PROSPERO had expected a scrimmage. The organisers of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), held this year between January 21st and 25th, advertise it as the world’s “largest free literary festival”. Moreover, the topic he had been invited to speak on, Indian cricket and cricket writing, is popular. For added spice, one of Prospero’s co-panellists, the writer and politician Shashi Tharoor, had been making the news in India—he was interviewed by the police this month over the suspected murder of his wife.
All the same, the heaving, barging, chattering throng of a thousand or so people, packing the aisles and testing the walls of the auditorium to which Prospero had been assigned, was remarkable and exhilarating. It was a much younger, livelier and more euphoric crowd than literary festivals usually attract. It wanted to be provoked, was eager to laugh and fought to be heard: as the microphones went around for questions, eager hands snatched at them.
The vastness, youth and exuberance of the crowd is by far the most distinctive thing about the Jaipur festival, which is by far the biggest of the many literary festivals launched in India in recent years. It is, by any measure, a high-class confab, with this year Sir V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux among a host of foreign writers in attendance, and Amartya Sen, Amit Chaudhuri and Arundhati Subramaniam among a greater number of Indian ones. Bollywood stars, celebrity lawyers, politicians, artists, musicians and economists were also present, and many of the debates, in-conversations-with, poetry readings and diatribes were worth hearing.
Ms Subramaniam reciting her lyrical poems was a special delight; so was Salil Tripathi speaking, with quiet moral force, on Bangladesh’s independence war. To see Sir Vidia was thrilling; albeit that the frail octogenarian, carted on and off stage on a stretcher—in a way he would once have described caustically—is past his prime as an orator. Overriding this, however, was the crazy Jaipur crowd.
When the festival was started, a decade ago, by the authors Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple, it drew a dozen or so spectators. This year it attracted an estimated 80,000. And on the fourth day, with 20,000 packed into the disorderly old palace complex where it is held, and the queues for entry still growing, the police abruptly closed the gates. They feared a stampede was coming. But who were these people? And what were they coming for?
Not many will have been great readers, because not many Indians are. The Indian market for serious books is small; there are not 30 good bookshops in the country and a work of non-fiction that sells 5,000 copies in hard-back is a best-seller. The JLF bookshop, run by Amazon, was tiny, given the size of the event, and a mess.
Most of the festival-revellers, members of the emerging Indian middle-class and drawn from Gurgaon, Delhi and Jaipur itself, had come for the age-old love of being where the action is in a crowded country. They had come for the Hindi dance music that blared from the tea stalls, the prospect of seeing a Bollywood star and, for those who could squeeze into the VIP areas, lots of free booze. The JLF is more a mela—an Asian fair—than a meeting of literary minds.
Only a minority in the crowd that parted for Sir Vidia’s stretcher would have known who he was. Far fewer will have read any of his books. Yet this odd mix of elite refinement and mass entertainment is characteristic of India. It is evident in centuries of back-and-forth borrowing between courtly and folk traditions, in music, dance and poetry, and, in more recent times, in films and cricket. But the crowd also signalled something new: the gigantic ambition to get on, argue a case and wield influence that India’s development is unleashing.
Asked why they had come, many of the revellers said they wanted to learn something. They had come in record numbers, in spite of this year’s festival failing to cause the sort of headline controversy which it has stirred in the past. It has in previous years been beset by arguments with Hindu nationalists over its hosting of Pakistani artists, and with irate Muslims over its (foiled) attempt to host Sir Salman Rushdie. Mr Tharoor’s decision to brave the festival this year, despite his scrape with the law, was a much smaller drama.
Most of all, this mass curiosity was evident in the questions asked from the floor, which were often unpolished but urgent, and almost always on big issues. In Prospero’s cricket discussion, these concerned not just the future of Indian spin-bowling, but the issues of corruption, fairness, accountability, democracy and gender that are pressing for India, in cricket and far beyond it.
Something similar happened in many of the sessions. A discussion of Hindi and English poetry triggered an argument over the relative merits of English and other Indian languages. A session over India’s imperial past was, for some in the audience, not really about the past, but about the cruel, sparsely functional Indian state of today. A closing debate over the role of culture in politics was a tense argument about the creeping Hinduist agenda of India’s current government.
This is why the mess and clamour of the JLF is so appropriate. Few of the big ideas and dramatic stories discussed by the writers it hosts are bigger or more dramatic than the emerging India parading around them. This new India, milling around the tea-stalls and auditoriums, is vaster than the canon and stranger than fiction. Its emergence will help shape the culture, high and low, of the English-speaking world.
