This year’s Jaipur Literature Festival kicks off at a 3D Diggi Palace

“Someone once described the Jaipur Literature Festival [JLF] as Monsoon Wedding meets the Hay Festival,” William Dalrymple tells me over a call from New Delhi. “Anyone who enjoys the Monsoon Wedding side of it — the colour, the spectacle and the crowds — will obviously miss that. But I think there have been compensations in the astonishing quality of the [300] speakers this year: Noam Chomsky, Malala Yousafzai, Joseph Stiglitz, Mark Haddon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Robert Macfarlane, Philip Pullman… for free! In the West, any one of them would be a $50 ticket,” says the writer, historian, and festival director (a title he shares with publisher Namita Gokhale). We are discussing the 14th edition of the ‘greatest literary show on Earth’ going digital. Pre-pandemic, the annual bibliophiles’ pilgrimage had seen the Pink City come alive — with hotels booked months in advance, students camping out at railway stations, and visitors scrambling between jam-packed sessions and book signings. Evenings had buzzed with performances, special tours, and exclusive dinners. But 2021 is seeing the 10-day festival exchanging the physical grounds of the Diggi Palace for a 3D rendition of it.