The Greatest Literary Show on Earth

Shailendra Pandey / Tehelka Now in its third year, the Jaipur Literature Festival brings the voices of India and Pakistan together in peace.

Every January, the ancient city of Jaipur, India, celebrates the written word in a literary festival co-founded by Indian writer Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple, the British travel writer and historian, that easily places first in Asia for cultural cachet and star power. It's hard to believe that the festival is only three years old, given the crackle and buzz around its events and personalities—Salman Rushdie chose the occasion for his first public appearance after the fatwa. And this year too, through five sun-drenched mornings and vivid, musical evenings in the dignified old Diggi Palace, the festival made headlines across India.

"I've been to so many literary festivals, from Shanghai to Bogota, and this one is definitely the least dry, the most carnival-like", said travel writer Pico Iyer. "Where else would you go from Shakespeare to contemporary politics to V.S. Naipaul and then Sufi music—each in such a full-bodied way? The music definitely had a cleansing, clarifying quality after that clash of ideas, like a sorbet in the middle of a rich meal.”

"Where else would you go from Shakespeare to contemporary politics to V.S. Naipaul and then Sufi musi?"

The guest list this year included international boldface names like Iyer, Simon Schama, Michael Wood, and others with Indian roots, like Vikram Seth, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, and Shashi Tharoor. An additional 160 writers, celebrated and obscure, as well as readers, scholars, socialites, journalists, and publishers joined uniformed preteens from the local schools and general milling humanity at the event. The organizers insisted that this remain utterly democratic, a strictly “no ropes, no tickets, no passes” kind of affair. As festival co-director Namita Gokhale put it, the fact that a young writer from Assam could find herself hanging out with a literary agent over dinner in the lawns, was what gave the event its peculiar electricity.

The festival kicked off with the dearly beloved, but rarely heard Vikram Seth reading from his work and talking of his own writerly life. He described the 11 years it took not to finish his economics PhD at Stanford—the feeling that there was “something more than what I was doing,” the epiphanic encounter with Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and the tremendous foolhardiness of The Golden Gate (his California verse-novel). When asked about writing A Suitable Boy, the big fat book that “gouged out his thirties,” Seth replied that he was “happy just to write…this interminable novel that no one would buy, translate, review or stock or read.”

“The world is not against you, it is only indifferent to you,” he said to aspiring writers, describing the slog to get a book published. He mused later, why kill trees unless writing that book is absolutely essential to your soul?

Far from being a bloodless book-chat affair, the Jaipur festival was a stew of all sorts, from CEO-philosopher Nandan Nilekani to Bollywood songwriter and poet Gulzar to actor Amitabh Bachchan. 

But the undoubted apogee of the festival was the young Pakistani platoon. In 1997, when The New Yorker profiled ten young South Asian writers to watch, six were Indian, three were of Indian origin, and one was Sri Lankan. It was a shocker—Pakistan was glaringly absent, “as though it was a barren desert to India's cultural fecundity,” as co-director William Dalrymple put it.