Richly complex Indian influences animate a literary gathering in Jaipur.
Richly complex Indian influences animate a literary gathering in Jaipur.
JAIPUR: Inclusion is the leitmotif of the literary part of the Jaipur Virasat International Festival. As if to emphasise the point, the Jaipur Literature Festival, the second part of the 10-day celebration of Indian heritage and culture, kicked off on Friday with a series of talks by celebrity attendees Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Mark Tully, and Deepti Naval.
It did not matter if you were Indian, Australian, or British. You could be an Indophile or an NRI who would come over once in so many years to visit family; you could be the inheritor of a literary tradition that marked your family out as intellectual, or someone who had been denied the right to education despite a thirst for it…
The festival drew everyone who had written from the heart, been published, and been found worthy. The day began with Kiran Desai speaking of the long years of toil over the Inheritance of Loss and the ‘lucky chance’ that brought her the Booker, overheard Kabir converse with a rather too human God and St Peter, peeked at Meerabai’s wedding night at the exact moment her veil was being raised by her husband, and went on to a description of one of history’s least documented but bloodiest massacres: the wiping out of Indians in Delhi by the British in the wake of the Sepoy Mutiny.
Kiran Nagarkar’s readings from Cuckold and God’s Little Soldier, Dalrymple’s PowerPoint presentation that telescoped his years of research on the last Mughal’s life and times into half-an-hour, and Feryal Ali Gauhar’s performance of her recent work, which brought out the various aspects of violence against women, were facets of a kaleidoscope of creative thought that turned through the day.
Baby Haldar, author of the autobiographical Aalo Andhari in Bengali (translated into English by Urvashi Butalia) set the tone in the beginning. Asked if she would, with her newfound success as a writer, think of restarting her life with a second marriage, the spirited mother of two smiled shyly and said she is well and truly wedded to her writing now. She went on to admit with pride rather than embarrassment that she would continue working in the home she served when she first began writing as long as she was needed there.
More than anything, the festival showed that the mind and spirit were independent of the station or form that housed it. “If we look within our cultures, we have almost all the answers, and if we can rediscover the knowledge - we have everything needed for sustainable development,” was how Faith Singh of Anokhee and founder of the Jaipur Virasat Festival described its raison d’être.
By the time the festival ends, the voyage of rediscovery may have begun.
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