Jaipur Literature Festival: The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community with Salil Tripathi and Suketu Mehta in Conversation

Monday, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:00 pm EDT September 8, 2025

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

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In The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community, acclaimed writer Salil Tripathi traces the journey of a community whose enterprising spirit has carried them across the world. The Gujaratis, through their remarkable resilience and pragmatic commercial spirit, have left their footprint in almost every continent. Traversing through histories of migration, faith, commerce, and politics, Tripathi, with celebrated writer Suketu Mehta, examines the paradoxes of belonging and ambition.

Presented in partnership with Jaipur Literature Festival NYC.

In-person attendees will be admitted on a first-come, first-seated basis. Registration does not guarantee entry. All registrants will receive a link to livestream the event.

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In Conversation

  • Suketu Mehta

    Suketu Mehta

    Suketu Mehta

    Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. He is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. Mehta has written original screenplays for films, including New York, I Love You.


    Photo Credit: Courtesy of JLF NYC

  • Salil Tripathi

    Salil Tripathi

    Salil Tripathi

    Salil Tripathi has been an award-winning correspondent in Southeast Asia. His latest book, The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community, is longlisted for the Kamladevi Chattopadhyaya NIF prize for non-fiction. His previous works include Offence: The Hindu Case and The Colonel Who Would Not Repent (longlisted for the Tata Literature Festival prize). Tripathi is the co-editor of For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, a collection of writings from and about prison, with artist Shilpa Gupta. Born in Bombay and based in Brooklyn, he serves on the board of PEN International.


    Photo Credit: Courtesy of JLF NYC

Featured Books

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    The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community

    By Salil Tripathi

    Published by Aleph Book Company

    In The Gujaratis, through wide-ranging scholarship, original research, and a lifetime of observing the community he was born into, and is proud of belonging to, distinguished journalist and writer Salil Tripathi crafts an engrossing account of the community.

    From the holy town of Somnath, steeped in incense and distorted histories, to the high-octane corporate boardrooms of Mumbai, down the bustling avenue of Hovenierstraat, the heart of Belgium’s diamond trade, to lonely American highways dotted with Patel-owned motels, Tripathi dissects the Gujarati presence in India and across the world and observes the strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies of the community with acuity and wit. We learn about asmita, the essence of being Gujarati, and understand what it means to be ‘Gujarati’ as the author traces the epic story of his people through centuries of social, political, and cultural upheavals.

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    Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

    By Suketu Mehta

    Published by Vintage

    PURCHASE

    A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider’s view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs, following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse, opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood, and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks.

    As each individual story unfolds, Mehta also recounts his own efforts to make a home in Bombay after more than twenty years abroad. Candid, impassioned, funny, and heartrending, Maximum City is a revelation of an ancient and ever-changing world.

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