The first time I attended a literature festival, my friend and I began sorting the crowd into two made-up categories: “flower pot” and “garden.” The flower pot was indifferent to literature; the festival was simply the latest “hot” place to be. The garden, naturally, was people like us.

It was already clear that ambition here had little to do with writing itself. As Siddhartha Deb writes in The Baffler, “[At these festivals,] literary ambitions expand not in terms of aesthetics, ideas, or engagement with the world, but along the lines of a networked career.” Between the drunk writers and those bending over backward for literary agents they had once forsaken for a prestigious British agent, the only way to clamber up the literati ladder it seemed was with the garrulity of a snake-oil salesman.

I wanted to be a writer, and even at seventeen I understood that writers were now expected to speak more than they write. My friend, precocious and articulate, told a rather provincial me that I had to improve my enunciation. And so, I bit the pen and stepped, willingly, into the circuit.

In the n+1 essay “Critical Attrition,” the editors diagnose what’s maiming the contemporary book review: “The main problem is that [it’s] first and foremost an audition – for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine… What kind of job or opportunity… depends on [the individual’s] ambitions.” The same can be said about contemporary literature festivals.

At these careerist spectacles, some “gardens” brandish press cards. Many are accomplished translators. Those truly adept at networking become writers! All of them maintain Bookstagram pages. When given the chance to interview a writer, they ask the most banal, conciliatory questions. Not because they lack curiosity, but because these questions are engineered to produce no friction, asking nothing of the prodigious writer they might later need. To a writer: "So you always draw from experience?" To a translator: "What was your first full-length work of translation?" To two novelists whose books feature epidemics: "Both the works kind of refer to the great, well, the pandemic that we have been through, and, you know, the silence of it, the danger, the fear, the paranoia. So, talk about that." The last one came from the National Books Editor of a leading English-language daily. You see, everyone involved knows the deal. No one is pulled up for asking something this vapid. This is the assignment. I know because I used to be one of them.

Here’s what I thought: the quickest way to write was to become a journalist first, then a novelist – because plenty of bad journalists turn into good novelists. The low-hanging fruit, it seemed, was festival coverage. Well, at least at that point in my life, it was all I could afford to pluck. The gig was about as glamorous as a low-rung advertising stint. We were put up in cheaper hotels than the writers we dined and wined with by festival organizers hoping to manage a few gurgled plaudits. The literature festival, it would seem after a few glasses of comped wine and a writer asking you for a line, was nothing if not a drawn-out exercise in mutual self-congratulation.

Though the ingénue might romanticise the literature festival, it is seldom a site of profound colloquy. As Amitava Kumar notes in his essay “The Indian Litfest Bug,” writers are unsuitably regarded as “uniquely qualified to answer questions about violent conflicts, or stubborn social customs, or world historical changes.” When Pakistani writer and translator Bilal Tanweer was asked, “Urdu and Sanskrit are dying languages. I want to ask you, what is being done to protect them?” he deadpanned, “Writers suck at public policy. Best not to ask them.”

Someone recently asked Prajakta Koli whether she condemned Israel’s violence in Gaza. (“I cannot [answer that]. I’m sorry.”) Incidentally, the attendee ill-fittedly paired this with a question about how Koli practices sustainability in fashion. After the session’s moderator shot back – “We are at a lit fest, and it’s only acceptable to talk about Prajakta’s book?” – Koli merrily detailed how she thrifts her clothes. The spectacle was entirely unsurprising, ironic at best and tone-deaf at worst.

More often than not, the best speakers at a literature festival are compelling in spite of the shindig, not because of it. At the 2015 Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), for instance, panellists and the moderator of the rather anodyne session titled “Is the Commerce of Literature Today Killing Good Writing” used the occasion to discuss how freedom of expression was being curbed in publishing, noting that “books are being banned and burnt quite often.” What made the conversation worth listening to was that it moved beyond the terms set by the festival itself. A meaningful comment at a literature festival, then, often involves implicating the festival and the publishing industry that props it up.

According to Kumar, these festivals bring together writers “who wouldn’t be caught drinking, or even pissing, together.” To be invited is to have arrived. As much as it is a legitimation exercise for publisher and author alike, the festival also supplies the reader, or the would-be reader, and more often than not the never-reader, with what literary theorist Michael Meehan calls “surrogate literacy.” By this, he means that physical proximity to the creator of a text outdoes the need for the text itself. This tendency is most evident in the rise of the influencer-author, a figure who doggedly churns out content and, incidentally, writes. She becomes an author by way of notoriety, and a bestseller partly because of her hackneyed prose, but overwhelmingly because of her amassed follower tally. Some editors now build their catalogues almost entirely around figures like her. For festival organisers, the presence of an influencer, with her emphatic and tightly consolidated fanbase, guarantees footfall and supplies virtually free publicity.

At festivals, Meehan observes, many writers “enact their books,” leaving little of their personhood to the imagination. Jerry Pinto – admittedly one of India’s finest novelists – gets the audience to perform with him, sometimes chanting translations of his work in a program so repetitive it almost feels mechanical.

It is this expectation that the writer must perform that Amitav Ghosh once attributed to “never” attending the jamboree that is the JLF (though he did eventually attend its U.S. edition). “Public spectacles are a sideshow: if the Indian book world loses sight of this, as it seems to be in danger of doing, it will upend both the cart and the horse.” The cult of literary performance, he goes so far as to insist, threatens free speech.

