In its birthplace in Northern India, the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) has grown to surpass Glastonbury in attendance numbers.
For the first time, this burgeoning cultural phenomenon which aims to transform society by providing egalitarian access to the world’s foremost thinkers, made its way to the Adelaide Festival Centre.
Access to books can change a life; they can even change the world. One of the festival’s most illustrious speakers, Booker Prize longlisted Indonesian novelist Eka Kurniawan, spoke on a Saturday afternoon in the Space Theatre about the anger he initially felt when he first discovered the work of Dostoevsky and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the library of the Gadjah Mada University, where he was studying philosophy.
The author, who has been compared to both Garcia Marquez and even Quentin Tarantino, was angry because for all the years prior to his discovery of literature, he had been forced to make sense of his impoverished upbringing and the brutality of Indonesia under the Suharto regime with limited resources: the folk stories told in his village and the pulp fiction horror tales sold cheaply on the streets.
The JLF aims to ensure that Eka’s experience of deprivation, of fumbling in the dark for decades before finding the illumination and refuge provided by the literary greats, is not repeated. At the Adelaide Festival Centre, the most prominent wordsmiths from across the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia, China and Indonesia assembled to provide free and open access to the meanderings of their minds, in panel discussions and spoken-word poetry sessions.
More than this, these literary giants could be seen signing books, or simply sharing midday Sapporos in the foyer while engaged in fervent discussion with ardent and impassioned fans of their work.
The importance of all this talk, all this sharing of perspectives, cannot be overstated. The Indian mythology expert Devdutt Pattanaik spoke during an opening night session about how mythology is simply the subjective understanding of a community. By uniting representatives from so many communities in one venue, by exposing attendees to the dizzying array of perceptions of what is true, the JLF 2018 slowed, albeit incrementally, a global advance towards the homogeneity of thought and action.
In Jaipur, the average age of festival goers is 20-25 years of age; millennials who feel left behind and at a loss to know what to do about it. While the demographic was certainly much older this year in Adelaide, the word will inevitably spread among our youth about the importance of spreading words, and in so doing, will make this inaugural event yet another jewel in Adelaide’s artistic and intellectual crown.
