I attended the Jaipur Literature Festival for the first time last year and for the life of me I can`t quite recall what prompted me to attend. I was an emerging bookseller, curious about all facets of the industry and quite seduced with the idea of spending five days in the Pink City. What I found on my arrival in the princely state was beyond my wildest expectations.

At the time, the festival was in its infancy. All of three years old and it had hosted the likes of Ian McEwan, Donna Tarte, William Dalrymple, Hari Kunzu, Mark Tully, Kiran Desai, Suketa Mehta and Kamila Shamsie. Great effort had been made to entertain the attendees. A musical night with Anushka Shankar, a glamorous ball hosted by the then recently launched Indian Vogue. It was a colourful, all access extravaganza, the likes of which I had never seen before.

Fast forward to this year and I found myself back at Diggi Palace (the heritage hotel that serves as the venue for the festival) and the list of authors has expanded threefold. One of a handful of Pakistani survivors of an Indian visa pogrom, I set out eagerly to explore all that the 2009 Jaipur Literature Festival had to offer. I expected to see a few Bollywood-themed sessions (last year Amir Khan spoke at length about reading disabilities (I can only assume this was a not so veiled attempt to promote his film) but was left gawking when the programme informed me that Amitabh Bachchan would be appearing in person to launch a poster memorabilia books called Bachchanalia.

Vakas Swarp, the author of Q&A which inspired the film Slumdog Millionaire, was interviewed by William Dalrymple about his experience of writing the book in his `spare time` during his diplomatic posting in London. While author Chetan Bhagat explained that his goal was to `reach the people of my country` and hence chose to be `massier and massier`.

I say why bother if you`ve nothing worthwhile to say. The festival was beginning to get a bit too sensationalist and a lot less literary for my liking.

With a festival thin on western authors (I`m not clear whether this was a fallout of the Mumbai tragedy, or whether they had caught wind of the slipping standards) it fell to the Pakistani and diasporic writers to lend the affair some credibility. This was the first visit for Mohammed Hanif, the author of the bestseller A Case of Exploding Mangoes and the much heralded new talent Daniyal Moeenuddin, whose short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was published this week to great fanfare. Both writers inspired awe and admiration among the writers in attendance. Mohammed Hanif`s Booker nomination and the New Yorker`s fascination with all that flows from Daniyal`s pen have firmly established their reputations worldwide.

Chiki Sarkar, the editor in chief of Random House India said that the emergence of Pakistani fiction is one of the most exciting current literary trends reported in the International Herald Tribune `These are books that no Indian, or few Indians, could write,` she said.

Throughout the festival I encountered industry insiders bemoaning the demise of Indian writing. I was startled by this need to own writing talent as if it`s a national resource, but then Amitabh rant on the prominence of Indian cinema whilst lamenting the depiction of Mumbai in Slumdog provided us a context to this nationalism.

For a younger generation of writers, identity has been a myth which has taken great effort to dispel. Hari Kunzru, Tahmima Anum, Nadeem Aslam and Tash Aw were brought together in a light-hearted panel discussion called `Defining Diaspora.` Each panelist spoke of the kaleidoscope of cultures that had individually shaped their being; and how despite the wide-ranging subject matter of their books their publishers always seized upon their exoticism when settling upon a book cover that will sell.

These writers epitomise the brave new world of literature. Nadeem Aslam railed against post-colonial literary depictions by trading in the saffron and saris for Kalashnikov and beards in his recent novel Wasted Vigil. He gave the audience a heart-wrenching account of intersecting lives destroyed by violence in the war-torn landscape of Afghanistan, whilst being neither a native of the land or child of war. Hari Kunzru did one better and transcended all boundaries by writing about a failed radical who comes face to face with his past — all without a brown face in sight.

Ready to lend their voice to a sub-continental literary event these writers were resigned to being eroticised due to their ethnicity and yet with good humour shared their experiences with us and opened themselves up to whoever was willing to listen. As is the nature of the festival I was able to gain access and speak to these authors at a convivial musical event, where two Israeli brothers well versed in qawali preformed a rousing rendition of Fateh Ali Khan`s Dum Must Qalander. I found myself coming full circle that night, as I asked myself with awe and wonder `Where the hell am I?`