Branded as “the world’s grandest celebration of books and ideas” and “the greatest literary show on earth,” the Jaipur Literature Festival has grand ambitions for storming the world stage as a thoughtful and progressive interchange of literary excellence and social engagement. Now in its eighteenth edition, however, the festival has shifted towards an alignment with pro-establishment sponsors and government entities, initiating questions on how a necessarily commercial event can serve to dismantle exclusive hierarchies and status quos. In the following dispatch, Matilde Riberio discusses the various shortcomings of the festival in its conduct and programming, as well as its ideological evolution over the years.
The Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF), India’s largest literary event and one of its first to attract an international audience, has long positioned itself as a confluence of ideas, texts, narratives, and genres—a place where, as the academic Soni Wadhwa wrote after the 2024 edition: “Nobody tries to distance themselves from it. All are welcome.” At the same time, the festival has always been a space of political contest, and nearly every edition has been caught up in controversies involving the stifling of free speech, corporate sponsorship by companies with markedly unethical practices, and sexual misconduct allegations against various panelists and the cofounder, William Dalrymple.
The question thus becomes whether the JLF can transcend these roots to actually become a junction of subcontinental voices, or whether it will continue to grow into an increasingly overt vehicle of privilege, elitism, and capitalism as the years pass. Unfortunately, the issues that have mired the 2025 edition, taking place over January 30 to February 3, suggest that the festival may have finally shed any pretensions of being anything other than a business-friendly, upper-caste Hindu-dominated, and state-sanctioned “tamasha,” as the journalist and activist Aakar Patel described an earlier edition, using the Hindi and Urdu word for “spectacle.”
A key lightning rod during the festival was settler colonialism—namely, both the Indian occupation of Kashmir and Israel’s occupation of Palestine, two issues that have become politically entwined in light of the strong ideological affinity between the technocratic, well-managed ethnostate that Israel projects itself as, and the image of governance projected by India’s ruling right-wing party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). One incident that made headlines was when the Kashmiri filmmaker MK Raina walked offstage in the middle of a panel discussion with the playwright Ila Arun, in response to Arun’s extended reading of her most recent play, a Kashmir-set adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. This was directly after Raina had criticized Arun’s play, as well as other Bollywood depictions of the region, for being “lousy” and accusatory towards Kashmiris (a key theme in the Indian control over Kashmir has been the portrayal of independence movements as terrorists or separatists). In another, somewhat less-reported incident, a journalist from the Press Trust of India attempted to interview the Palestinian envoy to India, Abed Elrazeg Abu Jazer, but was interrupted by a festival official, who said the interview was not sanctioned by the festival’s PR team.
However, these incidents are merely the tip of the iceberg, hinting towards the broader cultural and political undercurrents of the JLF (which was held at the five-star Clarks Amer Hotel). As the academic Millicent Weber wrote after a series of controversies surrounding racist remarks at various Australian literary festivals: “A literary festival is bigger than the immediate, physical event. These festivals begin as live and immersive, but tap into digital and international conversations and communities as well.” Thus, in deciphering how the JLF sets up its discursive boundaries, one can see that the festival is not reflective of a true gathering of ideas; instead, its organizational structure is increasingly aligned with capital, Hindu nationalism, and India’s general swerve to the right under the BJP. Specific incidents and questions of sponsorship only bring these interests to the fore.
This underlying agenda becomes even more clear upon scrolling through JLF’s 2025 website, which details the various events and panelists. It starts with the top billing, which multiple news outlets have referred to as a “Maha Kumbh” of literature—a nod to the Kumbh Mela, an ongoing Hindu pilgrimage that has been enthusiastically attended and promoted by BJP members. Like the Kumbh, the JLF draws together would-be pundits of the literary field in India, but notably includes individuals with scarcely disguised links to the ruling party, its allies, and various political actors whose suspicious actions have given rise to some of the key issues around the JLF. Taking into consideration the political backgrounds of the various participants, it is perceptible how the festival has gradually been influenced by both the BJP’s Hindu nationalism and the opposing Indian National Congress (INC)’s turn towards neoliberalism.
Take for example its panel on “Democracy and Equality: The Constitution Story,” which features Ashwani Kumar, a former member of Parliament from the INC, alongside Arghya Sengupta, whose Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy has drafted several legislations for the BJP—including one in service of the Aadhaar identification card scheme, which was read down and limited by the Indian Supreme Court for violating the constitutional right to privacy. There are also panels presented by Sakal Media Group, whose regional-language newspapers often show support for the BJP and its Hindu majoritarian ideology, and a number of events focusing on a vision of “Indian-ness” based on Vedic Hinduism, excluding other faiths and interpretations that are linked to non-dominant castes or religious groups. For example, Vayu Naidu’s session on her retelling of stories from the Ramayana, a Vedic epic, is billed as being about “Indian myth,” while a session on Indian art was focused on understanding “the eye of the ardhanari, where the finite and infinite coexist,” again referencing a concept from the Hindu myths contained in the Puranas.
