Arts entrepreneur Sanjoy Kumar Roy may be Kolkata-born and Delhi-based but a major component of his life and career is inextricably entwined with India’s fabled pink city of Jaipur, where his company Teamwork Arts has produced the critically acclaimed annual Jaipur Literature Festival hailed as the ‘greatest literary show on earth’ for 18 years and counting now
Oprah Winfrey might have polarised fans after her sensational 2021 interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle but there is no doubt she has and will always wield influence. So imagine the buzz it generated when she listed the two main reasons for her maiden visit to India in 2012: to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) — which she later hailed as one of her greatest life experiences — and, to film a four-part series for her channel.
For Sanjoy Kumar Roy, those words were sweet indeed. “It was wonderful hosting Oprah and [her visit] helped expand JLF into a truly international brand, not to mention being a real red letter moment when she said that,” he says. Telling the story, Roy recalls that JLF was entering its fourth year when [New Age guru] Deepak Chopra sent an email, sharing how the talk show host was keen to come to the festival. “Of course, I was excited. We all were! We began talking about it. And when Oprah finally did come, all of America invariably followed.”
Colour and culture are crucial components of every JLF / Photos: Soophye
Lighting up ‘lit’
One of the great arts entrepreneurs of the world — an oxymoron, if ever there was one — Roy is the managing director of Teamwork Arts Pvt Ltd, a Delhi-based production company which produces over 30 hugely successful festivals spanning performing arts, visual arts and literature across 40 cities in countries like Australia, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the US. Starting out as a film and television content producer, Roy was roped in when Faith and John Singh (founders of the cult Jaipur-based craft and apparel brand Anokhi), who had set up the Jaipur Virasat Heritage Festival, brought together celebrated authors Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple and approached Teamwork Arts to create a standalone event.
See also: Singapore’s creative minds set to shine at Milan Design Week
Ever since its establishment in 2006, JLF has left an indelible mark on India’s arts and culture scene. Traditionally set over five days in magical Jaipur, its fabled pink city and capital of the state of Rajasthan, the festival has grown from a small event with just 18 writers in attendance, to being hailed as the “greatest literary show on Earth”. A veritable phenomenon, JLF has hosted thousands of speakers and welcomed over a million book lovers from across India and the globe to date. More than just literature, JLF is a sumptuous feast of ideas, a platform for
self-expression, and a safe space where discourse, culture and purposeful engagement flourish. Besides the world’s greatest writers, the festival also attracts thinkers, humanitarians, business leaders, celebrities and more, all of whom relish the chance to immerse themselves in thoughtful dialogue and be inspired by ideas and opinions that truly resonate.
There are dance and musical performances as well as art installations, while past speakers include Nobel Laureates and winners of the Pulitzer and Booker Prizes. JLF has also become a space where billionaires and Bollywood stars converge. But beyond its megawatt allure, the festival remains famously democratic and inclusive. Its low general admission fee of about INR200 (RM10) for five days (students pay INR100) means that it draws people from all walks of life. More importantly, everyone gets treated equally once within the festival grounds of the Hotel Clarks Amer (it was moved from its original site of The Diggi Palace due to space constraints).
Gokhale, Roy and Dalrymple are the key figures behind the acclaimed Jaipur Literature Festival
Roy shares an early memory of how he went down to the event grounds one winter’s morning and saw about 200 chairs set up for an audience. “I told my colleague to take most of them away as, you know, I didn’t want people to notice the seats going empty later on.” But then people started to stream in. And they kept on coming. “That first year, we received 5,000 to 6,000 guests.” The festival grew quickly and robustly, primarily through word of mouth, before going on to hit half a million on-ground attendees just before Covid-19. “Now we are trying to cap things at 350,000 over five days although we have a great many more watching us online.”
Another of his stories also poignantly illustrates JLF’s ethos. “I once saw a man and boy walk through the festival gates and they were stopped by security. Because I happened to be there, I went up to ask, ‘Can I help you?’ to which the man answered: ‘We sleep on the pavement up ahead, opposite the Sawai Man Singh hospital. I know I will never be able to afford to send my son to school or buy him a book. And I heard you tell stories here. I just thought if he heard a story, a good story, it could change his life forever.’
He apologised for coming and turned to go when I said, ‘No. Stay. This is exactly what the festival is for’.”
