Writers on a Roll
Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz is only half joking when he tells a large audience at Diggi Palace, “America’s approach to art is: ‘ Wait, you’re still here?’” Thanks to the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival ( JLF), that increasingly riotous carnival with a brain, this is far from the case in India.
Diaz was speaking to a crowd of a couple of hundred; perhaps many of them hadn’t read his book, but what is remarkable is that many will buy it and, of these, some will read it. This might not sound like the purest of enterprises, but in the reality of today’s literary marketplace, it’s a sufficiently heartening best case scenario. As much as it brings in its wake controversy, criticism, complaints about crowds and quibbles about the ‘ festivalisation’ of literature, the JLF is a powerful trailblazer that both evidences and perpetuates the vitality of reading and writers in today’s India.
I’ve been attending the festival for four years and it gets bigger and better every year. As an editor, writer, unofficial scout and freelance journalist, I might represent every kind of person who comes here— insider, petitioner, enabler, tout, reveller and yes, groupie. After all, you have to be dead inside not to feel the hit of the writer junkie when novelist Richard Ford is engaging with India and the universality of international literatures or when Vikram Seth chooses to read a poem a schoolgirl has requested.