Comment

Festival diary: hi-jinks in Jaipur

IN early January 2009 I saw my teacher, the Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock at an academic meeting near Alwar, in Rajasthan. I told him that the organizers of the Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF) wanted me to interview him for a general audience, and that we should plan a list of questions for him to answer. Having been in his graduate classroom for years and seen him in extremely scholarly settings, I was nervous about his reaction to my proposal that we engage in a public conversation before non-specialists. ‘I’m convinced that South Asia is the most literary place in the world,’ he said. ‘Every other person you meet is likely to confess, after a while, to being a closet poet or an amateur novelist.’ He smiled. ‘This is apart from the fact that everyone knows and tells all these stories,’ – gesturing around him, as though stories were hovering in the air, like a flock of birds – ‘all the time’.

Shelly, as his students and friends call him, has edited a massive volume titled Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (University of California Press, 2003), and is General Editor of a series of Sanskrit classics and their translations. If anyone knows about the history and practice of literature in India, in several classical and modern languages, it is Shelly. He was animated, enthusiastic. ‘I would love to talk about literature with this crowd. In fact, if you like I will even recite some Sanskrit poetry that I’ve recently translated. If there’s anywhere in the world where a literary festival makes sense, it is here.’ Two weeks later, when I saw him again at the Diggi Palace in Jaipur, I had to admit that he was absolutely right. He read out loud from Bhanudatta’s Rasamanjari to a rapt audience that included such literary luminaries as U.R. Ananthamurthy and S.R. Farooqui, fellow-scholars and Indianists like Mukund Lath, Wendy Doniger and Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, and Gurcharan Das, who is writing a new book on the Mahabharata. The stories of South Asia came to perch on our shoulders, riveted, like us, by the sound of the language of the gods being recited in the world of men.

The 3rd annual JLF ran from January 21 to 25, and was the most fun I’ve had in a really long time. Writers, actors, painters, poets, editors, publishers, journalists and photographers literally gathered under a tent pitched by William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale, and for five days the world was forgotten. People couldn’t stop talking. After dark the bar opened in the front lawns, and dinner was served, and then the concerts began, night after night. Till the wee hours there was singing, dancing and more talking under a canopy of fairy-lights. Dalrymple, especially, was like a million volt battery, keeping hundreds of participants and listeners energized for the entire length of the festival. He was everywhere, at once, and never seemed to flag for even a moment. One of India’s leading newsmagazines ran a rather curmudgeonly and off-topic report about the alcohol consumed at the JLF, but what was far more striking than how little or how much folks drank was how much folks smoked. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, like a ’60s coffee house taken to another order of magnitude. After a while even a non-smoker like me was completely buzzed, and frankly I’m not sure if the high has worn off even two weeks later!

What really caused the euphoria many of us experienced, though, was the sheer intellectual and creative momentum of the gathering, the sense of being among others who loved language and followed its difficult dictates even in times of economic hardship and cynical consumerism. Few writers present had day-jobs; most had managed to find ways to write full-time, and this was something I found particularly moving. Personally I know too well, from the writers I am close to, what a fiscal, emotional and psychological challenge it is to keep body and soul together on the strength of a pen. Readers can tell how intelligent or imaginative a writer is; perhaps few have any real understanding, however, of how resourceful a writer has to be to have even a modicum of success. As someone who comes to writing from a slight angle – I always have an academic position to fall back on should I feel unsure of my creative capacities – what I liked best about the JLF was the alternative universe it created, for a few precious days, in which one could meet those who live by a different set of rules, and, after extreme hardship, give us beauty.

What do you get at a literary festival that you don’t get simply by reading the authors that you admire, or even by watching them on television? It is a glimpse of another mode of being, a parallel economy, as it were, in which a set of gifted individuals enter into astonishingly complex relationships with their art and with each other in order to produce, at the end, a work of literature. Editors and publishers, too – a set I find myself getting better acquainted with all the time – are a vital part of this delicate process. You cannot tell by looking at a book-jacket how lovely, how intricate and how fragile this web is, that laces together a writer’s original creative impulse with the text artifact you purchase finally in the bookstore or borrow from the library. So many journeys have to be made, so much of a price paid that has nothing to do with the sticker saying Rs 395 on the back of the book. At a festival, at least at a good one like in Jaipur, the intangibles are momentarily made visible, and you cannot but appreciate the love, effort, pain and talk that go into crafting something beautiful. Wasfia Nazreen, a talented young Bangladeshi photojournalist, took a number of pictures at the JLF (many of which can be found online), that actually capture the festival’s singular atmosphere, like images from the probe sent out to Venus.

