When I think about festivals, my first associations are enforcement and dissent. At my old university, of which I was mostly very fond, the vice-chancellor decreed there should be a Staff Development Festival each September. This sounds admirable, until you realise that this equated to two weeks during the school holidays when employees were not allowed to take leave. We were instead compelled to look enthusiastic during sessions on topics as eclectic as “developing a research career,” feng shui, IT and DJing. This almost Orwellian Staff Development ‘Festival’ therefore caused much discontent and was scrapped soon after the departure of the vice-chancellor whose brainchild it was. You can’t coerce people into feeling festive, and a compulsory festival is surely a contradiction in terms.

Seeing long faces and witnessing bitter sniping in certain panels at this year’s Karachi Literature Festival made it seem as though these participants had been similarly corralled into celebrating, forced into fêting each other. And yet, other panels such as the Urdu reading I attended by Amjad Islam Amjad had a truly festive atmosphere, with people packed into the room, raptly listening, and one woman even wiping away a tear at the end of recital. The launch of policeman-turned-writer Omar Shahid Hamid’s clever English-language thriller The Prisoner was equally celebratory, and it was interesting to see many of Hamid’s police colleagues proudly occupying several seats in support of a co-worker who had produced a novel about their world.

This year’s KLF was held against the backdrop of a broader Sindh cultural festival set up by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. The PPP leader argued that his festival would help in the publicisation and restoration of Pakistan’s cultural heritage, including Moenjodaro, the world’s oldest surviving city which is part of the rich pre-Hindu Indus Valley civilisation. However, the Sindh Festival caused widespread controversy because many experts and conservationists felt that its inaugural concert — which included a light show and performances by famous Pakistani musicians, for invite-only guests — would harm the ruins of Moenjodaro, which is a Unesco world heritage site. It seems to me that Bhutto Zardari’s opening ceremony was indisputably a Bad Thing, doing untold damage to an already crumbling historical site. However, forming an opinion on Pakistan’s literature festivals is not so clear-cut. Reading media reports before, during and after the KLF and Lahore Literary Festival demonstrates a clear divide between those who view cultural festivals as festal, humanist celebrations, and others who view them as fecal, elitist commodifications of art.

In his influential book about cultural prizes, The Economy of Prestige, James F. English writes: “Modern cultural prizes cannot fulfil their social functions unless authoritative people — people whose cultural authority is secured in part through those very prizes — are thundering against them. The vast literature of mockery and derision with respect to prizes must, in my view, be seen as an integral part of the prize frenzy itself.”

This is also true of the literary festival: the naysayers are only the other side of the coin to the yay-sayers! Additionally, as Random House India editor Faiza Sultan Khan observes, the ‘elitist’ argument about KLF and Lahore Literary Festival is mostly formulated by members of the elite themselves.

Rather than participating in either festival-extolling or -bashing, finding a middle way is desirable. A realisation that those who trash festivals are themselves central players in those festivals’ own myth-making might allow us to stand back and assess festivals for both their good and bad. They are about big business, corporate sponsorship and the new phenomenon of live tweeting — and in many ways, all this does seem antithetical to ‘true art’. But they can also encourage literacy, champion marginalized groups and promote peace. Festivals perhaps make more sense for the cinema than for books, because events like Cannes are opportunities for screenings and film-watching marathons. Amitav Ghosh makes the point that by contrast reading and writing are solitary activities that attract mostly introverted people, because they “provide an island of quiet within the din of tamasha-stan.” Ironically, one never has much time for reading or calm contemplation during the social whirl of the book festival.

But perhaps that’s not the point: as the saying goes, it’s the economy, stupid. Festivals are all about book sales and marketing. For example, the winners of literary prizes are often announced at festivals, creating new readerships and bringing maximum publicity; think of the winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature being revealed at Jaipur, or the Commonwealth book and short story prizes’ announcement at Hay-on-Wye. Sometimes a literary award becomes the excuse for the staging of a festival or vice versa, with a symbiotic relationship existing between prizes and festivals. At KLF 2014, three major prizes were announced: the Embassy of France Prize, which Uzma Aslam Khan claimed for Thinner than Skin, a KLF Coca Cola prize for best non-fiction, given to Osama Siddique’s book Pakistan’s Experience with Formal Law, and a Peace Prize with German Consulate backing, won by Akbar S. Ahmad for his book The Thistle and the Drone.

As the latter example suggests, there is also sometimes a humanitarian aspect to festivals. The Indo-Pak peace angle of this year’s festival was quite prominent. A keynote address was given by the Mahatma’s grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, who said South Asia is a house in which the occupants don’t yet know each other properly, but this house, together with the house of Middle East, needs to be sustained and developed for the benefit of humanity.

As well as broad issues of humanitarianism and peace-building, we can adapt James English again to suggest that festivals “create a forum for displays of pride, solidarity, and celebration on the part of various cultural communities”. This is certainly the case in Pakistan, the very existence of whose festivals is viewed by outsiders in particular as an affirmation of liberal values. For example, writing in the New York Times Review of Books, Hugh Eakin senses the “urgency” of the Lahore Literary Festival’s aim to “defend the written word.” But it is also true in Britain, where the other day I had an inspiring lunch with two literary friends trying to establish a new Bradford Literature Festival to promote literacy and literature in a city that is too often criticised from within and without, and whose residents’ aspirations are consequently failing to thrive. It is dramatised in an even more political way in Palestine, where Cairo-born London-resident writer Ahdaf Soueif founded PalFest in 2008 to “use the power of culture against the culture of power.” Soueif continues to bring writers to Occupied Palestinian Territory despite ongoing opposition from Israeli authorities.

Despite all these positive aspects to the dazzling rise of the cultural festival in the last two decades, I am reminded of the thoughts about coercion and enforced jollity with which I started. Festivals have tended not to emerge organically out of grassroots movements, but they are increasingly becoming one of the only shows in town for literature, particularly during the global economic down-turn which has led to stringent cuts in arts funding.

Cultural festivals can’t be forcibly imposed from the top down, but if they work in partnership with readers and authors to champion literature and humanitarian or pressing political concerns, then this writer at least will feel genuinely festive.