances at literary festivals going up. Are these events replacing reading?’ It’s an interesting idea but in fact it’s not true, at least in South Asia.
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