JAIPUR, India — A crowd, some members sitting on the floor, listened attentively last week as the author Amit Chaudhuri described the influence of writers from Ireland and the American South on his work.
Outside the tent where he was speaking, fans and photographers mobbed the Indian poet Gulzar, who shared the Oscar for the song “Jai Ho” in “Slumdog Millionaire,” blocking his exit from a hall. Elsewhere the Pakistani wunderkind Ali Sethi was fending off people who wanted to have pictures taken with him.
That was just the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival, a five-day extravaganza that in only five years has become the official annual celebration of a vibrant and resurgent Indian and South Asian literary scene. By the time the festival ends on Monday, organizers estimate that some 30,000 people will have seen more than 200 authors and other speakers.
Indians might be known worldwide for being mad about cricket and Bollywood musicals, but they are also increasingly embracing literature in all its forms. Book sales have been rising as incomes and literacy have steadily climbed in recent years. Even the country’s once insular Hindi film industry, known for its formulaic song-and-dance dramas and thrillers, is taking notice of the boom and adapting popular novels into movies.
Vikram Chandra, the author of “Sacred Games,” said that when he was attending boarding school near Jaipur, few authors commanded the kind of celebrity that was on display at the festival, where schoolgirls — some from the elite Mayo College, at which he studied — chased him and other authors down for autographs.
Literature in India “was a cottage industry confined to the university,” he said. But in the past decade, and especially in the past five years, a booming economy has created big audiences for books, including genres like literary fiction, young women’s literature and children’s books, which were tiny niches earlier. Book sales here are increasing at about 5 percent a year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“What we see now is intimately linked to the economic growth,” said Mr. Chandra, who teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley.
One indicator of the vibrancy of literature in India today was the presence of film stars from Mumbai and socialites from Delhi at the festival, Mr. Chandra said. “That itself is a sign of strength, when you can get the beautiful people in any culture to connect” with a medium, he added.
But for all the promise and potential of India’s literary scene, plenty of challenges and tensions remain.
Chiki Sarkar, the editor in chief of Random House India, said that while book sales were growing very quickly, most books still sell just a couple of thousand copies, a fraction of what even poorly performing books sell in the United States.
“Our worlds are growing, and our markets are growing, but they are just beginning to grow,” said Ms. Sarkar, who grew up in India but studied and worked in England before returning to work at Random House’s new Indian operation three years ago.
The same could be said of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Started five years ago as part of a broader cultural festival, it has taken on a life of its own in the past three years.
The festival is a product of two very different personalities: William Dalrymple, who has spent much of his professional career writing about South Asia; and Namita Gokhale, a writer of Hindi books who started an earlier literary festival to highlight lesser-known Indian writers working in Indian languages.
From the start, Mr. Dalrymple said, he wanted the festival to be a stage for Indian literary luminaries like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Mr. Chandra, who, though born in India, live outside the country. But Ms. Gokhale was just as determined to make it a place to showcase lesser-known authors writing in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and other regional Indian languages.
At one level their different aims dovetail, bringing together different threads of India’s diverse linguistic and artistic traditions. At the festival, for instance, Ms. Gokhale organized a handful of sessions with writers who are Dalit, members of the lowest rung of the caste system. Mr. Dalrymple, for his part, delivered notable and sought-after writers like Wole Soyinka, Alexander McCall Smith and Niall Ferguson.
That literary pedigree, combined with late-night music sessions by Indian and Western performers — and the fact that the festival is free — was a potent draw for visitors, who swelled into the front yard of the Diggi Palace, built in the 19th century.
But the two themes — the global India and the domestic India — do not always easily blend. Some authors in India said they had little interaction with foreign writers. The foreigners, for the most part, spent time with one another and with Indian writers from the West. Mr. Dalrymple and Ms. Gokhale acknowledge that their different interests often turn into heated arguments about the festival program.
Omprakash Valmiki, one of the Dalit writers, said that he felt that his and other books written in Hindi were starting to find bigger audiences at home and abroad. (His autobiography, “Joothan: A Dalit’s Life,” was published in English by Columbia University Press in 2003.)
Mr. Valmiki, who has a day job as an engineer at an Indian government defense factory, said he almost turned down the invitation to attend the festival because he thought it would be too exclusive. But he said he was glad he had come after all, because the sessions he participated in were packed. Though he had few conversations with writers working in English, he said he was pleasantly surprised when a former chief minister of Rajasthan state stopped him and told him she had bought his book and was looking forward to reading it.
“Things change slowly,” he said in Hindi. “Literature can’t create a revolution overnight. It creates a base that changes society over time.”

