The Hindu Business Line : The word in Jaipur

Publishers and authors are usually the last to catch on to things that happen around them. So while India became the place-to-go in 1991 for most consumer products, the literary bandwagon avoided India like it had the bird flu. But after the economic revival in 2001, the stampede began in right earnest in 2003.

India now hosts a handful of litfests every year. In addition to the Qutab Festival and the Kala Ghoda, there was also the Kovalam Literary Festival and the country’s first-ever festival of children’s literature, Bookaroo, held last year. Fests bring together booklovers, authors from their self-imposed exiles, agents and editors.

“I am in danger of becoming a literature festival junkie,” says Lijia Zhang, the Chinese author of Socialism is Great! in attendance at this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival. She, more or less, lives from fest to fest, having attended the Hong Kong festival, the LA Times fest, Melbourne Writers Festival, and the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali before arriving at the Jaipur festival.

Started by the Jaipur Virasat Foundation, this festival is four years old. Its directors, William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale, claim it is turning into Asia’s biggest. Going by the sheer numbers, may be.

Star visitors included author Vikram Seth

Booklovers, students and writers came to hear authors Vikram Seth, Pico Iyer, historian Simon Schama, Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock, poets writing in Irish, Urdu and Khasi, and actors and sociologists speaking of their love of the word.

Actor Amitabh Bachchan

More than 6,500 people had registered until day three, before Amitabh Bachchan dropped by to launch the heavy tome that’s Osian’s Bachchanalia: The films and memorabilia of Amitabh Bachchan. Organisers lost count of the numbers after the Bachchan Session.

“The idea is to create a really sexy festival,” says Sanjoy Roy, MD of Teamwork Productions, which put the fest together. Glam quotient was high enough at the Diggi Palace, which has hosted the festival for free ever since it started. From Nandan Nilekani to models and designers, popular author Chetan Bhagat to Pakistani pop singer Salman Ahmad and lyricist-filmmaker Gulzar... it was happy hunting for the autograph seekers.

The news of the 10 Oscar nominations for Slumdog Millionaire, including one for Gulzar, came in good time adding to the celebrations. The movie was screened at the festival too, and it couldn’t have worked out better for Vikas Swaroop, whose book Q&A the movie is based on. Swaroop, an Indian bureaucrat currently posted in South Africa, was zipping between sessions at the fest and Slumdog events in other towns.

Away from more serious literary debates, distractions there were many, but that is de rigueur at all fests. Literature in all its forms was being celebrated here, explains Neville Tuli, Founder Chairman of Osian’s. Hari Kunzru welcomes it too; in fact, he says he was most moved by the baul performance and the Sufi session.

For the more literary, there was enough else. Not all debates were mint fresh though. Taking the dais to ‘define diaspora’, Kunzru wondered why a Frenchman in New York wasn’t “diasporic” enough and if it only applied to brown skins. In a lighter vein, Nadeem Aslam (Pakistani?), Tash Aw (Malaysian?) Tahmima Anam (Bangladeshi?) — all displaced authors — found new common ground, joked about the “oriental jacket collective” and publishers who insisted on covers depicting a woman in a pink saree and beautiful hennaed feet.

What was new, and the talk of the festival, was Pakistani (English) writing; with Aslam, Mohammad Hanif and Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose book of shorts stories In Other Rooms, Other Worlds came highly recommended. “I suspect that there are many Lithuanian writers who should get the attention they deserve,” quipped Mueenuddin about “the coming of age” of Pakistani writing.

Two months after the Mumbai attacks, the audience had found new and generous cultural ambassadors. Aslam described trying to capture the changing Pakistan, to writing with a quill which was on fire. If you didn’t get it fast enough on paper, it would disappear, worried the young literary stars. Such exchanges are important, adds Kunzru, who was part of a debate/session on Kashmir. An author speaks as an individual, and that has more force in the change it can bring, he explains.

Travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer, who drew a packed audience, says he spends eight months of the year at home in rural Japan, so he looks forward to hearing authors like Vikram Seth and others speak at festivals like this. “A lot of writing comes into its own when it’s spoken, a good test of writing is how well it survives when it’s read,” adds Dalrymple. He’d never understood the repetitive line in Coleman Barks’ poetry. But when the Rumi renditions were accompanied to music by Paris-based Turkish musician Kudsi Erguner, they made perfect sense.

The written word in translation was explored by eight poets at a session presented by the British Council. It seemed strange to find a “Kamal Hassan from Pushpak” reference in a Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s poem written in Khasi. Indian language writing, or bhasha literature, was also represented at the fest. But an English-speaking media, infatuated by the ‘of India’ English writing, had little time for it.

“Some people wait for years, some people die before they are recognised… Many of our greatest novelists and artists weren’t recognised in their times,” said Vikram Seth in conversation with Sonia Faleiro. Four years ago, Faleiro had blogged: “I whimpered. So did my two friends. We held hands, and rocked on our heels to keep from crying out aloud. For the love of God, Mr Seth, don’t scare us so.”

This time she says on her blog: “He talked about how he writes, what his mum Leila Seth really thought about him and his siblings when they were all living at home ‘doing nothing much’! and about the importance of developing hobbies (he plays the flute, writes calligraphy, solves bridge problems, paints...). ‘It’s important to develop interests outside of writing,’ said Seth. ‘Otherwise you’re no better than a cook who cooks chicken and nothing else’.”