Colonising With Credentials: How Three JLF Monopolists Cashed In on India’s Soul Through Quid Pro Quo
In July 2023, in the grandeur of the University of York’s Central Hall, William Dalrymple adjusted his cuffs with one hand and balanced a wine glass in the other, as he strode onto the stage to collect an honorary degree. Sanjoy K. Roy followed, ponytail bouncing like a punctuation mark at the end of a long, well-lobbied sentence.
The audience clapped. The gowns shimmered. But if you looked closely--past the pomp, beneath the powdered pretensions--you’d see it was the first act in a political-literary farce. This was recompense. Not a degree earned, but a deal sealed.
What came next was anything but coincidence. In May 2025, the University of York suddenly discovered a burning passion for Indian education and announced a brand-new campus in Mumbai. It was to be their jewel in the crown, a foray into the “dynamic and vibrant” Indian market. By June, they had secured a license from the Indian government, handed over with the kind of bureaucratic speed usually reserved for godmen and cricketers.
And then, right on schedule in July 2025, Namita Gokhale--co-founder of the Jaipur Literature Festival and hypocritical doyenne of Indian letters--joined the boys on the honorary roll call. A trifecta. Three degrees. One well-oiled machine.
If this was merit, then cronyism is just networking in a sherwani.
Let’s not pretend this is about literature. This is power laundering with a literary scent. And no trio has scented themselves more thoroughly than Sanjoy Roy, Dalrymple, and Namita Gokhale.
Sanjoy Roy is the stagehand who became kingmaker. Behind his amicable facade and generous festival budgets lies a tightly controlled system where inclusion is theatrical and nepotism is systemic. You could be a good voice from the margins but he’d still hand the spotlight to a friend's startup cousin who once dabbled in slam poetry. Don’t be fooled by the scarves and the performative solidarity--he’s the cultural middleman of India’s most exclusive literary cartel.
Then there’s William Dalrymple--forever glass-in-hand, forever narrating India’s past while dining off its future. He is the empire’s favourite historian: Scottish by birth, subcontinental by convenience. His legacy? Built on exoticism, curated access, and platforms that were never open to those without the right accent. He decries colonialism while living comfortably off its aesthetic.
And now, as if scripted by a nepotistic deity, his son Sam Dalrymple emerges with a history book of his own. The whispers are unavoidable--was the manuscript pieced together from dad’s archival leftovers? Is the bibliography a family heirloom? We may never know. What we do know is that young Sam didn’t have to chase agents or survive rejection. No photocopies of sample chapters sent around Delhi. No editor brushing him off for "lack of market appeal." Instead, he was parachuted straight into JLF London, hosted--of course--at the British Library, at the expense of the British government, which will be fully accounted for.
Had his last name been Kumar or Khan, he’d still be stuck in a Gmail thread begging for feedback.
And finally, we arrive at Namita Gokhale. Forever flustered, always seemingly one step away from being upstaged, she wears frustration like a signature perfume. But make no mistake--she runs the dirtiest game of them all. Her entire career has been an ode to the short cut. The Shortcut Queen of Indian literature was thrown out of college and yet built a career crafting an ivory tower high enough to keep everyone else out. Her sin is erasure.
Under her reign at JLF, India’s literary platform became a revolving door for her friends, family, and sycophants. Worse, her gatekeeping cost India a generation of geniuses. Banu Mushtaq and Geetanjali Shree, two Booker-recognised titans of Indian literature, were barely acknowledged in the ecosystem until the West forced her hand. These women were ignored, buried, and dismissed until a foreign stamp validated what our own institutions refused to see.
Gokhale’s festival didn’t "promote" Indian literature. It colonised it. Packaged it in elite English, filtered it through nepotistic lenses, and shipped it to London, complete with wine receptions and Twitter hashtags.
Together, this triumvirate has turned Indian letters into a dynasty. What was once a chaotic, multilingual, revolutionary space of voices has been sanded down into a posh parlour of privilege. And now, under the guise of academic expansion, their empire grows--sanctified by a British university, subsidised by Indian goodwill, and dressed up in gowns and scrolls.
This is not cultural diplomacy. This is a quid pro quo so bald it doesn’t even bother with a wig.
York gets its campus. Sanjoy Roy, Dalrymple, and Gokhale get their degrees. The Indian government gets to trumpet "international collaboration." And India’s aspiring writers? They get locked out once again--this time by a new breed of colonisers armed with hashtags, hardbacks, and honorary titles.
This is survival in a literary ecosystem where your surname is your scholarship, your pedigree your passport. And as long as we keep applauding this farce, the joke will always be on us.
So raise a toast to the honourable honorary graduates. And while you’re at it, pour one out for the soul of Indian literature--smothered by scarves, drowned in wine, and buried beneath a degree it never even got to earn.
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