For decades a core objective of the Soviet Union was to “decouple” the United States from Europe. Decoupling, as it was called, would break the Western alliance that kept Soviet tanks from rolling across the Prussian plains.

Now, in weeks, President Trump has handed Moscow the gift that eluded it during the Cold War and since.

Europe, jilted, is in shock. The United States, a nation whose core idea is liberty and whose core calling has been the defense of democracy against tyranny, has turned on its ally and instead embraced a brutal autocrat, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Gripped by a sense of abandonment, alarmed at the colossal rearmament task before it, astonished by the upending of American ideology, Europe finds itself adrift.

“The United States was the pillar around which peace was managed, but it has changed alliance,” said Valérie Hayer, the president of the centrist Renew Europe group in the European Parliament. “Trump mouths the propaganda of Putin. We have entered a new epoch.”

The emotional impact on Europe is profound. On the long journey from the ruins of 1945 to a prosperous continent whole and free, America was central. President John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963 framed the fortitude of West Berlin as an inspiration to freedom seekers everywhere. President Ronald Reagan issued his challenge — “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” — at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987. European history has also been America’s history as a European power.

But the meaning of “the West” in this dawning era is already unclear. For many years, despite sometimes acute Euro-American tensions, it denoted a single strategic actor united in its commitment to the values of liberal democracy.

Now there is Europe, there is Russia, there is China and there is the United States. The West as an idea has been hollowed out. How that vacuum will be filled is unclear, but one obvious candidate is violence as great powers duke it out.

Of course, as the almost daily whiplash on new tariffs has made clear, Mr. Trump is impulsive, even if his nationalist and autocratic tendencies are a constant. He is transactional; he could change course. In 2017, on a visit to Poland during his first term, he said, “I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail.”

The president has since stripped himself of the shackles of such traditional thinking and of the establishment Republican entourage that buttressed it. He appears to be a leader unbound.

The challenge for Europe is to judge what constitutes maneuvering on Mr. Trump’s part and what is a definitive authoritarian American reorientation.

A week after the ugly Oval Office blowup with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, accused of failing to say “thank you” for American military assistance that has since been “paused,” Mr. Trump has agreed to a meeting next week of senior Ukrainian and American officials. He has also threatened to impose further sanctions on Russia if it does not enter peace talks. This may allay some of the damage, although little if any basis for ending the Russian-instigated war seems to exist.

“Whatever Trump’s adjustments, the biggest danger would be to deny his abandonment of liberal democracies,” said Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist at Sciences Po University in Paris. “Trump knows where he is going. The only realist position for Europe is to ask: What do we have as a military force and how do we integrate and grow that power with urgency?”

President Emmanuel Macron of France declared this week that the continent faced “irreversible changes” from America. He urged “massive shared financing” for rapid European military reinforcement, announced a meeting next week of European chiefs of staff and said “peace cannot be the capitulation of Ukraine.” He also offered to extend France’s nuclear umbrella to allies in Europe.

These were indications of big strategic shifts. But nowhere in Europe has the impact of American realignment been more destabilizing than in Germany, whose postwar republic was largely an American creation and whose collective memory holds sacred the generosity of American soldiers offering the first succor to a devastated nation.

Christoph Heusgen, the German chairman of the Munich Security Conference, teared up last month as he contemplated the end of his three years in the job. It was easy, he said, to destroy a rules-based order and a commitment to human rights, but hard to rebuild them. He spoke after Vice President JD Vance accused Europe of denying democracy by trying to block the advance of far-right parties, including a German party that has used Nazi language.

“It was a terrible sight, the whipping boy and the weeping boy,” said Jacques Rupnik, a French political scientist who has written extensively on Central Europe. “Europe must step up now to fight for democracy.”

For many Germans, the idea that America, whose forces did so much to defeat Hitler, should opt to cosset a party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, that includes members openly supportive of the Nazis feels like an unpardonable betrayal. The AfD is now Germany’s second largest party.

In the words of the British historian Simon Schama, interviewed this week by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, this combined with the cutting-off of American military and intelligence aid to Ukraine, at least for now, constituted “horrible infamy.”

Germany’s incoming conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, reacted with words that felt like the death knell of the old order. “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the United States,” he said. The Trump Administration, he suggested, was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

In moments, a triple German taboo fell. Mr. Merz’s Germany would exit American tutelage, examine the extension to Berlin of French nuclear deterrence and permit growing debt to finance a rapid defense industry buildup.

Even at a time of economic difficulty, Germany is a bellwether for Europe. If French-German military cooperation does grow fast, and is complemented by British military involvement, as seems likely under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Europe may shed its reputation as an economic giant and strategic pygmy. But it will not happen overnight.

Europe’s major powers, it seems, have concluded that Mr. Trump is no outlier. He has plenty of support among Europe’s growing far right who are anti-immigrant nationalists. He is the American embodiment of an age of rising autocrats for whom postwar institutions and alliances are obstacles to a new world order built around great-power zones of influence.

If Mr. Trump wants to grab Greenland from a European Union member, Denmark, what other European conclusion is credible? The outlier of the past decade now looks like President Biden with his passionate defense of democracy and a rules-based order.

Of course, the ties between Europe and the United States are no small matter. They will not be easily unraveled; they are much more than a military alliance. According to the latest E.U. figures, trade in goods and services between the 27-nation European Union and the United States reached $1.7 trillion in 2023. Every day, some $4.8 billion worth of goods and services crosses the Atlantic Ocean.

Mr. Trump has claimed since taking office a second time that the European Union was “formed in order to screw the United States.” It was a statement typical of his a-historical, zero-sum view of the world. In fact, by any reasonable assessment of the past 80 years, the Euro-American bond has been a prosperity engine and a peace multiplier.

“The alliance is at a very painful stretching point, but I would not call it a breaking-point, at least not yet,” said Xenia Wickett, a London-based consultant who has worked for the U.S. National Security Council. She differentiated between Mr. Trump’s demand that Europe pay more for its defense, a not unreasonable request, and his embrace of Mr. Putin.

Where that embrace leads, if maintained, is unclear. But as Mr. Schama said, “When you do reward aggression, it guarantees another round of aggression.” Ukraine, for Mr. Putin, is part of a much broader campaign to undo NATO and the European Union. Along with China in a “no limits” partnership, he wants his Russian resurrection to put an end to what he sees as Western domination of the world.

As Pierre Lévy, a former French ambassador to Moscow, wrote last month in Le Monde, “It’s up to the American people to understand they are in Putin’s line of fire: de-Westernize the world, end American hegemony, end the dollar’s dominant place in the global economy, and act with the backing of Iran, North Korea and China.”

For now, and for unclear reasons, Mr. Trump does not seem to care. He is not about to waver from his zero-criticism susceptibility to Mr. Putin. Europe, it seems, will just have to overcome its stupefaction.

“We are all heartbroken when we wake up,” Ms. Bacharan said.

Russian and North Korean forces have made significant battlefield advances in recent days in the Kursk region of Russia, threatening Ukraine’s supply lines and its hold on a patch of land it hopes to use as a bargaining chip in future negotiations, according to Ukrainian soldiers, Russian military bloggers and military analysts.

Working together, a new influx of North Korean soldiers and well-trained Russian drone units, advancing under the cover of ferocious artillery fire and aerial bombardment, have been able to overwhelm important Ukrainian positions, Ukrainian soldiers said.

“It’s true; we can’t stop them,” said Oleksii, the commander of a Ukrainian communications unit fighting in the area, when reached by phone. “They just sweep us away, advancing in groups of 50 North Koreans while we have only six men on our positions.”

“Decisions are being made here, but I don’t know how effective they will be,” he said.

If Ukrainian forces were cut off or forced to retreat, it would be a significant setback for Kyiv. Not only was the incursion into Kursk a signature operation that boosted morale and embarrassed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, but holding territory in Russia gave Ukraine a potential bargaining chip in any peace negotiations. Pulling out could weaken its bargaining position at a moment when President Trump is trying to force through settlement talks.

Ukrainian forces first swept across the border last summer in an unexpected assault, overrunning unprepared Russian positions and securing a bridgehead of some 200 square miles around the Russian town of Sudzha, which sits about six miles from the border.

It was the first time that a foreign army had crossed into Russian territory since World War II.

Military analysts remain divided on whether the surprise decision to carry out an offensive into Russian territory served a useful purpose or was a strategic mistake.

Russian and North Korean soldiers have retaken about two-thirds of the land lost in the summer — but at a horrendous cost, with at least 4,000 troops killed in combat, according to Ukrainian, South Korean and Western intelligence estimates.

Ukrainian officials have said the offensive served multiple goals: thwarting a looming Russian offensive into the Sumy region of Ukraine; demonstrating that Western fears of escalation were overwrought; forcing Russia to divert resources away from the frontline in Ukraine; and possibly serving as leverage in future peace negotiations.

The recent setbacks in Kursk have come as Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine have managed to stall Russian offensive efforts for months and largely stabilize their lines.

Three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Putin, who keeps tight control over all information in Russia, has paid no apparent political price for the military embarrassment in Kursk, even as the Kremlin has lost thousands of soldiers in grueling battles to drive the Ukrainians out.

As the battles dragged on, the Russians brought in an estimated 12,000 North Koreans to join the fight. North Korea was already supplying Russia with millions of artillery shells Moscow desperately needed, as well as artillery and ballistic missiles.

For months, Russian and North Korean forces have been attacking in some of the most ferocious clashes of the war, the intensity rising and falling but never really subsiding, soldiers said.

The North Koreans were forced to withdraw from the battlefield in January and regroup, but they soon returned.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Feb. 8 that “Russia has once again deployed North Korean soldiers alongside its troops.” Four Ukrainian soldiers all said in interviews that North Koreans were at the vanguard of the latest waves of attacks, along with elite Russian drone units.

Ukrainian soldiers said the North Koreans were now better adapted to waging war on a battlefield that has been transformed by the proliferation of drones. They still engage in the same ferocious frontal assaults that led to so many casualties, but they are operating more cohesively.

“The North Koreans’ application of tactics is constantly improving,” said Andrii, a drone commander fighting in Kursk. They are working in better coordination with North Korean artillery units and supported by Russian drone operators, he said.

They have helped the Russians break through Ukrainian lines in the western part of the Ukrainian-held pocket near the border, south of Sudzha, according to DeepState, a group of analysts mapping the battlefield based on sources in the Ukrainian military, and open-source data like satellite imagery, photos and video posted on social media.

Ukrainian soldiers in the fighting said that their lines were broken south of the small village of Kurylivka, where the enemy troops were able to cross a narrow river in January. They quietly amassed forces, soldiers said, but by early March, there were simply too many North Koreans, and when they attacked they overran the Ukrainian positions.

Ukrainian forces retreated in an organized manner along designated defensive lines, Ukrainian soldiers said. The enemy advance has been halted, for the moment.

In addition to having an overwhelming edge in troops and firepower, the Russians have saturated the battlefield with fiber-optic drones. Unlike radio-controlled drones, these are immune to jamming because they are controlled by ultrathin fiber optic cables that unspool as their pilots guide them to their targets.

Capt. Oleksandr Shyrshyn, a battalion commander in the 47th Mechanized Brigade fighting in Kursk, said that the Russians appeared to have increased the range the drones can fly while bringing some of their best operators to the Kursk region.

Small Russian assault units of just a couple of soldiers are also now sometimes moving forward with the drones, further extending the range pilots can fly them.

“Once they storm in, at approximately 200 to 300 meters from the front line, they start using them from there,” he said.

This, he said, has allowed the Russians and North Koreans to strike more effectively at Ukraine’s main supply line: the only road leading from Ukraine to Sudzha.

That route has long been a target of Russian attacks. On a visit to the border this winter, it was littered with the wreckage of blasted-out armored tanks and other military vehicles that had failed to safely run the gauntlet.

The Russians can now keep that road under near-constant fire.

Captain Shyrsyn said that his soldiers were still able to hold their positions even under increasing pressure, but other soldiers said the situation was growing more difficult by the day.

Andrii, the drone commander, said, “The enemy has strongly focused on cutting our logistics, which affects our ability to hold the defense.”

“This was influenced by the number of their drones and the training of their crews,” he said. “It feels like they have gathered their best crews here, and, accordingly, their numbers are large.”

“We have losses,” he added, “but we are still carrying out the tasks assigned to us.”

Liubov Sholudko and Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting.

Itay Svirsky, 40, was a therapist who loved philosophy. Eden Yerushalmi, 24, was training to become a Pilates instructor. Alex Lobanov, 32, a father of three, never met his youngest child.

They are among the 41 hostages killed since being taken captive by Hamas and its allies during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to an analysis by The New York Times of forensic reports and military investigations into their deaths, as well as interviews with more than a dozen Israeli soldiers and officials, a senior regional official and seven relatives of hostages.

Some were killed by Hamas, some by Israeli fire, some their cause of death unknown. The losses — and most acutely, the scale of them — are now at the heart of an anguished debate within Israeli society about whether more people could have been brought back alive if a truce had been reached sooner.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has long contended that only military force could compel Hamas to free the hostages. Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents argued that the longer the war, the likelier that the hostages would be executed by Hamas or killed in Israeli strikes.

The debate has gained more resonance in recent days as the country faces the prospect of returning to war since the lapse of the recent truce. The Israeli government recently upended the process by proposing a new framework, immediately rejected by Hamas, that called for a seven-week extension during which the group would release half the living hostages and return the remains of half the deceased ones.

Of the 59 hostages still believed held in Gaza, the Israel government has said that only 24 are alive. The fear and uncertainty over their fates has been seared on the national psyche.

In late February, thousands of Israelis lined the streets along the funeral route of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, who were kidnapped during the Hamas-led attack on Israel and killed in Gaza. Many held signs that read “sorry,” an apology for not doing enough to save them.

Of the 251 people abducted during the Hamas-led raid that ignited the war in October 2023, more than 130 have been exchanged alive for Palestinian detainees. The Israeli military has retrieved the corpses of more than 40 others, many of whom were taken dead into Gaza during the attack. Hamas has handed over eight bodies as part of the latest cease-fire agreement.

A few hostages were almost certainly killed in the first days of the war, before it was possible to seal a truce, according to two Israeli officials. But many others have died since the brief first cease-fire collapsed in November 2023 and the fighting continued in a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

The soldiers and officials all spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive findings.

Although Israel and Hamas neared another cease-fire deal in July, the talks collapsed, and it took another five months to strike an agreement, one largely similar to the one discussed in the summer. Mr. Netanyahu’s political rivals and some of the hostages’ relatives have said that the months of extra fighting, while degrading Hamas and its allies in Lebanon and Iran, led to the deaths of more hostages and ultimately failed to defeat Hamas.

“We could have brought home more hostages — earlier and for a smaller price,” Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister until November, said in a televised interview last month.

While Mr. Netanyahu’s office declined to comment, he has long blamed Hamas for the failure to reach a truce. “Only continued military pressure, until total victory, will bring about the release of all of our hostages,” the prime minister said last year.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the specific circumstances in which the hostages were killed but said in a statement that it has carried out operations with numerous precautions taken to protect the captives.

The statement added that it “expresses deep sorrow for every incident in which hostages were killed during their captivity and is doing everything in its power to prevent such occurrences.” The military also said that it regularly updates the families of hostages on the status of their loved ones.

Seven hostages were executed by their captors as Israeli soldiers drew near, and four others died in Israeli airstrikes, according to Israeli officials and the public findings of military investigations.

Three hostages were killed by Israeli soldiers who mistook them for Palestinian militants, the Israeli military said publicly; one was shot dead in crossfire. The circumstances surrounding the deaths of 26 others remain inconclusive.

In some cases, there are conflicting claims, such as in the case of the Bibas family. Hamas said that the three were killed in an Israeli strike, but the Israeli military said they were murdered.

Neither side has offered evidence for their conclusions. After examining the bodies, Dr. Chen Kugel, the director of Israel’s national forensic institute, said in a statement that there is no evidence they were killed in a bombing.
Some relatives of the hostages blame Hamas alone for these deaths. Nira Sharabi’s abducted husband was killed in an Israeli airstrike, according to a military inquiry. She said in an interview that Hamas was ultimately responsible “because they took him and put him there.”

Others believe that the government cared more about fighting Hamas than saving their loved ones.

“The government deceived the public by downplaying the risks the war posed to hostages,” said Merav Svirsky.

Her brother survived an Israeli airstrike only to be executed by his Hamas captor days later, according to three Israeli officials and Ms. Svirsky, who was briefed by military.

“The captor murdered my brother. But the reason he shot him was the military’s campaign,” Ms. Svirsky added.

Killed in Airstrikes

When Israel hit a subterranean Hamas command center in November 2023, the strike killed two Hamas commanders, including Ahmed al-Ghandour, a Hamas general who Israel said helped organize the October attack.

A month later, Israeli infantry scouring the site of the strike discovered the bodies of three unintended victims: an Israeli kidnapped from a music festival on Oct. 7 and two soldiers captured at a nearby military base.

The military has tried to prevent harm to hostages. Throughout the war, intelligence officers gathered information about each captive and maintained records of their last known location, according to more than 12 officials.

But the military couldn’t pinpoint the whereabouts of many hostages, especially in the first weeks of the war when information was scarce and aerial bombardments were at their most intense, according to three military officials. If there was no clear indication of a hostage’s location, the air force was able to strike, as in the attack on al-Ghandour.

After eventually concluding in March 2024 that the airstrike had killed hostages, the military didn’t inform their relatives for months, according to two defense officials. The military declined to comment on the incident.

In January 2024, the military allowed relatives to see a forensic report, later reviewed by the Times, that suggested the men may have been suffocated by noxious gases.

Maayan Sherman, the mother of one of the victims, soon began a public campaign to press the military to admit that the gases were emitted during an explosion caused by an Israeli missile.

It was not until September that the military acknowledged the men were killed in one of its own airstrikes. It has not disclosed the exact cause of death.

Executed by Hamas

In late August, Israeli commandos advanced through a town in southern Gaza, hoping to find Hamas’s top leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, according to five Israeli defense officials.

As they were hunting for Mr. Sinwar, the Israeli military assessed there were people potentially being held in tunnels in the same neighborhood. The commandos confirmed the presence of at least one hostage on Aug. 27, when they discovered a living captive, Farhan al-Qadi, an Arab Israeli, in a tunnel.

Fearing their presence might endanger other hostages, the forces initially suspended their mission, according to a military investigation.

The area was already previously marked as restricted for operations on military maps, which were reviewed by the Times. Three officials said that by operating in the area, the military risked their lives, since militants had been ordered to kill captives if cornered.

Ultimately the need to hunt Mr. Sinwar took higher priority, according to four defense officials.

After a daylong pause, the commandos pressed ahead on Aug. 28 with their search.

On Aug. 31, instead of Mr. Sinwar, the commandos discovered the bodies of six hostages who had been shot, killed and abandoned in a narrow tunnel.

Hamas issued conflicting messages shortly after the incident — one official blamed Israel for killing them, while another strongly suggested they were killed by Hamas fighters.

The military inquiry later concluded that they had been killed by their guards as the Israeli forces approached.

Mr. Sinwar was ultimately killed in another operation on Oct. 16.

Killed During Rescue Attempts

One night in December 2023, a squad of Israeli commandos thought they were on the cusp of rescuing a female hostage. The squad stormed a Hamas hide-out in Gaza, expecting to find an Israeli woman in a separate room from her captors, according to three Israeli officials.

Instead, they found themselves in a gun battle with Hamas militants. The woman was nowhere in sight. Without Israeli intelligence officers realizing, Hamas appeared to have swapped her for a male hostage, Sahar Baruch, according to the officials.

Soon, Mr. Baruch was dead — killed in crossfire that also injured Israeli soldiers, the officials said. It is unclear whether Mr. Baruch was killed by friendly fire or his captors; Hamas later released a video of his body.

Mr. Baruch’s remains are still in Gaza.

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting

Mizoram, a state in India’s remote northeast that shares boundaries with Bangladesh and Myanmar, has one. Surat, a city best known for its diamonds and textiles, has one. Bengaluru, the country’s tech hub with a touch of hipness, has one. Kolkata, whose residents take their reputation for erudition seriously, has at least three.

And then there’s the big one: the Jaipur Literature Festival, which calls itself the “greatest literary show on Earth” and recently celebrated its 18th year.

While India may appear consumed by Bollywood, cricket and phone screens, literature festivals are blooming, bringing readers and writers together in hilltop towns and rural communities, under the cover of beachside tents or inside storied palaces.

Some of the festivals, like the one in Jaipur, attract tens of thousands of people. The Mizoram festival, held for the first time in October in Aizawl, the state capital, was a more intimate affair with around 150 guests.

The boom has been driven by young people who, in a country of dozens of languages, are increasingly reading literature in their native tongues alongside books written in English. For these readers, books open worlds that India’s higher education system, with its focus on time-consuming preparation for make-or-break examinations, often does not.

The events’ appeal has widened as organizers have begun promoting Indian writing in languages other than English. The five-day Jaipur festival, which early on focused almost entirely on English-language writing, has in recent years invited more authors who write in languages like Telugu and Malayalam, two south Indian tongues.

To Namita Gokhale, an author and a co-founder of the Jaipur fair, the surge in book-focused festivals — by some estimates there are now as many as 150 — signals a more confident nation.

“There’s a new generation, people who are more naturally bilingual,” Ms. Gokhale said. “A love and respect for the mother tongue is returning.”

The festival season typically runs from October to March, when the weather is pleasant in much of the country. Most are free to attend. For college students, they are venues to explore new topics, meet a favorite author or simply check out the scene.

From self-improvement books like James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” to the best-selling debut novel by Ravi Mantri, who writes in Telugu, young people are reading. And they are eager to expand — and advertise — their literary experiences, meandering through festival book stalls, attending panel discussions and often posting their intellectual “cred” on social media.

“It’s a badge of status for many,” said Harish Bhat, an author and formerly a top marketing executive at Tata Sons, an Indian conglomerate, who has attended at least 15 literature festivals in the past decade.

Readers like Neelam Shravani, a 23-year-old management student, are at the core of the events. In January, Ms. Shravani attended all four days of the Kerala Literature Festival, held in the beach town of Kozhikode, “purely for the love of books.”

She did, however, come with a plan, picking panel discussions based on the authors she most wanted to hear and researching her picks carefully to make her questions “more in-depth.” Listening to Nobel laureates, of whom there were two at the Kerala festival, was of particular interest.

The festival started in 2016, when its founder, Ravi Deecee, the managing partner of DC Books, which publishes literary works in Malayalam, assembled a small army of volunteers to clean up stretches of the beach where trash had been dumped to host a gathering of readers and writers.

The bulk of festival attendees are young people. “It’s a promising thing,” Mr. Deecee said.

This year, half of the festival’s 354 sessions were conducted in Malayalam, and the rest in English and other languages, including French.

Literary classics in regional languages aren’t the only ones selling; new writing is also having a moment.

In 2023, Mr. Mantri, the author who writes in Telugu, released his first book, a love story called “A Few Pages From Mother’s Diary,” expecting to sell a few hundred copies. His publisher, Swetha Yerram of Aju Publications, says it has sold more than 185,000 copies, after young readers created memes about how moved they were by the book. Based on her sales analyses, a majority of its readers are between 25 and 35 years old. It will be translated into English and other Indian languages this year.

Mr. Mantri, who quit his job as a business analyst in Dublin to pursue a literary career, embodies an aspirational Indian for the country’s growing middle class — a successful professional who is both at home in the world and proud of his roots.

“No matter how far you travel, your mother tongue keeps you rooted,” he said. “That is the only language you can speak with your mom, that brings you back to your home.”

Mr. Mantri said he had received daily emails from first-time readers saying they had touched little other than academic texts before picking up his novel. His book, he said, has acted as a gateway to Telugu literature — and literature more broadly.

“Reading is an addiction,” he said. “If you start reading, you cannot stop at one.”

Prarthana Manoj, a 24-year-old who has moderated panels and volunteered at literature festivals, said that young attendees were more curious about topics like class, caste and gender.

“Even if they haven’t read a lot, they are trying to be more inclusive,” Ms. Manoj said. “They have these genuine questions, and you’re like, OK, this is a beautiful crowd.”

Many organizers have borrowed the Jaipur festival’s playbook, which includes panel discussions, book signings, a festival bookstore and other cultural events, but put their own spin on it.

The four-year-old Shillong Literary Festival, in the scenic northeastern state of Meghalaya, celebrates local poetry and traditional storytelling by Indigenous communities, with a backdrop of cherry blossoms. Wayanad, a district in the south Indian state of Kerala, distinguishes itself by hosting India’s “largest rurally held festival.” The Vidarbha Literary Festival in the city of Nagpur in the western state of Maharashtra says it is “dedicated exclusively to nonfiction writing in English in India.”

Srikrishna Ramamoorthy, a venture capitalist and co-founder of the Bangalore Literature Festival, said the fairs had taken off after governments and cultural organizations embraced them as a way to showcase regional writing and culture. “People saw merit to the model,” he said.

For the festival in Mizoram, in the hilly and forested northeast, the intention was to keep it small and invite people to explore the history and culture of the state, which has the second-highest literacy rate in India.

The event connected well-known literary figures among the Mizo ethnic group with the largely Mizo audience, and introduced others to the language and complexities of the region, said Sanjoy Hazarika, a journalist and author who helped put the festival together.

It was “both looking inward and reaching out,” Mr. Hazarika said.

For authors, book festivals are a gift. They have a chance to talk about their work onstage, meet admirers and fellow writers, and sign books.

At the Jaipur festival, fans of the author Sudha Murty stood in line for more than an hour to have her sign copies of her new book. Ms. Murty is the wife of N.R. Narayana Murthy, the billionaire co-founder of Infosys, and the mother-in-law of Rishi Sunak, the former British prime minister, both of whom were in the audience.

Many authors, especially those with new books out, end up hopping from festival to festival. Mr. Bhat, the former Tata Sons executive, said that in the past six months, he had attended the festivals in Bengaluru, Kozhikode and Jaipur to promote his book “Jamsetji Tata: Powerful Learnings for Corporate Success,” which he co-wrote.

“I feel a little bit like a nomad, but a happy nomad, going from one festival to another,” Mr. Bhat said.

Evangelical Christian leaders who delivered votes to President Trump are now pressing him to declare that Israel can claim ownership of the West Bank, based on a promise God made to the Jews in the Bible.

They are seeking a way to pave a path toward annexation of territory that is widely viewed internationally as intended for a future Palestinian state. Israel seized the territory from Jordan in a war in 1967 and has occupied it since. In recent years, the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been encouraging Jewish settlers to build homes there at an increasing rate.

Prominent evangelical supporters of Mr. Trump are mounting a multipronged approach to pressure the president — making appearances in Israel, petitioning the White House, pushing their ideas at a key evangelical conference and building congressional backing.

Some of America’s leading evangelicals, including Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins and Mario Bramnick, visited Jerusalem on Tuesday to publicly back Israel’s sovereignty of the West Bank.

“I literally feel God is giving Israel a blank check,” said Mr. Bramnick, the president of the Latino Coalition for Israel and the pastor of a Florida church whose profile ballooned after he hosted prayer calls in support of claims the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Mr. Trump.

These evangelical leaders are part of a movement called Christian Zionism and believe that the land was given to the Jews in the Bible.

They refer to the West Bank with the biblical names of Judea and Samaria. They believe that Christians who assist in fulfilling this biblical pledge are blessed and that the establishment of the state of Israel indicates other biblical prophesies will follow. For some, though not all, that most notably includes an apocalypse that will lead to a second coming of Jesus Christ.

“We Christians are calling on our beloved President Trump and his team to aggressively remove all barriers to Israel’s sovereignty over all the land, including Judea and Samaria,” said Terri Copeland Pearsons, an influential pastor who produced the television program of her father, the televangelist Kenneth Copeland, and now serves as the president of his eponymous Bible college in Texas. She made the remarks at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in the state last Thursday.

