Jaipur jamboree

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For literary buffs and bibliophiles, there is never a dull moment at the Jaipur Literature Festival that keeps its tryst with literature and literary lights from January 21 to 25. The JLF, as it has come to be known, gets the world to Jaipur. And it promises a world (just take a look at its lineup if you don’t believe me) to those in love with the written word who flock to the festival every year like moths to light.
In its 2011 edition, the JLF has many delights up its sleeve. Among its chief attractions will be J.M. Coetzee and Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winners. It will be a first for both Coetzee, who is known to be reclusive (it’s to festival co-director William Dalrymple credit that he is on board), and Pamuk, who will be there along with girlfriend and Booker winner Kiran Desai. Pamuk’s The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, that lays bare writing (and reading) novels, will be released by Penguin Books later this year.
Also painting the Pink City golden this year will be American and British literature’s living legends: Richard Ford and Martin Amis.
To me, one of the most interesting sessions to keep an eye and ear out for will be the one on the crisis of American fiction (part of the festival’s focus on writing from the United States) with Jay McInerney (The Good Life), Pulitzer-winner Junot Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) and Ford in conversation with Amis. We had a hint of this crisis, Jonathan Franzen notwithstanding, but it will be interesting to know how these writers see it, interpret it.
The 2011 package will also include Candace Bushnell, the writer of Sex and the City, Irvine Welsh, a major Scottish literary figure who shot to fame with Trainspotting, Pakistan’s Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist), Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Monica Ali, Fatima Bhutto, US journalist and author Jon Lee Anderson, Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock and Vikram Seth, who is working on the sequel to A Suitable Boy and was one of the star attractions at the Kerala Hay Festival organised in November last year.
There will, of course, be the usual suspects, who have delighted poetry lovers at the JLF’s earlier chapters: Gulzar and Javed Akhtar, the czars of verse. Pakistan’s best-known writer, and mother of Kamila Shamsie (who will also be there), Muneeza Shamsie will talk about two nations, two narratives in a conversation with publisher and author Urvashi Butalia.
A window on Arab novel will see its two practitioners, Ahdaf Soueif and Leila Aboulela, talk about the contours of Arab novel outside Arabic language.
The local and regional flavours will be represented by Aidan Singh Bhati, Rajasthan’s popular Hindi poet and critic, poets Ashok Chakradhar and Ashok Vajpayee, anthropologist and social psychologist Chandra Bhan Prasad, Oriyan poet and playwright J.P. Das, and veteran Malyalam poet K. Satchidanandan.
Like every year, the festival will conclude with a debate on the need to have unrestrained freedom of information.
In a piece in the latest issue of Newsweek, Dalrymple writes that Jaipur Literature Festival works because “we are a lot of fun”. He writes: “The buildings are festooned with ribbons, we set off fireworks at night, and after 6.30 pm the writers have to shut up and give the stage over to music and dancing.” The festival’s song and dance offerings will help you unwind with soulful music of artistes as culturally varied as Australian rapper Omar Bin Musa, Pakistan’s Salman Ahmad of Junoon and Sufi singer Sian Zahoor, Arab’s singer-composer Natacha Atlas, Israel’s Sufi singer Shye Ben Tzur to the sensational Susheela Raman, a JLF regular.
If last year saw Amit Chaudhuri striking a chord with music lovers, this year Jeet Thayil and Suheir Hammad will delight you with their performance. Pakistani young novelist Ali Sethi, who took us down “melody” lane with Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s kalams last year, will be at it again.
However, the most notable attraction of the JLF 2011 will be the announcement of the $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. The six shortlisted novels are: Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals, Musharraf Ali Farooqui’s The Story of a Widow, Tania James’ Atlas of Unknowns, Manju Kapur’s The Immigrant, Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy.
Festival co-director Namita Gokhale ensures that the JLF continues to “showcase the strength and diversity” of writing in the Indian languages, like Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Tamil, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Gujarati, etc. This year, the strength of the regional literature will be reflected in writings from the Northeast.
If there is anyone who personifies JLF’s freewheeling spirit, it has to be Sanjoy Roy of Teamwork Productions, the man behind the show, who besides Jaipur and Kerala Hay festivals, helps steer about 12 other such shows across the globe. Roy says that the Diggi Palace has gone under a major makeover to make space for the burgeoning bibliophiles who throng the festival. “We have increased the capacity of the main venue three-fold to make space for 7,500 people per hour. There will be two new venues. There will be food courts, cafes and bookstalls,” he says. “We are back with a bumper crop.” This year, says Roy, there will be everything in “plenty”. “Isn’t it better to complain about the plenty than deficiency?” he asks, smiling.
The JLF prides itself, and rightly so, on its great egalitarianism. It is free. And no one — no author or politician, nor even the royalty — gets special treatment.
I remember how, in 2007, Salman Rushdie roamed around the Diggi Palace’s manicured lawns without any gun-toting men forming a security net. In 2010, Ayaan “gadfly” Hirsi Ali, a wildcard draw at the festival, with a fatwa on her head, found herself at home in the crowd.
Things have changed since 2007 when you could gloat with pleasure that you had lunch or dinner with Salman Rushdie on the next table, though you might still find Coetzee standing in the lunch/dinner queues behind you.
The JLF is now an independent festival and not a part of the Jaipur Virasat Foundation as it was then. It has become a literary mela, and, in the process, lost the intimacy valued by those who have frequented it since it began as a small gathering. Many fellow journalists I met and bonded with in Jaipur have turned authors themselves and many debutant authors are already into their third or fourth books. But Jaipur continues to bring us all together. In some cases, just once every year.