Mihir S Sharma: Listening in

India's globalised class is still a slave to anxiety that it is peripheral to the world. Everywhere in the world, we imagine, people are talking to each other but without mentioning us at all

It is that time of year again. The time of year when every conversation in Delhi begins with: "Are you going to Jaipur?" The time of year when the Facebook feeds and Twitter timelines of people who are not, in fact, going to Jaipur turn into squalls of noisy reproach at their craven refusal. The time of year when those who have read perhaps half a book in the past year suddenly declare themselves to be prostrate with excitement at the prospect of standing uncomfortably at the back of a crowded hall in order to listen to their favourite minor Latin American poet muse on the Nature of Reality or possibly Royalties.

The Jaipur Literature Festival, or JLF, is no longer unique. There are now approximately as many book festivals in India as there are Cafe Coffee Days, and sometimes it's hard to tell them apart, too. And the years in which JLF has grown to its current Maha Kumbh status saw, also, the explosion of that related jamboree, the Media House Conclave, in which recently unemployed world leaders and B-list celebrities descend on a stage somewhere in a metropolitan city - or in one ill-fated case, Goa - in order to enlighten us about, say, the revolutionary nature of the Internet. There they sit enthroned in a hundred banquet halls, amid a reverent silence punctuated only by the tinkle of expensive jewellery and the beep of expensive smartphones, bringing to us primitive worshippers the distilled wisdom of the world.

What on earth explains this odd phenomenon? Whence this desire - from a people who do not shut up on the streets, in offices or on news TV - to listen in silent contemplation to people whom they wouldn't watch in a documentary if it was being premiered in their drawing room? I have a theory, and it is this: that India's globalised class is still a slave to anxiety that it is, when all is said and done, peripheral to the world.

Everywhere in the world, we imagine, people are talking to each other but without mentioning us at all. Conversely, that here is a giant global conversation that Latin American poets, Brooklynite novelists and Central Asian journalists are all part of, and we don't understand it at all. This is, we privately believe, a disgrace. It's like we're at a party where everyone else knows each other, and so we decide to hang around sheepishly at the edge of their conversations and listen in. (This is also, incidentally, why we all read The Economist, for god forbid a coup happens somewhere and we don't know.)

For a country that's otherwise so insular, this is very strange behaviour indeed. Of course, the anxiety we feel is neither justified nor unique. Everyone but the French, who imagine they are the centre of the world, the Chinese, who believe they should be the centre of the world, and New Yorkers, who actually are the centre of the world, has this anxiety in some form. But, in India, there is an additional twist. Because we Festival-going children of great privilege are subject also to the additional fear that even our own national conversation is something that we're deaf to, closed off as we are by the high walls that we've erected to keep the Bharat bit of India out of our better homes and gardens. Naturally, we can't admit it; but, nevertheless, the worm of that fear gnaws away at us, making us doubly and uncharacteristically grateful for any conversation we're admitted into. It doesn't matter which conversation; what matters is addressing this sense of isolation, of becoming part of a shared history. Thus, this Friday at JLF, even a lecture on the Second World War by the historian Antony Beevor was met by a blitzkrieg of questions.

Perhaps this is where my theory leads: that until we drop our walls and become more willing to listen to the multitude of voices in our own country, we will always be a little too desperate to listen to voices from outside. At JLF, interestingly enough, it's possible to make a start. The festival's organisers, William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale, together manage to provide both sorts of conversations: the ones from beyond, and the ones from below. Give yourself a generous measure of both, and it's practically medicinal. Every year that I've been at JLF, the most surprisingly rewarding session for me has featured voices that I wouldn't otherwise have easily heard - transgendered writers from the South, say, or historians of Western Indian folk music. Yes, JLF is one symptom of our national neurosis about marginalisation; but it's part of the cure, too.