Royal romances and self-loathing Scots: an update from the Jaipur Literary Festival

The Jaipur Literary Festival is becoming a major event not just for literary folk but also for India’s prestige-conscious society. Here in the grounds of the city’s Diggi Palace hotel, a charmingly faded pile built in the 1860s as a grand town house for a rural Rajasthan ruler, Delhi’s self-appointed social elite have all mingled with the crowds (around 27,000 people have attended in total), along with famous writers and ambassadors from the US, UK and other countries, without demanding (as they usually do) exclusivity and front row seats.

In a country where prestige and patronage count for so much and do so much damage, it is striking how the festival straddles India's vast social divides, with sessions on the Dalits (untouchables) at the bottom of India’s social strata, as well as to the lives and loves of the Indian dynasties and the British royal family.

It was fitting that one of these sessions focused on Queen Victoria’s fascination for two particular Indian men, explored in very different ways by two Indian authors. The Exile, by Navtej Sarna, an author and Indian diplomat is a historical novel about the life of Maharaja Duleep Singh who became prominent in Victoria’s court when the queen was in her 30s. More revealing was Victoria and Abdul, Shrabani Basu's biography of a servant, Abdul Karim, who became an influential and often disruptive adviser to Victoria on India, “a good looking, extravagantly dressed servant...hated by the Queen’s household both for his race and class”.



Another author, Nayantara Sehgal, spoke of a more local controversy–the rumoured affair between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, India's first post-independence leader and wife of India's first post-independence viceroy respectively. Sehgal, who is Nehru's niece, said that while Sonia Gandhi, the current leader of both India’s Congress Party and of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, was against publication of love letters between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, the question of whether Nehru and Mountbatten “really went to bed is pure conjecture. No-one really knows about it except them”.

However, the event that garnered the most laughs was a gathering of four Scottish writers–Andrew O’Hagan, Niall Ferguson, Alexander McCall Smith and William Dalrymple (the festival’s co-director)–for a session called "Under the Kilt", a wry, self-effacing celebration of their homeland (which had donated £10,000 to the festival).

Ferguson, who recently described Scotland as "the Belarus of Western Europe" because of its alcoholism, self-pity and low standards of living, stated that Scots had made a great impact on the world when in exile: “once you’d left school you’d go and run England and then run the world”. Not that Ferguson felt this was anything to be proud of–he also argued, as in his book The Ascent of Money, that the Scots were heavily responsible for the world’s financial crash.