Hello reader,
A recent Guardian article titled “Most Indians don’t read for pleasure – so why does the country have 100 literature festivals?” opened the floodgates this week to all sorts of online debates about India’s book-reading culture.
It’s true, literature festivals seem to be everywhere now, in Southasian cities large and small. As they’ve grown, they’ve also become something more than strictly literary: part soapbox, part television studio, forums where a country talks to itself. Increasingly, these festivals are also being pulled into wider political and cultural battles. (Read Dhanuka Bhandara’s commentary for Himal on how state patronage and geopolitics have become strange bedfellows for Sri Lanka’s literary festivals.)
But at their best, I think festivals offer something deeper: an opportunity to learn and to make unexpected connections across disciplines and borders. Adventure can be found in conversation, in the surprising panel, or the encounter you didn’t plan to have.
Sometimes, though, it can feel almost like a luxury to gather for literature while the world is on fire. Yet, precisely because of these crises, festivals prove their worth. They remind us of our shared humanity – and of our capacity to imagine, to listen, to connect through books.
Read on for a roundup of upcoming Southasian literary festivals this month. Do you enjoy literature festivals, avoid them, or fall somewhere in between? I’d love to hear what you make of all this. Write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
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Fact and fable in Anup Mathew Thomas’s photographic Kerala
In ‘Native ball’, the artist presents life in Kerala through a deliberate mix of fact and fabrication, combining photography and text to evoke a kind of magical realism
By Shubhra Dixit
How do you win a translation prize, and what comes next? The 2024 winner of the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation, Sana R Chaudhry, is offering a masterclass on Monday, 16 February (10 am EST / 8:30 pm IST) on her journey translating the Pakistani feminist icon Fahmida Riaz’s 2017 Urdu novel, Fortress of the Forgotten Ones, out next month from Open Letter Books.
Translators considering the 2026 prize, and anyone starting out in literary translation, will find the session both practical and inspiring, with plenty of time for Q&A. Register here: bit.ly/ASprizemasterclass.
Ceylon Literary & Arts Festival (Colombo)
The third Ceylon Literary & Arts Festival is set for 13–15 February at Cinnamon Lakeside in Colombo, bringing together literature, theatre and the arts through panels, workshops, exhibitions and a dedicated Children’s Festival.
Goa Arts and Literature Festival (Goa)
The 14th Goa Arts and Literature Festival runs 12–14 February at the International Centre Goa, bringing together writers, thinkers, artists and readers for three days of conversations, readings and book launches. This year’s programme also includes a Young GALF mini-festival for children and young adults.
Alliance Literary Festival (Bengaluru)
The fifth edition of ALF, themed “Her Story: Celebrating Nāri Shakti”, takes place 19–21 February at Alliance University. The programme spotlights women’s writing, leadership and cultural power, and an inaugural Pitchfest for women writers.
Read A Kitaab Literature Festival (Mumbai)
A reader-led festival in Bandra, Read A Kitaab returns this year as a two-day celebration of books and children’s literature, with a focus on building India’s reading culture from the ground up.
Asian Literary Festival (Global)
Part of a global “caravan of festivals”, the Asian Literary Festival’s 2026 itinerary includes major editions in Gampaha and Kochi, alongside stops in Nairobi, Montreal, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, linking writers and readers across borders.
Umar Khalid and His World: An Anthology (Three Essays Collective, February 2026), edited by Anirban Bhattacharya, Banojyotsna Lahiri and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, brings together writings by and about the imprisoned student activist. With contributions from scholars, journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders and fellow UAPA prisoners, alongside songs and poetry from the anti-CAA protests, the collection places Khalid’s case within a wider story of dissent, democracy and authoritarianism in contemporary India.
🎧 From the Himal podcast archives: Shahrukh Alam talks to Harsh Mander about the criminalisation of protest and how India’s laws are being used against Muslims.
Two new Sri Lankan novels arrive this month, each with a beloved local food right in the title!
Ashok Ferrey’s Hot Butter Cuttlefish (Penguin India, February 2026) is a romantic comedy set in a lakeside Sri Lankan village. When Malik arrives hoping for a fresh start, the pandemic strikes – and the locals take it as karmic disgrace, as politics turn intimate and love appears in stranger and stranger forms.
Father Cabraal’s Recipe for Love Cake (Penguin India, February 2026) by the Gratiaen Prize-winning author Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe is a novel of rebellion, inheritance and the long afterlives of violence. It braids colonial history with present-day unrest through two parallel stories: a former war reporter sheltering a fugitive, and a 17th-century island under the grip of a brutal trading company.
In Touching Grass: A Book of Comics (Bloomsbury India, February 2026), Rachita Taneja, better known as the creator of Sanitary Panels, moves beyond viral moments to deliver a sharp, resonant critique of authoritarianism and the everyday violences of our time. Her comics take on casteism, Islamophobia, transphobia, inequality and climate anxiety, while probing the exhaustion of staying politically awake in an algorithmic age. At its heart, Touching Grass offers something rarer than outrage: a stubborn hope rooted in solidarity, humour and ordinary acts of refusal.
📖 From the Himal archives: What is it like to be a woman cartoonist? The Indian playwright, artist and journalist Manjula Padmanabhan reflects on cartooning, stress and laughing at death.
As West Bengal heads toward the 2026 assembly elections, Battleground Bengal: The Political Future of a Fiercely Contested State by Sayantan Ghosh (Penguin India, February 2026) maps the violence, corruption and currents of identity and patronage shaping the race. The book traces how the state, long dominated by the Trinamool Congress, has become a key flashpoint as the BJP has steadily risen there since its dramatic gains in 2021.
Manipur may have a new government, but insecurity persists. In Stories the Fire Could Not Burn (Speaking Tiger, February 2026), the journalist Hoihnu Hauzel blends reportage and memoir from within the Kuki-Zomi/Mizo community, placing her family’s losses in Imphal within a longer history of contested land, power and ethnic conflict since May 2023.
🎧 From the Himal podcast archives: A conversation with the senior journalist Patricia Mukhim on Manipur’s unending crisis and its failure to address long-standing inequalities.
Two major new books this season offer a layered look at the work of Shahzia Sikander, the Pakistan-born, New York-based artist whose feminist practice has transformed contemporary engagements with Southasian visual history.
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior (The Monacelli Press, February 2026), published alongside a major mid-career retrospective, is the first comprehensive exploration of Sikander’s art and ideas. The illustrated volume immerses readers in her vibrant, subversive iconography and her reworking of immigrant women’s narratives against Eurocentric art histories.
Meanwhile, Shahzia Sikander by Jason Rosenfeld (Lund Humphries, March 2026) is the first standalone monograph devoted to her work, with a particular focus on painting. Tracing her journey from Lahore to New York, it illustrates Sikander’s pioneering role in the neo-miniature movement and her expansive practice across animation, sculpture and mosaic – attentive throughout to questions of gender, empire, diaspora and power.
In Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India’s Lost Technological Revolution (Princeton University Press, February 2026), Dwaipayan Banerjee excavates the forgotten story behind India’s tech paradox: a country of world-class talent that captures only a fraction of the industry’s profits. Tracing the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, he recounts an ambitious push for computing self-reliance – and how Cold War geopolitics, corporate monopolies and domestic political choices steered that dream toward outsourced services instead. A sharp reminder that technological sovereignty is never just technical, but deeply political.
📖 From the Himal archives: An interview with Ajantha Subramanian on her book, The Caste of Merit, and how technical knowledge became the preserve of a ‘meritorious’ dominant-caste elite in India.
Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist anthology of love stories, edited and translated by Nikhil Pandhi, gathers powerful stories of desire and defiance under caste and patriarchy. Dalit women and men navigate heartbreak, intimacy, violence and political struggle – from forbidden love across castes to relationships tested by activism, ambition and displacement.
📖 From the Himal archives: Ankush Pal and Alfiya Azeem Khan write on the persistent risks of love across social boundaries in India, as inter-caste and inter-faith couples continue to face discriminatory social attitudes and legal pressures.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian
💌 Are there any new books, authors or events you would like to see featured? I’d love to hear from you. Write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
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