Organizers at the event pushed a resolution sponsored by the American Christian Leaders for Israel that rejects “all efforts” to pressure Israel to relinquish West Bank territory. That group, formed a decade ago, describes itself as a network of about 3,000 Christian leaders “representing tens of millions of American Christians” who advocate “biblical truth” and steadfast support for Israel. Organizers at the convention said they would present the petition to the White House shortly after the conference. The sponsors did not respond to a request for comment on how many people signed the petition and whether it was presented to the president.

The demand is meant to help build support for a controversial effort promoted by some in Israel to annex land that is home to roughly three million Palestinians and now about half a million Israeli settlers.

Much of the world considers Israel’s West Bank settlements, which have expanded rapidly in recent years, a violation of international law. Israel disputes this characterization.

The Christian Zionist advocacy around the West Bank comes as the prospect of an independent Palestinian state has grown especially dim since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, ignited a war in the enclave and also led to rising tensions in the West Bank, about 55 miles away.

Those petitioning Mr. Trump to support Israeli annexation of the West Bank say they hope such a declaration will end any further discussion of a future Palestinian state there.

Their resolution comes as Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right government has greenlighted settlement construction and expansion in the West Bank at a faster rate than in the past and amid intense military raids in Palestinian cities there since January. The raids have displaced tens of thousands of residents.

The petition also joins a wave of similar initiatives by influential conservatives and Christians, in Congress and beyond, aiming to sway policy in the second Trump term.

Days before American Christian Leaders for Israel announced the petition, Representative Claudia Tenney, Republican of New York, who identifies as Presbyterian, sent a similar letter to Mr. Trump with five other members of the congressional “Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus” she started this year. It called on his administration to “recognize Israel’s right” to declare sovereignty over the territory, saying that doing so would be integral to defending “the Judeo-Christian heritage on which our nation was founded.”

Asked in February at a news conference with Mr. Netanyahu about his position on Israeli annexation of the West Bank, Mr. Trump said that “people do like the idea,” and that there would be “an announcement probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.”

Mr. Trump’s comments also helped fuel enthusiasm for a resolution on Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank adopted last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an agenda-setting annual conservative gathering.

Mr. Trump has supported other initiatives of the Israeli far right: Last month he endorsed mass Palestinian displacement from Gaza, and in January, he overrode a Biden executive order that had allowed sanctions for West Bank settlers deemed to have violated human rights.

He has selected evangelical Christian supporters of Israel for key positions in his administration, including the televangelist Paula White-Cain as a senior adviser to the newly created White House Faith Office who is vocal about her support for Israel on religious grounds, and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, a former governor and Baptist minister who has long aligned with Israeli settlers, as his nominee for ambassador to Israel.

In 2017, Mr. Huckabee participated in a ceremony in a West Bank settlement and told CNN he thinks “Israel has title deed to Judea and Samaria,” adding that “there is no such thing as a West Bank” or “an occupation.” Last year after he was named for the ambassador role, he told Israeli army radio that annexation was “of course” a possibility.

Ms. Tenney recently introduced a bill that would replace government references to the West Bank and use the biblical names instead. Representative Brian Mast, the Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has instructed staffers to call the territory Judea and Samaria, according to an internal committee memo first reported by Axios last Wednesday. (Neither lawmaker responded to requests for comment.)

Christians are far from uniform, however, and many support a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Evangelical leaders’ stance does not reflect the views of the entire community, much less the perspective of all Christians or all Americans broadly, as backing for Israel has fallen amid its war with Hamas in Gaza, while support for Palestinians has risen and driven a protest movement on college campuses.

“This is a long, enduring tension we Palestinian Christians have with our siblings in the U.S., especially evangelicals,” said Daniel Bannoura, a theology doctoral candidate at Notre Dame who hosts a podcast on faith and social justice called “Across the Divide.”

Mr. Bannoura, the son of a Baptist minister, grew up in the West Bank and later attended college and graduate school in the United States. He said that because his community in the West Bank was “very small and dwindling” — made up of about 50,000 people by some estimates — and because their identities complicate prevailing narratives, “Palestinian Christians haven’t been given a voice.”

In stark contrast, many evangelicals have a direct line to the White House. Larry Huch, a Christian Zionist minister and television show host, boasted at the news conference promoting the West Bank annexation petition that Ms. White-Cain of the White House Faith Office was in touch.

About 80 percent of white, evangelical Christians voted for President Trump in 2024, according to a voter survey by The Associated Press. And the Christian vote more broadly was key to his victory, research from Arizona Christian University showed, with Christians making up more than 70 percent of voters and more than half voting for Mr. Trump.

“The current administration is very aware that white evangelical Christians voted in large numbers and are deeply motivated to support Israel,” said David Katibah, who leads communications and Christian engagement at Telos in Washington, a group formed by two Christian Americans in 2009 — one evangelical and the other of Palestinian descent — to support a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict through education and “peacemaker” training.

