Reporter's Notebook: The Jaipur Literature Festival debuts in Seattle in spectacular fashion

When I recently previewed the Jaipur Literature Festival's debut in Seattle, local author Sonora Jha gave me an important piece of advice: "Wear colorful clothes."

More importantly, she said, "In India, we dress really nice for these events. Seattle, I hope you pick it up a notch."

I want to publicly thank Jha for the guidance. If she hadn't said that, I might've been wildly underdressed for the festival, which was vibrant in both the content and the dress.

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The original Jaipur Literature Festival, hosted in its titular city, is one of the world's largest literary festivals. About 550 authors and artists and more than 200,000 attendees joined this year's festival in February. As it's grown in India, the festival has also spread to other cities all over the world. Seattle is the latest edition.

JLF Seattle featured dozens of authors and creative speakers to Town Hall Seattle over the weekend. If you missed it, don't worry — the plan is for this literary event to join the city's summer festival pantheon. It opened on Friday night with an invitation-only gala-like event at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. I was lucky enough to be invited and brought along KUOW politics editor Catharine Smith as my guest.

Thanks to Jha, we donned colorful gowns, and thank goodness we did. I might have complimented every beautiful sari I saw in what was, hands down, the best dressed crowd I've seen in my time in Seattle.

The visual delight quickly turned cultural, as arts entrepreneur Sanjoy K. Roy took the stage in the museum's intimate performance space. Roy is the managing director of Teamwork Arts, which produces festivals all over the world, including JLF. The original JLF has grown into one of the world's largest literary festivals, and listening to him speak about the importance of sharing ideas around the world, it's easy to see how that happened; he has a passion that permeated the room.

While JLF in all its iterations — from the United Kingdom to Houston and now Seattle — is largely a celebration of Indian thinkers, culture, and writing, Roy talked about how the festival is a place to reflect on all peoples and on our shared home, Earth.

"People may be firing rockets at each other, but we're here to stay," he said, "because we believe that it's important to provide a context to what we live in, and in many ways, bring east and the west together."

"Ignorance, in many ways, gives rise to hatred," he went on. "Hate comes easy to us. But perhaps through this knowledge that all of these wonderful writers brought to the table, if we were able to push back on that ignorance, maybe we can push back on hatred. And by pushing back on hatred, maybe we can push back on the violence that we see all around us."

Somehow, that sentiment was more beautiful than all the rich fabrics around us.

As the evening went on, we were treated to a lecture by Gursharan S. Sidhu on hidden stories in Indian art and poetry read by retired Indian diplomat Navdeep Suri. Suri translated novels by his grandfather Nanak Singh, a survivor of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, which was a major turning point in India's fight for independence from the British raj.

These conversations revealed to me my own ignorance of Indian culture (Gursharan S. Sidhu, discussing several Indian artworks, repeatedly noted that most if not all of the audience members would recognize the scenes depicted in them, and I, sadly, did not). But I left that night feeling enlightened —and eager to learn much more.