The literature festival has stayed constant, but again, not without changes and expansion, the transformations not loved by everybody who remembers the location and the scale of its iterations in the first decade of the century. “Kumbha Mela of literature, thiik i bolechhey ora!” (the Kumbh Mela of Literature, they are right) mutters one Bengali fellow-writer as we juice ourselves through the press of the crowd. The hotel gives them food but otherwise pays them nothing and they are solely dependent on the largesse of the tourists. On stage at the festival, writers talk of the different kinds of exile they have experienced and depicted, about what exists between exile and belonging. Is it actually literature they will explore in the future or some other sense of community that merely uses books and literature as an excuse?

Source: The Telegraph January 20, 2026 07:42 UTC