Letters from the Festival Directors
The DSC Jaipur Literature Festival is now widely acknowledged as the Kumbh Mela of Indian and international writing, drawing writers and readers from across India and the wider world: from the Americas, Europe, Africa and across the breadth of South Asia, the brightest, most brilliant, funny, moving and remarkable all come to Jaipur in January.
We have become the crucial catalyst in platforming new literary communities in South Asia, with regular speakers from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Yet despite a growing band of other literary festivals popping up across South Asia, which we are proud to have inspired, we remain the only literary festival in the region to showcase both the greatest names in international writing and the finest writers from India who produce their work in languages other than English.
Our offerings this time are as diverse as in previous years, with session subjects ranging from myth, religion, art, architecture, archaeology and music to gardening and economics. Debut writers and unheard voices share the sky with international stars and popular bestsellers.
We celebrate the art of writing for stage and screen, and of the novel and the short story. We introduce Indian readers to extraordinary new talents such as Teju Cole, Taiye Selasi and Pola Oloxiarac. We are particularly proud this year to have Tom Stoppard, David Hare and Ariel Dorfman, three of the greatest living playwrights in the company of legendary Indian theatre personalities like Girish Karnad and Asghar Wajahat. The festival will host fine novelists such as Annie Proulx, Ben Okri, Kiran Nagarkar, Lionel Shriver and Michael Ondaatje, as well as Salman Rushdie, winner of the Booker of Bookers, and friend of the festival at its very beginning, who is now returning for a second visit. We are also thrilled to host Oprah Winfrey, sometimes said to be the most powerful woman in America and the woman who, along with JK Rowling, has probably done as much as anyone else alive to get people reading books.
We have so much to offer that it is difficult to know where to begin. ‘Prison Diaries’ discusses the powerful and moving memoirs written by Iftekhar Gilani, Anjum Zamarud Habib, and Sahil Maqbool, during their days in jail. Conservationists hold up a vision for a sustainable ecological future in ‘Born Free: Tiger Tales from Ranthambore’. Hugely beloved poets and legendary lyricists like Gulzar, Javed Akhtar and Prasoon Joshi bring a whiff of Bollywood andaaz to the gardens of the Diggi palace. We will also be analysing the fascinatingly interwoven lives and relationships of Tolstoy and Tagore, Gandhi and Ambedkar.
There is a special emphasis on the Bhakti and Sufi poets who illumined the literature of medieval South Asia, from Kabir and Meera Bai to Rumi and Shams Tabrizi. Like the indomitable crowds of the Arab Spring, the poet saints searched for social justice and the dignity of the individual. 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 connection with their personal divinity. While we venerate the great literature inspired by religious faith, and are proud to present writers on popular spirituality as widely read as Deepak Chopra, we also celebrate humanism - both in ancient Indian and Enlightenment versions, with discussions about God and man in the presence of some of the world’s most articulate and literate athiests such as Richard Dawkins, Javed Akhtar, Steven Pinker and AC Grayling.
With its 22 scheduled languages, 122 regional languages, four classical languages (Sanskrit, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu) thousands of mother tongues and countless dialects, India exists in a constant and ongoing state of translation. While Indian literature in English is visible in the mainstream media, the vibrant writing in the various Indian languages is not always accessible. Writers from Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Bengal, Assam, Goa, Maharashtra, the Konkan coast, Karnataka and Punjab showcase the linguistic diversity of these regions, and the compelling thread of shared sensibility which binds them together. ‘Raavi Paar’ and ‘Amar Bangla’ evoke literature across borders while Dalit writers like OP Valmiki, Bama and Gogu Shyamala question the hierarchies of caste and language.
We are proud to look outwards as well as within. We present frontline reports from the Arab Spring and the troubled embrace of Israel and Palestine; we report on migration, exile, and on genocide. We ask what is the role of the writer when faced with oppression or military tyranny, and we speculate on who will be the superpowers of the 20th century. We examine the literature of Latin America, look at screenwriting from Hollywood to China, and the literature of the Afropolitans, the new generation of global writers who have their roots in Africa.
Travelling across genres, we examine the art of narrative non-fiction, literary journalism, military history and travel writing, with cutting edge writers of non-fiction like the Tiger Mother Amy Chua, and masters of long form journalism as distinguished as the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick and the former editor of the Paris Review, Philip Gourevitch. We are lucky this year to have an especially strong team of prize-winning biographers: Purushottam Agarwal on Kabir, Simon Sebag Montefiore on Stalin, Rosamund Bartlett on Tolstoy, Peter Popham on Aung Saan Suu Kyi, James Shapiro on Shakespeare, Joseph Lelyveld on Gandhi and Sugata Bose on Subhash Chandra Bose.
Literature Festivals like Jaipur help us reflect on the changing nature of words, the shared stories they tell and the histories that they condense. In a virtual age, festivals like ours assert the joy of engaging face to face in dialogue and debate. 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. All literary events are completely free, the authors mingle with the crowds, and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.
We thank the writers, the participants, the sponsors and the committed and engaged audiences who make possible the collective energy of the festival.
Every year, in January, the world visits India, and India visits the world. We hope you enjoy the journey.
- Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple, January 2012
