“IN the beginning there was the word. But which word? Which language? Which script?” That’s the essence of the question an audience member seems to be asking Irving Finkel, author and curator of the British Museum, on the last day of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF). It’s a sunny winter day. We’re in the front lawns of the Diggi Palace (a medieval haveli with sizeable grounds), the biggest of six venues at the festival. The lawns are filled so that there’s hardly any place to stand, let alone sit. Finkel’s session on the cuneiform script was announced at the last minute, as a replacement, when Niall Ferguson’s scheduled visit to Jaipur fell through. Rumour mills say this was because Ferguson’s passport, stamped with visa, had been sent back to the wrong address, courtesy some governmental mismanagement. For JLF, such mayhem is par for the course.

Finkel, with his long white beard, bristling with energy and wit, answers by mock-enacting a quick skit on stage. He asks us to imagine a situation where he and William Dalrymple, his co-panellist, writer, historian and the festival’s co-director, are actually cavemen. “How would they have first communicated? How difficult would that be to trace?” In reply to another question, he remarks that a probable reason why we haven’t been able to decipher the Harappan script is because they seem to be mostly names, addresses and titles. “Imagine you’re a Martian trying to decipher the English language and someone hands you a UK telephone directory,” Finkel says. “It would tell you nothing.”But, over and above the laughs, Finkel’s session is brilliant. This is despite it not having been on the schedule till hours ago. That’s the thing about JLF. You don’t go just for what’s on the schedule. You go for the surprises.

Some of these surprises may have nothing to do with sessions. JLF, or simply ‘Jaipur’ as it’s often referred to, is the world’s largest free literature festival. What this means, essentially, is that the crowds you see at JLF are like those nowhere else. Jaipur in these five days of the festival gives itself to not just a celebration of literature but also a unique sociological experiment of sorts. Last year had a footfall of 245,000. This year was 40 per cent higher.

Visitors arrived from 33 different countries. There were 360 authors and 100 musicians. Booker winners, Pulitzer winners, Nobel laureates, celebrities, debutantes — those famous, those renowned, those who’ve just gotten there — they’ve all spoken at Jaipur and continue to do so. Some of this year’s stars were: Margaret Atwood, Marlon James, Thomas Piketty, Ruskin Bond, Anil Kumble, Stephen Fry, Karan Johar, Baichung Bhutia, Colm Tóibín, Aleksandar Hemon and Kajol.

Now, let’s return to the audience. 25pc of this, over five days, was made up of students, according to statistics put out by the festival’s organisers. The rest? Writers, aspiring writers or simply readers travel to Jaipur every year for the festival. People from the city itself, who engage with literature often (all kinds of literature, for JLF covers a wide scope), make it a point to visit. But these alone can hardly be said to account for such numbers. Alongside them, in the past few years, there appears to be a growing number of attendees who don’t really seem to have cared much about books so far, but who are told by the media, and the word about town, that JLF is a big deal. It is the place to see, and be seen in.

Hence, such attendees — a diverse lot — are curious about JLF. They are ambitious about visiting JLF. And nothing makes for better first steps towards literature. At filmmaker Johar’s session I meet a group of boys, one of them wearing a faux leather jacket. They tell me they are aspiring actors who have come just for this session. But they stay on and attend James’s conversation on A Brief History of Seven Killings. I speak to some college students who have been asking authors to click selfies with them. They’re not sure who the authors are. One isn’t even sure the person they were just with is an author and not a random tourist. But they say they intend to find out. Also, they say, after they’ve found out, they intend to buy books by the people they’ve photographed themselves with.

Some of these attendees make their way to the speakers and press lunch area. This area is free for speakers at the festival and accredited media, but others have to pay INR4,000 a day or INR16,000 for the entire festival (the equivalent of 4,600 and 18,000 Pakistani rupees respectively) to enter. This sum entitles them to a delegate’s pass which secures them entry here, as well as to a music event and dinner on each night. The price of this pass may have been daunting for locals some years ago, but today members of Jaipur’s rising middle class are happy to pay. “Are you a writer?” is how a delegate’s conversation with a panellist begins often, innocuously, at lunch. Then, mostly, it goes on to the writer’s specific area of interest. One author, who would rather remain unnamed, called this newer JLF phenomenon a kind of “cultural osmosis”.

