The ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival 2019 took place at the Diggi Palace Hotel, Jaipur Rajasthan from 24 to 28 January. Along with literature festival, Jaipur Music Stage was also run at Hotel Clarkes Amer from 24 to 27 January. The 6th edition of the B2B arm of the Festival, Jaipur BookMark (JBM) also began with a keynote address by Juergen Boos from 23rd January and included sessions on the fate of independent bookstores, skilling for the publishing industry, translations and rights, market trends, art and design work in publishing, distribution models and many engaging discussions. The festival’s Youth Outreach programme with Yuva Ekta Foundation and School Outreach programme with Pratham Books engaged many children and young people.
Hailed as a grand and eloquent literary extravaganza worldwide, the ‘Kumbh of literature’, the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival 2019, was to continue its tradition of providing access to a gamut of ‘stories’ – fearless, funny, tender, fantastical, true-to-life, fiery, equivocal, atypical and everyday – for all. The programme drew over 500 speakers from around 15 Indian and 12 international languages, representing over 30 nationalities having awards ranging from the Nobel, the Man Booker, the Pulitzer, the Sahitya Akademi, the JCB Prize and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
The 12th Jaipur Literature Festival began with the inaugural keynote by Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan, author and President of the Royal Society. It also featured Man Booker-winner Ben Okri; Pulitzer-awardee Colson Whitehead; Yale Professor and renowned astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan; best-selling and prolific writer Alexander McCall Smith; Man Booker-winning Yann Martel; writer and essayist André Aciman and other accomplished writers.
Joining them were Ashwin Sanghi, ranked as one of India’s most popular authors; the irrepressible, fearless and delightfully irreverent Shobhaa De; Usha Uthup – whose voice that ricochets straight off your soul; leading Hindi novelist, short story writer, playwright and satirist Narendra Kohli; Neelesh Misra, versatile lyricist, radio storyteller, writer and founder/editor of Gaon Connection, India’s biggest rural media platform; the prolific Devdutt Pattanaik, who has made mythology chic in the modern day; Manoranjan Byapari, who emerged as a writer, having learnt to read and write in jail at the age of 24, Manisha Koirala, gifted actor and gritty cancer-survivor who recently returned to the screen; feisty film-maker Meghna Gulzar who discussed her book Because He Is, in a session with her legendary father, Gulzar.
The list continued with Tamil author, scholar and literary chronicler Perumal Murugan; wildlife conservationist Rom Whitaker, founder of the Andaman and Nicobar Environment Trust (ANET), and the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust; Benyamin whose recent novel Jasmine Days, originally written in Malayalam, won the first JCB Prize for Literature; Sir Roy Strong, writer and diarist, and former Director of the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum; Ruth Padel, award-winning poet and conservationist, Professor of Poetry at King’s College, and Darwin’s great great granddaughter.
The sessions covered a grand span of ideas from environment, conservation, wildlife cinema, politics, history, poetry, science, artificial intelligence, language, mythology and gender. In an atmosphere charged with the outcry of #MeToo allegations, ‘Women and Power’ vocal feminist Mary Beard discussed history’s flawed positioning of women under the shadow of dominating cultural misogyny, with the powerful voices of Germaine Greer, Katty Kay, Reni Eddo Lodge and Urvashi Butalia and Bee Rowlatt.
In a session, democracy, information empowers: in ‘The Right to Know’ RTI reformer Aruna Roy, activist Harsh Mander and Sreenivasan Jain, made a passionate appeal for a citizenry’s ‘Right to Knowledge’. In another session ‘India Decides: The Great March to Democracy’, India’s 16th Chief Election Commissioner Navin B. Chawla, shared an in-depth account of the challenges of executing free and fair elections in the world’s largest democracy.
Language and its almost primeval relationship with writers were discussed in ‘Reclaiming the Mother Tongue’, with bilingual poet Akhil Katyal, and leading Malayalam litterateur N.S. Madhavan. The Festival sparkled with the spirit of journalist-writers such as two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll, and Åsne Seierstad, author and reporter from war-torn regions such as Chechnya, China, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Diplomat Navtej Sarna in ‘The Post American World’, along with a distinguished panel comprising Jon Lee Anderson, Peter Bergen and Steve Coll, elaborated upon how the growth of India, China, Brazil, Russia and Africa is generating a new landscape which will soon push the West out of its position of complacence and hegemony.
In ‘The Future is Now’, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the University of New South Wales Toby Walsh, and former journalist and writer Meredith Broussard, discussed our future under the steady but ambivalent influence of AI, and the possible choices we need to make to remain in control of our lives.
The Festival presented not just stimulating conversations on literature and the written and spoken word, but also included performance as well as visual arts giving it a vivid cultural backdrop. The hub of the Festival continued to be its customary home at the Diggi Palace Hotel, and at across multiple locations in and around the city, including the Amber Fort, the Jawahar Kala Kendra, the Nahargarh Fort and Clarkes Amer Hotel among others. The Festival also featured the JCB Prize for Literature Festival Bookstore, managed by Full Circle where one can find the greatest books from the speakers at the festival.
The city has been overtaken by a deluge of cultural and heritage events spilling beyond the four walls of Diggi Palace to multiple venues across the city.
Art played a critical role at the Festival: with leading contemporary artist Marc Quinn, featuring in a session After Bloodhead, exploring what it is to be human in the world today through subjects including the body, genetics, identity, environment and the media. There was a live public art demonstration by Abhishek Singh who captured the Festival on canvas over five days, and another one by Jaipur-based artist Sandip Gomay who uses live human models and inanimate objects in a way that collapses depth and makes his models appear two dimensional when photographed. Also, on display, tribal “Warli” art presented by the Ojas Art Award, featuring works of the 2019 edition’s Master Artist Rajesh Chaitya Vangad, and Protégé Artists Tushar Vayeda and Mayur Vayeda.
ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival is described as the ‘greatest literary show on Earth’, a sumptuous feast of ideas. The past decade saw it transform into a global literary phenomenon having hosted nearly 2000 speakers and welcoming over a million book lovers from across India and the globe. The Festival’s core values remain unchanged: to serve as a democratic, non-aligned platform offering free and fair access.