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Victor Mallet, Amita Baviskar | Jaipur Literature Festival

582 views · Published 2 February 2018 · 1:03:55 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: Jaipur Literature Festival · 2018 · Travel & Events

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River of Life, River of Death: The Ganges and India’s Future: Victor Mallet & Amita Baviskar

Victor Mallet is a journalist, commentator and author with three decades of experience in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He is currently Asia news editor for the Financial Times and was bureau chief in South Asia, based in New Delhi, from 2012-2016. Mallet has written numerous editorials, columns and features on security, politics, economics and business. He has twice won the Society of Publishers in Asia Award for opinion writing. In India, he was twice awarded the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism as a foreign correspondent, once for a feature about the rise of Narendra Modi and later for a magazine article on the River Ganges. He is the author of The Trouble with Tigers, the highly praised book on the south-east Asian industrial revolution and the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. His new book is Ganges, River of Life, River of Death: The Ganges and India’s Future.

Amita Baviskar is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi and writes on environment and development in India. Her first book was In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts Over Development in the Narmada Valley.  Her most recent books are Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (with Raka Ray) and First Garden of the Republic: Nature on the President’s Estate.

River of Life, River of Death: The Ganges and India’s Future
India is killing the Ganges , writes Victor Mallet, "and the Ganges in turn is killing India."The waterway that has nourished more people than any on Earth for three millennia is now so polluted with sewage and toxic waste that it has become a menace to human and animal health . Former India correspondent for the Financial Times, Mallet traces the holy river from source to mouth and from ancient times to the present day. As one sadhu told him in Rishi kesh, "If Ganga dies, India dies. If Ganga thrives, India thrives. The lives of 500 million people is no small thing." Drawing on four years of first-hand reporting and detailed historical and scientific research, Mallet delves into the religious, historical and biological mysteries of the Ganges. Starting at the Himalayan glacier where the river emerges pure and cold from an icy cave of the Cow 's Mouth and ending in the mangrove swamps of the Bay of Bengal, Mallet asks: can India succeed in saving the river from catastrophe - or is it too late?
Presented by Amity University

THE JAIPUR LITERATURE FESTIVAL 
Described as the 'greatest literary show on Earth', the Jaipur Literature Festival is a sumptuous feast of ideas. 

The past decade has seen it transform into a global literary phenomenon having hosted nearly 2000 speakers and welcoming over a million book lovers from across India and the globe. Our core values remain unchanged: to serve as a democratic, non-aligned platform offering free and fair access. 

Every year, the Festival brings together a diverse mix of the world's greatest writers, thinkers, humanitarians, politicians, business leaders, sports people and entertainers on one stage to champion the freedom to express and engage in thoughtful debate and dialogue. 

Festival Co Directors Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple, alongside Producer Sanjoy K Roy and Teamwork Arts, create a platform for an array of speakers to debate, discuss and present their ideas in the annual five-day programme set against the backdrop of Rajasthan's stunning cultural heritage and the Diggi Palace in the state capital Jaipur. 

Past speakers have ranged from Nobel Laureates His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama,  J.M. Coetzee, Muhammad Yunus  and Orhan Pamuk, Man Booker Prize winners Ben Okri, Howard Jacobson, Margaret Atwood, Marlon James, Michael Ondaatje, Paul Beatty and Yan Martel, Pulitzer Prize winners Andrew Sean Greer,  Benjamin Moser, Colson Whitehead and Jhumpa Lahiri, Sahitya Akademi winners Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, M.T. Vasudevan Nair as well as the late Girish Karnad, Mahasweta Devi and U.R. Ananthamurthy along with literary luminaries including Amish Tripathi, Chima¬manda Ngozi Adichie, Vikram Chandra and Vikram Seth. An annual event that goes beyond literature, the Festival has also hosted Amartya Sen, Amitabh Bachchan, the late A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Fry, Thomas Piketty and former president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai.

The Jaipur Literature Festival is a flagship event of Teamwork Arts, which produces over 33 highly acclaimed performing arts, visual arts and literary festivals across more than 40 cities globally.

Link to our website: https://www.jaipurliteraturefestival.org
Link to Jaipur Literature Festival 2018 sessions: https://bit.ly/3bZZgaD

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