Citing that as the first time it truly hit home how the festival makes a difference in people’s lives, Roy posits: “Just imagine! That is why I always remind myself of JLF’s four pillars: our work in heritage, allowing democratic access, using knowledge to push back on ignorance and hatred, and focusing on young people.” With 80% of JLF’s audience below the age of 30, Roy wants to continue working hard to “get young people through the door. We need to make [the festival] sexy enough. Yes, come for the pizza, by all means, but maybe they can then stumble upon an idea that could open an important door [in their minds]. Everywhere across the world, that is our idea. Can we break the divide between science and the arts? Can we make maths sexy? Can we make science accessible? Can we make particle physics interesting? To get a ‘yes’ to all of the above, we need to ensure our programming stays right”.
A packed JLF session
For more lifestyle, arts and fashion trends, click here for Options Section
Making the dream work
What makes JLF stand out from other festivals is, undoubtedly, the people who run it. Devotees of Indian writing would be well familiar with Gokhale and the Scottish-born, India-based Dalrymple. But beyond its author-led leadership, due credit must also be given to Roy and his people at Teamwork Arts. One of the most culturally influential people to know, he himself is a recipient of a National Award for Excellence and Best Director for the film Shahjahanabad: The Twilight Years, and founder-trustee of the Salaam Baalak Trust, which provides support services for street and working children in the inner city of Delhi. Besides this, he also confers with various industry bodies on important policy issues within India’s cultural space.
“I love reading, theatre and the pursuit of creativity and have always been invested in the arts,” Roy says. Born in Kolkata but educated between Delhi, Mumbai and London, Roy completed his higher learning at St Stephen’s College, Delhi University, one of India’s oldest liberal arts and sciences colleges and whose alumni (called ‘Stephanians’) include distinguished scientists, economists, writers, Members of Parliament and Fortune 500 CEOs. “Honestly, I think I spent more time protesting and being part of human rights initiatives [than studying],” he laughs. “But I have to credit my professors Dr Tankha, Dr Vohra and Dr Gupta for being my mentors and guides through this very defining period.
“As opposed to what Harvard Business Case Studies teach us, Teamwork Arts really happened by accident,” he says, half-jokingly. “I ran a theatre action group in the early 1980s before setting up Teamwork as a film and TV content company. We certainly didn’t have a plan. In fact, we didn’t have anything. I met my wife Puneeta while doing theatre in university in the early 1980s. And when we — or rather she — decided we should marry, I remember my future father-in-law asking: ‘So what is it that you do?’ I said theatre. And he asked, ‘but what’s your day job?’ To which I replied theatre again. He said: ‘See here. How are you going to look after my daughter?’ I duly said: ‘Oh no, your daughter is a manager in a big firm, so she will look after us.’ Obviously that didn’t go down very well,” he laughs.
Despite the less-than-encouraging banter between him and his prospective father-in-law, what worked in Roy’s favour was India’s nascent television industry. Private television had just opened up and there was no pool of industry professionals outside of the government-owned Door Darshan. “So people used to come up to [those] in the arts, people like me, and ask us to create, produce and direct whatever we could. I initially said ‘no, I wasn’t gonna do any of that TV stuff’.” However, as his wedding date drew closer, Roy eventually acquiesced. “I relented and joined Bobby Bedi, who was and still is a big producer.”
With one foot in the door, Roy slowly persuaded theatre colleagues to join him. “It was in 1989 and I asked Mohit [Satyanand, his partner] to set up a separate company. “That’s how Teamwork started,” he says matter-of-factly. “Initially and until 1995, we were primarily a television and film production company. By 1995, we had about 15 daily and weekly soap operas, cake shows, food shows, chat shows, news programmes — some very successful ones — running. Every Saturday, we used to get together with all our producers and directors to see what was next week’s big story … you know, who behaved badly, which actor ran away with whom … that sort of thing,” he wisecracks.
Things came to a head when two senior producers — Sharupa Dutta and Manika Berry — approached Roy one day, lamenting that the work left them brain-dead, figuratively speaking. “So, on the spur of the moment, I thought, ‘Okay, if you don’t want to do television, let’s go back to the arts’. I conveniently forgot that television was making us money every hour of the day … unlike arts, where there’s no money,” he roars.
Truth be told, Roy and Co have not done too badly at all. A suggestion by Satyanand led to the creation of Friends of Music, a platform that eschewed popular music, Bollywood and rock to champion experimental tunes. “We opened it to anyone willing to experiment and, somehow, it was a success, with many of the big world music groups of today evolving from that platform. We did the same for dance, commissioning many of our classical greats and telling them to do works they normally wouldn’t be allowed to.”
He cites legendary names like Astad Deboo and Aditi Mangaldas creating astounding contemporary renditions based on traditional learning. “And then we did the same with theatre, starting with commissioning new writing. Suddenly, we had a slew of fresh and exciting content!”
