Is bigger better?

The Jaipur Literature Festival undoubtedly got bigger this year, but it stands in danger of falling prey to its own success, writes G Sampath

In her keynote address at the Jaipur Literature Festival, novelist Nayantara Sahgal likened India to a microcosm of the human race, with a “mix and muddle of races and cultures”. This comparison could well be applied to the Festival itself. It was an opportunity to see at close quarters how the larger divides and the resultant macro-conflicts of the world played themselves out in a limited environment.
 
The most talked about of these divides was of course the global versus local, framed, in this context, as (Global) India versus (Local) Bharat. This division was most visible in the festival organising team itself, with the global and local lobbies pulling the event in different directions. Eventually, the two seemed to have reached some sort of a compromise, with the Bharat/local aspect materialising as the two-day event called ‘Translating Bharat’ which was appended to the beginning of the lit-fest. The India/global lobby, which had more clout, as indeed it does in the real world, occupied the remaining five days.

The air beneath the chandeliers of Diggi Palace was palpably riven by this conflict, and naturally, the festival suffered as a result. Of course, at one level, the conflict had to do with egos and ownership — almost all of the festival directors feel individually that the Jaipur lit-fest is their baby, that it was they who gave shape to its inaugural edition in 2006, and helped to make it big. And such a sentiment is bound to create conflict where there is a divergence of vision, for ultimately, the divide between Bharat and India is one of vision.

William Dalrymple, one of the festival directors and the prime moving force behind the event this year, wants to turn the Jaipur Lit-Fest into an international one on a par with other such major events in the world, notably, the Hay and Edinburgh festivals. “Edinburgh is a good model”, he says. “Under the umbrella of the main Edinburgh festival, which is a three-week long, big budget affair with ballets, operas, and orchestras being flown in, you have five different, completely free-standing festivals — a television festival, a cinema festival, a book fair, and so on. Any intelligent audience might well be interested in theatre, music, cinema and also books. So, together you have a huge influx of cultured and interested people, who may choose to go to all of these various festivals.”

Mita Kapur, listed as a member of the Jaipur Literature Week directorial team, and a key organiser of the event in 2006 and 2007, seems to be the most vocal opponent of what she sees as the international, and primarily English, take-over of a platform meant for India’s local literary traditions and culture. Under the aegis of her literary consultancy, Siyahi, she put together what Dalrymple calls “her own semi-detached  programme within a single Jaipur Literature Week” on the first two days.

This event, ‘Translating Bharat’, was neither mentioned in the brochure of the ‘main’ festival, nor promoted actively by the PR agency hired by the festival producers, which seems strange considering it is supposedly a part of the same ‘Literature Week’. But it drew in the local crowd, and had writers and translators from the Bhasha languages discussing not just the problems of translation, but also the politics of who gets read and who doesn’t depending on the position of their language in the global and national cultural hierarchy.

Author Pavan Varma, one of the speakers at this event, summed it up with precision when he said, “Literature festivals are often an incestuous dialogue between Indians who write in English and Englishmen who write in English”. This, according to Kapur, is exactly what has happened to the Jaipur lit-fest this year. “Why so many goras in an Indian festival?” she asks. “A lit-fest is about bridging the gap between the reader and the writer. But if you’re doing it for a bunch of foreigners, and for a bunch of Delhi social butterfly crowd, that’s not what I conceive this festival to be.”

Indeed, many delegates felt that literature and the lay reader were getting pushed to the background and the festival becoming more of a media circus. These misgivings seemed to find validation when a star called Aamir Khan thudded into the lawns of Diggi Palace. The Bollywood icon being followed everywhere by a ragtag crowd of autograph hunters, media persons and television cameras became a sideshow in itself. One delegate complained that Khan’s bodyguards barred his way to the toilet because the star happened to be somewhere in the vicinity.

“If Aamir had written even one book, I wouldn’t mind him being here as a film star — as in the case of Dev Anand. But what is his contribution to the field of literature?” asks Kapur. “I admit that Khan is a borderline case,” says Dalrymple, “but it does no harm to have some stardust in the air, he got in people who otherwise wouldn’t have been there.”

But many writers felt marginalised, in their own space, as it were, by the intrusion of film celebrities. “Writers have to compete for attention with the world of glamour everyday, all the time. So, in a literary festival at least, they should remain centre-stage,” says novelist Kunal Basu. Ironically, it was Basu’s film connection — Aparna Sen is making a film out of his short story, ‘The Japanese Wife’ —  which ensured that his book got sold out at the festival.

Nevertheless, if the festival wants to be true to the spirit of the Jaipur Heritage International Festival, of which it is a part, if it wants to embrace the values of its founding patron, the Jaipur Virasat Foundation, whose avowed goal is “to engage local communities in the values of cultural diversity” then the organisers have to ponder over the conspicuous absence of local participation this year.

Dalrymple believes that they failed to market the festival properly to the Jaipur populace, partly because, he explains, “we got the funds only in November, just six weeks before the event, which gave us very little time.” But he adds, “I do think there are two different audiences, and there is surprisingly little cross-over between readers who are interested in vernacular Indian writing and those interested in international writers.” But isn’t a lit-fest all about bridging gaps and so on?

“It is when your programming is weak that insecurity sets in, and you start running after film stars and celebrities,” says Kapur. There might be something to it. On the first two days, even when there were no ‘stars’, the sessions with Urdu dastangoi, Mizo chants, and the rendition of Kabir’s dohas by Tipaniya ji — all representing the indigenous literary tradition summed up in the term ‘Bharat’ — were packed to capacity.

Yet, this neat schema of Bharat and India could itself prove problematic. A note of warning was sounded by an unknown speaker from the audience during the session on “India that is Bharat” moderated by Pavan Varma. He pointed out that the attempt to bridge this so-called divide between India and Bharat is itself a dubious enterprise given that both these are themselves power elites — while ‘India’ represents the globalised mainstream and its ideologies, ‘Bharat’ represents the domestic, primarily Hindu/Hindi mainstream. Where is the space for the truly marginalised here?

Granted, ‘Bharat’ is supposed to be used metaphorically, to signify all that is in the margins and need to be recouped, such as tribal, folk and oral traditions. But how could one ignore the fact, especially after the 2002 Gujarat riots, that the very idea of ‘Bharat’ is being appropriated by an indigenous, predominantly Hindu elite? Unfortunately, the gentleman who raised this question was rudely shouted down by one of the festival directors and his point didn’t get the attention it deserved — such intolerance couldn’t be in the spirit of (marginalised?) Bharat, surely. 
 
The most fascinating, and perhaps fruitful, aspect of the lit-fest therefore was the way it set in relief all these divides lurking beneath the façade of fun and good cheer: between the Indian English writers and Bhasha writers, between Indian writers published in India and those published abroad, between little known Indian writers and the feted ones, between writers and film mega-celebrities, and lastly, between the entire class of privileged producers (writers, festival organisers, empanelled speakers) and that most marginal, and marginalising, of all groupings — the reading-consuming public who sit at a level below that of the producers, literally (beneath the stage) and otherwise, and for whose benefit the festival is ostensibly organised. Was the gap between these various hierarchical binaries bridged at this festival? Or is that asking for too much?