William Dalrymple’s notebook: How I lured Jhumpa Lahiri and Jonathan Franzen to Jaipur

In 2004, ten days after I moved my family to a new life in India, I gave a reading at a small palace on the edge of the ‘pink city’ of Jaipur. Fourteen people turned up, of whom ten were Japanese tourists who had got lost. The next year, I helped organise a modest literary programme of 18 authors. Two failed to arrive, but with the aid of my co-director, Namita Gokhale, we gathered a respectable audience of nearly 100. Eight years later, however, by some strange yogic sleight of hand, the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival has shape-shifted into the largest free litfest in the world and the largest literary event in the entire Asia-Pacific region. I still have no office, or assistant, or even a visiting card, but the festival is now a major operation, and my amazing colleagues who look after our production have to wrestle with staggering logistics: in the course of last week they cooked some 14,700 hot meals, booked 1,800 hotel nights for 240 participants, sold 10,000 books and hosted 75,000 people a day, adding up to around a quarter of a million punters in all. And that’s not counting the evening music programme which gathered similar-sized crowds.

One reason for this is the exceptional beauty of the city of Jaipur itself. My heart always lifts as I leave fog-bound Delhi and head onto the Jaipur highway. Within a couple of hours you find yourself amid sunlit mustard fields, camel carts and Rajasthani turbans of bright, primary colours. By the end, you are driving past the bastions of the Amber Fort and city walls improbably running near vertically up the Aravalli mountains.

JLF works partly because it is a properly festive festival. The buildings are festooned with bunting, there are hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts milling around, including an abnormally large number of students and beautiful women, we let off fireworks at night and after 6.30