How 10 Japanese tourists led us to Jaipur’s literature festival

Festivals, like children, have their own lives. As a festival director, you do all you can to make your offspring flourish: choose the best location and time of year, plan the food and the drink and the lighting, design beautiful tents, fill them with the bright, the brilliant and the beautiful from across the world.

But at a certain point you have to let go, and look on with hope as your baby makes its own way into the world, to hang back at the school gates as its goes off on its own and begins to follow its own destiny, whatever that may be.

In January in 2004, Faith Singh, the founder of the clothing company Anokhi, invited me to her new Jaipur Heritage International Festival of music and dance, and when I jumped at the chance, she asked if I would like to give a small reading while I was there.

That reading took place somewhere at the back of a university, in a room that no one was able to find. Fourteen people turned up, of whom 10 were Japanese tourists who had got lost.

That evening, I suggested to Faith that maybe something could be done to start a small book festival around her Heritage Festival, just as Edinburgh had its Book Festival running alongside the main Edinburgh International Festival.

It seemed odd to me that India, which provided so many writers to literary festivals around the world, seemed to have so few literary events of its own, other than some academic discussions of poetry at the Sahitya Academy, a few authors on British Council tours and the odd invitation-only event for elderly would-be literateurs at the India International Centre in Delhi.

Wherever I appeared at literary festivals around the globe, all the usual celebrated Indian writers were there – and one tended to meet far more of what the West regards as the A-list Indian writers in English at the literary festival of Hay-on-Wye, deep in the Welsh countryside, or Cheltenham or even New York PEN, than one ever did in Mumbai or Delhi.

This was partly because so many of the most successful South Asian writers who make a living mediating a fictional India to the West no longer live in their homeland. But the absence of these writers, except for the occasional book launch or lecture tour, was also partly because there was no big festival for these writers to perform at.

So two years later, the festival finally opened. We thought we had 18 authors – all Indian residents, though “two failed to show up,” as my co-director, Namita Gokhale, remembers. Since then Jaipur has transformed itself from an event into a phenomenon and the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) has grown like some creature from the Mahabharata.

In 2006, we invited our first global star, Hari Kunzru, who was passing through India on his way to visit his squeeze in Auckland. In 2007, we moved up a notch, hosting that year’s Booker winner Kiran Desai as well as Suketu Mehta and Salman Rushdie, who spoke brilliantly to an enormous crowd.

It was the following January that the festival really arrived: in 2009 we tripled the size of the festival and invited 160 authors, performers and musicians; to our astonishment 20,000 people turned up to hear them.

Only a decade after that first reading we now find ourselves running the largest free literary festival in the world.

I still have no office or assistant, but the festival is now a major operation, and my amazing colleagues at Teamwork who look after our production have to wrestle with staggering logistics: in the course of a week last January they cooked 14,700 hot meals, booked 1,800 hotel nights for 240 participants, sold 10,000 books and hosted 75,000 people a day, adding up to around a quarter of a million punters in all. And that’s not counting the evening music programme that gathered similar-sized crowds.

JLF works partly because it is a properly festive festival. The buildings are festooned with bunting, there are hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts milling around, including an abnormally large number of students and women, we let off fireworks at night and after 6.30 the writers have to shut up and give the stages over to music and dancing.

We do what we can to keep order, but we have no control over what visitors always seem to like the most – the energy and enthusiasm of our audiences.

“It’s settled,” Time Out wrote last year. “The Jaipur Literature Festival is officially the Woodstock, Live 8 and Ibiza of world literature. The Frankfurt Book Fair, the Booker Prize Awards and Hay-on-Wye are like watching the Pope sleep compared to an ambience best described as James Joyce meets Monsoon Wedding. [The authors] were treated somewhere between Bono doing an air dive and Salman Khan (a Bollywood sex symbol) taking off his shirt at an autorickshaw driver’s convention.”

Another big asset is that we are situated in Jaipur, one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and one that has a rich literary and cultural tradition of its own, as well as the most wonderfully benign late January climate.

Because the festival is free, and relies on piecemeal sponsorship rather than ticket sales, we are always semi-broke. But authors are never slow to take up a freebie, and a warm Jaipuri palace in January is an easy sell to scribblers huddling round their radiators in the frozen North.

Each year we get a Nobel laureate (next year VS Naipaul, who will be celebrating 50 years of A House for Mr Biswas) – a clutch of Pulitzer winners (including Kai Bird, Adam Johnson and Gilbert King) and most of the Booker shortlist (including this year Will Self and Neal Mukherjee) – all in addition to over 200 Indian and South Asian writers who write in over 30 different languages, curated by my colleague Namita Gokhale.

This year, we have sessions on writing criticism, art history, historical novels and memoir; we’ll take a new look at Lawrence of Arabia, Homer and Marie Antoinette; and we’ll have sessions on tigers, bumble bees, Neanderthals, pirates, aesthetics and exotics, detectives and spooks – where we’ll explore the world of spies and the CIA. It’s going to be an utterly amazing few days.

William Dalrymple, co-founder and co-director of the JLF is the author, most recently, of Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-42

The festival will take place next week, January 21 to 25. The full list of speakers can be found at: jaipurliteraturefestival.org

On Twitter: @DalrympleWill