A heart for the arts
Cutting a fey figure with his long, white-streaked hair, Roy admits his looks fit perfectly within the creative community. “I used to say that because I looked artsy and spoke English well as a person of colour, I got invited to give lectures in universities often,” he jokes. It also helped that diversity was finally being given a seat at the table when Roy’s star was ascending. But, to him, it was still nowhere near enough. “I sat on the theatre advisory council of the Arts Council of England and yet every time I travelled — and I travelled a lot — I never saw works from India being presented in mainstream venues.”
He began to ask questions. “I asked a lot of whys and why nots. Why shouldn’t we be in the South Bank or the Royal Albert Hall or the Barbican?” Having pivoted to the arts in 1996, Teamwork soon set about establishing their first festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2001. Fourteen years later, they put together a massive cast and crew to launch a spectacular Bollywood-style mela as part of the iconic Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Their efforts did not go unnoticed and Singapore soon came a-calling. “Things caught on very quickly after Edinburgh,” Roy agrees. From Scotland and Singapore, Teamwork Arts soon began stamping its creative mark in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and all over Europe.
It was also right from the beginning that he made a concerted effort to use arts to create value for built heritage. “We tried to ensure everything could be repurposed. We don’t want to build new things by, first, pulling down or destroying what already existed.” From the start in Edinburgh, existing and heritage spaces, such as old churches and chapels, homes and even basements, were commissioned as festival venues as much as possible.
Otherworldly encounters
For a man with a wealth of his own stories to tell, Roy has stubbornly resisted writing a book despite being plagued with endless requests from publishers. But all things happen in their own good time. Roy shares how he is, at last, releasing a work of non-fiction at year end. Ghosts in my Room will be a compilation of his experiences with the supernatural. “I was a kid when I had my first encounter. I must have been about seven or eight years old. My grandfather had just passed away, so we returned to Kolkata.”
The family home in question was sprawling, palatial in fact, with numerous rooms. “I was sleeping with my dadi (grandmother) that night, in her big four-poster bed under a mosquito net, and had just begun to nod off when I saw a sort of disembodied hand, holding a dagger, flash across the netting. I screamed the entire place down. As it happened, my grandmother saw it too.”
Other incidents followed, including in Roy’s previous home where, after taking a bath, the fogged up mirror would bear the ghostly imprints of two palm prints. “Although it wasn’t an unpleasant experience, it was not easy either,” he says. “Even now, if I am with a group of people, I sometimes receive a message in my head saying I need to tell them that they are ill.
I used to worry people would think I was mad but my wife assured me as I was getting this information for a reason, it was my duty to convey it. And so I would — but in a subtle way, like asking: ‘Why don’t you go get yourself checked?’ As it happened, one particular person had cancer, while another had a heart issue … and so on. The list started growing once I opened myself up [to being a messenger].”
On his acquiescence at last to writing a long-awaited book, Roy concedes it is part healing exercise as well. “Even if you do get used to it, it doesn’t mean I am comfortable [experiencing supernatural encounters]. But somehow, I found closure of sorts by relating the incidents through writing. The entire process has turned out to be a journey of discovery, reflection and wonderment of what has been my lived experience of ghosts and otherworldly creatures. So, in the end, it is a book — part memoir and partly about my life and also the unusual, supernatural experiences I have been through — from Delhi to Jerusalem and Edinburgh. It is being published by HarperCollins as we speak. I leave it to the reader to determine if these were tricks played by the mind, which could be scientifically explained, or indeed a window to another dimension in which we coexist.”
Before edition #19
Happily, Roy also hints that Ghosts in my Room might be on the line-up of next year’s JLF. He maintains that he is always more of a reader than writer; reading six or seven books at the same time is par for the course. “I just love reading. It is my go-to, my space.” A recent favourite is Anirudh Kanisetti’s Lords of the Deccan, about the great kings of South India, namely the Cholas, the Rashtrakutas, the Pallavas and the Chalukyas.
As he does not watch television and spends minimal time on social media, Roy says time at home in Gurgaon, a satellite city of Delhi, is his idea of bliss. “The house is shared with three cats and four dogs, and weekends are all about having a fabulous lunch, opening a nice bottle of wine early in the evening and [having friends over],” he smiles. “We have fabulous cooks in the house. In fact, I am quite a good cook myself. And before you ask, I am strictly non-vegetarian. I like to joke that I am allergic to everything veg.” He also gamely shares how Sunday is the day dedicated to oiling his trademark long tresses. “I travel so much so it is nice to be able to enjoy the house. And look after myself a bit.”
The 19th edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival will be held from Jan 15 to 19, 2026, at Hotel Clarks Amer, Jaipur, India
