Asia's biggest literature festival to bring 165 top int'l writers to Jaipur

One of the largest literature festival in Asia, the ZEE-Japur Literature Festival, has unveiled a staggering list of 165 top-of the prominent writers who will discourse, debate and shed insights into every aspect of international literature, culture and arts for four days from January 21 to January 25, 2016 in the historic "pink city" of Jaipur — the capital of the exotic desert state of Rajasthan in north-western India.

Described as the "greatest literary show" by journalist-columnist and writer Tina Brown of The Daily Beast, the Jaipur Literature Festival began in a small way as a literary initiative of the Jaipur Virasat Foundation — a non-profit group that works with musicians and craftspeople of Rajasthan to preserve their skills and promote economic livelihoods.

The foundation also promote the ancient heritage of the state which is home to the royal Rajputana clans and the lair of the grand Mughals who left behind imposing forts, battlements and ornate palaces across the swath of Thar desert.

The original idea of the festival was present a holistic picture of the desert culture — steeped in its music, arts, dances, performances and story-telling.

Over the last decade it has grown into a bustling festival of contemporary global literary and cultural art facilitating fusion and new strands of thoughts.

The festival is one of the biggest tourist draws of northern India during winter logging an average footfall of 500,000 from around the world.

It is held every year at the Diggi Palace, a "thikana" or the "royal retreat" of a 16th century warlord of the Diggi Rajput clan, an offshoot of the erstwhile ruling Rathode Rajput community of Rajasthan, known for their feats of valour on battle fields and rich artistic legacies dating back to more than 1,000 years.

The line-up of writers for 2016 leads with the likes of Margaret Atwood, poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist who will discuss her new novel, "The Heart Goes Last"; Ruskin Bond, photographer Steve McCurry; controversial Harvard historian Niall Ferguson and Britain's national treasure Stephen Fry.

French Economist and global voice on wealth and income inequality Thomas Piketty, Bosnian American fiction writer Aleksandar Hemon, Israeli author and peace activist David Grossman, and India's most celebrated psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar will take centre-stage alongside noted Hindi poet and author Uday Prakash, Sahitya, Rita Chowdhury and Dhrubajyoti Bora as well as prominent Gujarati poet and scholar Sitanshu Yashaschandra.

Think-tank strategist Homi Bhabha from the Mahindra Humanities Centre will curate a strand of sessions around the theme of privacy in the contemporary world while British author and columnist Ben Macintyre and a host of frontline reporters will discuss conflict and its effect on the modern world with American reporter Dexter Filkins, English foreign correspondent Christina Lamb and CNN's national security analyst Peter Bergen.

Science communicator, children's author, journalist and novelist Lucy Hawking will speak of her extraordinary journey in transmitting the awe, wonder, and understanding of our universe to young readers.

As ever, the festival will celebrate the rich diversity of languages in South Asia with a panorama of leading Indian writers including Mridula Sinha, Alka Saraogi, Ashok Vajpeyi, Yatindra Mishra, Prabhat Ranjan, Harish Trivedi and Mridul Kirti in Hindi, Anita Agnihotri in Bangla, Vivek Shanbhag in Kannada, Ila Arab Mehta in Gujarati, Madhav Hada in Rajasthani, Makarand Sathe in Marathi, Sahil Maqbool in Kashmiri, and many others including the Santhali publisher Ruby Hembrom.

The language section will give voice to vernaculars like Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Pahadi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Santhali, Tamil and Urdu.

The focus of the festival will be on the rich oral heritage of Rajasthan with sessions on "Kaavad" traditions of illustrated storytelling and performance and music.

The unique multi-lingual flavour of the festival will be enhanced by the presence of foreign language writers in French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Icelandic and Slovenian.

Beside the busy literary discourses, the festival will look into the state of affairs in the publishing industry based on a module "The

Jaipur BookMark" that will liaise business and networking opportunity for those working in the books and publishing industry.

The two-day Jaipur BookMark conference will be held alongside the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival at the Narain Niwas Palace Hotel on January 21 and 22 next year to discuss the prospects of self-publishing, e-books, digital content and distribution or international and Indian publishing communities.

Explaining the objective of the festival, Namita Gokhale, writer, publisher and co-Director of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, said, "The ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival is propelled by ideas and the excitement of real-time conversations.

According to noted writer-journalist William Dalrymple, the co-director of festival, who manages the international participation, the line-up for 2016 is astonishing.

"Each year at Jaipur we try to produce a programme more remarkable than the year before, but this year has to be our most astonishing line up ever. Among the international authors appearing this year we present writers of genius as diverse as economist Thomas Picketty and humourist and polymath Stephen Fry.

"We import some of the world's most admired novelists, including Margaret Atwood, Colm Toibin and David Grossman, as well as arguably the world's greatest living travel writer, Colin Thubron. We deeply delve into three areas of world literature we have so far failed to explore- notably the novelists and poets of the Balkans, the Caribbean and Central America- while returning to examine eternal classics such as the work of Shakespeare, Proust and Andaal.

"We will explore a vast range of subjects from Neanderthals to hedge fund managers; the bleak depths of depression to the heights of the Silk Road; universal myths of the Deluge to the literature of the Sandanistas; Jamaican rap and mediaeval mystic poetry; the agonies of Gaza and the pleasures of the karma sutra. It's going to be an incredible few days."

The core values of the festival remain the same —to create a platform that celebrates freedom of expression and ideas bringing together the very best writers from across the world to one of the most magical and atmospheric historic sites in a celebration of literature open and equal to all, Sanjoy K. Roy, director of Teamworks Arts, which produces of the ZEE-Jaipur Literature Festival, said.