Jaipur Literature Festival

The Road In

You do not simply arrive at this festival. You earn the arrival, and the earning usually begins the night before, on a train pulling out of Delhi or Kolkata that smells of somebody's leftover puri sabzi and somebody else's cheap perfume. The berths fold down one by one as the coach quiets, the fields outside turning from city sodium orange to the flat, unlit dark of the Aravalli foothills. I have taken the Ajmer Shatabdi more times than I can count, and there is a particular hour, somewhere past Alwar, when I stop trying to read and simply watch the window instead, because that is when the land begins to change its mind about what it wants to be.

By the time the sky starts to lighten, a low fog has usually rolled in over the fields around Bandikui and Dausa, the kind of pale morning mist that does not sit still but drifts sideways in loose ribbons across the mustard crop, so that a farmer walking his buffalo to water seems to appear and disappear twice within a single minute. The train slows here more than anywhere else on the route, and I have come to treasure that slowness, because it gives you time to watch the mist burn gold at the edges as the sun finally clears the horizon, and to watch it happen without a phone screen between you and the field. Somewhere around this stretch the chai vendor works his way down the aisle for the third time, and the tea he pours tastes different from any tea you will drink for the rest of the year, mostly because of the cold and the waiting and the particular ache of almost being somewhere you have wanted to be for months.

Those who choose the road instead of the rails get their own version of this same unveiling. The highway out of Delhi toward Jaipur runs through a landscape that keeps rearranging itself, flat cultivated plains giving way to sudden outcrops of pink and grey rock, dhabas strung along the roadside with their charpais and their tandoors already smoking by six in the morning. Winter fog is a genuine hazard on this stretch in the earliest hours, thick enough some mornings that drivers slow to a crawl and the headlights of an oncoming truck appear only seconds before the truck itself, a wall of white that swallows road signs and milestones alike until the sun burns through around Shahpura and the last thirty kilometres unroll clean and bright toward the city.

Thamma used to pack a small steel tiffin for any journey longer than three hours, whether anyone asked her to or not, and I still find myself doing the same thing before a Jaipur trip, filling a box with muri and narkel naru though I know perfectly well there will be kachori waiting within the hour. Some habits are not really about the food. They are about carrying a little bit of home into a city that is about to hand you a great many new ideas all at once, and about having something familiar to hold when the fog outside the window makes the whole world look like it has not decided yet what shape it wants to be.

Jaipur Junction railway station in the early morning is its own small festival, pushcarts of chai and men balancing towers of newspapers on bicycle carriers, and the auto drivers outside have learned, over twenty years, to recognise a lit fest crowd from a mile off. You mention Clarks Amer and their faces change, half amusement and half resignation, because they know this particular week means traffic that will test every ounce of patience they own, and a fare that, if you are not careful, will test every ounce of yours.

The Palace That Started It All

Long before Jaipur Literature Festival became a name people dropped at dinner parties in London, it was a modest gathering inside the grounds of Diggi Palace, a two hundred year old family home turned heritage hotel a short walk from the pink walls of the old city. In 2006, two writers, William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale, put together a programme with about eighteen speakers and an audience so small that some of them were tourists who had simply wandered in looking lost. Nobody in that first small crowd could have guessed what it would become.

What I remember most from my own early years at Diggi is not any single session but the man at the gate. Thakur Ram Singh, whose family owned the palace, would stand at the arched entrance each morning of the festival and greet the first guests almost as though welcoming them into his own drawing room, which in a very real sense he was. There is something in that gesture, an old fashioned Rajasthani courtesy, that no amount of expansion ever quite managed to replicate once the festival outgrew those lawns.

The owner of Diggi Palace stood at his own gate each January and welcomed strangers as though they were family arriving for a wedding. That happened, year after year, until the crowds grew too large for one palace to hold.

The Hall of Audience inside Diggi Palace hosted the marquee sessions, but it was the tented lawns and the courtyards that gave the festival its particular intimacy, authors wandering between venues on foot, past bookstalls and tea counters, close enough that you might find yourself queuing for a samosa directly behind someone whose novel you had read on the train that very morning. That closeness, more than any single debate or launch, was the thing regular visitors mourned when the festival eventually moved on.