In his 2012 essay, “Festivals and Freedom,” he argues that transforming literature into pageantry mars the conditions that make serious writing possible. Ghosh, one of the foremost “Stephenian” novelists in the country, can afford the privilege of such reclusion, something he acknowledges himself. His point, however, stands: “Through the last century … the reader related in the first instance to a book, not to its writer; and writers, for their part, did not confront their audience directly in the manner of musicians, singers, actors and so on.” This insulation, he notes, not only protected writers psychologically, but allowed them to take “greater risks in hurling defiance at society at large,” and, most of all, preserved the autonomy of their work.

Ghosh defends this ministerial, arguably conservative literary model in which the relationship between writer and reader is aloof and in which writers need not explain themselves in slippery speech. As Deb points out, what the literary festival abets – through arm-twisted writerly performances on a stage funded by those with ideologies that the writer would otherwise never concede to – is a “lesson antithetical to the very soul of writing”: “to compromise.”

Meehan notes that the “culture” literary festivals proselytise is one that occupies an ahistorical present tense, where the only books in discussion are the obvious ones from the past and whatever is being marketed at the moment. The panels, by design, stick to what is current or trending. Some seem curated just to pad the roster of speakers. At the 2018 JLF, a child psychotherapist was paired with a commercial fiction writer, a Dalit memoirist, and a landscape designer for an unimaginatively titled “Across the Genres.” The authors, brought together with scant overlap in intellectual concern, were ill-suited to speak to one another’s books; the result was a conspicuous absence of exchange between the speakers, replaced by four monologues delivered one after the other.

Even when the panel curation is intriguing, discussions often pivot to the latest bestseller, the next hot influencer-author, or the cause du jour, while anything outside this periphery of concerns is largely ignored. A telling example emerged at a 2025 JLF panel, where M. K. Raina objected to his co-panellist Ila Arun’s romanticisation of his home state, Kashmir, in her play Peer Ghani. “I'm sorry, I see bad films of Kashmir, accusing Kashmir of all kinds of things, lousy films... Kashmir is not being represented at all because they don't know that state is my assertion. I take strong objection to this.” In response, Arun repeatedly tried to hush him as though he was a petulant child, saying, “Okay, okay!” and adding, laughing, “We’ll come back to you.” She never did. Raina walked off the stage, while Arun had already eaten up much of the session reading out her play. The mere whiff of anything tendentious is sniffed away as a “distraction.” Like Arun, most speakers stick to touting their current releases and trading platitudes about creative inspiration. For the occasional writer invited for their marginalised position, this is often their only networking opportunity in an otherwise insular, self-serving industry.

The endeavour of compromise is inevitable at a literature festival, where propriety is expected, if not publicly insisted upon. A few years ago, when Sujatha Gidla inveighed against Rohini Nilekani, who was moderating the panel Gidla was on, she referred to her as “the wife of Nandan Nilekani” and speculated about how she had “got to be the moderator of a session on writing under threat.” Gidla went on to ask, “What experience do you have with threats? I would have thought you are on the other side, those who threaten.” Though unmistakably caustic and unnecessarily gendered, the remark was ultimately a critique of Aadhaar – a program fraught with surveillance concerns, of which husband Nilekani is the chief proponent.

Nilekani responded that she was “surprised” Gidla was speaking to her “as a wife and not an individual,” a line that drew applause from the audience. She added that she did not wish to enter “unnecessary controversy.” The ever-supplicant crowd of the literature festival thus confirming that, at these platforms, naming power is considered unbecoming and perhaps even unnecessary.

The festival circuit expects the writer not only to perform, which Gidla did, but also to conform, which she did not. Just this month, the organisers of the Bhopal Literature & Art Festival cancelled a conversation about a contentious book on Babur, citing “administrative pressure.” The explanation was disarmingly direct: “The author has exposed Babur in his work, and anyone could have challenged that,” the festival’s co-founder said. “We wanted to save our festival. That’s why we had to call it off.”

This studious deference to the status quo becomes easier to understand once you examine the festivals’ sponsors. Until 2020, Zee, one of India’s largest entertainment companies and “best known for a news channel that serves as the media bludgeon of the Hindu right,” backed JLF, which in 2017 even featured members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh on its speaker list.

A preoccupation with the ephemeral – the “now” of books, authors, and audiences – sets the festival stage. In this present-tense literary economy, which values immediacy over what David Hume might categorise as the sempiternal “standard of taste,” ambition has no reason to reach outside the festival circuit that confers temporary prestige. This often means, for the literarily ambitious, hobnobbing with writers whose work you might not otherwise appreciate.

When I was at one of these hooplas last year, a reviewer for a legacy media outlet leaned over to size up a lowly columnist who had just anointed a major festival organiser’s book as his favourite of the year. “Now, why do you think he did that?” the reviewer asked rhetorically. Sometimes, one simply has to brown-nose their way up the ladder.

Not all writers, my friend insisted, would be “gardens,” our shorthand for wide-eyed, well-read, wishful novices. In our callow barometer, a well-established writer could qualify too, as long as she remained as curious and engaged as she had been at her debut. This meant that the "garden" had to remain forever unswayed by external maladies like commerce and popularity. One can only imagine where we’d slot the authors of the widely read self-help books with faux-aphoristic titles.

As I’m writing this, I’ve been invited to yet another literature festival. A familiar trio – exactly the same three people I saw on another panel – has been slotted together once again. Much to the chagrin of literature, it indeed must be a small world. What a terrible loss this is for our imagination, where the pots keep multiplying even as the garden keeps shrinking.