A ‘sea of stories’ launches Jaipur Literature Festival

Literary festivals have become a major movement all across India and the subcontinent and it all started with the Jaipur Literature Festival, said William Dalrymple, launching the 17th edition together with Sanjoy K. Roy and Namita Gokhale in Jaipur on Thursday. The success of literary festivals in India – and the subcontinent — is largely because there’s a rich, oral tradition and literature is just not read, but performed in public, he said.

The Jaipur festival is a moveable feast with music, colourful art, a bazaar, bookshops, food and, of course, conversations around books, reading, publishing and all its challenges. Namita Gokhale said the festival was bringing back the spirit of the ‘katha-sarit-sagara’ or the ‘sea of stories’, committing itself to the “rich diversity of our heritage”, and also trying to make sense of the times.

Stories were aplenty with subsequent sessions talking about Gaza and war, territory and identity, borders and Partition, gender, feminism; there was a spotlight on the coasts and marshy lands, music and poetry.

Difficult choices

In the afterglow of winning the Booker Prize, Irish writer Paul Lynch began proceedings with a discussion about his book, Prophet Song. The novel tells the story of Eilish Stack, a microbiologist in an unnamed island, trying to grapple with forces beyond her control to save her family. A totalitarian regime has taken control and she has to make choices even though “the true nature of the threat cannot be quantified.” What the book wants to convey, said Lynch, is that the unravelling on the island is a timeless event, it belongs to the past, the future and the present: “the world ends for people all the time, in the way it is ending for people in Gaza or Ukraine.”

Dismissing the notion that his book should be considered a political novel, he said it questions many aspects of the complexities of life, often coming up short of answers. “It has a political dimension, but grief and loss is what I am interested in… and what lies beyond our understanding.”

Borders, gender

At least three new books were launched, including Somnath Batabyal’s Red River which is set in Assam and took 13 years to write. An ethnographer and anthropologist by training, he tells the story of people on the margins, looking at ethnic, language conflicts in the Northeast through the eyes of refugees, separatists and the army.

Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry was one of the most borrowed books of American public libraries in 2023, and that popularity has clearly reached Indian shores. A full house attended the session with readers asking pertinent questions from the book about feminism, gender and the work still left to be done. The novel follows a chemist, who battled gender inequality in the 1960s before going on to gain popularity with a cooking show. Garmus said she had got letters from 15-year-old boys, saying their attitudes towards girls had changed, and that gave her hope.

At another session, the great travel writer Colin Thubron (In Siberia, Shadow of the Silk Road, The Amur River) talked to Yuvan Aves about his new book Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary, with nature writer Robert Macfarlane (Underland, Landmarks) joining virtually. Aves was drawn in by both Thubron and Macfarlane to speak about the “intertidal zone – that in-between space where land meets sea – and also where being meets world.” He narrated a thrilling story of how a fisherman taught him to understand the various types of winds and what they portend.

Talking about his new book, Breaking the Mould, co-written with Rohit Lamba, the former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan said India’s biggest asset is its human capital and the book focuses on “how do we take advantage of that… how do we upscale and upskill the labour force for the 21st century.”

Over the next few days, a host of writers will take the stage, including Hernan Diaz (who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for his novel Trust), Katie Kitamura, Yascha Mounk, Mary Beard, Damon Galgut, Peter Frankopan, Devika Rege, Rakhshanda Jalil, Jonathan Freedland, Josephine Quinn, Charles Glass, Amia Srinivasan and Kai Bird.