Where the Festival Lives Now

As the numbers swelled past a quarter of a million visitors across five days, Diggi Palace simply could not hold the crowd any longer, and the festival shifted its main programming to Hotel Clarks Amer, a larger property with modern auditoriums, wider lawns and far better digital infrastructure, positioned closer to both the airport and the railway station. I resisted this move in my own head for a full year before I ever set foot on the new grounds, the way you resist any change to a place that holds memory.

Clarks Amer has its own charm once you stop comparing it to what came before. The lawns are broader, which means more breathing room between sessions, and the newer venue can seat far larger audiences for the marquee conversations that now regularly draw Nobel laureates and Booker Prize winners. The property itself carries a heritage inspired design, domed pavilions and stone jaali screens built to echo the palaces around it, so the setting still feels rooted in Rajasthan even though it is a hotel built for scale rather than a family home turned festival ground. What it cannot quite recreate is the sensation of literature spilling out of a private courtyard. It is a fair trade for capacity, though old timers like me will always keep a small private fondness for the Diggi years tucked somewhere behind the ribs.

What Sets This Festival Apart From Every Other Book Fair

India and the world have no shortage of literary gatherings, from the smaller, ticketed affairs in Europe to the trade heavy book fairs of Frankfurt and Kolkata, and it is worth naming plainly what makes this one different rather than simply calling it the biggest and moving on. First, it costs nothing to walk in. General entry has stayed free for two decades on the deliberate belief that ideas should not have a ticket price attached to them, and that single decision is the reason a retired schoolteacher, a first year college student and a visiting foreign publisher end up sitting in the same row of plastic chairs with no separation of class or credential between them.

Second, it refuses to be only about English language literature. Sessions run across dozens of Indian and international languages in a single week, Bhojpuri poetry beside Korean fiction beside a panel on Sanskrit translation, and that deliberate multilingual scope is rare even among festivals many times its size. Third, the festival has always treated music as equal to the spoken word rather than as an evening add on, the Jaipur Music Stage running its own full programme of Sufi, folk and fusion performances that draw people who might never sit through a panel discussion but will happily stand in the cold for two hours to hear a qawwali set. And fourth, unlike a trade fair built for publishers to strike deals behind closed doors, the entire architecture here is built around proximity, authors eating the same thali as their readers, sharing the same queue for the washroom, which is the detail every first time visitor remembers longer than any single quote from any single panel.

Five Mornings, Five Entirely Different Moods

People who have never been assume the festival is one long undifferentiated blur of panels, but each of the five days has always carried its own temperament, and returning visitors learn to plan around that rhythm rather than fight it.

The opening morning

The first day belongs to the music before it belongs to the books. A Sufi or classical morning session opens proceedings while the crowd is still thin enough to find a proper seat, and the inaugural address in recent years has gone to genuinely major figures, including the International Booker Prize winner Banu Mushtaq, whose opening remarks in 2025 reportedly earned a standing ovation mid sentence from people who had barely settled into their chairs. Opening day also tends to carry the year's biggest historical or cultural conversations, the kind built around deep research rather than headlines, of the sort that scholars like Manu S. Pillai and Anirudh Kanisetti have made newly fashionable among a younger Indian audience discovering that history need not be dry.

The middle days

Days two and three are where the festival earns its reputation for genuine intellectual friction. Panels here range across translation, memory, migration, science writing and the ethics of biography, and the discussions, while occasionally sharp, are rarely about party politics so much as about ideas, what a nation owes its languages, whether a translated novel can ever carry the full weight of its original, how historians decide which forgotten figures deserve rescue. These are the sessions where the queue outside the largest venue starts forming forty minutes early, and where a badly timed break can cost you a seat entirely.

The weekend surge

By Saturday the crowd triples. This is when the festival becomes the vast, joyful crush that first time visitors are warned about, close to a quarter of a million people moving between five or six simultaneous venues, food courts working at full stretch and every lawn chair claimed within minutes of a session ending. Weekend mornings are glorious for watching people alone, students in university sweatshirts arguing about a translated Malayalam novel two seats from a retired diplomat quietly annotating his programme in fountain pen.

The closing evening

The final evening always slows down in a way that feels deliberate, a last major music performance under string lighting as the lawns empty out gradually rather than all at once. There is a particular ache to that last hour, bookstalls beginning to pack away their unsold stock, volunteers finally allowed to sit, everyone privately doing the math on how many books they actually managed to buy against how many they had promised themselves.