Mr. Katibah said he had been raised in an American evangelical community and noted that within it there is not a monolithic perspective on annexation. Increasingly, younger evangelicals are embracing “a more expansive view” that emphasizes mutual flourishing, justice and human rights for both sides, he said.

Some research does back this point. A 2021 survey commissioned by the University of North Carolina at Pembroke found a sharp shift in attitudes among younger evangelicals between 2018 and 2021, with their support for Israel dropping from 75 percent to less than 35 percent along with an accompanying rise in a desire to see United States policy that reflects a Palestinian perspective.

Yoon Suk Yeol, the impeached South Korean president who is standing trial on insurrection charges over his decision to impose martial law in December, was released from a detention center on Saturday, a day after a court ruled that his detention was invalid.

The Seoul Central District Court ruled on Friday that prosecutors had violated procedural rules by holding Mr. Yoon in detention longer than legally allowed before indicting him in January. The procedural violation rendered Mr. Yoon’s detention invalid, the court said.

Prosecutors, who had a week to appeal the decision, requested instead that he be released.

Mr. Yoon smiled broadly and waved at supporters as he walked out of a detention center south of Seoul, where he had been held since Jan. 15. He clenched his fist in a victorious gesture and bowed toward hundreds of supporters who had gathered outside the jail, waving national flags and shouting, “Yoon Suk Yeol!”

His release does not affect the insurrection charge he faces in a Seoul criminal court related to his martial law declaration, or the separate proceedings at the Constitutional Court. That body is deliberating whether his parliamentary impeachment was legitimate, and if he should be formally removed from office. But it does mean that he will be free while standing trial.

After a short ride from the detention center, Mr. Yoon returned to his presidential residence on a hilltop in central Seoul. As a motorcade carrying Mr. Yoon neared his residence, thousands of supporters lined the street to cheer him. Mr. Yoon briefly got out of his car to shake hands with the supporters, who called his impeachment and the insurrection charge against him a “fraud” engineered by his political enemies.

Mr. Yoon sounded as defiant as ever, calling his legal struggle “a fight to defend the freedom and rule of law in South Korea” and “a resolute standoff against those who want to usurp power by illegal means.”

“I will persist in this fight to the end together with the people,” Mr. Yoon said in a statement.

His release was the latest twist in the political upheaval and uncertainty that was unleashed when he declared martial law on Dec. 3, calling the opposition-controlled National Assembly a “monster” that “paralyzed” his government.

His abrupt imposition of martial law triggered a national outrage, prompting thousands of people to rush to block military troops from taking over the Assembly. That gave time for lawmakers to vote down his decree. His martial law ended in six hours.

Mr. Yoon’s party blocked the Assembly’s first attempt to impeach him on charges of disrupting constitutional orders. But it impeached him in its second attempt on Dec. 14, suspending him from office until the Constitutional Court delivers its final say on his political fate.

Separately, prosecutors went after him with insurrection and other criminal charges. Their first attempt to detain him, on Jan. 3, was aborted when he was holed up in his residence, surrounded by his bodyguards, and refused to hand himself over. He surrendered only when prosecutors visited again on Jan. 15 with more police officers.

He is the first president in South Korean history to be detained on criminal charges while still in office.

His lawyers have since tried to release him, disputing his impeachment, his arrest and the criminal charges against him.

In the end, Mr. Yoon was released from jail because of a procedural error that prosecutors made about how long the warrant they used to detain him was valid. By law, if prosecutors fail to indict a criminal suspect before such a warrant expires, the suspect must be released from custody.

Prosecutors, who believed that the warrant on Mr. Yoon would expire at 7:39 p.m. on Jan. 26, indicted him about an hour before that. But in its ruling on Friday, a three-judge panel at the Seoul Central District Court said the warrant had expired on the morning of Jan. 26.

The court ruling did not address any criminal charge Mr. Yoon faced. But his release is expected to encourage his supporters. His critics also feared that he would try to rally their support with his increasingly polarizing language to divide the country and build pressure on judges deliberating his case.

Prosecutors said on Saturday that they had decided not to appeal the court’s decision because they were not likely to win. But they vowed to win the main criminal trial against Mr. Yoon.

The Democratic Party, the country’s main opposition, accused prosecutors of turning their “back on the people.” It also denounced Mr. Yoon’s behavior after his release as “appalling.”

“He continues to defy the reality of his situation — that he remains a criminal suspect facing charges related to treason,” said Yum Seungyul, a party spokesman. “His actions today serve only to further divide and destabilize a country already on the edge.”

Mr. Yoon’s surprise release could deepen and potentially prolong South Korea’s political crisis, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.

“The Constitutional Court is already under political pressure from pro- and anti-impeachment protesters in the streets,” he said. “Yoon’s release from detention will energize his supporters and raise further doubts about the legal process against him.”