GOLDIE HAWN SWEPT into the Delhi lecture theatre with a bearded holy man, Baba Rampuri, by her side.

No one batted an eyelid at the Hollywood star and her friend in silk pyjamas, as this was par for the course at Kitab, India’s first international literary festival.

The pair had just driven in from a gathering of hundreds of other sadhus, who had all met up for a group get- together in the nude.

Fully and elegantly dressed, the American actress was the star of the festival, speaking about her memoir, A Lotus grows in the Mud, and her pet subject, happiness.

As well as her philosophy on jollity, she shared her views on Private Benjamin, told us how her father had once invented a door handle that sounded out Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, then described how Elvis Presley once told her that she must be funny . . . because she looked like a chicken that had just hatched.

Just before I interviewed her on stage, she had suddenly gone quiet on me in the green room at the Habitat Centre after several giggly moments.

Then complete silence descended, and with eyes tight shut, she was in the depths of meditation within seconds. A few minutes later she was wide awake and there was no stopping her. There was plenty of serious talk and plenty more of her trademark girly giggles.

Untouched by cosmetic surgery (“It’s a force against nature”), it was all too easy to see why her grandchildren call her Glam-ma as she kept the audience spellbound with her philosophy and her prettiness.

The festival, with The Times as its English media partner, was a mix of the serious and the surprising.

Goldie’s happy-talk followed more heavyweight discussion on globalisation and the role of the media in the literary world, with views from a variety of English and Indian authors. One surprise star on this literary stage was the MP Clare Short, who was gladhanded in the street as a heroine for her resignation from the Blair Government over the Iraq War.

The other festival star (“he’s a page three celebrity here,” hissed one Indian writer) was the historian William Dalrymple, who previewed his unfinished new book The Last Moghul, which examines why one in three Englishmen in India before about 1780 was happy to marry an Indian woman. That was before institutional racism set in.

He chirpily described how he had found 20,000 Persian and Urdu manuscripts in an almost untouched archive in Delhi. These, he said, contained some of the answers to this seismic cultural change in the behaviour and attitude of the Brits.

But authors, MPs, holy men and Hollywood or even Bollywood aside, the most noticable figure, in the end, was the festival founder Pablo Ganguli. At the age of 22, with the face of a young Elizabeth Taylor and the mascara and make-up to match, this unlikely literary powerhouse had managed to dream up and then pull off such a successful festival.

He had sashayed into the British High Commission and won sponsorship from India’s largest mobile phone company, Airtel, while sparking controversy, giggles and serious discussion in equal measure.

Him in a jewelled dress with hennaed hair talking to the Indian High Commissioner is not how Queen Victoria would have imagined her beloved Indian Empire. But at least she would have been amused.

Geordie Greig is the editor of Tatler

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy