The Jaipur Literary Festival

I’m over at the Huffington Post, with an interview with the redoubtable Willy Darlymple on the Jaipur Literary Festival which began today. Here’s an excerpt. The full interview can be found here.

A few days ago, William Dalrymple, famed architect of the Zee Jaipur Literary Festival which opened today, posted the following status update with a few significant details:

“Over the next six days we will be deploying at Jaipur:
– 240 speakers
– Over 2,000 workers to ready the venue
– Over 500 crew and volunteers
– Authors & Musicians from nearly 60 countries representing 22 languages– well over 2 lakh footfalls of visitors at Diggi Palace over 5 days
– a whole village has been imported to cook 15,000 plus hot meals for authors, press and delegates
– 940 lights will be erected across all venues in the 14-acre site at Diggi Palace
– 8 venues (6 at Diggi Palace, one each at Amer Fort, Hawa Mahal)
– 1,800 rooms plus rooms booked at Jaipur hotels for visiting speakers
– Over 2,30,000 sq ft of cloth used to decorate the Festival site
– Over 1,80,000 decorative hangings will adorn the venue”

It sounds both outrageous and delightful. The fact that several hundreds of those who will be speaking at the festival mingle, and refresh themselves in between sessions in a very small courtyard equipped with one small room for resting, is part of the charm of the world’s most popular literary festival.

I sat in that room – the room where Jhumpa Lahiri might go to speak to an interviewer, where Gloria Steinem might go to powder her nose, and where more than one author goes to lie down for a few minutes in between sessions, and where, surely, V. S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux will exchange a few private words this year – and speak with William Dalrymple. As we conversed, a young man walked in and asked why Dalrymple wants to live in India. “Only Indians ask me that,” Dalrymple quipped, harkening back to the idea that none of us appreciate our own homelands, whose many graces are shrouded by the black curtain of our familiarity. Perhaps it is the more hopeful and forgiving eye of the foreigner that has helped Dalrymple to conceive of a festival like this. There is a palpable energy and excitement at this particular celebration of literature that unfolds among and within the palaces of Rajasthan’s capital city, bolstered by the fluidity of the masses of volunteers who supply everything from a ballpoint pen to a train to the Taj Mahal without ruffle, an equanimity only matched by the even bigger masses flowing through the festival grounds. Between the blur of moderating and speaking on several panels, Dalrymple paused to discuss the thinking behind the creation of what is now the largest entirely free literary festival in the world