For five days last month, I felt like a Nobel Prize winner. Thanks to my white goatee, everyone at the DSC Jaipur Literary Festival, now Asia's largest, kept asking me to sign the books of invited South African novelist J.M. Coetzee. Even when I explained who I was, this was taken as a ploy by a reclusive author. Somehow Jaipur turns everyone into a laureate.
Some are starting to call it the book world's Kumbh Mela - after the Ganges bathing that qualifies as mankind's largest gathering. At the sixth annual edition of the phenomenon that is Jaipur, this pilgrimage of illustrious authors and second-rate gurus, brilliant scholars and schoolgirls, schmoozers and high-society grand dames, Anglo-Indian agents and publishers, Bollywood has-beens and Oxbridge dons, hard partiers and plain old readers reached critical mass. Like India itself, the world's wildest celebration of writing's contemplative life seemed both booming and bursting with contradictions - in constant danger of being overwhelmed by its vitality and success.
When weekend mobs flooded the sprawling grounds of the 19th-century mansion-turned-backpacker-hostel called Diggi Palace, they barely left elbow room for shoving inside rainbow-draped tents to hear discussions about everything from Nigerian fiction to new research on the East India Company. As the applications for free entry topped 32,000 producer Sanjoy Roy, the festival's long-haired logistical ringleader, reluctantly began considering new security measures with Rajasthan authorities. An event whose seminal trademark has been the egalitarian commingling of immortals with nobodies over free-flowing whisky, ecstatic drumming and soupy outdoor buffets, began random checks amid the stream of knowledge - or autograph - seeking humanity. But as Roy recounts, one of the first was a homeless man with a small boy who said he had never been able to afford a book for his son and heard this place 'was telling stories to children'. Roy says: 'Imagine the enormous divide this fellow had crossed. After that, we couldn't stop anyone. This is exactly how we hope to transform India.'
But will India transform the festival first? Nothing could be so Indian in its lurid colours and quick pace, its bonfires and hovering black crows, its earthen cups of masala chai. But just as surely, the hushed intimacy of early years will never return: the feeling of being personally initiated into a special fraternity of the intellectually curious by its expansive co-founders, British author William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale, a tireless champion of India's indigenous prose, now replaced by an unsorted swarm of strange faces and unchecked commercialism.
The main draw, of course, is the growing number of literary headliners that the super-informed Dalrymple keeps culling from his e-mails. The roster this time read like a who's who of the Library of Congress: Nobel Prize winners Orhan Pamuk and the aforementioned Coetzee, Booker Prize standouts such as Vikram Seth, Kiran Desai and Martin Amis plus a growing contingent of American luminaries (for those keeping score, Pulitzer and National Book Award winners like Richard Ford and Junot Diaz).
'Naturally, there's a celebrity factor that drives this in India,' says first-time novelist Tishani Doshi, expressing the general sentiment. With local press coverage stressing gossip about a real-life Pamuk-Desai coupling, she adds: 'So long as books generate buzz and get space on the front page, hopefully more people will read them.'