Literary Fields at the Periphery: Book Fairs and the Cultural Economy of North-East India

Book fairs in India are commonly viewed as celebratory spaces for promoting reading andliterary culture. In the North-Eastern region, however, they operate as complex culturaleconomies in which literature, market forces, linguistic hierarchies, and state power intersect.Drawing on qualitative primary data generated through semi-structured interviews, participantobservation, and document analysis at major book fairs in Assam, Tripura, and Meghalaya, thisstudy conceptualizes book fairs as hybrid institutions that simultaneously function as commercialmarketplaces, cultural festivals, and political arenas. The analysis shows that while these fairsprovide crucial platforms for regional publishers and writers in a context of weak distributioninfrastructure, they also reproduce structural asymmetries between metropolitan and localpublishing houses, between English and indigenous languages, and between state-sanctionedcultural narratives and counter-public discourses. State patronage enables visibility andinstitutional support, yet it also shapes symbolic representation and delimits the boundaries ofacceptable expression through subtle forms of cultural governance. At the same time, vernacularand indigenous language sessions foster the formation of localized reading publics and spaces ofcultural assertion that challenge dominant hierarchies of literary value. By situating book fairsJournal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology within a cultural economy framework and a field-theoretic perspective, the study contributes tothe sociology of literature and postcolonial cultural studies by demonstrating how peripheralliterary spaces mediate the production of cultural value, the politics of recognition, and thenegotiation of power in contemporary India.