The Jaipur Literature Festival USA concluded its two-day gathering in New York City, bringing together international authors, historians, tech executives, and political analysts to address world affairs, colonial legacies, and technological shifts. Hosted across three venues—the Asia Society, the National Arts Club, and The Center for Fiction—the conference culminated in a solo dance performance set to real-time biometric tracking titled “HeartBeat,” conceptualized by artist Christopher Janney and performed by dancer Mayuri Bhandari. Panel discussions examined the long-term impact of British colonial partition across South Asia and East Africa, the influence of mid-20th-century political operator Roy Cohn on contemporary American politics, and the societal implications of artificial intelligence. Producing organization Teamwork Arts confirmed that the New York edition was sold out, reflecting the festival’s ongoing global expansion across 40 cities worldwide.
NEW YORK — The final act of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) USA in New York—an intense solo dance performance by artist Mayuri Bhandari set to recorded and live sonic arrangements titled “HeartBeat”—served as the thematic anchor for a two-day series of literary panels and geopolitical debates across Manhattan on September 29 and 30.
Conceptualized by media artist and composer Christopher Janney, the “HeartBeat” performance utilized real-time biometric sensors to broadcast Bhandari’s actual cardiac output through auditorium speakers as she navigated an improvised choreographic sequence at the Asia Society. As the dancer transitioned from deliberate movements to energetic and high-tempo sequences, the audible pulsation rate fluctuated in tandem, accompanied by an onstage instrumental ensemble.
The performance at the Asia Society, alongside panel sessions hosted at the National Arts Club and The Center for Fiction, closed out a program featuring international biographers, historians, technology executives, and political commentators. Panelists addressed topics ranging from the historical mechanics of 20th-century colonial partitions and cold-war political networks to the long-term systemic risks posed by artificial intelligence and expanding presidential power in the United States.
Institutional Expansion and the Economics of Global Literary Festivals
Co-founded in 2006 by historian William Dalrymple and author Namita Gokhale at the Diggi Palace in Jaipur, India, the Jaipur Literature Festival has expanded from a regional gathering into a significant international franchise. Produced by Teamwork Arts under the leadership of Managing Director Sanjoy Roy, the flagship annual festival in Jaipur draws hundreds of thousands of attendees every January, positioning itself as the largest free literary gathering in the world.
The New York installment forms part of JLF’s global tour, which currently spans 40 cities across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Organizers confirmed that tickets for the New York venues were completely sold out, reflecting sustained commercial interest in nonpartisan international cultural forums.
During the conference, Roy engaged in a public conversation with writer and activist Sohaila Abdulali to discuss his newly published memoir, There is a Ghost in My Room. The dialogue detailed the administrative history of Teamwork Arts and recounted an early promotional visit to Boulder, Colorado, which established the operational template for launching JLF’s American franchises.
Re-Examining Imperial Borders and Colonial Post-Lives
Historical partition and the long-term consequences of British imperial administration formed a primary focus of the festival’s academic programming.
Historian Sam Dalrymple presented findings from his debut book, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. In a panel moderated by journalist and author Prashant Jha, the younger Dalrymple detailed the territorial divisions executed by British colonial authorities during the mid-20th century. Beyond the well-documented 1947 Partition of British India into India and Pakistan (and the subsequent creation of Bangladesh in 1971), Dalrymple outlined how administrative separations impacted Burma (Myanmar), Aden (Yemen), and several Gulf protectorates, arguing that hasty territorial drawing disrupted established regional trade routes and created lingering border disputes across Asia.
In a parallel session on African political history, Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, presented an analysis from his work, Slow Poison: Uganda and the Afterlives of Empire. Conversing with Columbia University Professor Neeraj Kaushal, Mamdani analyzed the institutional structures established by British administrators in East Africa prior to Ugandan independence in 1962.
Mamdani argued that the racialized legal codes, land distribution policies, and civil service frameworks instituted under British rule created the structural economic volatility that later enabled the dictatorial regime of Idi Amin in the 1970s. Specifically, Mamdani outlined how colonial labor policies systematically marginalized specific ethnic and commercial groups, laying the groundwork for the eventual forced expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population in 1972.
“There is a memoir in the book, but the book is not a memoir,” Mamdani noted during the panel, emphasizing that the text utilizes personal recollections primarily as a framework for archival and structural political analysis.
Modern Political Warfare: The Legacy of Roy Cohn
The intersection of mid-20th-century political tactics and contemporary American governance was examined during a panel featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird and researcher Susan Goldmark, moderated by tech entrepreneur and journalist Sreenath “Sree” Sreenivasan.
Sreenivasan, who previously served as Chief Digital Officer for Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the City of New York, led a discussion centered on Bird and Goldmark’s biographical work, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey.
The biography details the career of Roy Cohn, the aggressive attorney who gained national prominence during the 1950s Army-McCarthy hearings as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Bird and Goldmark documented Cohn’s subsequent decades in New York City, where he represented major organized crime figures across all five New York Mafia families, prominent real estate developers, and high-profile political operators.
The authors highlighted Cohn’s role as a legal counsel and political mentor to Donald Trump during the 1970s and 1980s, analyzing how Cohn’s aggressive litigation strategies, media manipulation tactics, and refusal to yield under legal challenge influenced modern political strategy in the United States. The biography also examines Cohn’s complex personal life, contrasting his private relationships with his public defense of socially conservative political movements during the height of the Cold War.
Artificial Intelligence, Algorithmic Bias, and Governance Frameworks
The technological dimension of the festival focused on the rapid integration of artificial intelligence across commercial enterprise and public infrastructure. Moderated by Roopa Unnikrishnan—Senior Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development at IDEX Corporation and a 1998 Commonwealth Games gold medalist in shooting—the panel titled “AI: An Era of Co-Intelligence” convened three industry analysts and researchers.
The panel included Nitin Seth, tech entrepreneur and former Chief Operating Officer of Flipkart; Vinita Gupta, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and founder of QuickPak; and Meredith Broussard, associate professor of data journalism at New York University and author of research on algorithmic discrimination.
Discussion focused on the structural limitations and ethical risks associated with current large language models and automated decision-making systems. Broussard detailed how uncritical adoption of automated algorithms in hiring, credit scoring, and criminal justice can perpetuate historical social and demographic biases present in training datasets.
Seth and Gupta evaluated the macroeconomic impact of AI integration on global software engineering, logistics, and corporate administration, emphasizing that while automation yields efficiency gains, regulatory framework development continues to lag behind technical deployment.
Unnikrishnan highlighted the critical necessity of incorporating diverse geographic, cultural, and socio-economic perspectives into the development pipeline of foundational AI models to prevent the concentration of technological governance within a narrow set of corporate institutions.
As the New York edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival concluded, organizers reaffirmed their intention to maintain an open global forum for literary, historical, and policy dialogue, connecting regional cultural centers with broader international debates on governance, technology, and historical memory.
