Three (Not Quite) Arabian Nights

One of my ambitions, ever since I arrived in Delhi three years ago, has been to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival (tagline, "the largest literary show on Earth.")

My fascination with JLF dates back to a conversation I had with a former colleague when I first arrived in India. Naively, I said, "I hear some of the panelists are really good."  She raised weary brows at me and replied, "I really just go for the parties."  Friends who went last year confirmed my ex-colleague's thesis: sure, JLF may play host to hundreds of famous authors, but what began as a minor and nerdy exercise has somehow turned into a "scene," complete with Bollywood spectacle and socialites from every minor town in north India.  (JLF is not the only intellectual event to get this treatment, remember TED India?)

My determination to attend was further fueled by a recent essay that described JLF in the following golden terms, "JLF is the Ibiza of literature. The intellectual equivalent of a weekend of mad clubbing."  That was Anuvab Pal writing in Newslaundry, a site I learned about at a party from a dude I was briefly and disastrously infatuated with.  So all the precedents looked very good.

I secured a freelance magazine assignment, to alleviate my guilt at spending money on what might turn out to be no more than a bacchanal, albeit set amid historic forts in a once-princely desert. My media cred meant that in addition to being an attendee, I would also be a "pressperson," a privilege accorded, this year, to a mere 750 people (!).  

There are several ways to get from Delhi to Jaipur, but the most popular are car and train.  I took a car, which wound down the Delhi-Jaipur highway at a truly kingly pace.  I'm still not sure how, on a fully paved road, we managed to take seven hours to cover 150 miles. In the United States, we could have gone and come back in that time.  Twice.

I arrived in the nick of time for a session and collected my press pass from a lethargic gentleman sitting outside a white tent.  "Are you arranging author interviews?" I asked.  He merely shrugged, as if earthly worries were beneath his concern.  Last year, the organizers of JLF unleashed a controversy by inviting Salman Rushdie as a keynote guest, this year they went in the opposite direction and brought in the Dalai Lama.  Apparently Buddhism was one of the themes of this year's festival, but the only time I really witnessed it was in the indifference of the people responsible for managing the media, an indifference so profound it was practically enlightened.

I learned that my press pass came with a few perks: I would get to eat meals in the delegate tent, and also have access to the one bathroom on premises that was regularly stocked with toilet paper.

There are a couple of interesting things worth mentioning about JLF.  The first and most remarkable is that the event is entirely free.  This democratic pricing strategy is both the blessing and the curse of the festival.  On the one hand, ideologically, I approve of making great ideas and writing free of charge.  On the other hand, festival attendance has ballooned over the past seven years from 100 people to 100,000.  On Saturday and Sunday, the venue steams with human presence.

That said, it's beautiful.  This year, at least, the grounds of the heritage hotel were covered in colorful signs and bright fabric streamers.  Teamwork Productions, the company that manages the event, deserves some kind of prize merely for preventing disaster. Between the bright afternoon sunshine of Jaipur and the colorful tents, I truly felt like I was at some kind of circus, albeit of the mental variety.

I had expected the sessions to be highly literary - organized around themes like "organic metaphors in post-revolutionary Latin literature", etc.  This expectation persisted even after I'd looked at the program, where the titles of the sessions ranged from the cryptic to the excessive, for example, "The Novel of the Future."  At any time there are five to six sessions running concurrently, so choosing the right one to attend is a mix of luck and research.  I doubt anyone will recognize every one of the hundreds of authors speaking.

I spent the first 24 hours in a mad dash to get my author interview.  After stalking him all over the festival - and giving my number to many, many volunteers - I finally cornered him after a book signing and proceeded to lay waste to all comers by grilling him about India's current account.  Or at least, that's how I remember it.  Anyway, after securing some answers, I felt significantly more free to enjoy the rest of the sessions.

If one thing surprised me, it was how political the festival became, and how many of the discussions seemed ripped from this year's news headlines.  A session by Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, titled "The Public Philosopher," became a discussion of the moral equivalence between rape and other forms of extreme violence.  One discussion, between Bollywood actress Shabana Azmi and lyricist Prasoon Joshi, nearly became a brawl when an audience member suggested that women who become mothers are entrusted by God with a responsibility that rightly supersedes women's individuality.  Since this year's festival took place over January 26, India's Republic Day, many panelists addressed the decline of the India growth story, pegged to the drop in Indian GDP growth to 6 per cent from 9 per cent earlier.  (A friend who's been attending for years told me that JLF often has a current affairs flavor.)

There were the predictably odd audience questions.  In a session on Kipling, an audience member asked if India would have been better off if the British had never left.  In another session, on 9/11 literature, an audience member asked why only Muslims become terrorists.  At moments like this, I had to hand it to the session moderators, who had to front all the difficult questions.

There were, of course, sessions more literary.  Howard Jacobson, in a panel on the Jewish novel, made a remark about how Jewish humor was marked by an awareness that the grandest joke of all is God's, an observation that recast the notion of Annunciation in a dark and satiric light.  Meanwhile, in a session on his novel "Persian Fire," Tom Holland held forth on the Greco-Persian wars, although he lost some of my favor when he referred to the Battle of Thermopylae as "not a very girly story."

And then there were the parties.  The goal of many a festival-goer is to score an exclusive invite to one of these shin-digs.  Earlier a friend had confided to me that the real secret to getting in is to "dress well and show up."  At this point, I'd heard comparisons between JLF and the Playboy mansion, and it was getting pretty heady.  I was ready for anything.

These high expectations turned out to be...entirely baseless.  Nora Ephron once referred to writing as a great career for people who prefer to be the wallflowers at the orgy, so imagine (if you can!) an orgy of wallflowers and you'll get a sense for it.  Also, the first two days of JLF were dry (no liquor sold in Jaipur on those days, because of religious and political festivals) so there was that damper, too. I do remember one guy sidling up to me at one event and instructing me to meet someone "outside the men's loo, he has something" - which felt delightfully like Prohibition, especially because "something" turned out to mean "illicit liquor" and not "disease."  At another point, a well-intentioned friend introduced me to several different men as "the last attractive single woman in Delhi" - which, ordinarily, would be my cue to leave any gathering.

But that may just be me, I may have missed something.   Anyway, the parties were fun, if not exactly Ibiza.

I did hear some hot remnants of gossip regarding famous authors seen emerging from bushes with various young men/women, as well as the underwear preferences of one young writer who'd recently been nominated for a well-known prize, but temper all this, dear reader, with the awareness that these were the kids who were shut in with their Shakespeares during their teenage years, so really.

And then, in four days, the adventure was over.  I grabbed a final glass of wine in the delegate tent and then we were back in the car to New Delhi.  Would I recommend JLF?  Absolutely.  Just don't expect the Playboy mansion.  The sessions were still, for me, the highlights.

I wrote about Pico Iyer's "Global Soul" session for the Iowa Review blog!  Check it out here.