| It hasn't been taken over by the sarkar. This means no three-hour speeches from dignitaries, very little in the way of oppressive security, no interminable lighting the lamp ceremonies, and an atmosphere of comfortable openness. |
| It gives equal space to banner headline authors and to local heroes. Take this year's programme, for instance. Mita Kapur, a festival organiser whose enthusiasm and pragmatism was one of the best things about Jaipur 2007, is back with the 'Translating Bharat' showcase, running from the 21st to the 23rd. Her vision of "translation" starts with a performance of Kabir's dohes, and continues with a very practical examination of what it means to write in one tongue and be read in another. One panel takes on the neglected North-East "" its languages, oral traditions and contemporary writers. One has translators talking to writers. All of this promises to be fun and enlightening. |
| It introduces us to people we didn't know, but whom we can't do without once we know about them. This year, for example, the writer Uday Prakash will be in conversation with Namita Gokhale. Uday Prakash has a nasty, unsettling take on globalisation, in stories like "Warren Hastings and His Bull". I'm a big fan of Uday Prakash's short stories, especially "The Third Degree", which has a police SHO asking the complainant to help him out when an interrogation goes wrong. There are others, like the young novelist Ambarish Satwik, whose Perineum was among the funniest and most unsettling novels of 2007. |
| For most Indian literature lovers, going to Edinburgh or London for a literary festival is an impossible dream. Jaipur has slowly started building a tradition of introducing us to writers whom we may not otherwise have met. |
| This year's line-up includes Miranda Seymour, John Berendt, Ian McEwan, Gore Vidal, and Donna Tartt. Miranda Seymour isn't well-known in India, but she deserves to be. Our country has a tradition of being wary of the family memoir; we still suffer from a deep-seated sense that in some way, writing our true stories involves a betrayal of the "larger" family. To be confronted by a memoirist (In My Father's House) "whose honesty appals even as it compels" (to quote The Guardian review) is strangely liberating. |
| John Berendt is the author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, one of the few non-fiction books to take on Truman Capote's legacy of writing "faction", and to take it further. In "Midnight", Berendt set down the biography of a city "" a Southern US city, in this case "" riddled with shibboleths, blessed with iconoclasts like the transvestite Lady Chablis, haunted by a murder that points to homosexual biases. After this book, Berendt looked for a replacement city and seemed to find one in Venice, but it wasn't quite the same. |
| Gore Vidal and Ian McEwan are two of the greatest writers of our time. Vidal is hailed as a great essayist in the US, a great novelist in the UK and seen as a great iconoclast everywhere in the world. McEwan's early, dark, brutal work has given way to a more humanist tradition, and he remains one of the finest writers alive in the world. Donna Tartt has written only two novels, bucking the industry trend where a novelist is doomed to push out a book every three years, and A Secret History has been especially influential. |
| Most of all, what I like about the Jaipur festival is not the big names and the literary conversation. It's the inclusiveness of the festival, its attempt to create a space where a young, aspiring novelist from Raipur can occupy the same space as the made-it-big Indian writer transplanted to New York. Manil Suri and Indra Sinha will be there, among others; and so will the palace cat. And what I love about this particular festival is that there will be space for all of us and our varied conversations among the comfortable deck chairs at Diggi Palace. The only criterion for an invite is that you should love books and reading, and being around people who love the same things. (Disclaimer: The columnist is chief editor, Westland and Tranquebar Press; the views expressed here are personal.) |
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