All roads this weekend lead either to the Pink City where the fifth literature festival is on in full swing or to Pragati Maidan in Delhi where the Art Summit is bigger than ever before. Both being events of increasingly international stature, many Indian and overseas visitors have been complaining that because of overlap, they have had to choose one over the other. Why didn’t organisers have the good sense to choose successive weekends and draw even larger crowds on the Delhi-Jaipur tourist run?
In Jaipur, however, this may be a blessing in disguise as the Litfest alone has taken up more than 3,000 hotel rooms and there is hardly a lodging to be had for love or money. In its fifth year, and with a dazzling cast of 223 authors (up from 165 last year) and 87 musicians and performers in concert, it is, according to festival producer Sanjoy Roy, India’s biggest international event and the fifth-biggest literature festival in the world — after Edinburgh and Hay in Britain, Sydney and Berlin. Star speakers include Nobel laureates Orhan Pamuk and J M Coetzee, Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai, Pulitzers like Liaquat Ahamed and there’s hardly a subject or genre of writing that is left unplumbed. From Jun Chang on Mao’s China to music and song in Indian films — with songwriters Javed Akhtar, Gulzar and Prasoon Joshi to Jon Lee Anderson and Ahmad Rashid on Af-Pak — audiences can take their pick from six sessions a day spread over four venues.
The intimate and charming Diggi Palace in the heart of the city, which has played host to the Litfest since its inception, is now stretched to capacity but, as if by magic, goes on adding and enlarging venues and providing new facilities. Its affable polo-playing owner Ram Pratap Singh, whose family home it has been for 280 years, has had to ship off his ponies to his farm so that the stable block can accommodate a new Mughal Tent with a sound stage and 1,000-strong seating capacity. He has added 15 new permanent public toilets, hot food and sandwich counters, and even several bars, ever since the incident (debated in the state legislature) two years ago when the writer Vikram Seth insisted on appearing in a discussion with a bottle of wine at his side. Luckily, the state government has seen sense and this year even made parking for 600 extra cars available in nearby hospitals and colleges. “We used to be known in Jaipur as Diggi key Thakur, now we’re known as Festival walley Thakur,” he says.
Although the Thakur of Diggi provides the space free of charge, every inch of the Litfest is sponsored. Corporations such as Merrill Lynch, Vodafone and Coca Cola pay Rs 30 lakh for each venue and sessions, at Rs 3 lakh an hour, are further underwritten by a host of public and private bodies. Meals for up to 1,000 delegates and mediapersons are also paid for by publishers and other companies. “It’s the best kind of branding — intellectual and international,” the head of a minerals company, who’s forking out Rs 12 lakh for a dinner, told me. In addition, infrastructure company DSC, the Litfest’s main sponsor, has instituted a new $50,000 fiction prize for the best novel of the year judged by an international jury.
Priyanka Malhotra of Full Circle bookshops who runs the bookshop has trebled sales space to 1,600 sq ft to this year and is offering 65,000 titles, mainly by authors present at the Litfest, with strategically placed signing tables for buyers to catch the writers as they emerge from their sessions.
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“For us, it’s like a big wedding in the family,” says Ananth Padmanabhan, vice president sales of Penguin Books, as he puts the finishing touches to his stylish stall with colleagues.
Now if Agra were to come up with events of the order that Jaipur and Delhi have established, it would truly gild the Golden Triangle’s reputation as the cultural hub of North India.