THE story of the Jaipur Literature Festival has embedded in it many dimensions of magic. An annual event that has become something in the nature of a literary pilgrimage, it has changed the way South Asian writing views itself and its place in the world.

‘The right to dream is the most fundamental human right’, the iconic Bangla writer Mahasweta Devi declared in her keynote address at JLF 2013. The Jaipur Literature Festival believes in the human imagination, beyond borders and boundaries, nations and ideologies. Over the years it has been compared to the Kumbh Mela, an Asian Woodstock, and a spreading banyan tree.

It has been a transformative experience to be associated with JLF and to witness first-hand the power of ideas, of books, debate and dialogue. In a fractured and polarized society, rent by uber-conviction and prejudice, literature and the narrative arts help us to listen to each other’s stories with empathy and understanding. Over the years, the litfest has been able to nurture the sort of open space that can provide a platform for the many contradictory ideas of India – a spool of simultaneous unwindings, remixes and spontaneous solo riffs. It has seen an incredible range and diversity of audiences. From the urban elite to the intellectual jholawalas, to the great janata janardan which is the backbone of Indian democracy – all congregate on the lawns of Diggi Palace and hear each other out.

It is difficult to write about something which has become so much a part of oneself. Perhaps I am much too close to the Jaipur Literature Festival, which has indeed taken over my life for the last ten years. So, requesting the indulgence of patient readers, I would like to invite them to an impromptu textual enactment of a Kaavad.

A ‘Kaavad’ is a form of performative folk art unique to Rajasthan. It employs a portable wooden shrine, a box of many windows, with multiple panels and painted doors and windows, all hinged together and opening up to different thresholds of the narrative. The itinerant Kaavadiya Bhats are the custodians of epic and folklore, family histories and genealogies. They bring together script and story, voice and visual illustration in a unique confluence of creativity.

Let me expand the metaphor and transport it to the wonders of our festival. The first panel of the ‘JLF Kaavad’ opens on the Indian languages. Characterized by their bewildering diversity, the twenty four national languages are only the frontal face of a literary culture that includes hundreds of mother tongues, thousands of dialects. South Asia exists in a constant and ongoing state of translation and interpretation. Over the years, the festival has emerged as a platform to understand and appreciate the Bhasha literary culture, in all its richness, diversity and complexity.

 

In 2014, in a special focus on endangered languages, Ganesh Devy talked of the need to conserve and preserve a multilingual appreciation of language and literature and resist a mono-linguistic nationalist model. The festival also saw the release of the Rajasthan segment of his landmark Peoples Linguistic Survey of India. Anvita Abbi spoke of the Great Andamanese languages, many of which face extinction, while Shekhar Pathak explained the fragile ecosystems of the Himalayan tongues in a session aptly titled ‘Raag Pahadi’.

Over the years, JLF sessions have consistently questioned the hegemony of the Anglophone world and the evolving hierarchies of linguistic power. ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy’, as Maz Weinreich famously commented. We have over the years showcased over thirty Indian languages, as well as several international literatures. At last count, this list of featured languages included Assamese, Bangla, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Rajasthani dialects such as Marwari, Mewari, Mevati, Harauti, Dhundhari, Bagri and Shekhawati have also found voice in the festival, as have Pahari and Kumaoni.

From classical Sanskrit to the ancient and enduring Santhali language, from transborder conversations by Sindhi writers from India and Pakistan to heated debates on the direction in which ‘modern’ Hindi is headed, the Jaipur Literature Festival examines all aspects of the spoken and written word as the repository of ideas and cultural identities.

 

The Kaavad is essentially an oral tradition, and so the JLF Kaavad quite naturally invokes Rajasthan’s oral heritage, its long legacy of ballad and folksong, of voice and music and memory, which are all an essential component of our festival. Mohan Bhopa, one of the great masters of the unique ‘Phad’ tradition of folk performance, and his wife Batasi Bhopa, were cherished regular visitors to the festival until Mohan Bhopa’s untimely demise in 2011. His son now continues the tradition, where the Bhopa recites against the backdrop of the ‘Phad’, an enormous painted and illustrated scroll, lit up by a lamp by the Bhopasi as the story unfolds.

‘There is an entire social, political, cultural and economic history in these paintings,’ art historian Kavita Singh commented during the 2009 festival, where audiences get a glimpse of the ancient interplay between voice, image and text. She continued, ‘Rajasthan’s rich bardic literature serves all strata of society. There are epics for kings, cattle herders and leather workers. What is interesting is how Phad has affected storytelling and how a symbiotic relationship of centuries ago continues even now… Today, we are accustomed to visual narratives that use the mono-scenic method – depicting a single moment from the narrative within one frame. But the Phad employs the narrative strategy used in pre-modern art – an entire sequence of events enclosed in one frame.’

 

That sounds rather like the simultaneous, multifaceted panels at the Jaipur Literature Festival! It’s no coincidence that my famous co-director, William Dalrymple, has also written with empathy and admiration about Phad in his piece ‘Homer in India’ in The New Yorker.