Where to Stay, and What Each Choice Actually Costs You

Jaipur in the third week of January is not a city short of rooms, but it is a city where the good rooms disappear early, and the choice you make about where to sleep shapes the whole week more than most visitors expect. Havelis in the old walled city, tucked behind the bazaars near Johari Bazaar and Tripolia, give you the most atmospheric version of Jaipur, courtyards, jharokha windows, breakfast served on a rooftop with a view of Nahargarh Fort catching the first light. The trade off is distance. Getting from the old city to Clarks Amer during peak festival traffic can eat close to an hour each way, which matters when your first session begins at nine.

Mid range hotels closer to Amer Road and the Jawaharlal Nehru Marg stretch cut that commute down to fifteen or twenty minutes, and this is where most repeat visitors end up settling once they have made the old city mistake once. A small but growing number of homestays have opened within walking distance of the venue itself in recent years, run by families who rent out a floor or two of their own house, and staying in one of these means you can slip back for a nap between the afternoon and evening sessions, wash the day's dust off, and return refreshed rather than running on fumes by the closing set.

Budget travellers gravitate toward the guesthouses clustered around Bani Park, a slightly quieter residential pocket a short auto ride from both the railway station and the venue, where a clean double room in January can still be found for a genuinely reasonable price if booked two to three months ahead. Whichever category you choose, book early. Rooms across every price band in Jaipur fill months in advance of the festival dates once they are confirmed, and last minute searches in the second week of January routinely turn up nothing within a sensible radius of the grounds.

Food, the Bazaar and the Author's Lounge

A delegate pass, priced in recent years at around three thousand five hundred rupees a day, buys you entry into the Author's Lounge, a quieter tented space set apart from the main crowd where speakers gather between sessions. It is not a place for autographs so much as a place to simply watch, a Nobel laureate sharing a table with a debut novelist half her age, both nursing the same paper cup of coffee, neither performing for anyone. I have sat there twice in twenty years and both times found myself too shy to say a single word to anyone, which my mother still finds hilarious given how much I claim to love this festival.

Food at the festival deserves its own separate essay. In the Diggi years, courtyard stalls served twelve course thalis that turned lunch into an event in its own right, Rajasthani dal baati churma sitting beside Bengali mishti doi sold by a vendor who, improbably, remembered my order from the previous January. Clarks Amer has scaled this up considerably, wider food courts, more regional cuisines represented, though something of the old courtyard intimacy thinned out along with the crowding. What has not changed is the particular joy of eating standing up in the cold, plate balanced on one arm, a stranger's conversation about a Turkish novel drifting over from the next cluster of people.

Outside the gates, the city itself becomes an extension of the festival's appetite. Rawat Mishthan Bhandar in the old city remains the place regular visitors quietly build a whole morning around, its pyaaz kachori served straight from the oil with a rush that no amount of queueing seems to dampen. Lassiwala near MI Road is worth the short detour for a single clay cup of lassi thick enough to eat with a spoon, and the smaller dhabas along Amer Road serve a version of laal maas that tastes nothing like the tamed restaurant versions found elsewhere.

The bookstore deserves its own paragraph too, sprawling tents stacked with new releases at a discount steep enough to undo any budgeting you attempted before arriving, alongside handicraft corners selling block printed textiles, blue pottery and silver jewellery from artisans who travel from across Rajasthan specifically for this one week of footfall. Shopping here is less a distraction from the literature than an extension of it, since half the joy is watching a craftsperson explain a technique with the same patience an author brings to explaining a plot choice.

Small Things Worth Knowing

Guides everywhere will tell you to arrive early and dress in layers. What experience actually teaches you tends to be smaller and stranger than that, the kind of detail an aunt mentions once, in passing, expecting you to remember it only after you have already made the mistake yourself.

The smaller, less starry sessions tucked into a lesser venue in the second or third slot of the morning, while the bulk of the crowd chases a celebrity name elsewhere, are frequently the ones people remember years later for the quality of conversation alone. A near empty room with thirty people and one genuinely brilliant translator holding forth can outlast, in memory, an overcrowded marquee session where you spent half your attention simply trying to see the stage.

The credential checkpoints at the entrances, of all the places inside the venue, tend to offer the most unscripted face time with visiting authors, since the checks require a real pause rather than a passing wave, and I have had two of my most memorable brief conversations with writers happen in that exact queue, waiting for a lanyard to be checked.

