Jaipur Literary Festival
Published in Eland E-letter, March 13th 2025
Jaipur is the best literary festival in the world, not because it is the biggest (it is not), nor because it is well-funded (it is not), but because it is free. Or almost free. You have to register in advance, but the five-day student pass will set back a young scholar 100 rupees, which is under £1.
This creates an audience unlike anything else I have encountered in the rest of the world. A Jaipur audience is younger, smarter, more alert and attentive. It is opinionated, bright-eyed, stylish and alert. Since no one buys seat tickets, if the audience feels that the speaker (be they ever so famous on the little screen) is underperforming, they simply rise up and go listen to someone more articulate and honest, often achieving this exit with some style, as sarees and scarves, or school blazers are adjusted with a determined flourish. At any hour of the day there are seven simultaneous talks being held, most of them in open-sided tents within the Jaipur Festival Compound, so there is plenty of choice, and plenty of freedom to move. My travelling companion and I agreed not to attend the same talks so we could double up on the already dazzling range of options. On each of the five days (Thursday through to Monday), the three biggest tents (Front Lawn, Charbagh and Surya Mahal) will host nine separate sessions, including a start-up session of a Morning Raga - classical Indian music. In the early evening there is always a raucous, high-volume and boldly-lit rock concert performed by bands flown in from Delhi or Bombay for which tickets are keenly purchased by Jaipur’s youth. For the rest, no individual, neatly numbered seat tickets are sold for any of the acts, nor are seats reserved for speakers or sponsors. So unlike our dear old, stuffy little Britain, there are no veiled class distinctions in the seating, or bossy volunteer usher creating entrance queues at the back of a white plasticated tent and inefficiently checking off tickets, just a determined free flow of individuals. For the more popular sessions, a crust ten individuals thick can surround the packed rows of seats within the tents, all craning to get some sort of view. Whilst in the indoor halls, if there are no free chairs the overflow audience neatly folds their legs to sit in the aisles or cluster around the stage.
This is all made possible by the weather, which also allows for acres of printed cotton cloth and for exuberant coloured flags and bunting. But side by side with Indian style is the smooth efficiency of the professional tech engineers, in control of two elevated camera crews who, aside from adding a whiff of film-making glamour, allow large screens on either side of the stage to screen close-ups of the speakers. Roving cameras also play over the assembled audience, and focus on individuals which helps bind the whole act (of speakers and audience) into a shared session. This professionalism, aside from the heightened experience it gives to the festival, is also a key to the funding. For in that last minute before you go up on the stage, a speaker (with other things on their mind than small print) is invited to sign a modest sheet of paper by a charming young assistant which allows the festival to transmit, and if they can find the buyers sell, these filmed sessions to the vast, information hungry and screen-savy audience of South Asia. The sea of enthusiastic young volunteers, easily identifiable by their magenta waistcoats, adds another raft of energy. After the festival was over, we went travelling for two weeks and by chance bumped into two of these volunteers in two different cities and had the chance to talk to them properly. They confirmed our opinion, that this was an exceptionally interested and animated audience, who treated the Festival like a free university spinning with ideas and opportunities.
Like every festival, there are also sponsors, embassies, corporations and family charitable foundations helping pay the cost of flying speakers out to Jaipur, putting them up in hotels, feeding them, transporting them and treating them well. The authors' tent served breakfast, lunch, fresh-brewed Masala tea, cakes and cocktails from dawn to dusk, and the conversation (after the sparkle of public performance) was gentle and self-deprecating. In this enclosure over the five days I had tea with half a dozen of my leading literary Arabist heroes - Avi Shlaim, Antony Sattin, Eugene Rogan, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Christopher de Bellaigue and Gaith Abdul-Ahad, aside from connecting with dozens of travel writers, war correspondents and historians, all highly eminent yet approachable and friendly. As ever, having a book ready to be signed, makes for an easy first introduction. I have genuinely lost count of the number of dinners and palatial receptions that we attended, apart from that fantastic finale, a concert and a dinner staged in the inner courtyard of the 17th-century palace embedded in the vast medieval walls of Amber Fort – which is perched like a fusion between Edinburgh and Windsor castle right on the furthest reaches of the city. We stayed in a minor mid-19th century palace, complete with its own Devi temple and resident Rajah, with ancient cannons and carriages sheltered under the enclosing verandahs. Breakfast was served on a high balcony where we could follow the fascinating feud between the hotel dogs (ably commanded by a fox terrier with a labrador puppy acting as his aide de camp) and the monkeys safe in the trees.
Jaipur started out as a small music festival, which attracted the attention of a pair of music-loving writers, the Indian novelist Namita Gokhale and the Scottish historian William Dalrymple, who in 2006 volunteered to give talks in between the concerts. This worked well, and they then asked their friends to join them, and this amicable process continued, and continues. This year there must have been 250 speakers, at least three-quarters of whom are Indian writers, joined by other English language speakers from all over the world. Namita and William are the Festival Co-Directors, but the whole thing is held together by the organisational genius and easy charm of Sanjoy Roy, film-maker, music producer and managing director of Teamworks. He is the Producer.
The first time I attended the literary festival at Jaipur was more than ten years ago. The weather was not in our favour, and all local flights had been grounded by a freak storm. I spent the first night on the carpet of Delhi airport, but when we eventually arrived (having travelled through a storm-ravaged landscape), I was glad not to have flown through that night. The Festival's book-shop tent had been comprehensively drowned, all printed matter reduced back to wood pulp, but it had a curiously liberating effect on the assembled writers over the next few days, who spoke freely without any thought of book sales and signings. On that first day, with the weather not yet set fair, I remember a session given by the biographer Richard Holmes, making use of an office canteen which had been borrowed as an emergency location and was packed to the rafters with a rapt audience listening to him talk about Coleridge. At one point, Holmes paused to give credit to the unsung scholarship of an elderly Indian professor with whom he had long corresponded, to whom he hoped to post a copy of his finished book. There was a faint stir, then a breach in the crowd, and a small figure was pushed forward by his friends, one of whom called out, “It is He”. Richard Holmes immediately halted his lecture in order to greet this old correspondent and give him the first, and (since the obliteration of the book tent) only copy of his brand new book. It had been dedicated to him. It was a highly affecting moment, the meeting of two old scholars for the first time, witnessed by a packed theatre of hundreds of delighted faces.
The next day the sun came out and just before my first experience of a Punjabi heavy metal rock concert, William Dalrymple beckoned me over. He knew I had been educated in British boarding schools and thought that I would like to meet a brilliantly painted transvestite who was much in demand at weddings (besides being the father of three) who taught me how to flirt as well as the ‘cut-direct’. My official invitation had been to speak about Shia Imams and Sunni Caliphs with a quiet American from the State Department, but William knew that one of the tricks about keeping any festival lively, is to get your guest speakers out of the authors tent, and in constant animation by giving them small minor tasks to keep them on their toes. He has a genius at this sort of thing, driven by his extraordinary all-embracing enthusiasms and energy, but even if you are not being test-driven as a future guest on one of his podcasts, there can be moments of blind panic if you are one of his guests. Such as day three, when William came up to me with his infectious grin, “I thought you might like to be in conversation with Marcus du Sautoy about Sacred Numbers. Whoops, I think we had better hurry, there seems to be a crowd waiting for him. He is the Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford and so the intellectual heir of Sir Isaac Newton. Have fun, but I must dash, as I am introducing two biographers of Christ to each other.”