From a small event in Rajasthan in northwestern India, the Jaipur Literature Festival has grown to become one of the most important and much-loved literary events in the world, expanding its reach to 19 countries around the globe and this week, it is back in Ireland.
The iconic Literature Festival, widely regarded as a global platform for ideas, dialogue and cultural exchange, sees its most ambitious edition to date start this evening with JLF – Island of Ireland.
The festival was to run in Belfast for three years in a row and the 2019 version was a great success but then Covid arrived and destroyed any plans for a sustained presence on the banks of the Lagan.
However, seven years later, the festival has expanded to include events in not just Belfast but also Armagh, Dundalk and Dublin.
Speaking to one of the founders of the Jaipur Literature Festival yesterday, Sanjoy Roy told me what he thought were the reasons behind the festival’s success.
“Well, I think it’s all about word of mouth and when the festival started 19 years ago we didn’t anticipate it would grow into this vast festival with so many additions but it has and in part of a number of reasons one is that Jaipur in itself has such amazing built heritage, which brings in people.
“There’s so much colour and atmosphere at the festival and there are great conversations and great writers from across the world who convene there.
“It’s a rock concert for literature, as somebody once described it,” he says.
“About 65 per cent of the festival programme is non-fiction as it looks at everything from artificial intelligence to particle physics to architecture, history, travel, politics, philosophy and geopolitics etc, and it’s really about informing people about how the world is constantly evolving.”
It’s a rock concert for literature, as somebody once described it
— Sanjoy Roy
While indeed, all this is very laudable, surely we are heading into a new world where literature is, in a way, under attack because people are fixated by 140 characters on X/Twitter; when younger people are finding it difficult to read whole books; when AI is giving us all the answers we need – usually the wrong answers – in a few clicks and when libraries are being closed.
Sanjoy wasn’t as pessimistic as this devil’s advocate.
“I think it’s cyclical in many ways that it’s like when music temporarily died and then you created a platform which was online.
“Of course, this destroyed the economics of it and democratised your access to music so I think these are our more temporary glitches It’s like that amazing discovery in Egypt recently where this royal lady was discovered with pages of the Iliad buried with her.
“Literature just lives on. And I think that’s the beauty of it. The form in which it lives on can be debated but traditional publishing has moved beyond that blip and in many new surges, you’re seeing publishing growing 17 to 18 per cent, especially if you’re looking at some of the figures coming out of the East, places like India, et cetera, where the potential is huge.”
Sanjoy rightly believes the greater threat is that people will take such offence to research or ideas or stories that one group or another will then burn or ban or trash books. That’s far more the challenge of our times, he says.
Therefore it is great to be welcoming the Jaipur Literature Festival to Belfast with its celebration of whatever we find behind the covers.
One of my own highlights will be tonight’s opening address followed by Empire: Ireland, India and the Making of the Modern World with William Dalrymple, Nandini Das and Jane Ohlmeyer in conversation with Christopher Kissane. On Saturday at 3pm is Tongue, Tribe, Self: The Language of Identity, which features a discussion between Lee Reynolds and Pól Deeds – the commissioner for the Ulster Scots and Ulster British Tradition and the Irish Language commissioner respectively – and Lata Sharma, one of Northern Ireland’s foremost diversity advocates, with Colin Graham in the chair..
On Sunday at 12 noon, former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar will be in conversation with Shona Murray on his life, politics and Indian background.
There will be a celebration of Irish and Indian music in the Market Place Theatre in Armagh on Tuesday, May 26, before the JPL moves to Dundalk for another roundof For and Against a United Ireland with Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride in conversation with Dearbhail McDonald.
Sanjoy is very excited – as a lot of people are – to have Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a former diplomat and Governor of West Bengal, be part of the festival.
Gopalkrisna has collected a large selection on his grandfather’s works, all his writings and letters and will be chatting to Fintan O’Toole about The Undying Light: India’s Futures, introduced by Christiana Zenner,.
You can find full details about the Jaipur Literature Festival at; https://jlflitfest.org/ireland