Ghafaruddin Mewati is another unique reservoir of heritage who has brought the festival alive with his magic. Heir to an ancient and secular Islamic tradition of reciting the Mahabharata, his epic performances span twenty two days of recitation, which he and his troupe have entirely committed to memory. JLF’s unswerving devotion to the oral traditions aims to transmit, not merely archive, these dynamic living literatures, and to bring them alive to a new generation of audiences.

 

In seeking to amplify the groundswell of voices, Dalit literature, the transformative writings of once marginalized groups, are always centrestage at the festival. Over the years, a range of iconic and radical writers including the late Om Prakash Valmiki, Kancha Ilaiah, Laxman Gaikwad, Desraj Kali, P. Sivakami, Meena Kandasamy, Ajay Navaria, Neerav Patel, and others, have resonated powerfully across the lawns of Diggi Palace. Prose, poetry and polemic from nomadic Gujar writers, from Santhali voices, from tribal communities struggling with the habits of script, seek to find their spot under the mellow Jaipur sunshine.

Kancha Ilaiah wrote in the Deccan Chronicle, ‘Literary festivals teach how to connect oneself to the social main culture, if one is doing the transformative writing. …At least the literature festival has lifted the veil. …If writing helps even a section of the oppressors to begin to understand the point of view of the oppressed, the role of writing becomes more meaningful. The Jaipur festival has shown the signs of such positive exchange of views.’

To continue the metaphor of the Kaavad let us open yet another window of the festival palimpsest. Controversies come naturally to the charged atmosphere of the JLF, as ideas and intellects collide and convictions and prejudices battle onstage and off. In 2012, the Salman Rushdie saga, where the famous Indian origin writer was unable to attend the festival due to threats on his life, indeed served to amplify a larger debate on the freedom of speech. In other years too, on different notes, scales and octaves, argumentative Indians and others join in to deliberate and dispute the pressing issues of our times.

‘Calm breaks out at Jaipur Literature Festival’, James Crabtree wrote in the Financial Times in January 2014. Ekta Kapoor had been booed and heckled, but tension temperature-metres were several degrees lower than those in previous editions, including the unfortunate Ashis Nandy controversy and others in the years before.

 

As an exercise in memory, I go through the brochures and catalogues of the festival that lie piled in a heap below my desk. The year 2008, I lost my beloved father that January, just some days before the festival. I remember wandering numbly through the lawns of Diggi Palace, seeking something, some solace for my hurt, some understanding of the nonsense of life and death. I listened in to Ian McEwan. I had been reading his new novel, Atonement. ‘Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination’? he had written.

‘How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her… No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all’… The consolations of literature.

 

The novelist Nayantara Sahgal delivered an inspired keynote address that year. Speaking about climate change, she observed: ‘We are here to celebrate literature, which is the same as saying we are here to celebrate diversity. It may be that the world is becoming flat again, locking us into a we and they, black and white, either-or way of thought – a shrunken and cliched world.

‘Literature means many voices. As writers, we project our unique points of view. As readers, other writers show us there are other visions and values, other ways of living and thinking. India has always seemed to me to be a good place to have a celebration of many voices. One of my favourite writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, once called his continent a microcosm of the human race. Our subcontinent too is pretty much the same kind of mix and muddle of races and cultures with a plurality of religions and languages thrown in besides. Racial purity, a single Book, a single Way of Life, one prescription for solving all problems, would seem absurd here, a fantasy we would never consider. I’d like to say we never will. Instead I have to say that diversity, here as in many parts of the world, is under attack. And because diversity is at the very heart, the very meaning, of literature, I wonder how creativity in life and literature will be affected – is already being affected – by the relentless drive toward sameness by religious fundamentalism on the one hand, and by the lookalike world that globalization based on marketization is producing on the other.’

Resisting sameness, we had conjured an unlikely cast of writers and speakers from across languages and disciplines. That was the year Gore Vidal didn’t come, cancelling his ticket from Galle at the very last minute. But Dev Anand did, and so did John Berendt, and Manil Suri, and Donna Tart, and Kunal Basu, and the talented Tamil writer Rajathi Salma who quite literally stole the show.

 

Before we knew it the year 2009 was upon us. I dubbed this the ‘Woodstock year’, when suddenly the jungle drum had spread the word about our festival. U.R. Ananthamurthy delivered the keynote address. Sunil Gangopadhyay was in conversation with his distinguished translator Aruna Chakravarti. Colin Thubron, Pico Iyer, Charles Nicholl and Michael Wood were in conversation about travel writing with Alice Albinia. Mohan Bhopa performed the ‘Pabuji ka Phad’. And yes, Amitabh the Bachchan was there too.

2010 was another vintage year. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka held the audiences enthralled even as the Dalit focus grabbed headlines around the world. Thinkers, activists and writers like Kancha Ilaiah, Bama, P. Sivakami, Desraj Kali, Ajay Navaria, Iqbal Udasi and Nirupama Dutt moved the conversation to spaces of transformative anger and assertion. The late Om Prakash Valmiki’s reading of Thakur ka Kuan (The Landlord’s Well) moved the assembled audience to tears. Something moved within the hearts and minds of the middle class resistance and ingrained prejudice.