The festival's international offshoots, held in cities including Boulder in Colorado, London, Toronto, Adelaide, Belfast and Doha, carry a smaller, quieter version of the same energy, and a fair number of serious regulars now build a second, calmer visit to one of these into their year rather than only the Jaipur edition.

A printed schedule, folded and kept in a pocket, has saved me more than once when the venue's mobile signal buckled under the weight of a quarter of a million phones all trying to load the same session updates at the same time. It is a small, almost embarrassingly analogue habit, and it has never once let me down.

The Journey Back

The train out of Jaipur after the festival ends is a different animal entirely from the one that brought you in. Everyone on it is carrying too many books, tote bags straining at the seams, and there is a particular quiet that settles over a compartment full of people who have spent five days listening rather than talking, as though everyone has temporarily run out of things to say out loud. If you leave in the evening, the return journey often runs straight into the same low fog that greeted you on the way in, except now it feels less like a veil lifting and more like the city gently closing a door behind you, the last lit windows of Clarks Amer dissolving into grey within minutes of pulling away.

I remember one such journey back to Kolkata, sitting by the window as the Rajasthani desert gave way slowly to the greener plains further east, the mist over the fields near Bharatpur thinning into ordinary winter haze, going through the small paper notebook I fill every year with lines I liked enough to write down mid session. Mother always asks the same question when I walk in the door afterward, not what did you learn, but who did you see, as though the festival's real value lies less in the ideas than in the simple fact of proximity to people who spend their lives building sentences.

There is a low grade sadness to the return trip that nobody quite prepares you for, the sense of stepping out of a five day bubble where books were the only currency that mattered and back into a world where nobody around you has any idea what a particular Argentine novelist said about grief on a Thursday afternoon in a tent in Rajasthan. The clouds over the highway thin out as the plains flatten, the fog burns off by mid morning, and somewhere around the state border the ordinary noise of the world starts creeping back in, phone signal returning in short bursts, the festival receding into something you now have to describe rather than simply live inside. It fades within a week. It always does. But for those first few days home, you carry Jaipur in your chest like a held breath.

The Twentieth Edition: Jaipur Literature Festival 2027

The 2027 edition marks the festival's twentieth year and is confirmed to run from the fourteenth to the eighteenth of January, five full days, at Hotel Clarks Amer in Jaipur. This is a milestone year in the truest sense, a full two decades since that first modest gathering of eighteen speakers inside Diggi Palace, and organisers Teamwork Arts and the Jaipur Virasat Foundation have historically used anniversary editions to widen the international speaker list considerably.

The festival's core theme has never been announced far in advance, remaining true to its founding ethos as a democratic, non aligned platform offering free and fair access to literature and ideas, with the final programme of speakers and sessions typically confirmed on the official website only a few weeks before the opening morning. Expect the same broad architecture that has defined every recent edition, five parallel venues, morning music sessions, the Jaipur Music Stage running alongside the literary programme, and the Jaipur BookMark publishing conference held as a companion event for industry professionals.

Because the general festival is free to attend, the actual bottleneck each year is not money but capacity inside the most popular venues, so registering the moment the portal opens and building a personal shortlist of sessions well ahead of the published schedule remains the single most useful thing a first time visitor can do.

Volunteering at the Festival

For anyone willing to trade a few days of comfort for genuine access, the volunteer programme remains one of the festival's quieter doors in. A team of roughly two hundred and fifty volunteers works across some twenty five departments each year, applications typically opening around August and closing in October, and the selection process usually runs through an online application, a written round and often a short interview.

• Press and Media volunteers work the press terrace, coordinating interviews between journalists and visiting authors.
• Registration volunteers are the festival's first human face, checking credentials for the general audience, Friends of the Festival, press and artists.
• Security liaison volunteers coordinate between guards and the audience during the busiest crowd movements.
• IT and Technical volunteers, often engineering students, keep connectivity and audiovisual systems running across every venue simultaneously.
• Jaipur Music Stage volunteers handle sound checks and act as liaisons for the touring musicians.
• Logistics volunteers manage transport and accommodation for the visiting authors, widely considered the most demanding but most rewarding department by those who have done it.

It is, by most accounts, unglamorous work for long hours, and it is also, almost universally, remembered fondly years later precisely because it puts you inside the machinery of the festival rather than merely in its audience.