In January 2004 I was invited to give a reading in Jaipur at a new festival of music and dance that was being set up in the state capital of Rajasthan. The reading took place in a small room at the back of the university. Hardly anybody could find it — about 30 people, mainly elderly aunties, turned up.
Despite the poor showing, Jaipur, one of the most beautiful cities in India, was clearly the ideal place for an arts festival. That evening I suggested to the organiser, Faith Singh, that I start a small literary festival around her Jaipur Festival. Two years later we kicked off with a line-up of 18 authors (though two failed to show up), all Indian residents.
Since then the Jaipur Literature Festival has mushroomed and my co-director, Namita Gokhale, and I have found ourselves running the largest literary festival in Asia, and the biggest free festival of literature in the world. Tina Brown has dubbed us “the greatest festival on earth”. On our fourth festival, last year, no fewer than 140 authors from 15 countries spoke to crowds of more than 20,000 people.
Several things combine to make Jaipur different from any other book festival. First, it really is a festival. The buildings are festooned with streamers, we let off fireworks at night and after 6.30pm the writers give the stage over to music and dancing until the early hours of each morning.
Second, it is completely free, including the beer. Anyone can turn up: students from Delhi, unpublished poets from Bihar, Mumbai socialites, Bengali political activists, diaspora returnees from New York and London, autograph-seeking schoolchildren from Jaipur; even Julia Roberts and her new baby have attended.
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Inevitably, we’ve had a few controversies. In 2008 everything was thrown into confusion by the terrorist attacks in Mumbai before Christmas. One of our themes was to highlight the emergence of a group of talented young writers in Pakistan. But after the attacks many figures of India’s centre Left, as well as the Right, argued for a sporting and cultural boycott of Pakistan, while on the extreme Right the politician Raj Thackeray called for all Mumbai bookshops that stocked Pakistani books to be attacked, leading the police to advise booksellers there to withdraw Pakistani writers, which many did.
However, we held a view that books, films, art, music and literature give South Asians identity, joy and momentum, so we held our ground and our Pakistani authors became the stars of the show. Nadeem Aslam and Daniyal Mueenuddin talked about how the terrorism engulfing Pakistan caused a “premature nostalgia”, provoking the writer to pin to the page a precious world before it disappeared. “Like writing very fast,” Aslam said, “with a quill whose other end is on fire.”
Yet the biggest difficulty, oddly enough, is not bridging the divide between India and Pakistan, but between those Indian authors who write in English and those who write in some of the country’s 22 national languages, 122 regional languages and 1,726 mother tongues. While Indian writers in the former colonial language of English are known and celebrated outside India — in contrast to, say, Latin American literature, which is received globally in translation from Spanish — many of India’s most celebrated and bestselling writers work not in English but in vernacular (or bhasha) tongues, particularly Hindi, Bengali and Malayalam.
Many of the more popular events at the festival are in these bhasha tongues. Two years ago we hosted the Hindi author Anupam Mishra, whose work has never been translated into English or any nonIndian language, but whose nonfiction book on traditional methods of water harvesting has sold more than a million copies in Hindi. To these bhasha writers, the global Indian literary superstars are a somewhat controversial proposition.
A few years ago one Indian critic, M. Prabha, wrote an entire book dismissing the whole movement of Indian writing in English as The Waffle of the Toffs (the title of her amusingly vitriolic book). She argued that almost all the Indian writers revered in the West were overpaid and out-of-touch middle-class public schoolboys, few of whom actually lived in India, preferring New York (the residence of Amitav Ghosh and Jhumpa Lahiri), LA (Vikram Chandra), Toronto (Rohinton Mistry and Michael Ondaatje) or even rural Wiltshire (home to V. S. Naipaul and Vikram Seth) to the chaos of the sub-continent.
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The controversy became properly embittered when, on the 50th anniversary of Indian independence, Salman Rushdie published the Vintage Book of Indian Writing. In it he included 32 writers, only one of whom had written in a language other than English. “Prose writing — both fiction and non-fiction — created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the ‘16 official languages’ of India, the so-called ‘vernacular languages’, during the same time,” he wrote.
Rushdie was aware that this was a controversial claim: “The ironic proposition that India’s best writing since independence may have been done in the language of the departed imperialists,” he continued, “is simply too much for some folks to bear.”
Predictably, there was a storm of protest: “Can it be true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England or America and whom one might have met at a party?” the novelist Amit Chaudhuri wrote in his response to the Vintage volume, the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. Ironically, Chaudhuri’s selection was in turn criticised for favouring Bengali authors over writers from the south.
These language issues remain touchy and things can go badly wrong. Three years ago, when one moderator tried to wind up a session with two stars of Rajasthani poetry that had drifted overtime, she was — quite unfairly — accused in a regional paper of showing disrespect to these literary figures and soon found her books being burnt by angry crowds of their fans. Only when the two poets rushed to her defence did the mobs of poetry lovers disperse.
But we continue to host packed sessions involving writers from Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Punjab and Rajasthan as well as the spread of the Indian diaspora. This year, among our more familiar international stars such as Hanif Kureishi, Roddy Doyle, Louis de Bernières, Michael Frayn, Claire Tomalin and Niall Ferguson, we are hosting a tribal Santal poet from the Bengali hinterland, a defrocked nun who has written a bestselling memoir in Tamil, and a raft of Dalit writers who voice the concerns of the group once known as the Untouchables. We open with one of the great writers in Kannada, Girish Karnad, who is making the keynote speech, and we are giving a prominent platform to the Bengali activist and author Mahasweta Devi, who was last year nominated for the Man Booker International Prize.
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Despite our efforts to mix the panels between the bhasha crew and the English-wallahs, there is always a certain amount of joshing between the two. But debate is what our festival has always been about. For, as Amartya Sen reminded us in The Argumentative Indian, Indians have always been an outspoken lot, with a habit of asking difficult questions, and speaking at length. India’s ancient epics are the longest poems ever composed, and in the 1950s Krishna Menon set the record for the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations — a remarkable eight hours. We have yet to match this record at Jaipur, but who knows ... maybe later this month?
Jaipur Literature Festival, Jan 21-25, Diggi Palace, Jaipur; jaipurliterature festival.org
William Dalrymple’s latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, is published by Bloomsbury. To order it for the special price of £18, call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst