One Festival to rule them all
Margaret Atwood: “If I’ve been asked to open this festival, I’m either very important, or very old.”
However cerebral Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) seems on paper, it requires the ability to juggle learning with merrymaking.
After basking in the darling milieu of the Galle Literary Festival before, Jaipur was everything India promises to be: frenzied and overwhelming, yet enlightening in the way a whirling dervish goes about it.
Jaipur Lit Fest is like speed dating through a liberal arts course with some of the world’s most celebrated minds.
From the world after empire and apocryphal Cuneiform to sexism in Bollywood; Caribbean poetry; transgender politics in India; hypocrisy in investigative journalism, and the method of Man Booker nominees, you begin to feel you’re back at university.
The day’s fervid expansion of brain cells is matched only by a relentless will to destroy them via the nightly line-up of live music acts and libations. Then you wake up, get dressed and do it all over again.
The festival takes place in a palace called Diggi in the heart of Jaipur. It all starts out folksy enough with Rajasthani box-painting storytelling, dances and a multitude of moustaches under colourful turbans doling out clay cups of tea.
But once the wicks of the ceremonial lamps go cold, the days became a measure of patience, endurance and contortionist’s yoga to pour yourself into human interstices just to hear people speak.
Some 330,000 footfalls were recorded in five days here, compared to Galle’s merciful 5,000 in three days. Then it’s a fight between superego and id – should you persist with Thomas Piketty’s French drone to wrestle with global macroeconomics, or aim to get a selfie with Stephen Fry? Jaipur challenges even the basest instincts.
The festival started out in 2006 as a gathering of a hundred or so attendees with 18 writers offering readings from contemporary works.
In its ninth edition this year, Jaipur showcased some 360 speakers including Pulitzer, Man Booker and Nobel laureates taking part in over 200 sessions of cerebral table tennis with contemporaries, stalwarts and newcomers too.
Margaret Atwood opened the festival, charming everyone with some well-disguised zingers. “If I’ve been asked to open this festival, I’m either very important, or very old.”
One unfortunate fan asked her why the women in her novels didn’t seem to progress, and he was treated to a gracefully wry tongue lashing on quite the opposite.
Marlon James who just won the Man Booker prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings, spoke of his roots in Jamaica and how he spends an obsessive amount of time plotting his novels, only to finally ignore it all.
Stephen Fry spoke passionately about Oscar Wilde and how in some senses he found parallels to his own life, in the whirlwind of Wilde’s gifted, yet troubled life. He even told us how he beats writer’s block – by creating a dialogue with himself on his word processor about what was bothering him – which would in turn, help him find a way out.
Alexander McCall Smith told a wonderfully spirited tale about how he drove some friends in Italy around in a bulldozer and extended their vineyard’s boundary as a favour to them before revealing at the end that he was making it all up.
And Christina Lamb told us how she fell into becoming an award-winning war correspondent from Pakistan and Afghanistan by a chance invitation to Benazir Bhutto’s wedding.
The beauty of Jaipur is its democracy in giving visitors and mainly urban India, the chance to speak to their literary idols. “I heard American writer George Steiner when I was a boy in an obscure Yorkshire school and it immediately made me want to be a writer,” says William Dalrymple, co-founder of the festival. “We’re doing that in Jaipur on an industrial scale.”
Dalrymple is like a modern-day Akbar – the ecumenical and Sufi-spirited Mughal emperor whose brand of syncretism can arguably be seen in the gatherings at Jaipur.
A sea of faces at a session in Diggi Palace
He co-founded the festival with Namita Gokhale, a tour de force in bringing Indian languages to the fore (23 at the fest this year alone), who is an accomplished writer and publisher herself.
“We could do an elite event where we charge 300 dollars for rich people to eat with their favourite authors, but we’re not here for that,” says Dalrymple on the phone from Agra.
“Our interest is to spark thousands of minds. I’ve seen school and college kids from Karnataka to Gujarat sleeping at the railway station.
They scrape some money together to buy some books and then hear Nobel and Booker prize winners speak. And when they go home, they want to become writers. Where else in the world do you get such an effect?”
There is a glamour quotient to Jaipur too, not least because of its HuffPo Gossip Girl style reportage either. Bollywood, cricket and publisher parties are a big part of the festival menu.
The grounds were stormed by college kids waiting to hear 90s Bollywood star Kajol, director Karan Johar, lyricist Gulzar, poet and screenwriter Javed Akhtar (or the more contemporary ‘Farhan Akhtar’s dad’) and 80s legend-turned-politician Shatrugan Sinha, speak.
Nightly there is a frenzy of discussion over which haveli or palatial hotel one could squeeze into to schmooze with top authors.
The larger challenge beyond surmounting velvet ropes, is striking up a meaningful conversation with said authors. “What inspires you to write?” won’t cut it when you’re suddenly faced with Jhumpa Lahiri or Jonathan Franzen at the bar.
With the so-called ‘wave of intolerance’ that’s swept over India in the past year with some writers being publicly daubed in paint or even murdered in the case of a professor and scholar, Dr MM Kalburgi who spoke critically of idol worship, all eyes were on Jaipur to see how freedom of expression might be dealt with.
Ever since 2012 when the fest witnessed controversial readings from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, the programme has become a chance for liberals to thumb a nose at naysayers.
During the proceedings several panellists spoke out against intolerance in all its forms from Burkha Dutt and Shobaa De to Karan Johar and even Margaret Atwood who opened the festival with “Writing brings to light the unknown…it sheds light on darkness – whether it’s fascist regimes, poverty, oppression of women or discrimination of so many kinds.”
The festival’s traditional final debate was on whether freedom of expression was absolute and unconditional. When it came to a vote, the motion failed thanks to the facile histrionics of Bollywood actor, Anupam Kher.
But in the end, it was a tacit victory for champions of free speech. Kher had to resort to being backed by a boorish crowd that required the littlest of provocation to chant his support.
Interestingly, the organizers recorded a surprising few hundred registrations just before the debate, suggesting foul play. If Jaipur proved anything, it was that freedom of speech in India is in rude health, despite what some will do to stymie it.
After all, we’re used to stuffed ballot boxes in this part of the world. The vote that really counts is the near 200,000 attendees who had stood for hours, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, to applaud the freedom of the word, in all its unfettered glory.
For highlights of what was said at most of these sessions, follow Govind on Twitter at Govind_Dhar.