Why JLF is forever young

This year, my favourite session at JLF was one that wasn't even on the programme, featuring the librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

It rained one day during the Jaipur Literature Festival. I expected the worst; I expected rain-sodden lawns, an empty venue, drenched writers and ruined books. But nothing of the sort happened. Thousands braved the rain to stand — some without umbrellas — and listened to writers that they had perhaps never heard of earlier. Everything ran on time, no venues were evacuated — in spite of the fact that almost all of them are in shamianas — and the books were safe. 

The contrast from a similar rainy day almost a decade ago was stark. The books tent had flooded, talks were shifted around — and it was, I agree, intimate and charming, and I was impressed by how the volunteers reacted. Even so, the difference brought home to me how much JLF has changed over the past years, into an event organised with such precision that even unseasonable rain no longer discommodes it. 

There is a ritual to going to Jaipur: the opening dinner at the Rambagh Palace, a little awkward as people try to figure out who is there that year and who isn’t; the presence of the political power of the moment in Rajasthan on the first day, delivering a speech or on a panel; the concert at the spectacular Amer Fort, blazing out into the night; and, of course, the inevitable dry day that you can’t avoid in late January, either Netaji’s birthday or Republic Day. And in the middle of all this, a blur of panels, some with old favourites — Simon Sebag Montefiore always gets a full house, as he did this time for a blood-soaked talk about the Romanovs — and some featuring entirely new breakout stars, such as the Australian YA author Markus Zusak. 

For me, however, the highlight of each year’s JLF is always one of the less-heralded and unexpected sessions. Frequently these feature writers from a tradition or a country relatively unfamiliar to me; or perhaps a historian who is a leading light in his field but is not a household name. This year, my favourite session was one that wasn’t even on the programme, featuring the librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Christopher de Hamel has written a book — which I have now ordered — called Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts in which he tries to distill the experience of walking into a library, being given an early medieval manuscript, and turning the pages (without gloves on, which he says is important). His presentation was fascinating and very funny; and he was visibly delighted with the quality of the questions from the audience, including one about the 15th-century Voynich Manuscript in the Yale University library, which is written in some sort of unknown script and inspired Lev Grossman’s Codex. 

It is hard to be a cynic at JLF. I mean you can try, but it doesn’t seem worth it. It feels so young. Yes, there are lots of young people drinking tea and sunning themselves on the lawns and apparently uninterested in the actual sessions. But, equally, there are thousands of young people who do crowd into sessions that you would think are quite distant from anything that they might be interested in. There they were in a session about the troubled border between Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, and about the communities divided and united by those lines on a map; or in a session about biography writing, the highlight of which was a startling story from a biographer of Ernest Hemingway about the “ritual” that eccentric writer planned to conduct in that bit of northern Italy in which he had been shot during the Great War. (Google it or better still buy Andrea de Robilant’s book.) Perhaps most warming, however, was the quiet and fascinated crowd as Audrey Truschke, Parvati Sharma, Ira Mukhoty and Rana Safvi discussed the Mughals. It wasn’t just that it was an all-female panel, and that most people probably didn’t notice — the ultimate defeat of tokenism, I’d say — but also that it was a reminder that, even in an age of fake history and hateful Whatsapp forwards, there is a place for and an interest in the work of real historians. 

JLF is, yes, more polished and professional than it was in its earlier years. After a few years in which there was always some headline or another that emerged from it, it has managed successfully to avoid controversy. Even the troubles of its sponsors no longer seem to hang over its head — after all, this year the main sponsor was Zee and while the festival was on stories were appearing about its corporate troubles and its shares tanked. Who sponsors it rarely matters; on stage at the final debate was Kapil Sibal, complaining that his own new television channel was being denied satellite slots by the powers that be. (Harvest TV is now up and running, and quite watchable.)

Yet, even if JLF has now emerged from tempestuous adolescence into comfortable adulthood, it still manages to have a youthful enthusiasm about it. Or perhaps that’s just what it inspires in people like me, who spend most of the rest of the year being crabby. Either way, it’s an achievement.