JLF 2015 needs to show us it's still got it

The Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, the marvellous carnival that celebrates books, music and conversation like no other, is upon us again. Starting tomorrow, the courtly Diggi Palace will host Nobel and Pulitzer-winning writers, as well as first-timers and aspiring authors. The big tents and lawns of the palace will welcome publishers, agents, students, readers and dedicated socialites. There will be conversations to eavesdrop upon, celebrities and pretty people to gawk at, and there will be arguments.

This year, the JLF line-up has been declared relatively underwhelming by many who scanned it in anticipation. The schedule is certainly less overwhelming and more compact than usual. There are large, overlapping themes - war, religion, politics and terror, the classical traditions, and the literature of resistance. There are other intriguing standalone sessions - on the first firangis in India, or on the Parsi way of being, on pirates in literature. Vijay Seshadri, Ashok Vajpeyi and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra will begin the festival with a keynote on the poetic imagination. VS Naipaul is back at the festival, as is his frenemy Paul Theroux.

This being Rajasthan, royalty gets a star turn this year, with sessions on the Chinese empress-dowager Cixi and France's Marie Antoinette, as well as Indian princess and rebel, Sophia Duleep Singh. There will also be conversations about craft and genre, historical fiction and memoir-writing, with writers like Will Self, Nicholson Baker, Amit Chaudhuri and Alberto Manguel.

Any real exchange of ideas will inevitably strike sparks. Sensitivities of religion and caste, arguments over free speech and dignity and inclusion have proved particularly combustible in the last couple of years. This year, JLF will directly take on censorship question, in a session titled "Ankahee: What Must Not Be Said", and even an a capella choir, Vocal Rasta, dedicated to freedom of expression.

Free and unstinting as the festival is, it is also a massive feat of assembly and organisation. Primarily sponsored by Zee for the third year running, it has also been supported by Ford, Amazon, British Airways, Rajnigandha pan masala and many others. A Facebook update from William Dalrymple, co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, conveyed a sense of the effort. Over the next five days, the event will feature more than 240 speakers, he said. More than 2,000 workers and 500 crew and volunteers are prepping to receive authors and musicians from nearly 60 countries. There will be eight venues, including six at Diggi Palace and one each at Amer Fort and Hawa Mahal. According to Dalrymple, it takes a village to cook 15,000-plus hot meals for authors, press and delegates.

In other words, expect JLF to be as much of a spectacle as ever; book chat by the day, music, parties and schmoozing at night. This year, as me-too literature festivals sprout all over India, JLF 2015 will need to command all its special charisma, to show us it's still got it.