Pretty setting, heavyweight fest

Though a star-laden affair, the Jaipur Literature Festival will equally emphasise the marginalised.

"Our dream is to make Jaipur a literary hub for the country," says Mita Kapur, director of the keenly-anticipated literary festival that will be held in the Pink City between January 19-21. The Jaipur Literature

Festival is, as Kapur puts it, "a fest within a fest", being part of the annual Virasat Heritage International Festival "" but it promises to acquire a life of its own, what with an impressive lineup of authors, publishers and mediapersons this year.

The writers in attendance will include Salman Rushdie, Kiran Nagarkar, Amit Chaudhuri, William Dalrymple, Shashi Deshpande and this year's Booker Prize-winner Kiran Desai. Engaging them in conversation will be the BBC's Mark Tully, NDTV's Barkha Dutt and writer-publisher Urvashi Butalia among others.

All of which means that this year's edition of the festival is slated to be much bigger in scale than the charming but modest event held at the same venue (the Diggi Palace Hotel) in January 2006.

Despite having a lot on her plate in terms of organising, Kapur isn't too worried that the large number of attendees will make the event difficult to manage.

"The idea", she says, "has always been to make this a broad-based platform. Last year was like the first step by a baby. This year we're moving forward, providing an opportunity for authors, publishers, literary agents and the media to interact."

One of the festival's priorities is to highlight literature in languages other than English; in fact, the festival will kick off on the evening of January 18 with a kavi samelan that will bring together outstanding poets from six Rajasthani dialects.

Later sessions will include one where Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi will discuss his work with Urdu critic/poet Aman Nath and another where theatre director Bhanu Bharti will read from his plays. "It's sad that a podium of this scale is not really available to literature in other languages," says Kapur.

With a number of suitable venues scattered over a relatively small area, and many opportunities for cultural sightseeing, Jaipur is a natural hub for such an event. Kapur's hope that the event will eventually grow to become as big as Edinburgh's annual literary festival might take some time to be realised, but at this point at least it doesn't seem like an unrealistic expectation.