Come August, and the South Asian writers’ diary begins to fill up with desi-inspired literary festivals in the USA. At last count, there were at least ten, not counting smaller, more focused functions such as the Lahore Literary Festival in NYC.
And no wonder.
The global South Asian diaspora is amongst the biggest in the world, more populous than entire countries. It is a community that wields gigantic political influence in the US, unleashed in part by what they see as a rapidly globalizing India. And it is a community that holds immense cultural clout. Recently, even Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans shared a Diwali video message to announce their latest Marvel Avengers film. North American influencers have besieged Instagram with glowing reviews of the movie adaptation of the Hindu epic Ramayana. Netflix’s whip-sharp Best of the Best received plenty of international acclaim. And in its wake, there has been tremendous buzz around the Netflix adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, starring Freida Pinto, amongst others.
Lahiri is one of multiple writers who have consistently captured the eye of the global literati, and is a beloved author both in India and abroad. In 2022, Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida took home the Booker Prize, with Indian writer Geetanjali Shree and her translator Daisy Rockwell simultaneously winning the International Booker Prize for Tomb of Sand. In 2025, Banu Mushtaq and her translator Deepa Bhasthi won the International Booker Prize for her collection of short stories, Heart Lamp. It is no surprise to anyone that South Asian writing is now a prominent part of the literary pantheon. There are even bookstores now that cater to South Asian and AAPI writing, across the USA.
This goes some way to explain the profusion of literature fests. The 2026 calendar alone includes several editions of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Alongside sit the South Asian Literature and Art Festival (SALA) in the Bay Area, the inaugural South Asian American Literary Festival (SAALF) in Chicago, the Indo-American Arts Council Literary Festival in New York and the Chicago Indian Literature Festival, and the tally reaches at least ten.
It is a geographical spread that would have been difficult to imagine even a decade ago, with the festivals ranging from established, multi-city international events to smaller, community-led gatherings.
But who exactly is filling up the seats at these festivals?
In an interview in September 2026, Kiran Malhotra, one of the founders of SALA, explains that their “speakers and participants are a mix of the older generation and millennials. Some are born here in the US while others came as immigrants many years back.” Malhotra puts its daily average footfall at between 1,000 and 1,200 people.
The Indo-American Arts Council’s 2026 Literary Festival in New York, for instance, welcomes submissions from Indian and diaspora authors, as well as writers of all backgrounds whose work draws inspiration from or is rooted in India’s cultural heritage. This gestures at attempts to create a wider audience for South Asian literature, rather than narrowing it simply to people of South Asian origin.
Some festivals were being held for the first time. The inaugural South Asian American Literary Festival (SAALF) took place on August 22, 2026, at the South Asia Institute in Chicago. A particularly poignant time to start a festival, it was a gentle act of defiance, perhaps, in the face of the rising hate that Indian immigrants are suddenly confronting in the USA. The South Asian Literature and Art Festival (SALA) 2026, held in the Bay Area, implicitly acknowledged this in its publicity literature, stating that at a time when headlines condense people to statistics, borders and conflicts, it wished to move past such flattening. In many ways, a literature festival is the perfect venue to grapple with serious matters, many of which may have direct bearings to the diaspora itself.
But notwithstanding the heft of the discussions, many festivals have the feel of a party, with music, food trucks, even fashion perhaps. For many people, the big daddy of them all is the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF). In India, of course, the JLF, as it is colloquially called, is an exhilarating experience for anyone remotely interested in books, and offers the rare chance of bumping into luminaries such as Kajol and Olga Tokarczuk, who might not otherwise hobnob with Indian readers at all. With music and dance performances, multiple food and drink stalls, and a cavalcade of Bollywood film actors, JLF has been described as a behemoth of a mela, a funfair, which it certainly is. And Indians love a mela, after all.
“I think the credit for South Asian festivals in the US (and other parts of the world) goes in large part to the Jaipur Literary Festival,” says the author Manil Suri. “The original festival in Jaipur became so successful that it just could not be contained — it followed in the path of millions of Indian emigrants and began taking root in the larger metropolitan areas where they had relocated.” There is now a JLF in North Carolina, a JLF in Los Angeles, and others in Seattle, Colorado, New York and Houston.
“I think it is a simply amazing way not only for South Asian literature to spread, but also for cross-pollination between different cultures to take place. There are so few US newspapers that carry book reviews any more that these festivals offer a vital means to bring readers and desi writers together.”
Perhaps that is ultimately what these festivals are about: not just celebrating a literature and a culture that have travelled across oceans, but creating spaces where they can meet, mingle and be taken seriously — without necessarily having to take themselves too seriously.
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