Far From the Madding Crowd

Founded in 2006, the Jaipur Literature Festival has enjoyed 15 years of untrammelled growth. It is, by any reasonable measure, an extraordinary success. Over the years, nearly every major contemporary writer from around the world, not to mention scientists, academics, journalists, celebrities, and even politicians have stopped by at Jaipur to marvel at, and be marvelled at by crowds of thousands, even tens of thousands.

JLF has become an international franchise, putting on literature festivals in nine cities, from Colorado and Belfast, to Doha and Adelaide, among others. It has even adapted successfully to the pandemic, connecting its eminent panelists via video links in its ‘Brave New World’ series conversations that have garnered, according to JLF producer Sanjoy Roy, nearly five million views. This year, JLF, which concluded on February 28, was hosted at a ‘3-D’ Diggi Place, with those who registered being able to navigate their way to the ‘Front Lawn’ or the ‘Durbar Hall’ to attend sessions as if they were at the venue in a normal, non-Covid year.

The line-up of speakers was typically high-powered, ranging from Bill Gates to Priyanka Chopra. According to author and festival director William Dalrymple, the breadth and quality of speakers and sessions helped offset, if not make up for the missing frisson of the live event. What set Jaipur apart from other lit-fests was the large, youthful crowds it attracted for its often serious, highbrow sessions. That and the fact that anyone could attend for free. Those who paid did it for closer access to the grandees, for the dubious privilege of dining or partying with them.

Conversation is the JLF mantra. If you have ever asked yourself, at a packed session on the Front Lawn, say, whether you were part of the conversation or just permitted to, worshipfully, listen in, the divide online between those doing the talking and those privileged to listen is made stark by the impossibility of participation, of even asking questions from the audience. Literary critic Homi Bhabha told sculptor Anish Kapoor in one session that they “burn the phone lines every day, so this is only part of a continued conversation”. While they continued their conversation, presumably the rest of us could play academic buzzword bingo, exulting out loud in our room to no one in particular when we scored “psychic interiority”, “void of vulnerability” and “liminal space” in a single sentence.

In another session, Harvard academic Michael Sandel told Shashi Tharoor that a problem that had to be acknowledged in the West was that the elite, supposedly the products of ‘meritocracy’, “are looking down on large swathes of the population”. Such conclaves can seem like just another bogie on the ever-lengthening global gravy train for the great and the good. A large public library would be an infinitely more valuable contribution to the spread of ideas, but where’s the glamour in that?

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