Rediscovering Rajasthan: An India I Thought I Already Knew

I just returned from the Jaipur Literature Festival, and the experience left me thinking about how much of India I had carried in memory—and how much I had misunderstood or simply never known. Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan, a state I grew up imagining from a distance.

As a child, Rajasthan lived in my mind as a place of contradictions. The land of Maharajas and palaces, but also the place from which migrant laborers came to Delhi to build roads. Women behind long veils. Men in turbans. A conservative state with strict social norms. And then there was Maharani Gayatri Devi—elegant, outspoken, politically active—who didn’t fit any of those boxes. That contradiction stayed with me.

Decades later, I arrived in Jaipur as an invited author for The Woman In Deed. It was my first time at JLF, and I had no idea what to expect. Silicon Valley had shaped me, and I wasn’t sure how I would land with a literary audience.

So for the first day and a half, I simply watched. I observed the crowds, the energy, the conversations. My fellow panelists were far more in tune with India and the literary world, and I was grateful for how naturally they included me.

When it was my turn to speak, something surprising happened—I was in the flow. The audience connected. The questions were thoughtful. The themes of my memoir—courage, identity, risk—landed. The next morning, a local newspaper carried a headline about my talk. It was a small moment, but it meant something: I belonged in this space too. It felt like reconnecting with an India I had walked away from fifty years earlier.

As part of my invitation package, I received a ₹5000 debit card to use at the festival bookstore. I walked out with eight books, one of which was on Rajasthan’s political history since Independence. I read most of it on my flight back.

Reading that book was like pulling back a curtain. Rajasthan’s transition from princely states to a democratic structure was messy, political, and full of maneuvering. The kings were not passive figures waiting for history to happen to them. They negotiated, resisted, and tried to retain power even as India was being reshaped. None of this was part of the Rajasthan I had understood growing up.

This deeper history sat in sharp contrast to the JLF I was experiencing—colorful, global, buzzing with ideas. The festival opened with a keynote by Banu Mushtaq, a Booker Prize winner and a Muslim woman who has faced persecution for her identity. Her speech was fierce and philosophical, arguing that resistance is not a choice but a necessity. Listening to her, I felt the weight of India’s complexities—gender, caste, religion, politics—all layered and alive.

In the authors’ lounge, I met writers who reflected deeply on the subjects they wrote about. Our conversations were casual but meaningful. This was a different India—confident, expressive, and intellectually engaged.

On the flight back, away from the noise and glamour of the festival, I immersed myself in the book on Rajasthan. The contrast was almost symbolic: outside, a celebration of ideas; inside, a history of power struggles and political evolution. Both were part of the same story: a state constantly reinventing itself.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I had re‑entered an India I had left decades ago and was seeing how much it had changed. The India I carried in memory was static. The India I encountered in Jaipur was dynamic, layered, and full of new voices.

My return to India through JLF was not nostalgic. It was grounding. It reminded me that the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from are often incomplete.

And as I wrote The Woman In Deed to understand the choices that shaped me, Jaipur showed me that India is doing the same—reshaping itself, one layer at a time.