– Kate Tempest , Lila Azam Zanganeh, Anne Waldman, Prasoon Joshi, Luke Harding, Shashi Tharoor and Suhel Seth rouse the crowds on final afternoon –
– Dates for next year announced as 19 – 23 January 2018 –
– ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival takes a taste of this magical event to Melbourne Australia,
London UK and Boulder USA later this year –
Monday 23 January, Jaipur: Described as the ‘kumbh of literary festivals’, the 10th edition of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival today came to a close after a fifth day packed with debate, discussion, humour and sunshine.
Over 400 world leading names and minds in the fields of fiction and non-fiction writing created a feast of words in the Pink City, includingJaved Akhtar, Ashwin Sanghi, Lila Azam Zanhaneh, Prasoon Joshi, Richard Flanagan, Luke Harding, Bibek Debroy, Paul Beatty, Mallika Dua, Hardeep Singh Puri, Hyeonseo Lee, Alan Hollinghurst and Shashi Tharoor.
Some highlights include the Festival exuberant American poet Anne Waldman who has appeared in a number of sessions to talk about Ginsberg, her life and to share her experimental poetry. Young UK based poet and spoken-word artist Kate Tempest entertained the audience on the Front Lawn on the last day raising whoops and cheers for her energetic delivery and insightful texts.
Festival Directors Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple both featured in sessions to talk about their own recent books, Things to Leave Behind and Kohinoor.
The yoga guru Sadhguru, author of Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy, spoke at the Front Lawn on the first morning suggesting that ‘Human intellect is firing like never before. This is why people are suffering. They have to think for themselves, not rely on scripture or a guru.’
Novelist and community activist Mridula Koshy, Anne Waldman, social theorist Ornit Shani, screenwriter and advertising guru Prasoon Joshi and chess champion Anuradha Beniwal all met across the five days with Puneeta Roy to contribute their experience and mind to the Festival theme Freedom to Dream looking at India today in the context of its history and its future including its democracy, citizenship, perception, persuasion and ideas, travel, adventure and freedom.
Friday morning’s sessions with Rishi Kapoor and then Anand Neelakanta, Prasad Devineni, S.S. Rajamouli and Rana Daggubati drew an excited and cheering crowd to fill the Front Lawn of the Diggi Palace.
Unsurprisingly the economy has been discussed in a number of sessions, always returning to the issues of de-monetisation. Some of the world’s finest economists and business minds including Ha-Joon Chang, Sanjay Agarwal, Kunal Bahl, Amitabh Kant, Frank Trentmann,David McWilliams, Dambisa Moyo, Sadaf Saaz got together at ZEE JLF to discuss this and other issues and ambitions in the field of economics.
Aishwaryaa, UN Goodwill Ambassador for gender equality, has borne witness to the positive changes that have come about in the film industry in the last decade, to a packed Front Lawn crowd she shared, ‘Five years ago, it would have been close to impossible for a woman director to do more than one film, but now I’m about to direct my third.’
The most Brexit is ‘the most divisive issue in Britain’, according to Guardian journalist Jonathan Shainin, who in a panel with Andrew Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash who described the Brexiters as naïve utopians.
Dr Shashi Tharoor stirred up the crowd on Sunday morning declaring that the Empire was an ‘exercise in serving its own perpetuation.’ ‘What the British Raj has deprived us of is our self-respect,’ said Tharoor, to enormous applause.
Philip A Lutgendorf and Shubha Vilas joined Arshia Sattar in a conversation about Lord Hanuman to discuss the deeper aspects of the revered monkey god. Historical fiction came under examination in Rewriting History: The Art of Historical Fiction looking at how you write a novel set in a period of history long before you were alive with some of the best in the world, Adam Thirlwell, Alan Hollinghurst, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Shazia Omar and Namita Gokhale.
A session on Exile, Taslima Nasrin told the assembled crowd, “I don’t believe in nationalism, I believe in one world of rights and freedom.”
The Festival closed today with the Debate: We Are Living in a Post-Truth World in which Anne Waldman, Ashutosh Varshney, Kapil Sibal, Luke Harding, Shashi Tharoor, Prasoon Joshi, Suhel Seth and Swapan Dasgupta moderated by Barkha Dutt look at the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2016 – Post-Truth. Will the truth ultimately triumph or does the motto of the Indian State, ‘Satyamev Jayate’ or ‘Truth Will Prevail ‘ no longer hold true
The authors invited to ZEE JLF 2017 represented writing in 30 languages and both ZEE JLF and its sister event had a focus on the undervalued art of translation and the cultural benefits of sharing literature from around the world.
The third year of Jaipur BookMark, the Festival’s sister publishing industry event concluded with the award of the second Oxford Bookstore Book Cover Prize, won by designer Pinaki De for the book Kalkatta by Kunal Basu. A second prize was awarded at Jaipur BookMark this year, the Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award was awarded to well known translator, poet, writer and critic Dr Anamika.
Over the course of its first 10 years, the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival has hosted 1300 speakers and welcomed 1.2million book lovers.
MUSIC
More than 100 musicians both global and local filled the mornings at Diggi Palace and the evenings at Clarks Amer. Music from artists including the arousing Shillong Chamber Choir, Swanand Kirkire and Anukur Tewari started the day for festival visitors, and the hugely popular Raghu Dixit Project, Lisa Hannigan, Soulmate and Inna Modja drew the crowds on the lawn of Clarks Amer in the evening.
The crowds gathered at Amber Fort and Hawa Mahal for two mesmerising Heritage Evenings in partnership with Rajasthan Tourism, in two stunning settings. Lit to accentuate the beautiful details of these heritage properties, around 1,200 people flocked to Amber Fort to hear the celebrated poetry of Anne Waldman from the USA and Bollywood lyricist Swanand Kirkire. At Hawa Mahal around 700 people went on a journey through the magical realm of entertainment with Vidya Shah and Luke Kenny.
For the sixth year running the Festival partnered with Pratham Books to produce nearly 100 interactive sessions promoting the love of books in schools across Jaipur from Jan 16-25, 2017. Authors who took part in the programme include renowned geologist Barry Cunliffe, children’s author and actor Nandana Sen, acclaimed writer Arshia Sattar, mountaineer Colonel Vishal Ahlawat, storyteller Rituparna Ghosh, journalist Kunga Tenzing Dorji.
Festival Director Namita Gokhale said, “There’s always a sweet sadness as the festival draws to a close. It’s been a wonderful exhilarating year, and the speakers and sessions covered a huge range of themes and narratives. I’m taking notes already, jotting down ideas, and gearing up for 2018.”
Festival Director William Dalrymple said, “I think it was our strongest year yet, both at the main festival and at the Music Stage. Our artists were all magnificent and I’m incredibly proud of them.”
Sanjoy Roy, Managing Director of Teamwork Arts, Producer of the Festival, said, “There are many truths and the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival is a platform to reflect some of these. And continue to make sense of the world that we inhabit and envision the future.”
OUTREACH
The Yuva Ekta Foundation, a not for profit Trust working at the intersection of Youth and Governance, has been facilitating the Festival’s Youth Outreach program for 10 years now. The Youth Outreach program seeks to integrate underprivileged youth in Rajasthan with their more privileged counter parts, creating opportunities for mutual learning and creative exchange. The theme for 2017 reflected the Festival’s and focused on Freedom to Dream. A total of 54 participants (29 participants from Schools and 25 participants from NGOs) were part of theatre based intensive workshops at Jayshree Periwal High School.
BAZAAR
The much expanded Bazaar @ Zee Jaipur Literature Festival saw 50 makers bring more than 20,000 products for sale, from 15 states across India, the online and offline platform that enables makers, designers and buyers to collaborate, co-create and sell handcrafted products, is hosting a vibrant crafts marketplace the Bazaar at ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival 2017. For this year’s festival, Direct Create (DC) showcased unique crafts honouring the versatility and skill of traditional crafts and combining it with a new design language. Merchandise celebrating 10 years of the Festival, will continue to be available online at www.directcreate.com.
MAGNA CARTA
The rare facsimile of the Magna Carta (1215AD) housed in a special gallery at Diggi Palace has been the focus of much attention from visitors to the Festival with Claire Breay Head of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts from festival partner’s the British Library on hand to share her knowledge of its history and significance with media and visitors. The document will now be returned to the UK.
SPONSORS AND SUPPORTERS
The ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival would like to thank the sponsors who made it once again possible to support the writers attending from India and abroad, to keep the Festival free to all, and to enhance the experience of the thousands of people who flock to the Festival.
Title partner ZEE Entertainment continues to support the festival, which with its international reach and visitors is a good fit with its vision, ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ (The World is My Family).
Cox & Kings came on board as venue sponsors for the first time taking a bold move as a tourism based firm investing in a key cultural property, the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival.
This year, the Festival is working with an array of international, national and local corporates, education institutions, the Government, trusts and foundations. Returning partners include Amity University, Dove, Indigo, The Aga Khan Foundation, AVID Learning, the Getty Foundation and supporters Penguin, BBC History Magazine and Ambit. Continuing their longstanding support of the festival are the Jan Michalski Foundation, The Glenlivet, Kingfisher and Full Circle, who will manage the Festival Bookstore.
BOOK LAUNCHES
ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival saw 19 new books launched including Gulab Kothari’s Manas, Shakti Maira’s The Promise of Beauty & Why it Matters and Capital by Abhay K.
PRIZES AND AWARDS
This year the Festival awarded three prizes, the third edition of the Ojas Art Award focused on Bheel art was presented to Lado Bai (Master Artist) and Subhas Amaliyar (Protégé Artist), as well as the second editions of the Shri Dwarka Prasad Aharwal Award which was awarded to upcoming Hindi writer Yatindra Mishra and the Kanhaiya Lal Sethia Poetry Prize which was won by Jayanta Mahapatra.
DIGITAL AND SOCIAL
Website
17 Facebook Live author interviews including Eka Kurniawan, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Beatty and Chandrahas Choudhury, 125 blogs including on Richard Flanagan, Sadguru, Devdutt Pattanaik, Kate Tempest and Ornit Shani, session films and real time tweeting all helped spread the reach of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival beyond the walls of Diggi Palace. The Festival has had over 1billion impressions on twitter and 11,500 people talked about the festival in 23,300 conversations.
On Facebook ZEE JLF’s posts attracted 156,000 engagements, videos were watched 99,000 times, the Facebook page picked up 31,000 likes, and we saw huge increases in engaged users (up 392%), people seeing our content (up 2538%) and viewing of content (up 1089%) thanks to a new partnership with Facebook.
Instagram saw 2,950 posts from the Festival and the ZEE JLF Instagram account picked up 18,500 likes over the Festival.
The ZEE JLF YouTube channel has clocked 108,556 minutes of video watched, with a global audience split of 76% from India and 24% from abroad.
ART
As in recent years the Diggi Palace gardens host not just the venues but also a range of artworks to inspire your eyes as well as your ears. Subodh Gupta’s new exhibition for the festival stood outside Durbar Hall. Who ate up the forests? Is inspired by Bhrigupati Singh’s book Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India. Photographer Rohit Chawla showcased 10 years of his secret ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival photography studio’s treasure and Rajasthani artist Jagmohan Mathodia’s work enlivened the author’s lounge at the festival this year.
THERE’S MORE TO COME…
Far from being the end of the Festival in 2017 – there is set to be three further editions of JLF across the world at the British Library in London this May, and then the second edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival in Boulder, Colorado, USA in the autumn, and the newly announced JLF Melbourne next month. The international outposts of the JLF festivals will be produced by Teamwork Arts, which in addition produces over 25 highly acclaimed performing arts, visual arts and literary festivals in more than 40 cities across the world.
Next year the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival will run from Thursday 19 to Monday 23 January. The Festival has already announced a handful of writers lined up for next year including Amy Tan, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Dipanker Gupta, Davesh Soneji, Graham Swift, Hari Kunzru, Ian McEwan, Mario Vargas Llosa, Michael Morpurgo, Michael Palin, Neil Gaiman, PJ Harvey, Rohinton Mistry, Sunita Narain, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Zadie Smith.
BBC World Service recorded a special edition of The Arts Hour on Tour from the festival which will be broadcast on Sunday 29 January.
Today it was announced at ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival that ‘India at 70: LSE India Summit 2017’, the LSE South Asia Centre’s annual flagship Summit will this year commemorates the 70th anniversary of India’s independence. As India reflects on this landmark and charts a path to the future, the Summit will debate core issues that are central to the way forward as it aspires to be a global power in what promises to be an ‘Asian’ 21st century. Experts from across the spectrum will come together at the Summit including J A (Tony) Allan, Rahul Bajaj, Mukulika Banerjee, Harry Barkema, Amita Baviskar, S Gurumurthy, Suhasini Haidar, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Kalpana Kannabiran, Onkar S Kanwar, Madhav Khosla, Marcus Moench, Nirupama Rao, Mukund Rajan, Kanwal Sibal, Ashley Tellis, Himanshu Thakkar. Teamwork Artswill produce ‘India at 70’, LSE INDIA SUMMIT 2017 to be held from 29-31 March 2017 at The Stein Auditorium, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi 110003. The Summit is free and open to all. Entry is on a first-come basis.