And yes, Niall Ferguson was there too, and Her Majesty Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck of Bhutan, and Hanif Kureishi, and Javed Akhtar, and Shabana Azmi. And Girish Karnad, and the charismatic Shobhaa De. The party was getting even bigger.

Fast forward to 2011. To quote from the Directors note: ‘As the Sankranti kites fill up the skies and the winter ends, once again, the world visits Jaipur and Jaipur visits the world.’ The ‘greatest literary show on earth’ had John Coetzee and Orhan Pamuk make an appearance. Two Nobel laureates and seven Booker Prize winners. Socialites and socialists, Hindi and Angrezi, Junot Diaz and Chimamanda Adichie, Candace Bushnell and Mohsin Hamid. You get the picture.

2012 was the year when, famously, Salman Rushdie did not come to the festival. The year when Oprah Winfrey did. The theme for 2012 was ‘The Living Legacy of Bhakti Poetry’, and we had Purushottam Agrawal and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Shabnam Virmani and H.S. Shivaprakash, and many others, speak of the flowering of devotion and intellect when ‘the high art of Sanskrit classicism yielded to the voices of common people, of weavers and washermen, thieves and prostitutes, confronting their times and establishing a direct connect with their personal divinity.’

 

Girish Karnad was in conversation with David Hare and Tom Stoppard that year. We also had the privilege of hosting Ben Okri, and Michael Ondaatje. ‘The Katha Sarit Sagar’, the ‘Sea of Stories’ which is Indian literature, is renewed and revived every year by the extraordinary phenomenon of the Jaipur Literature Festival, which remains the most democratic and egalitarian book festival in the world’, I wrote proudly in the Directors note that year. A crowded year, a difficult year, dogged by controversy, by stress and tension, but one of our best, ultimately.

The tale of the Jaipur Kaavad moves to 2013. Sessions on ‘The Buddha in Literature’ were centred on the immense literary and cultural expanse of the Buddhist legacy. His Holiness the Dalai Lama delivered the keynote address. Two of the greatest poets in Europe, Simon Armitage and John Burnside, attended the festival. Sebastian Faulks and Aminatta Forna, Nadeem Aslam and Mohammed Hanif, Ahdaf Soueif and Tahar Ben Jelloun, Michael Sandel, Diana Eck, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Ambai and Ashok Vajpeyi and Amit Chaudhuri – a bibliomaniacs paradise.

2014 seems yesterday and a lifetime away. Sidestepping the hysteria of television journalism and the bias and prejudice of traditional party lines, our ‘Democracy Dialogues’ examined the larger issues of political and social evolution. The ‘Jaipur BookMark’ broke new ground in the publishing industry, bringing together local and international publishers, and introducing a crucial forum for the fast morphing book industry. Eminent translators from around the world discussed the discipline and creativity entailed in the twice-told tale.

We had sessions on art and mathematics, archaeology and aesthetics. Jhumpa Lahiri did a ghare baire return to her motherland. Amartya Sen and Jonathan Franzen, Homi Bhabha and Antony Beevor, Gloria Steinem and Ganesh Devy. My colleague William Dalrymple observed that it was ‘the most cerebral, intellectually stimulating and high-powered we’ve ever fielded.’

 

From Bollywood to Bulle Shah, it has been an intense, emotive journey. I remember those first intimate years, when the ‘Durbar Hall’ would have doves and sometimes parrots flying about among the cornices. Shobhaa De got a full house that first year and Mahmood Farooqui mesmerized us with a brilliant ‘dastangoi’ performance. Salman Rushdie was present in 2007 mingling with the crowds with unimaginable ease in those still innocent years.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Kabir, Manto and Ismat, Andaal and Meerabai, Tagore and Vijaydan Detha, have all come to life for new audiences, new generations, on the lawns of Diggi Palace.

A sophisticated cosmopolitanism can be as flawed and parochial as the most prejudiced chauvinism. A true internationalism, sensitive to world literatures, has to be inclusive rather than exclusive; it has to be local and rooted to soar the skies. As the strains of Padharo mhare des break the cold night air, the heart of Rajasthan, historical and heroic, straddling tradition and modernity, welcomes writers and readers to this intense annual celebration of our planet and our universe.

Our festival is like a spreading banyan tree, with ever extending roots and branches giving strength and sustenance to each other, a symbol of interdependence and the blossoming of collaborative human knowledge.

The unique ‘JLF model’ has been taught at the Harvard Business School for three years now. This year, ‘JLF roaming’ arrives at the South-bank Centre, London, where we bring together a series of sessions that invoke the special ‘spirit of Jaipur’, which is both celebratory and interrogative, spontaneous yet rigorous. From myth and memory to the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from Bollywood via London to an examination of the plural, multi-vocal literatures of South Asia, and a closing debate on democracy and dynasty, we bring the ever-argumentative Indians to the bank of the Thames.

Every January, as the Sankranti kites soar the skies, Jaipur visits the world and the world visit Jaipur. Across borders and boundaries, languages, religions and ideologies, we celebrate the human spirit, and human knowledge, and the small blue planet to which we all belong.