Jaipur goes to London

The first-ever Jaipur Literature Festival, nine years ago, was attended by 18 authors and a few dozen people, some of whom were dazed tourists who simply stumbled upon the event, as the festival’s co-director, author William Dalrymple, has often jested. The festival’s first foray outside of Jaipur had no such modest start. On a gloriously warm and sunny Sunday in mid-May, a large crowd gathered for JLF’s first London outing at the waterfront South Bank Centre for a full day of literature, debate and music.

The venue was certainly an intuitive second home for the festival. Set up in the early 1950s to provide a “tonic” to a nation still haunted by the horrors of two World Wars, the South Bank Centre was committed to the “propaganda of the imagination”, its artistic director Jude Kelly explained at the launch. The hope was to provide a venue for humans “to stay and fall in love with other humans”, to express similarities and differences and recognise that “everyone’s imagination must count,” she said. Following her own first visit to the JLF, she had vowed to do her best to bring JLF to the centre’s annual South Asian festival of music, dance and literature — Alchemy.

Bringing the event to London presented the organisers with something of a challenge, explained Dalrymple at the end of the day. In India, the JLF has established its reputation by attracting top names from across the world, including some with limited links to India. A similar strategy in Britain — home to the thrilling, literary-gargantuan-magnet, the Hay Festival — could prove counterproductive, which is why the JLF organisers focused largely on showcasing Indian talent.

Unlike the original, the London event wasn’t free, though in a city used to extortionate prices for cultural events, the £20-a-head ticket won’t have raised eyebrows. It brought along some of the quirks associated with the original, including drumrolls as timekeepers for debates.

The day itself kicked off with a thunderous drumroll, and quickly launched into a fascinating discussion on myth and memory. The audience quickly warmed up to Mary Beard, the classical historian, eager to move away from the traditional place myths had been accorded in societies (including attempts to see similarities across cultures) and encourage seeing it more as an active verb — “to myth”. Her no-nonsense approach included a gentle put-down of the countless stage productions of Greek tragedies that sought to establish relevance in whatever was the contentious conflict of the day, which drew warm laughter from the audience. Playwright Girish Karnad was also a delightful presence, entertaining the audience with his brief history of Indian mythmaking — and its early aversion to tragedy — while at the same time grounding the discussion in current politics, highlighting the role that myth, as it evolved over the years, has played in propagating communal tensions. The impossibility of being wrong about a myth, was what was both so exciting and dangerous about it.

This strong start was always going to be hard to maintain through the day. While a session on the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz was praised by those attended — particularly the insights of his daughter Salima Hashmi — a discussion on empire seemed to exasperate many in the audience as it descended into a series of hostile exchanges between participants and failed to cover new ground, sticking to such well-trodden textbook themes as the impact of British rail infrastructure on developing India. A discussion on the portraits of Indian metropolises done in recent years drew a large and attentive crowd, from a British audience eager to learn more about the evolving cities, as did a well-paced discussion on the literature of regional languages, with Girish Karnad once again providing a particularly insightful presence.

A conversation with Vikram Seth provided the international “celebrity” moment of the festival; and while a clearly star-struck moderator failed to get as much out of the discussion as she could have, Seth proved a charming presence on stage, insisting that novels were merely “elevated gossip” and breezily brushing off the organisers’ attempts to cut short a Beastly Tales reading halfway through — to loud applause from the audience.

Following the JLF tradition of closing with a debate, the day ended with the discussion “Dynasty and democracy are not incompatible in South Asia”. As one of the debaters was swift to point out, the topic’s double negative was not just confusing for the audience but also a peculiarly Indian-style of wording.

Many pointed out that the widespread prevalence of dynasties in politics made the topic a moot point, while sidestepping the more important question of whether it allowed for the type of democracy we wanted to live.

Dalrymple was the first to admit the London event was a work in progress — “cobbled together” over a handful of weeks. But as I watched a typically London crowd — a hodgepodge of ages and nationalities — gather in the foyer to listen to Nathoo Solanki and other Rajasthani musicians perform into the night, it was clear that this would be a lovely addition to the city’s cultural scene that many, me included, would return to over the years.

COMMENT NOW