This merging of the majority faith with national identity, as Gyanendra Pandey writes, comes at the cost of the identities and belongingness of minorities, and dovetails well with the BJP’s aim of projecting the idea of India as a wholly Hindu polity via an intentional, political elision of other groups—their existence and their experiences. While the content of the panels has by and large remained neutral towards the government, with some even voicing criticism of its policies, the festival itself seemed clearly to be aligning itself subtly with the ruling party’s ideas.
It is important to note that none of these concerns are unique to the current edition; for example, the 2016 edition of the JLF was held around the same time as the Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy’s trial for sedition. The TV channel Zee News, which had run “vicious commentaries” against her, was a sponsor of that edition, which included panels that spoke abstractly on freedom of speech. Three years ago, in a short feature for Asymptote on the 2022 JLF, I described it as “continually [grappling] with the question of how big a role politics should be allowed to play in the literary scene,” in reference to the 2017 choice to include members from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—an ideological precursor of the BJP—on a panel. However, this belies the fact that any attempt to remain neutral is held against the backdrop of a subtle, politically-pitched choice to cater the festival to India’s upper-caste Hindu elites—a choice that has become vividly visible in 2025.
Once, the more progressive and inclusive tendencies of the JLF had featured authors like Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar and Meena Kandasamy, who have respectively authored texts about the experiences of Adivasi (indigenous) and Dalit groups. This last programme of the festival, however, saw very few non-upper caste speakers, and no talks relating specifically to the experiences and writing of marginalized communities in India. Apart from the impact that the event’s elitism may have had on its diversity, the loss of such voices is perhaps unsurprising in light of the event’s sponsorship and ties to Indian conglomerates, many of which have been directly linked to the further exclusion of such communities.
The Vedanta Group, for example, has built several steel plants in Jharkhand at the expense of indigenous populations; this injustice is directly reminiscent of Shekhar’s short story, “The Adivasi Will Not Dance,” which narrates the decision of an Adivasi performer to protest at the publicized opening of a new power plant, criticizing the government’s disenfranchisement of indigenous groups while tokenizing and fetishizing their culture. In a similar case of corporate oppression, the carmaker Maruti Suzuki, one of the event’s corporate sponsors, has refused to recognize a union of non-permanent, fixed-term employees in another of its persistent violations of Indian labor codes and laws; such precarity in the Indian workforce is particularly experienced by Dalits, Adivasis, and other marginalized groups.
In this manner, the JLF falls short not only in the specific context of creating a literary space to counter Hindu nationalism, but also in terms of its broader orientation towards ongoing struggles and inequities in India. Early on in its existence, it was still possible for its corporate sponsorship model to be seen as a powerful alternative to the government intervention that characterized other literary endeavors in India; in a 2013 interview, the Hindi-language poet Ashok Vajpeyi said that festivals like the JLF could only become “spaces of discussion and dissent” once the government was kept out, and thus seemingly disinterested corporations were tapped for funding instead. However, this choice comes with its own perils, as these entities also seek to control what can be said in the purportedly open space of a literary festival. Human rights lawyer Nandita Haksar, writing against the festival’s corporate sponsors, argues that these relationships fulfill an important discursive purpose: they are “not an innocent act of corporate largess, but an attempt to control and sabotage the radical potential of writers, literature, poetry and culture. There is a need to not only expose the dangers of such sponsorship, but to use these platforms to make the sufferings of the people visible and their struggles relevant in the field of culture.”
However, the question is whether the JLF is itself the right platform for such struggles and culture wars to play out; is it truly an exchange of ideas and literary potentials, or a virtual restatement of increasingly exclusionary discursive demarcations? In a deeply polarized and fragmented polity, perhaps the festival’s ability to bring voices together also stems from its relative unwillingness to take a stand against any of these voices. In a marketplace where even discourse and ideas must compete for corporate funding and value creation, perhaps it is no longer profitable for the JLF to defend anything other than abstract values like freedom of speech and secularism, conveniently ignoring its sponsors’ and panelists’ roles in very real conflicts.
Matilde Ribeiro is a law student based in Bangalore, India. She is a copyeditor at Asymptote and has contributed to the blog. She is also the deputy editor-in-chief in charge of the blog section of the Socio-Legal Review, a key platform for contemporary socio-legal analysis from South Asia, published by the National Law School of India University (NLSIU).
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