Even a cursory visit to http://jaipurliterature festival.org/ gives an idea of the number and range of writers and other well-known public figures in attendance. There was the redoubtable Vikram Seth, surrounded by school children on a chair under a tree; Hari Kunzru, handsome and ambling about under the bright buntings; Patrick French emerging from the elevator in the hotel lobby with a shy smile and a briefcase; Namita Devidayal joining the Bauls from Bengal for a soaring spontaneous song at midnight; Ashis Nandy holding court in a smart jacket and scarf with a glass of scotch in his hand; Daniyal Mueenuddin describing his farm in rural Pakistan to a small group, sitting on charpai-s in the leafy courtyard at the back of the Diggi Palace; Tahmima Anam, clad in black, petite and intense, conversing animatedly; Basharat Peer, ever in search of coffee, being harassed by yet another young female reporter for an interview; Shashi Tharoor, regal and slim, seeming very much on the verge of entering politics (as the rumour goes); Ashok Vajpeyi, snowy-maned, droll, affable; Alok Rai, hands in his pockets, backpack on one shoulder, surveying the gathering with an ironic half-smile; Tarun Tejpal, perpetually with a camera retinue in tow, no longer the journalist but rather the celebrity himself; William and Olivia Dalrymple, the Oberon and Titania of their authorial fairyland; Lijia Zhang, zealous ambassador from Beijing, clad in exquisite and exotic Chinese fabrics; Rana Dasgupta, at once reticent and debonair; Gulzaar, white hair, white shawl, and the ineffable glamour of a poet in his twilight years; Siddhartha Varadarajan, a man of principles in a fabulous sherwani; Nadeem Aslam, who broke so many hearts by shaving his beautiful head of hair, his sweet manner belying his wrenching prose; Nandan Nilekani, wearing his philanthropist’s hat together with his public intellectual’s hat; Mohammed Hanif, wry, beleaguered, uncomfortable, funny; Vikas Swarup, somewhat eclipsed, paradoxically, by the huge success of the movie Slumdog Millionaire based on his novel Q and A; Amitabh Bachchan, wearing a pink shirt for his appearance in the Pink City, and equally discomfited by Slumdog; Nandita Das, lithe and intelligent, grace under pressure; Sunil Sethi, sharp-eyed, unsparing, gregarious, as a critic ought to be; Mukul Kesavan, the reluctant historian and even more reluctant journal editor; Chandrahas Choudhury, set to be the next sensation when his novel Arzee the Dwarf comes out in a few months; Simon Schama, Tina Brown, Tom Keneally, stars from other literary capitals, all quite at home in Jaipur’s occasionally blazing, mostly balmy sunshine.

Not all was sunny, however, as you might expect when so many clever, opinionated and articulate people get together at one place. Panels on V.S. Naipaul, on fundamentalism, on Kashmir, and variety of other contentious subjects had packed houses, many questions, heated discussions and fraying tempers. For the most part I would say writers and artists handled themselves better than journalists and media persons, in situations of ideological conflict, perhaps because the former were addressing themselves to the issues at stake, while the latter may have had some investment in playing to the gallery and raising the pitch of the proceedings. Festival organizers, however, managed to reign in the mood whenever things started to look and sound less like intelligent deliberation and more like television. The openness of the JLF, though, and its firmly international, cosmopolitan and secular character, ensured that the prevalent discourse stayed on the fine line between thorough debate and self-censorship. Let’s put it this way: no one had to mince words, no matter how unorthodox his or her point-of-view. But no one was allowed to run away with the agenda either, except for a gentleman who composed a rather long and completely tuneless song in Hindi in honour of Amitabh Bachchan, and proceeded to get a hold of the mic and sing all of it, for several minutes, in front of hundreds of writhing members of the public. That was the single occasion when one wished for a more authoritarian intervention from the festival directors!

After some teething troubles in previous years, when the JLF had not quite achieved a balance of the different arts, of English language and Indian language literature, of a wide array of sponsors and benefactors, and of serious literary business and celebrity razzle-dazzle, in 2009 it seemed that the Festival had hit its stride. A vocal Pakistani presence made a huge mark: Mueenuddin and Hanif are published by Random House India, and Aslam is a regular visitor to the country. The presence also of Junoon rocker Salman Ahmad, and of a number of young Pakistani reporters, bookstore owners and lawyers ensured that the Festival felt properly South Asian, instead of being narrowly about Indian writing in English. Publishers Chiki Sarkar of Random House, Ravi Singh of Penguin, Karthika V.K. of Harper Collins, and Namita Gokhale of Yatra Books all came with posses of their writers, and brisk business went on during breaks between sessions all over the Diggi Palace. The press had a field day, as did lots of very young aspiring novelists, bloggers and reviewers.

Gajraj Diggi and his wife Mia Stallone had just opened up a new restaurant on the Palace premises and could barely keep up with the demand for food and drink, as agents, writers, journalists and publishers put their heads together over the stone tables at all hours of day and night. Each evening Dalrymple could be seen dancing at the foot of the stage, no matter what the style of music, a large shawl or one of his little sons draped over his shoulders. It was impossible not to feel uplifted by his palpable enthusiasm for the extraordinary creative possibilities and aesthetic energies in our part of the world. ‘South Asia is the most multi-lingual, most literary place on the planet,’ Shelly had said. In April 2009 the market focus of the London Book Fair is going to be India. In a world economy that’s going to hell, they have surely done well to turn to a literary culture that has flourished for two millennia already, and shows every sign of continuing to flourish for the foreseeable future, money and markets notwithstanding.

Ananya Vajpeyi