NEW DELHI —– It is that time of year again when the pink city of Jaipur in Rajasthan State warms up to host a carefully curated panel of literary greats from across the globe for the Jaipur Literature Festival, South Asia’s biggest annual literary event. In its sixth year now, the five-day event will kick off on Thursday at the majestic Diggi Palace, where 283 writers will appear before an audience of several thousand people and engage them through conversations and book readings.
The runup to the festival has not been without controversy. The Hindu right-wing group RSS and the national opposition Bharatiya Janata Party are demanding a ban on the participation of Pakistani writers in the wake of the recent skirmish along the Line of Control between India and Pakistan. And Muslim clerics have threatened to agitate if any of the four authors who last year read out excerpts from Salman Rushdie’s banned book ‘The Satanic Verses’ are seen at this year’s festival. Of the four, only the novelist Jeet Thayil is on the speaker’s list this time.
Organizers said that these threats would not affect the festival’s schedule.
“The media should not give space to this kind of rabble-rousing,” said Sanjoy K. Roy, the festival’s producer. He said the venue was already secure, with more than 200 security personnel, and added that there was no need for any additional security.
A day ahead of the official opening, on Wednesday, an unlikely marriage of cricket and literature is culminating in a friendly game between authors and cricket players on the home turf of one of India’s premier league teams, the Rajasthan Royals. It will be ‘Royals XI’ versus ‘Authors XI’.
This year the festival is more “multilingual and multivocal” than the previous editions, said Namita Gokhale, one of the directors of the festival.
Writings in 17 Indian languages, including Bangla, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Tamil and Kashmiri, will be showcased at the multilingual sessions that will offer a flavor of regional literary history as well as folk literature. Santhali, a language spoken in India’s east coast, will be represented at the festival for the first time. There will also be readings of literature in several foreign languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, as well as in Sinhala, spoken by the ethnic Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka and in Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan.
The idea of the festival is to show “India to the world and the world to India,” said William Dalrymple, the festival’s co-director.
The overarching theme of this year’s festival, which features 174 sessions, is Buddha in literature.
Spirituality has been central to literature in India, said Mr. Dalrymple, adding, “Buddhist literature has influenced so much of Asian literature.”
Complementing the theme, the big surprise guest this year is his holiness the Dalai Lama. The Tibetan leader, who is living in exile in India, will hold a conversation with the British-born novelist Pico Iyer on Thursday afternoon in a session titled “Kinships of Faiths.”
After the brouhaha last year over Oprah Winfrey’s star-spangled reception, the selection of this year’s chief guest seems to have been tempered on purpose.
“Oprah’s appearance sucked the oxygen from the other sessions,” Mr. Dalrymple said. “She took so much press.” Some of the other big names like Tom Stoppard, “one of the best playwrights” did not get the attention that he should have received last year.
Nonetheless, he said this year’s guest list is still spectacular.
Among those appearing are several award-winning authors, including the Commonwealth Prize Winner Aminatta Forna from Sierra Leone, Howard Jacobson, a Booker Prize winning author, and Andrew Solomon, a Pulitzer winner.
The historical novelist Lawrence Norfolk will be introduced to Indian book lovers for the first time along with other popular British writers including Sebastian Faulks and Deborah Moggach.
Mr. Dalrymple pointed out that several prominent authors from the Arab world are participating in the festival, including the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif and the Moroccon writer Tahar Ben Jalloun.
An emphasis on feminist writing and featuring women’s voices would seem to be a natural choice for the organizers after the recent spate of protests against sexual harassment of women in India.
“It wasn’t by design, but by instinct,” Ms. Gokhale said, noting planning for the event began in March last year.
Mahasweta Devi, an octogenarian Bengali writer and social activist, who will make her first appearance at the festival, has been on the organizers’ wish list for each of the past few years. A Tamil feminist writer who writes under the pseudonym Ambai will also be making her first appearance.
Diana L. Eck, a religious scholar form Harvard, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a postmodern and postcolonial theorist from Columbia, are among the distinguished women scholars scheduled to speak at the festival.
“The strand of sessions on ‘The Buddha in Literature’ examines the role of women in the Buddhist theology and hierarchy,” Ms. Gokhale explained. Other session including “Imagine: Resistance, Protest, Assertion” emphasize the “inspirational surge of women’s solidarity,” she said.
The phenomenal growth of the festival over the years has led the organizers to add another venue, the Char Bagh to the existing venues at the Diggi Palace to accommodate the crowds. Mr. Roy, the festival producer, said that 22,000 people can be accommodated per hour, up from 14,000 last year. A total of 122,000 people attended last year.
The festival organizers have spent an estimated 56 million rupees (about $1 million) this year. While Teamwork Productions, which is overseeing the event, is struggling to break even, the event will continue to be egalitarian and open to all without an admission fee, said Mr. Roy, who is also the managing director of the company. “Arts create wealth in a different way,” he said.
Chiki Sarkar, the publisher of Penguin Books India, uses the annual festival to launch a featured new book or talent. This year will see the launch of Anjan Sundaram, the author of “Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo.”
“Very often projects that I have been thinking about for a while get crystallized in Jaipur,” she said.
Festival regulars say that much of the magic of the Jaipur Literature Festival takes place outside the sessions themselves. “The best thing is the surprise element, the random encounter that can result in something completely unexpected, new, and sometimes wonderful,” said Urvashi Butalia, a publisher and writer who is the co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house and the director of Zubaan, an imprint of Kali.
At least 20 parties will be hosted during the festival and 145 artists are expected to perform through the course of the five-day event, including Indian folk artists and Spanish performers.
(Neha Thirani contributed reporting.)
