At the Jaipur Literature Festival, East meets West as it does at no other event in the book world. East and West immediately fall into heated debate about the role of the occupier in Afghanistan, and about why the most recognized South Asian writers are all expatriates from their homelands.
Then West bums a smoke.
East confesses to a mad crush on the writer U.S. writer Junot Diaz, who was just signing books in the courtyard.
And they head off together to dance until dawn on the ramparts of the Moghul emperor’s fort.
As book events go, there is nothing quite like this one.
The festival couldn’t help but be a little bit magical, set as it is in the grounds of a 150-year-old palace in the princely city of Jaipur – visitors enter through 20-metre azure wooden doors studded with silver. When Diaz (who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)took the stage on Friday, he was occasionally drowned out by the screams of the peacocks who glare down at the book-lovers from the flowering trees.
The Jaipur festival has another remarkable quality: Its events are free. Some 30,000 people attended last year, wandering into the palace grounds and on to the lawn or into the tents where readings are held. Early estimates are that the crowd has increased by another third this year (leaving the events groaning at their ribbon-wrapped tent seams.) “As a writer there are very few festivals you go to that you really enjoy – but this is a festival that’s festive,” said the Toronto-and-Kathmandu-based writer Manjushree Thapa (Seasons of Flight). “Everyone is happy to be in Jaipur, because it’s beautiful and it’s a mix you don’t find elsewhere of international writers and local ones – it’s very cosmopolitan and also very rooted. And they don’t focus on the international at the expense of the literature from the corners of the world.” Thapa is at the festival as part of a focus on writers from Nepal.
The festival was founded six years ago by the Scottish-émigré-to-India historian William Dalrymple (City of Djinns) and the Indian novelist Namita Gokhale (The Book of Shadows). In the beginning, it was something of a novelty, a cult destination for book lovers. But its freewheeling format allows for all manner of serendipitous encounters, and it began to be a favourite event for Western writers as well as South Asians.
“There is no segregation of writers, publishers and public and that makes for a very fluid kind of experience,” said the British-Indian novelist Rana Dasgupta, winner of the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Solo. He found himself chatting with the Indian tycoon Nandini Nilekani (Imagining India) at the festival two years ago. “In such a hierarchical society, where access to people is so controlled, it seemed so miraculous that you could walk in on Nandan Nilekani having his lunch, when he is at the very heart of the transformations of this country. The fact that a person like that doesn’t need to hide – the festival brings that openness in those who come.”
Desi-lit superstar Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy), for example, loitered in the festival bar on Friday night flirting with all comers. “I love this place,” he enthused. “It’s more like a bazaar – anyone can come in.” (The next morning, he sported large dark sunglasses and fell asleep in the penultimate row of a talk by Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss) and the British historian Patrick French (The World Is What It Is). Candace Busnhell (Sex and the City), meanwhile, stood in very New York stilettos and teased up-do amidst a tide of green-and-yellow auto-rickshaws, hollering into a cellphone while a cow munched rubbish behind her.
This quixotic quality, and the crowds, have put the festival onto the international map in a new way this year. “There is a sense it is now much more important to the industry,” Dasgupta said. “I was in London three weeks ago and I couldn’t believe the number of people who said, ‘See you in Jaipur!’ ”