But the true test of JLF as a sociological study lies in the contrast the festival poses to the image of it that the media sometimes projects. Take the Johar controversy. Apparently the fact that the filmmaker questioned freedom of expression and democracy in India made big news. General V.K. Singh, a central minister, while in Jodhpur, a city not too far away, suggested he be beaten up in retaliation. In Jaipur, however, the crowds cheered Johar for speaking about these issues and the criminalisation of homosexuality in the country.

The content of JLF 2016 was spectacular and varied, as expected. Dalrymple is a historian and Namita Gokhale, co-director of the festival, is a persistent campaigner for Indian writers, who are writing in languages other than English, to get their due. So naturally the sessions involving history and Indian language writers were spot on. History talks at the festival involved not just larger sweeping themes but also insightful microscopic ones — such as the conversation between Anabel Loyd, Timothy Minto (great-grandson of Indian viceroy Gilbert Minto) and journalist Pragya Tiwari on the journals of Vicereine Mary Minto (Gilbert’s wife).

Connected with Indian languages, the two most compelling sessions were one by Dhruba Jyoti Borah, Sitanshu Yashaschandra, Anita Agnihotri, K. Satchidanandan and Vivek Shanbag — debating whether 24 Indian languages represent any sort of unity in Indian literature — and another broader one on poets and freedom of speech by Salil Tripathi, Ashok Vajpeyi, Nirupama Dutt and Nilanjana Roy (Vajpeyi and Dutt being here was especially significant because non-English Indian writers and poets have been at the forefront of India’s free speech protests since last year).

The conversations espoused by JLF cannot be neatly summed up with understated themes. Some sessions revolved around broad subjects of global import such as economics (Thomas Piketty, Arvind Subramanian, Sebastian Mallaby, Mihir Sharma), history (Irving Finkel, Cyprian Broodbank), art (Caroline Vout, Vidya Dehejia), feminism (Abeer Y. Hoque and Mona Eltahawy), sports (Suresh Menon, Anil Kumble, Baichung Bhutia), medicine (Atul Gawande, Gavin Francis, Aarathi Prasad), poetry and politics.

But there were also relatively narrower topics: war photography (Don McCullin), dance, spies (Ben Macintyre and Raghu Karnad on Kim Philby), the Middle East, concentration camps (the session with artist Molly Crabapple and academic Laleh Khalili presented a different and interesting lens), modernity (Shobhaa De, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Christophe Jaffrelot, Ravikant and Pragya Tiwari), journalism, Pakistan (‘The Pakistan Paradox, ‘The Pity of Partition’, ‘Temples in Pakistan), environment, wildlife, caste and many, many more.

With six sessions going on simultaneously, and three of these — on average — being ones you would not like to miss, it is quite evident what JLF intends to do. The festival is not just about the sessions you will manage to attend; it really is also about the great number of sessions you will invariably miss. It is about the feeling of knowing you really wanted to hear Subramanian tell you about the works of fiction you must read to understand economics, but you had to choose to listen to Israeli novelist David Grossman instead. It is this feeling — of knowing that there are far too many ideas and books in the world to be crammed into five days — that will make you look up the session (thankfully most of them are archived online) and then look up the books Subramanian speaks about.

In this way JLF avoids trying to be the last word on literature. It settles for being a potential starting point to many thoughts. But let’s stay with this thought of the last word for a moment. For not all surprises at the festival are pleasant ones. JLF 2016 ended with a debate, as it always does — this one on free speech. Anupam Kher was a part of the debate, arguing that free speech isn’t absolute and unconditional. Some months ago, having been booed at a literature festival in Mumbai for referring to the current time as a golden age in Indian politics, Kher had called the audience a “paid audience”. This time round, Kher had tweeted about the fact that he would be at JLF and had given a press conference and bytes before the debate.

Moments before the event, the grounds witnessed a sudden influx of people. An unpaid audience appeared to have arrived. An audience that, in due course, proved to be a far cry from the by-and-large understanding and accepting crowds the venue had played host to for the past five days. They cheered at every punchline of Kher’s, including one in which he used an expletive (b------) to demonstrate, apparently, that this isn’t used at home usually, so it shouldn’t be used in public or in art either (context be damned). When a speaker from the other side — Aam Aadmi Party politician Kapil Mishra — spoke, he was met with united cries of “Modi! Modi!”

When a vote was called for to decide the winning side of the debate, Kher’s side won. This was how one of India’s best literature festivals, a spawning ground for so many ideas, ended. But there is solace in knowing it will be back again next year. With many more ideas, hopefully, and many more words.

The writer is a Delhi-based columnist and an associate partner at the new media company Oijo.