India finds a cheap solution to bribery: the zero-rupee note

Eliza Fay (1756-1816) was an actual Englishwoman, even if she was also, in the words of E. M. Forster, quite “a work of art.” Only a woman as confident in mind and body as Mrs. Fay could have survived the perilous adventures in foreign lands she relates here with such sang froid. As Simon Winchester writes in his introduction to this latest edition of her correspondence, she was someone “for whom the words imperturbable, indomitable, and redoubtable might have been coined.”

She was only 23, the half-educated wife of an Irish barrister, when the newlyweds set off in 1779 on a rough-and-tumble journey across Europe and the Middle East to Bengal. There, he quickly ran up debts and fathered an illegitimate child. Leaving the scoundrel, she returned to England in 1782 and supported herself by importing muslin and other goods that required her to voyage three more times to India, and once to America. Alas, no more successful at business than at marriage, she almost vanished from history. Little is known about her last 20 years except that she died penniless and intestate in Calcutta.
Had Forster not come upon a 1908 edition of her letters and cajoled Virginia and Leonard Woolf into reissuing them, a unique document of juicy 18th-century realism might be lost to us. In long letters (addressed to “My Dear Friends” or “My Dear Sister”), Mrs. Fay offers frank opinions of everyone she meets, and every place, while portraying herself as the plucky heroine of her own epistolary novel. “Grand Cairo” has, in her view, “neither order, beauty, nor grandeur,” and the gap between rich and poor is “disgusting.” She had entered the city in drag, disguised in silk robe and trousers. “I never could have thought my constitution was so strong. I bore the fatigues of the desert, like a Lion, though but just recovering from my illness. We have been pillaged of almost everything, by the Arabs.” Imprisoned with her husband for 15 weeks in 1780 by Hyder Ali in Calicut, now known as Kozhikode, on the Malabar coast, they bribe their way out and make their way to Madras, which she tours by palanquin and finds “every where delightful.” What she once thought were tall tales of sea captains — “dancing snakes, Jugglers swallowing swords” — she confirms with her own eyes. Her reports of life on the water, including an early description of a catamaran, are of historic as well as literary value.
Mrs. Fay surely realized that her life, however sad the end, was exceptional for daring and scope, especially for a woman of her time. Few men voyaged farther than she. As Mr. Winchester puts it, her contemporary Jane Austen would have been “shocked, shocked.”

The Myth of the Holy Cow

D.N. Jha

Cows have not always been sacred in India: in ancient times cow sacrifice and beef-eating were widespread. The Myth of the Holy Cow presents the evidence for this and traces how it changed, setting the sacredness of cows in the context of more general strictures against killing and meat-eating. Jha begins with the Indo-European background, the Vedic texts, and archaeology: "the Vedic references to cattle flesh as an important dietary item tie up very well with archaeological evidence". The Upanishads offer suggestions for ritual substitution, with some questioning of the efficacy of animal sacrifice.
Buddhism rejected sacrifice and its ahimsa doctrine prohibited killing, but theoretical debates persisted and meat-eating remained common. "The prohibition of killing was carried to its extreme and the ahimsa doctrine was practised much more vigorously in Jainism". But neither faith held the cow as sacred.
The law books of Manu, Yajnvalkya and others discuss lawful and forbidden foods. Manu "exempts the camel from being killed for food, but does not grant this privilege to the cow"; and in general ritual cow slaughter is not considered killing. Jha also considers evidence from the Mahabharata and Ramayana epics and from medical and astrological texts.
The Brahmanical rejection of cow killing started to develop around the middle of the first millennium AD. But "commentaries and religious digests from the ninth century onwards keep alive the memory of the archaic practice of beef eating and some of them even go so far as to permit beef in specific circumstances". The kali age had to be distinguished from earlier ages.
When it came to purity and impurity, there was a paradoxical contradiction between the purity of the products of the cow and the impurity of its mouth.
There are extensive notes to each chapter in addition to a large bibliography. Along with the indices and other accessory material, this leaves just eighty pages of actual text, making The Myth of the Holy Cow more of a long essay than a monograph. Even with the references consigned to the notes, the density of sources, terminology and so forth may be daunting for readers unfamiliar with the Indian traditions.
A brief introduction considers the political status of cow veneration as a tenet of modern fundamentalist Hinduism, while the back cover proudly announces the book's banning in Hyderabad. The Myth of the Holy Cow is not a polemic, however, but a scholarly history of attitudes to meat-eating and cows in South Asia, of interest outside the context of Indian politico-religious debates.

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