It's Jaipur once more

The eight edition of the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), "the world's largest free literary festival", begins in the Pink City this week. The five-day festival will see visitors from India and abroad gather in the city to hear writers, publishers, readers, artists, actors, musicians, politicians, economists, historians, sociologists and activists, local and international, agree or argue over books and ideas at imaginatively curated discussions which, while staged and formal, have the informal spontaneity of addas.

Last year, a record 220,000 people walked into six shamianas erected using 230,000 sqft of cloth across 14 acres of the 200-year-old Diggi Palace, the venue of the lit fest since it began in 2006. They listened to 240 speakers, among them two Nobel laureates (Amartya Sen and Harold Varmus), who represented 15 countries and 20 languages. A 500-strong army of volunteers and part-timers looked after the authors, press and delegates who consumed 14,700 hot meals over the five days. Such was the rush of visitors that hotels in the city saw additional 1,800 rooms booked for the duration of the festival.

If there's one thing that Zee JLF can rightly take credit for, it is to have made stars of writers and transformed a dull cultural platform into a high-profile media event. No wonder, so many have now jumped to replicate its success — last year, there were as many as 60 lit fests held all over India. How many of these will last is hard to say, but what they have done is revive an interest in books and reading, and forged a sense of community among authors across geographies.

It has done wonders for the book trade too. Last year, Full Circle Books, the "official books partner" of Zee JLF, sold 10,000 copies of the 700 titles it stocked. This year, Full Circle, a chain of three book stores in Delhi, has been replaced by Amazon — as everywhere, online is replacing off-line at Zee JLF too.

THE STARS
V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel prize-winning author comes to Jaipur for the first time. There'll be a special session to mark 50 years of A House For Mr Biswas, his earliest masterpiece with a panel chaired by Farrukh Dhondy and comprising novelists Hanif Kureshi, Amit Chaudhuri and Paul Theroux. This last is a JLF coup — Theroux and Naipaul were friends for over three decades until they had a bitter falling out in 1996, which lasted for 15 years. There was a brief rapprochement in 2011, when the two shook hands at the Hay Festival, but the Zee JLF is the first they'll be together in such close confines. That post-lunch session on day one at the Rajnigandha Lawns should be a show-stopper.

This time, the keynote session, titled 'The Poetic Imagination', will feature three poets — 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner Vijay Seshadri, Jnanpith awarded modern Hindi poet Kedarnath Singh and the venerated English language poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Ruth Padel, the British poet who beat Mehrotra to become professor of poetry at Oxford University in 2009, will also be there in a late evening session on January 23, which will also have DNA editor and poet C.P. Surendran, American poet and Iraq war veteran Kevin Powers, Rajasthani poet Aidan Singh Bhati, Thai poet Wipas Srithong and Ashok Vajpeyi.

The film people will be out in full force led by Naseeruddin Shah, who has been travelling to lit fests all over with his well-received autobiography, And Then One Day. Javed Akhtar, Prasoon Joshi, Waheeda Rahman, Vishal Bharadwaj, Girish Karnad, and Shakespearean director Tim Supple are some of other speakers from the film and theatre world.

Others to look out for at Jaipur are three authors of Chinese origin — Jung Chang, whose memoir Wild Swans of growing up in Mao's China, has sold over 15 million copies worldwide, dissident writer Ma Jian and Anchee Min, best known for her memoirs, Red Azalea and The Cooked Seed. Man Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and British biographer and winner of last year's Samuel Johnson Prize, Lucy-Hughes Hallett, will be some of the other stars at Jaipur. There'll also be a session addressed by former Indian president distinguished scientist, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

MUSIC
Music is as much of an attraction at Zee JLF as books and authors are.

The event has always promoted local artistes. It began as an initiative of the Jaipur Virasat Foundation, which is also behind the Rajasthan International Folk Festival (RIFF) held in Jodhpur, and can claim credit for launching the careers of many local musicians. The Rajasthani musicians with top-billing this year are Nathoo Solanki and Chugge Khan, and Queen Harish, the cross-dressing dancer called the "whirling Queen of the desert". Urban indie music will be well represented by Jeet Thayil's new project Still Dirty. Some of the other performers are Midival Punditz and Vocal Raasta, a little-known cappella group of 15 singers from Delhi as well as Indira Naik, who is trained in the Patiala gayaka, Malini Awasthi, who sings dradra, kajri, jhoola, holi and chaiti, and Sufi singer Rashmi Agarwal.

The international headliners this year include Transglobal Underground, a London-based music collective (Western, oriental and African fustion), and Pakistani folk singer and Iktara player Sain Zahoor. Then there'll be Fanfara Tirana, made up of band members of the Albanian armed forces, who mix Albanian traditional music, Balkan beats, dub reggae and jazz, and an Azerbaijan musical ensemble led by Alim Qasimov. Among the other notable acts are The Unorthodox, Unprecedented Preacher, a jugalbandi between Godfrey Duncan, a British storyteller of African origin, and sitarist Sheema Mukherjee, and Dub Colossus, a reggae-dub collaboration between contemporary Ethiopian musicians and British musician-producer Nick Page.

BOOKMARK
Last year saw JLF unveil a new initiative, Bookmark, which is a forum for publishers, book-store owners, translators, literary agents and the like.
One session to look out for at the two-day event held at nearby Narain Niwas will be on the importance of libraries and national archives, featuring Canadian anthologist and translator Alberto Manguel, Nicholson Baker, novelist and founder of the American Newspaper Repository, Dipali Khanna, member secretary of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and Venu Vasudeva, director general of the National Museum.
Kindle country head Rajiv Mehta's presentation on the untapped possibility of digital platforms for distribution and marketing also promises to be interesting.